This is Not the End

by Chandler Baker

  “You know Ms. Johnson would probably give you an extension on that exam if you asked.” He’s not going to press the issue. He’s not going to rush me, I realize, and relax.

  “Um, let me stop you right there. No.” I peer up at him, curling my thumbs under the padded strap of my book bag. “I absolutely can’t fall any farther behind than I am now. Not if I want to graduate with you guys.” I’d decided before any of this that—if I lived—I wasn’t going to finish my high school career with the lowly juniors below us. No way. “Plus, anytime my parents take a break from pill patrol, they switch right over to hyperscientific grade analysis. I’m not joking. There’s a chart where my mom has calculated how many more points I’ll need on my SAT to offset the fact I’ll no longer be recruited for swim team so that I can still get into Stanford. It’s frightening.”

  “What about the Replacement Child? I thought she was occupying most of the free space on their mental hard drives.”

  “Elsie? She already has Stanford onesies, socks, and matching hair bows. Trust me, she’s a shoo-in.”

  “Well, don’t count yourself out of the running just yet. You may have a better shot than you think. I”—he scoots back, knocking at my locker door—“have a present for you. Open up.”

  I glance sideways at Henry. “Okay, weirdo.” I spin my combination lock. “You didn’t have to get all mushy on me.” What if he’s planned some grand romantic gesture for my return? I’m not sure I’m ready for that.

  He shrugs.

  Inside my locker is a new binder tied with wrinkly pink ribbon. I pull it out, cradling it with one arm. “Gee, thanks, school supplies. Can never have too many of these.” I drum my fingers on the white plastic. Okay, definitely not romantic.

  He rolls his eyes. “Look inside, Stel.” God, I hate when he calls me that.

  I tug at one end of the messy bow and stash the ribbon in my locker. Unfolding the binder, I peek. Scratchy handwriting is scrawled on pages of leaf paper. I immediately snap it shut. “It’s the homework I missed, isn’t it?” I squint up at him. I’ve always found Henry’s height comforting.

  He sighs. “Oh God. Please don’t make a big deal out of this. My new number’s in there, too. See?” He flips to the inside cover. “Had to get a new phone. So don’t”—he points at me in mock seriousness—“throw this away.”

  I stare at the cover. A binder full of all the work I need to make up. Of course it’s tempting. A fast track to senior-year fun. I shake my head, ignoring the devil on my left shoulder. I’ve come this far.

  “Henry…” I say, drawing out the word a little too long. “Thank you. Really.” I stretch up onto my tippy-toes and wrap my arms around his neck. My nose squishes into the rough fabric of his uniform and I’m caught up in the familiar fresh scent of Dove soap and Ralph Lauren cologne.

  He pushes away and holds me out at arm’s length. “Okay, what’s wrong?”

  “Not to be that girl”—I curl my fingers into air quotes—“but I feel a little, I don’t know, icky, taking this. Like I’d be cheating.” My shoulders pinch up toward my ears.

  “Oh, come on, Stella.” He wraps his palms over the bill of his baseball cap, tugging it down over his eyes. “I knew you were going to do this. Weren’t you the one complaining that your incessant rule-following hadn’t gotten you anywhere? That was you before surgery, right?”

  “Yeah, but…” I bite my lip. He’s right. If I made it—and that was a big if—I’d promised myself I’d try not to be so uptight.

  “And besides, it’s not like anyone thinks you can’t do it on your own. You’re, like, number one in the class.”

  “Correction: was number one in our class.” I feel my lips curl into a scowl. Missing a couple hundred days of school doesn’t exactly work wonders for your academic record.

  “Whatever. You know what I mean. Everybody missed you. It’d be nice to actually get to see your face now that you’re back for real.”

  “Henry. Nobody missed me. I’ve been practically invisible in this school since, like, my diagnosis.”

  “I wouldn’t say nobody.”

  I stare up at him, trying to give him my best puppy-dog eyes. For good measure, I thrust out my lower lip, too. “Look, I’m sorry. I know I’m lame and I swear I’m going to change that, but…I just have to do this my way, okay?”

