Everything That Makes You

by Moriah McStay

  He dropped her hand and cast an angry look out the window. “I just want to be normal. I want to be eighteen. And then nineteen and twenty-five and forty and eighty, just like everybody else.”

  “But you’re not.” Fi knew it wasn’t what she should say, but she said it anyway.

  “I was until you found out.”

  “Lying to me doesn’t make it go away!”

  “I don’t need you to point that out, Fi,” he snapped. “I know I can’t go up a flight of stairs without getting light-headed. That I can’t go four hours without a nap. I’m not trying to hide from it. I just want to live outside of it sometimes.”

  “Everything was fake then. We’re not even real.”

  “Yes we are!” he shouted, sitting up quickly. The machines began a furious round of pinging.

  “Marcus, stop! Lay back down!”

  He collapsed back, breathing heavy. Her hands still shook, but she grabbed his. They were frighteningly cold.

  “I don’t want you to die,” she said, crying.

  “I’m not going to die,” he said.

  “Do you promise?”

  With a small smile, he nodded.

  “What has to happen?” she asked.

  “Well, we’re still trying to figure that out. I’m on medication now. But a new heart would help.”

  “Is that hard to get? A heart?”

  “I’m O negative, which makes it a little harder. But I’m on the list.”

  They stared at each other a little bit after that, Fi perched on the edge of her chair; Marcus reclined on the semi-upright bed. Their hands stayed clenched together in Marcus’s lap.

  “I’m so mad at you,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “I’ll make it up to you. I promise.”

  “Don’t die. That’ll make it up to me.”

  “I’m not going to die,” he said again.

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Wait, pretty much.”

  “Well, how long can you, you know, wait?”

  His fingers still tracing lazy patterns against the back of her hand, he said, “Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”

  But that wasn’t really an answer.

  MAY

  FIONA

  Mrs. Doyle peeked her head into Fiona’s room. “Almost packed?”

  Pretending like this wasn’t the biggest, scariest thing she’d ever done, Fiona calmly gestured to the clothes on the bed—sweatpants and some button-down shirts she stole from Ryan. “I think so. I won’t need much, right?”

  Her mother looked at the piles on the bed. “You’ll be in a hospital gown most of the time. Underwear. Socks. The button-downs are a good idea.” She looked at Fiona’s desk. “Do you have anything to read?”

  Fiona tossed a few books and a Moleskine into the bag, folding the clothes on top. She looked over at her guitar resting in the corner. She felt like a mother abandoning a child. “Yeah, but I probably won’t get the chance. It sounds like the bandage will be pretty big.”

  Perching on the end of the bed, her mom patted the space beside her. Fiona eyed her warily but sat. “We don’t have much time, Mom. They want me there in an hour.”

  “I know. I just wanted to talk a minute.”

  Fiona stiffened. “Okay. What about?”

  After a long, slow exhale, her mother spoke to the wall across the room. “You don’t have to do this, you know. You can change your mind.”

  Fiona looked at her mother. “What? I thought you wanted—”

  “What I want doesn’t matter. What do you want?”

  “I want this.”

  “It’s a major procedure, Fiona. It could be great, but there’s always a risk.”

  “I know that.”

  Her mom nodded slowly. “You have great instincts, you know. Not many kids your age have that.” She laughed a little. “Not many adults have that.”

  Fiona stared hard at her mother, looking for signs of illness, head trauma, alien abduction. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m just worried. My little girl is going into surgery.”

  Fiona shook her head, confused. “It’s the miracle cure you’ve always wanted. I’m getting fixed.”

  Her mom gave her a weird, sideways look. “When did you get so brave?”

  Brave? The girl who sat mute in the coffee shop? “Mom, we don’t have a lot of time.”

  Being a scarred girl with a beautiful mother pretty much sucked. It happened all the time—teachers, other kids at school, even her mom’s own friends would tell Fiona things like “She couldn’t be old enough to be your mother,” or “Your mom’s so pretty.” And then the complimenter would look suddenly mortified, like Oh no, I’ve called attention to this poor girl’s unfortunate condition.

