Invincible

by Amy Reed

  Dedication

  For Elouise and Brian, who make me whole

  Contents

  Dedication

  Then

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Now

  If

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  If

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  If

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  If

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  If

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  If

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  If

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  If

  Thirty-Four

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Amy Reed

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THEN.

  one.

  “LET’S GO TO THE CAFETERIA,” STELLA SAYS. SHE IS RESTLESS. She is always restless.

  Unlike everyone else in here, she is not in pajamas. Every day, without fail, she puts on her black skinny jeans, big black boots, a thick coat of red lipstick, and her signature black fedora with the peacock feather sticking out the side. Even though all we ever do is sit in each other’s rooms. Even though we’re not allowed to leave hospital grounds. Even though the only people she talks to voluntarily are me and Caleb and Dan, the Child Life Specialist, and none of us could care less what she looks like.

  “Are you hungry?” Caleb asks. His pajamas have soccer balls on them. Mine are pink with white hearts. The left leg is cut off to make room for my white plaster cast, decorated with Sick Kid autographs.

  “No, I’m not hungry.” Stella groans. “I just need to get out of here. Aren’t you guys going crazy? How can you not be going crazy?” She’s like a caged animal. Pretty soon, she’s going to start gnawing on the metal bars of my bed. She was like this even in Outpatient, even when she knew she was going to get to leave in a few hours.

  “My parents are going to be here any minute,” I say. “I should stay.”

  “Have you asked them yet about adopting me?”

  “But you have parents, Stella,” Caleb says. He has a hard time with sarcasm. Stella has diagnosed him with mild Asperger’s in addition to the brain cancer we already know about.

  “I’m going to get legally emancipated,” she says. “Just as soon as we get this whole cancer thing figured out. I’m only still their daughter because I’m using them for their health insurance. God, Evie, I am so sick of your room.”

  We’ve been spending a lot of time in my room. And by “my room,” I mean this particular room during this particular stay, which is going on two weeks now, my longest yet. There have been countless identical rooms over the past year, some in this part of the cancer floor, some in the super-duper sterile prison part of the floor when my white blood cell count was zero. It’s a little hard for me to get around right now because I just got surgery and my leg is in a cast, so I can’t just hop out of bed whenever I feel like it. Not that many kids on the cancer floor do much hopping.

  I may seem lucky for getting one of the few single rooms, but everyone here knows they’re reserved for the hopeless cases so some other poor kid doesn’t have to deal with a dead roommate. This one is pretty much the same as every other room I’ve had, so many by now that I’ve lost count, but half as big. I wasn’t even here a night before Mom put up the same sad decorations as my last long stay, to make it “feel more like home.” No number of family photos or teddy bears or bouquets of flowers will ever make this feel like home. All they do is confirm that I’m going to be here for too long.

  “We could go to the teen lounge,” Caleb says. “We could play a game.”

  “The teen lounge doesn’t have any windows,” Stella says.

  “Turn the TV to the Discovery Channel,” I say. “It’ll be just like looking out the window, except you’ll be in Africa or underwater or something.”

  “Or it’ll be some reality show about Amish prostitutes or morbidly obese dwarfs who talk in tongues.”

  “That’s TLC,” I say. “The morbidly obese dwarves.”

  “You two are no help. Plus Dan might be lurking in the teen lounge and he’ll just try to get me to talk about my feelings.”

  “It’s good to talk about your feelings,” Caleb says. “Dan says it’ll make you sicker if you keep things bottled up inside.”

  “When have you known me to keep things bottled up inside?”

  “Good point.”

  “You guys don’t have to stay here,” I say. “You can go do something without me. I’m fine by myself.”

  “Oh, Evie,” Stella says. “Don’t go acting all heroic. We’re not going to leave you in here all by yourself.”

  “Really, it’s okay.”

  “Can you stop thinking about everyone else for once and just admit that you can’t live without me?”

  “I want to watch the football game,” Caleb says, grabbing my remote and turning on the TV.

  “I hate you,” Stella says, but she doesn’t move. There aren’t a whole lot of other options for us as far as activities go. Watching football in a cramped hospital room may not be everybody’s idea of a good time, but it could be worse. It could always be worse.

  I first met Stella eight months ago, when I was going in for my third round of chemo. It was her first and she wasn’t happy about it, which I could tell because she was climbing the eight-foot-tall stuffed giraffe outside the outpatient oncology center while her mother and a security guard were trying to talk her down. Her mom was actually more like trying to scream her down in Mandarin, but neither approach was working.

  She held on to that poor giraffe’s head, screaming bloody murder until her mom finally managed to pull her down, and as she fell to the floor she made one last dramatic proclamation, calling everyone “heartless bloody dickholes.” Parents covered their kids’ ears; her mom swiped her on the side of her face with the back of her hand, and I decided Stella was both the most beautiful and bravest person I had ever seen in my life. She was showing all the fear and fury I felt but could never let out. She wasn’t pretending to be anything she wasn’t.