  Henry tilts his head back and stares up at the locker pod ceiling for a good five seconds. “You, Stella Cross, are too good for your own good.”

  “True,” I say, this time giving him a playful punch in the gut. “But that’s why I keep you around.”

  Just then, two clammy hands reeking of cocoa butter and chlorine cover my eyeballs. “Guess who-oo?”

  “Oh my God, Brynn!” I squeal, spinning to wrap her in a big hug, too. Brynn’s auburn hair is swept into a messy bun and she’s wearing a blue zip-up hoodie over her uniform. When Brynn and I were little, we’d once tried to count the freckles on her cheeks but kept losing track, so we decided she must have infinity freckles, which at the time didn’t make sense, but ended up being sort of true, since she seemed to keep getting more every summer. I haven’t seen her since post-op at the hospital. Once home, my parents had adopted the title of “Germ Nazis” and hadn’t allowed visitors.

  “You look ah-mazing!” She twirls me around. “Here I was thinking you’d be all like zombified with stringy hair and fingers falling off. But nope. Good as new.”

  As hard as I try to keep up—which until now hasn’t been very—Brynn continues to outpace me on everything, whether it’s rounding third base with the captain of the cross-country team or getting caught with a cigarette after last period. I really shouldn’t be surprised anymore when I come back from a long absence to find she’s not the same freckle-faced kid I knew growing up. For instance, she seems to have a new piercing every time I see her, and this time it’s her eyebrow, a neon-green barb that looks like it hurts, threaded through the skin above her right eye.

  “I think to be a zombie, I’d have to have been bitten by a zombie. You don’t just spontaneously become a zombie by dying and coming back to life.”

  “Not necessarily,” says Henry. “You could be Patient Zero. Like, you could have been the first person infected and the zombie disease was just lurking inside of you so that when you died and reanimated, you’d be total walking dead. Don’t you guys ever watch TV?”

  I stick my tongue out at him.

  “See?” Brynn crosses her arms. “For all we know, you could be about to start the apocalypse.”

  “Noted,” I say. “Then I guess you two better stay on my good side.”

  I spend the rest of the day fighting to keep my eyes open. Recovery is still exhausting, and there are several times when I have to creep along like an old woman. I try extra hard not to fall asleep in calc, and, in AP lit, and I finish reading The Awakening while the rest of the kids in my class take a quiz on All the King’s Men. By lunchtime, I’m so tired, I’m not even hungry. I’m seriously considering finding a picnic table to crawl under to nap. Ever since the surgery my appetite has shrunk to zilch, probably because I spend half the day worrying about the time I’ll be met with my next lightning-round burst of pains. If side effects were baseball cards, I’d have a half-million-dollar collection.

  I stayed late to talk to Dr. Schleifer, my government teacher, about my makeup work, and by now, I’ve missed the lunchtime crush of students. I walk down an empty hall where every classroom door has been sealed shut until the time when the next bell rings. Through the blinds of the classroom windows, I can make out the students, trapped inside, faces aimed at whiteboards, human specimens entombed inside a series of glassy terrarium tanks, all lined up one after another. I pass through a cold spot on the way to the cafeteria, a not-so-rare phenomenon in Seattle, where the coldest air seems to pool into invisible ice pockets—even indoors. I guess it happens because of the uneven amounts of moisture in the air, but when I was little, my neighbor told me that if you found yourself passin
g through a cold spot, it meant you’d just passed through a ghost. The image always stuck.

  I pause to lean on a set of lockers. Being up for an entire day has left me feverish. I feel red and sticky at the base of my neck and behind my ears. The locker cools my skin and I allow myself a few minutes to breathe. I don’t have a firm grasp on what would happen if I overworked my new heart, but I imagine it heating up under pressure before exploding like a bloody pile of spaghetti in a microwave.