  So Fiona dressed like a boy and wore her hair in her face, like she couldn’t have cared less about the “beauty” thing. Even though deep, deep down, she did care. She carried around her vanity like a secret, shameful addiction.

  Now some twisted form of fate offered a new option—with conditions.

  One: acknowledge her secret vanity. Two: sacrifice part of herself.

  And she said yes.

  Then she spent months of waiting for—she was horrible—someone to just go ahead and die already.

  Now, hours before she was going to do this thing that took twelve years to happen, her mother was, once again, making the fight impossible to win.

  “I still want to do it,” Fiona said.

  “All right.” Her mother kissed her forehead and stood up. “The timing really couldn’t be better, could it? Two days after graduation, with the whole summer to heal?”

  “Yeah.” Very thoughtful of this person to die so conveniently.

  “Don’t forget your toothbrush,” her mom said. “Meet you downstairs in five minutes.”

  The next three hours, Fiona sat in no less than seven deceptively hard upholstered chairs and answered the same questions over and over again—Nothing to eat since breakfast. No prescription drugs. No other history of illness. Her hand ached from signing all the forms. She nodded as doctors went through the organ transplant rules again and again. She got her blood pressure taken at least three times and smiled falsely at all the nurses who smiled genuinely at her.

  She was trapped in a cycle of administrative hell when all she wanted was to move forward already.

  Finally, doctor number three gave Fiona the all clear to go back for prep. An enormous male nurse, hunched slightly to reach the handlebars of the wheelchair in front of him, told Fiona to “Saddle up and bring your posse with you.”

  Looking gray, her father picked up her bags while her mother gathered all the forms together into neat piles. Ryan stood statue-still, a deer in the headlights.

  Craning her neck up to the ginormous smiling nurse behind her, Fiona asked, “What do they do back in prep?”

  “You’ll get changed, we’ll sterilize the area, start fluids in the IV for anesthesia—”

  Fiona looked at Ryan. “You can wait in the room. It’s okay.”

  Ryan tried—and failed—to look calm. “Don’t be stupid. Of course I’m coming.”

  “Ryan—”

  He held up a hand. “I should be there. I need to be there.”

  “Why? To watch me get poked with needles?”

  Ryan wobbled and leaned against the wall. The enormous nurse took a few steps toward him, hands held up like he might need to catch Ryan at any moment.

  Fiona shook her head. “Lord, you’re pathetic. You don’t have to come.”

  “No. It’s okay, I’ll come.”

  Their mom took over, loading all the bags—Fiona’s suitcase, a tote bag of magazines and books, her own overnight bag—into Ryan’s arms. “The point is moot, Ryan. I need you to handle all these. Take everything to Fiona’s room and stay there until we come.”

  “But—”

  Mrs. Doyle snapped, “I can’t manage everything, Ryan. Just do it, please.”

  With loaded arms, Ryan
walked over to Fiona and kissed the top of her head. “See you soon. Good luck.”

  Then the giant nurse took charge, pushing Fiona from the room and leaving the pack-muled Ryan behind. Her parents followed, the lot of them heading down a cold, white hallway. Buzzing overhead fluorescent lights provided background music for the world’s smallest, most stressed-out parade.

  She looked over her shoulder to her mother. “Thanks for sparing Ryan.”

  Mrs. Doyle winked her right eye. Fiona wondered if a few weeks from now, she’d be able to do that, too.

  Prep took a long time. Fiona answered the same questions, this time in a hospital gown and from a bed. Nurses swabbed her face at least four times. She watched, fascinated and repulsed, as the skinny needle poked through the surface of her flesh and sank in—her first, and hopefully last, IV. She fiddled with the bed controls, when they finally left her alone. The bed grinded and whirred as it followed her fickle commands—up, down, back, forward, high, low—until her mother groaned at her to stop.

  The surgeon and anesthesiologist were the next crew to ask the exact same questions as the nurses already had. The anesthesiologist went through her shpiel—risks of side effects and death, et cetera, et cetera. Her dad turned an as-yet-undiscovered shade of gray.

  What the hell am I doing?