  I walked up to her as she sat under the giraffe, sobbing. I sat down next to her and said, “Hi, I’m Evie.” Her makeup was smeared but that somehow made her even more glamorous. “Are you getting chemo?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too. It’s not that bad.”

  “I’m going to lose my hair,” she whimpered. “I can’t lose my hair.” She had beautiful hair. It was long and straight and perfect. She had thick bangs that came all the way down to her eyes. It was rock-star hair.

  “You could get a wig,” I said. My hair had already started thinning. Everyone assured me I was still beautiful, as if that was the most important thing for me to worry about.

  “Wigs are for old ladies.”

  “What about a hat?”

  She thought about that for a minute. “A hat could work,” she said. “I could totally rock a hat.”

  We walked into the clinic together, our mothers following close behind.

  My mom tried valiantly to befriend Stella’s mom, but Mrs. Hsu was cold and suspicious right away. She still is
, even after all this time. Families get to know each other well when their kids are in and out of the hospital all the time, when they’re sitting together for hours on end in the injection clinic. They hug; they bake each other things and buy each other Christmas presents; they cry for each other’s children. But not Stella’s parents. They are always off to the side, silent, miserable, judging, and alone.

  Stella and I got chemo that first time in adjacent rooms. After a few minutes of lying there while the poison pulsed through the portacath tube drilled in my chest, I heard a knock on my wall. I knocked back. She started a series of steady, measured taps. I thought maybe it was Morse code. I didn’t know Morse code. Then I started counting and noticed a pattern that repeated itself after seven clusters of taps. You have a lot of time to kill when you’re getting chemo for eight to ten hours.

  I pulled out my phone and dialed what I counted. She picked up on the first ring.

  From that moment forward, Stella was my secret best friend. By secret, I mean only in the cancer world, the hospital world, the world of Sick Kids. Stella and I never see each other outside this world. In the other world, the world of the well, we are other people. We are people who would not mix. In the other world, she’s in an all-girl punk band and I’m a cheerleader. I mean was. Past tense. I’m not really sure what I am now.

  In the other world, I already have a best friend. Kasey Wexler-Beene has had that title since she walked up to me on the first day of kindergarten with her bouncing blond pigtails and said, “Do you want to be friends?” We’ve been inseparable ever since. Until the cancer, that is. How can friends be anything but separable when one has cancer and spends most of her time either in the hospital or at home recovering from being in the hospital? How could a relationship not change when one is dying and the other is not, when one is halfway in another world that no amount of love or history or devotion will ever help the other understand?

  But she tries, and I love her for that. At first, a lot of my friends joined her when she’d visit, either piling into the living room while I recuperated on the couch, or even coming to the hospital when I was too sick to go home. I could be hurt by their absence now, but I understand, and I don’t blame them. They have their lives to live, and they shouldn’t waste them sitting around watching me get sicker, and honestly it’s a relief to have fewer people to smile and pretend for. But Kasey is forever loyal. She still comes to visit with my parents or my boyfriend, Will. But over the past few months, especially since I’ve gotten sicker and stopped going to school entirely, it’s gotten harder and harder to find things to talk about, harder to find things we have in common. What do you talk about when one person’s life has stopped and the other’s has kept moving forward?

  In some ways, I’ve already said good-bye to Kasey. I’ve already said good-bye to my family. They may not know it yet, they may think I’m still with them, but I’ve been drifting away for a long time now. The world of the sick has been claiming me a little more each day, with each round of blood work, with every CT scan and PET scan and bone scan, every biopsy and bone marrow aspiration, every surgery, every chemo injection, every radiation treatment, every blood transfusion, every pain med, every hospitalization. After a year of this, it’s a miracle I still know how to speak to people outside the hospital. It has been so long since I belonged in their world, no matter how hard they try to keep me in it, no matter how hard I try to stay.

  But I haven’t said good-bye to Will yet. I can’t. Even though I know it’s selfish, I can’t let him go. I can’t release him. Some part of me still believes we can make it through this together, that our love is strong enough to work miracles. I can’t imagine going anywhere without him, even death, wherever or whatever that is. I have no idea what’s going to happen to me after I die. I don’t even know how to begin imagining it. People keep telling me it’s going to be quiet and peaceful, that it will be a place I can be forever happy, but I don’t believe them. The only thing I know for sure is it will be a place without Will. Wherever I go, I have to leave him behind. And how can that be paradise? What’s the point of heaven if the person you love most in the world isn’t there?

  two.

  “ARE YOU SURE YOU’RE OKAY?” MOM SAYS FOR THE MILLIONTH time, her eyebrows furrowed in her now permanent Worry Face. “We don’t have to do this.”

  “Of course I’m okay,” I say with as big a smile as I can squeeze out of my face.