  A boy my age who I recognize as Harrison Miller rounds a corner down the hall, whistling, with a book in hand. He stops when he sees me. “Are you all right?” he asks. “You lost?”

  I smile wanly. “Fine, yeah, thanks. Just catching a breather.” I stand up straighter and push the fallen wisps of hair out of my face. Though it’s sweet he asked, I take his comment as a context clue about the rest of my appearance and, to put it in medical terms, the prognosis isn’t good.

  “You must be new here. I’m Harrison.” He extends a hand. “You’re a senior too?” He points to my copy of The Awakening. Harrison, who I’ve known at least in passing for six years, is built like a screwdriver, knobby head attached to a rod-straight body.

  My eyes widen. I don’t know when the last time we talked was. Maybe never. But at a small private school, you know people. “I—I—” I stammer, unsure of what to say. I’ve been in and out of school for over a year, but could people have possibly forgotten me? I pause for a second. Nobody takes this long to answer with her name. Then, on instinct, I answer, “I’m Veronica Leeds.” I use the name Brynn and I once invented to talk to boys online. I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of introducing myself as Stella—he’d surely recognize the name and afterward realize he was talking to a girl who’s completely unmemorable.

  We shake hands and—after exchanging a few excruciating niceties about how friendly the people are here and how the class ranking system blows and how the worst thing about Duwamish by far is the uniforms—part ways. By now I feel confident that I’ve turned an unattractive shade of Pepto-Bismol pink, so I duck into the women’s restroom, which smells unmistakably of Lysol and French fries, just as I remember.

  It’s hushed. The sound of running water trickles in from the boys’ restroom next door. Feeling all but invisible in this school, I’m halfway relieved to see a reflection in the mirror. I unzip my bag and take out a travel-size Clinique makeup carrier. I lean over the counter to apply a soft layer of lip gloss and a dash of blush. The last thing I want now is to look sick. I’ve done the whole sick thing and I’m so over it.

  At first glance I think that I spilled my compact on my shirt. The hint of color on my white polo draws my gaze downward. Tucking my chin, I frown at a glob of red on the fabric. I try to scrape it off with my nail. No luck. I feel my eyebrows squinch into a V at the top of my nose.

  When I step back to look in the mirror, crimson handprints cover my shirt from my stomach all the way to my chest. My hand flies to my mouth and I catch a whiff of something metallic.

  “Oh my God.” My voice is a whisper. I stare at the blood. “Ohmygod.” I repeat faster. “What happened?” my voice shrieks.

  I turn on the faucet and pull my shirt underneath it, where I scrub furiously at a handprint. It stays put. Blood crusted on fabric. Smelling like spare change. Blood in the shape of hands. Grabbing at me. Gore. Plasma. Bodily fluid. Get off me. Get off me.

  Beginning to panic, I flee from the bathroom, walking fast the rest of the way outside to the lunch area.

  It’s only when I’m surrounded by other people in the quadrangle that I let my stride slow. My pulse throbs in the two glands at the top of my throat and my hands tremble even though they’re clenched into fists at my sides. I glance down at the gory blots, ready to find someone to tell, but when I do my breath hitches in my chest.

  They’re gone.

  As in, they’re not there.

  I thumb the fabric, looking for even one of the stains, but the only thing remaining is a giant wet spot where I’d doused myself with water from the faucet. Even my fingernails are clean. It doesn’t make sense.

  I press my knuckles into the side of my head and take a deep breath. I’m tired. I must be tired. I rub the heel of my hand into my eye socket and try to shake off whatever it is I thought I saw.

  I was wrong. Confused. Meanwhile, the teeth in my chest gnaw at the new heart in response.

  CHANDLER BAKER grew up in Florida, went to college at the University of Pennsylvania, and studied law at the University of Texas. She now lives in Austin with her husband, though her heart remains at the beach. She strongly believes that writing quality improves vastly if done while staring out at a large body of water and daydreaming. Chandler is the author of the young adult thriller Alive, as well as the High School Horror series. You can visit her online at www.chandlerbaker.com.