  Numbly, Fiona nodded that she understood, and the anesthesiologist calmly clicked another bag onto the IV stand over her head. “This should make you feel a little spacey,” she said, injecting something directly into the IV line.

  “It’s so smooth,” Fiona said. The world swirled around itself, and reality went two-dimensional—the last moment she’d recall of her scarred life.

  Blinking her one free eye against the—really, did it have to be that bright?—overhead glare, Fiona thought her parents’ faces might split apart from the grins.

  From somewhere out of her line of vision, Ryan said, “Jesus, she looks terrible.”

  “Ryan, shush,” snapped their mom. “She just got out of surgery. What did you think she’d look like?”

  “Not like a freaking mummy,” he muttered back.

  Fiona tried to lift a hand to feel the bandages, but her father’s hand gently pressed it back down. “Don’t touch, sweetie.”

  Fiona wanted to snap back that she wasn’t five, but the drugs wouldn’t let her voice out of her throat.

  The next twenty-four hours passed in an unpredictable in-and-out, with the in not much more than thwarted attempts to scratch at bandages and grunts for more pain medication. It wasn’t until solidly into day two that a reasonably clearheaded Fiona opened her single available eye to a bright new day streaming through the window. Ryan sat in front of it, doing a bored flip through their mother’s Southern Living.

  “Hey,” Fiona muttered.

  “Hey, stoner.” Ryan smiled back.

  “Was I bad?”

  “Nah. Lots of babbling. And whining. Oh, the pain, the pain. You’re such a wimp.” His smirk faded to a look of concern. “Does it really hurt?”

  Fiona pushed herself up slightly, wincing. “It’s not too bad.”

  Ryan didn’t look like he believed her.

  “How’s it look?” Fiona asked.

  He frowned and shrugged. “Couldn’t say. You’re still covered with bandages. The doctors have come in and changed them, but I, uh—”

  “I’m the wimp? You left, didn’t you?”

  “Well, they say it’ll take a few weeks for the graft to take anyway. It doesn’t look good right now.”

  “It doesn’t?” she asked, a little panicked.

  “No, that’s not what I meant. The doctor says it went great. He says you’ll be better than new.”

  “Oh.” Better than new. What the heck did that mean?

  “Yeah. Great, right? Worth a few months of bandages.”

  Fiona didn’t bother to bring up the excruciating pain, the itch of stitches, or the freakiness of wearing someone else’s skin. “You’re awfully confident for someone who hasn’t actually seen it.”

  “It’s just, well, I mean, it doesn’t look like regular skin, yet. It’s too, uh, fresh.”

  A rolling table rested at the end of her bed, suspended just over her feet. Fiona wondered if she should offer Ryan the pea-green vomit bucket sitting on top of it. “Are there lesions?” she goaded. “Any discharge?”

  “Please, stop.” Ryan looked like he might faint.

  Fiona pointed to the mirror on the table. Ryan handed it to her, watching as she studied herself.

  Bandages covered the right side of her face, neck to hairline, including her right eye and entire nose. Her hair sat in a greasy mat on her head, and what little skin did show looked slightly jaundiced. “I look terrible.”

  “Oh, please, nobody cares,” Ryan said, rolling his eyes. “Stop being such a prima donna.”

  Fiona glared at him with one eye. “Pus. Ooze.”

  Ryan smacked his hands over his ears as the surgeon came through the door. Her parents followed right behind.

  When the surgeon started peeling back the bandage, Ryan asked, “Anybody want anything?” and walked out of the room before Fiona or her parents had a chance to answer. The hospital room door didn’t make a sound as it slowly closed.

  Everything hurt—peeling off the tape, lifting the bandage, gently testing the sutures, and inspecting the graft. The surgeon asked her a few questions along the lines of Can you feel this? What about this? Fiona was used to a dull, awkward throb in her cheek, but this was pain—white-hot and searing along the border of what was hers and what was borrowed.

  Putting on a new dressing, the doctor said he was pleased with it so far. Everything looked great; the match couldn’t have been better; she was healing nicely. He wanted her to stay a few days more, but after that she could recover at home.