  Of course I’m not okay. I’m seventeen and I’ve been sitting in Oakland Children’s Hospital for the past two weeks with a broken leg, and now I’m waiting for test results that will tell me how close I am to death. I just watched my parents beg the evil Nurse Moskowitz for permission to take me outside so I can breathe real air instead of the toxic stuff that circulates around the hospital. “It’s not the smartest idea,” Moskowitz said with her signature squint and pursed lips. “But I suppose it’s safe as long as she’s bundled up.”

  That was today’s little victory. Hooray! Now my parents and my sister, Jenica, get to wheel me around the hospital’s sad excuse for a courtyard, which isn’t much more than a few picnic tables and paved circle around a tuft of grass next to the helicopter landing pad. I made my face placid as a medical assistant moved me from my bed to a wheelchair, an arduous process of disconnecting my IV and fluids, transferring and hiding my catheter and pee bag, and trying to not drop the giant broken log that used to be my leg. So yeah, I am the exact opposite of okay. But no one needs to know that. They have enough to deal with already.

  I didn’t really want to go for this “walk” in the first place, but I played along because we have to do something other than sit in my depressing room while we wait for Dr. Jacobs to show up with my test results. So now here we are, huddling beneath a gray blanket of winter drizzle, breathing the “real air” of a city with one of the worst rates of pediatric asthma in the country. Mom is trying hard to keep her smile, so I am too, and so is Dad. Smiling to keep each other smiling. That’s what we do. It’s our special family talent. Jenica taps away at her phone, too preoccupied to play this game as devotedly as us. We have become experts at ignoring the elephant in the room, even when he follows us outside, even when he’s clomping around us and blowing his trunk for attention, even though he’s been with us for so long he’s practically part of our family, our loyal pet.

  “Look at those daffodils,” I say.

  “They really do a nice job with the landscaping here,” Dad says. “It really brightens the place up.”

  “I was thinking I could bring in ice cream tomorrow,” Mom chirps. “Maybe get some of those weird flavors you like at Tara’s? What was that last one you tried? Curry?”

  “Saffron,” I say.

  “Do you think Caleb and Stella would like some too? I’ll get a bunch. We can have a little ice-cream party.”

  “It’s freezing,” Jenica says. “Nobody wants ice cream.”

  I don’t tell them that even this pale winter light is too bright for me, that even with the buffer of my pain pills, it feels like a million tiny screws are boring through my eyes into my brain. I can feel the wet air seeping through my clothes. I try not to shiver. I don’t want to tell anyone I’m cold. I don’t want to make anyone worry more than they already are.

  Someone has to make conversation. Someone has to help my poor mother out. “Did you hear from Stanford?” I say to Jenica.

  “Not yet,” she says, finally looking up from her phone. “Probably have a few weeks until they send out their letters. I feel good about it, though.”

  “And if you don’t get in, there’s always Berkeley, right?” Mom says. “Or even UC Davis?”

  Jenica snorts. “I am not going to Davis. You can’t be serious, Mom.” Oh yeah, this is why we don’t talk.

  I can’t help myself: “Don’t forget, some of us aren’t even going to get to go to college.”

  “Oh god!” Mom exhales.

  “Girls!” Dad says, and wraps his arm protectively around Mom. She le
ans into him with all her weight, shoving her face into his chest, as if blocking out the world will make it stop hurting.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” I am sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt her, just Jenica. But even Jenica didn’t deserve that. They’re already hurting so much.

  Mom returns to us, the brave smile plastered back on her face. “It’s okay, honey.” She takes my hand. “Oh, Evie, you’re so cold!”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Let’s go back in,” Jenica says. At least we can agree on something.

  Neither Mom nor Dad seems to want to move. As miserable as this is, they don’t want it to be over. These small moments outside my hospital room are some of the few things still connecting me to their world. No one talks about it, but there’s always the possibility that any of these could be my last trip outside. My last chance breathing air outside the hospital. Forever.

  I think I’m going to puke.

  “Are you okay?” Dad says.

  “I’m fine,” I say again. Again and again and again and again, even though it will never be true. I don’t mention the headache that has morphed into a full-blown migraine strong enough to tear through my painkiller haze.

  The rain starts in earnest. The sky darkens. Jenica is the only one brave enough to turn around and start walking back to the hospital.

  Nurse Moskowitz meets us at the elevator, all frowns and cold, efficient hands. “I should never have agreed to this,” she says, shaking her head as she pushes my mom out of the way to take control of the wheelchair. “Evie’s in no condition to be out in the rain.”

  Mom helps me get into dry pajamas while the others wait in the hall. Moskowitz takes my temperature, and it’s barely above ninety-six. “Too low,” she scolds Mom, and turns the heat up in my room. All I want to do is sleep, but that’s when Dr. Jacobs arrives.

  “Doctor,” my dad says, shaking his hand. Everyone’s sitting up a little straighter. Even Jenica has put her phone down and is paying attention.

  “I think I have a migraine,” I say.

  “It’s a little early for your pain pills,” Moskowitz says.

  “It’s all right,” Dr. Jacobs says. “She can have them now.” He’s usually such a stickler about meds. The news he’s here to deliver must be bad.