  “She’s due at Northwestern in mid-September,” her mother said. “Should we defer it a semester?”

  The doctor shook his head. “Shouldn’t be a problem. That’s a solid sixteen weeks. The stitches will be long gone. She’ll have a scar around the edge, which should fade with time but might never fully go away. She’ll still be experiencing numbness in the area.” He looked at Fiona. “We talked about that, how you might not ever get total feeling in the graft. Do you remember?”

  Fiona nodded—then winced. Her hand automatically went to her face, but the doctor caught it and brought it back down.

  “Don’t touch it.” He looked back to her mother. “She’s handling it great, though. I won’t give the all clear for a few more weeks, but I don’t see any reason to keep Fiona from her life any longer than we need to.”

  FI

  It had been five days.

  The world had been Marcusless for five days.

  Fi hesitated at the back of the church. Standing on her right side, her mother leaned and whispered, “Where do you want to sit?”

  Nowhere. I want to go home. “I don’t care,” she answered.

  Her mother pointed the lot of them to a pew in the back. Just as they began to shuffle in, a boy Fi had never met before tugged on her arm. “Are you Fi Doyle?”

  She nodded.

  He smiled. “I’m Will, his cousin. Aunt Ellen told me to find you. They want you up front.”

  “Oh.” Fi gestured to her family—and to Gwen and Trent, who she guessed counted as family, too. “My parents? And—”

  “Yeah. Y’all come on.”

  They followed Will the Cousin up front. So many people were crammed into this small, sacred space. Hundreds of people she didn’t know were saying good-bye to the boy she knew best.

  Fi sat between her mother and Trent. Her mom pulled her close, until Fi’s chin rested on her shoulder. Tucking into her mother reminded her of Marcus. But then, everything reminded her of Marcus.

  Trent sat on the other side of her, solid and breathing. She hated him just a little for it.

  The organ started playing, and what was left of the King family—mother, father, Jackson�
��processed up. The people she didn’t know came to the pulpit, one after another, telling wonderful stories about Marcus. She thought about her own stories: Marcus telling her jokes over the phone; Marcus beating her at Scrabble—and then throwing the game; Marcus protecting her from Cujo, as she hid her face against his chest during the first, and only, horror movie they watched; Marcus kissing her; Marcus lying beside her, dragging his hands through her hair.

  She wished her final memory of him was different—something funny or kind or adorable—not of a bony, nearly colorless boy, mumbling under a haze of drugs and unable to get out of bed.

  She stared at the metal urn on the altar. Now he was only memories and the contents of a jar.

  Back when Fi naively believed Marcus’s bucket list conversations were purely philosophical—not because he really needed to think this thing out—he’d said he wanted to be “picked clean and burned up.” At the time, she was horrified. Now she understood what he meant. He wanted to give whatever useful bits he had left to someone else. He’d spent the last part of his life waiting for the same favor.

  She didn’t realize she’d been crying until the service ended. Her mother gently nudged her upright, and Fi saw the dark wet of her mother’s silk shoulder. “Sorry.”

  Her mom waved her off. “Come on. We have to go to the reception.”

  “We do?” Fi eyed the church of strangers, not sure if anyone here knew who she was.

  “We do.”

  They piled into the Doyles’ minivan, and her dad followed a line of cars to the Kings’ house.

  In all the hours Fi had spent in this house, she’d never seen anyone here besides Mr. and Mrs. King, Jackson, and Marcus. Marcus had mentioned he had cousins, aunts, and uncles in town, but she’d only seen them in pictures.

  His family’s antisocial tendencies always felt strange to her. Her own parents knew everybody. The Doyles couldn’t go to dinner, the grocery store, the gym without running into someone they knew from work or growing up here or just because he was somebody else’s sister’s husband’s cousin or something.

  The Kings, however, were a little insulated family island, and as far as she knew, she was the only visitor. So when her family trailed her into the Kings’ house for the reception, everything felt wrong. There was no odd smell from Mrs. King’s homemade herbal remedies. All the lights were on. The place was packed with people.