Sick Kids In Love

by Hannah Moskowitz

  “It’ll be worth it, right?” Luna says. We’re sitting on the banister outside the school after the day’s over, soaking up the end of one of the first days of nice weather. She looks like she hasn’t slept since before Coney Island. “When we’re in college. Or just when we’re seniors.” She looks at Siobhan. “How did you get through this?”

  “Pot, mostly,” she says.

  “Yes. Okay. Let’s go smoke, I need it. You in?” Luna asks me.

  “I can’t. It’s Wednesday. I’m at the hospital today.”

  “You’re at the hospital every day,” Luna says. “No wonder you’re stressed. Hospitals are stressful! It’s like a universal fact.”

  “You were just saying how stressed you are,” I say.

  “Yes, and imagine if I went to hospitals. I’d just…pop.” She digs her phone out and checks the time. “Okay, I have two hours until rehearsal starts.”

  “That’s enough,” Siobhan says.

  “Yeah, let’s get out of here.”

  They head off toward their secret smoking spot behind the school, hand in hand. I’m irrationally annoyed at them, because I’m annoyed at everything today, but I shake it off and head toward the subway. My volunteer shift doesn’t start for another hour and a half, but most weeks I just head straight to the hospital and kill time until then. Today, of course, I forgot my uniform, because why wouldn’t I, so I have to stop off at home first. Maybe I’ll take a quick nap or something. I hate short naps, though. Three hours or nothing.

  My phone rings, the little jingle I have just for Sasha, as I’m hauling myself up the stairs. He calls pretty often on my way home from school, on days we’re not meeting up. I don’t love having conversations on the subway, since I feel like I must be bothering everyone, but I’m only on it for a few stops. And also I’m trying to care less about mildly bothering people with my existence, but…it’s a process.

  Today I don’t really give a fuck what any of these people think because I’m so cranky that these strangers are all somehow part of the problem, so whatever.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” he says. “How’d it go? Today any better?”

  “Not really.” The train’s late, too.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I had a shitty day, too, if that helps.”

  “What happened?”

  “I got a nosebleed in the middle of a Calc test, so I couldn’t leave. It was an event. The girl next to me looked personally offended.”

  “Eesh.”

  “Are you almost home?” he says.

  “I’m on my way. The train’s… Hang on, it’s coming in now.” I step back from the yellow line as it rushes past. In the summer, it’s free air-conditioning, that moment when the train flashes past. Right now it’s just March. “I forgot my uniform, so I have to go home and get it before my shift, because today wasn’t irritating enough.”

  “Oh,” he says. “I forgot you were at the hospital today.”

  “Every Wednesday,” I say, and maybe I don’t say it super nicely, but seriously, he always forgets, and it’s not like it’s his enzyme replacement therapy, where it’s always a different day of the week. It’s every Wednesday. It’s not hard. He just doesn’t pay attention. Not to anything but weird facts about murder, anyway.

  “Well, maybe you should take this week off,” he says. “You’ve had a rough week.”

  I snort out a laugh.

  “Tell me about your day,” he says, and I rant about college counselors and teachers who think they’re your only teacher the rest of the way home, and we’re still on the phone when I get off the train and cross Queens Boulevard and walk up my block, and there’s Sasha, sitting on my doorstep with a couple of plastic shopping bags.

  “Hi,” he says. Into the phone.

  I hang up like a rational person, and he lopes over and hugs me. I breathe out and relax into him.

  “I brought supplies for caramel marshmallow popcorn,” he says. My favorite. “And I’ve been sitting here looking for the worst horror movies streaming on Netflix, and I found two that might actually kill us.”

  “The dream,” I say.

  “Come flop down on the couch and I’ll rub your feet.”

  “My feet are okay.” I unlock my front door.

  “Okay, so I’ll French braid your hair.” He does fantastic French braids. I can’t do them because my fingers get too stiff. His are so tight he can do them in the evening and I can sleep in them and wear them to school the next day.

  That does sound nice. I don’t have time for any of the rest of it, but I can have French braids at work and think about him instead of thinking about my hair in my face. “Okay,” I say. “Thanks.”

  My uniform polo is about as close to the door as it could be without falling off the kitchen counter, like it’s mocking me for forgetting it. I shove it into my tote bag, because Sasha and I are not at any sort of clothes-removing stage and it seems weird to dart upstairs and change. I’ll just do it at the hospital. We sit down on the couch, and he combs my hair out with his fingers.

  “Do you want to pick one of the movies while I do this?” he says.

  “I can’t watch a movie,” I say. “I have to be at the hospital in an hour.”

  “Call in sick.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “I feel fine today,” I say.

  “That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve a night off,” he says.

  “Literally every other night besides Wednesday is a night off. It’s a once-a-week commitment. A ton of people have jobs they have to go to after school. Every day.” Just because I don’t know these people—it’s not really the expensive-private-school demographic—doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

  He finishes one of the braids and ties it off with a hair band from the junk mug on the table beside the couch. “I just thought it would cheer you up to spend some time together,” he says, and I don’t like the way he says it. Like he’s bravely trying not to pout about the fact that I’m not throwing away my commitments just because he can’t remember them.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It probably would. But that’s not the point.”

  “You’ve said before that they barely use you,” he says. “That when you step away they just have a nurse take your place like you weren’t even there.” He starts on the other braid.

  “Wow, thank you,” I say. “Always good to hear my boyfriend thinks what I do doesn’t matter.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” he says.

  “The point is that I’m doing menial shit,” I say. “When I’m doing a job, the nurse doesn’t have to do it, so she can go do something more complicated instead of sitting there answering the call buttons. Which, by the way, I’m awesome at, and as someone who’s sometimes hospitalized, you should be grateful for volunteers because we pay more attention to the call buttons than the nurses do.”

  “So maybe if you’re not there they’ll be forced to do it and learn to appreciate them,” he says.

  “Yes, you’re right. They’re slow to answer calls because they’ve never done it before because they have volunteers to do their bidding, not because they’re overworked and sleep-deprived.”

  “You don’t have to be mean,” he says.

  “I’m not being mean. You’re the one who’s trying to argue me into missing work, like you’re going to find some kind of loophole and all of a sudden I’ll agree with you that, you’re right, I don’t actually have to keep up my commitments, I’m so stupid, if only I’d had a boy here this whole time to show me how I was actually…what, hurting the medical process by being around to pick up slack? Is that what we’re going with?”

  “You know, I had a rough day, too,” he says.

  “I know, and I’m sorry, but I can’t just drop everything.”

  He’s no
t braiding anymore, so I turn around and face him.

  “I was just trying to do something nice for you,” he says.

  “I know, and it would have been really nice if it was yesterday, or tomorrow, or literally any other day besides Wednesday, and honestly, you should know that by now. It’s just Wednesdays, and it’s every Wednesday.”

  “Okay, well…” He runs his hands through his hair, like he always does when he’s stalling for time. “I’m not good at stuff like that. I don’t remember dates and stuff.”

  “Because you don’t pay attention,” I say. I can’t help it.

  “What?”

  “You don’t pay attention to things you don’t want to hear. You don’t listen when I say what days I work or that I can’t hang out because I have to study or…”

  “Okay, I’m sorry I want to spend time with you?”

  “That’s not it,” I say. “It’s that you don’t take me seriously. Like…I ask you questions for my column, and you turn them into a joke.”

  He looks hurt. “I thought you liked when I did that.”

  I do. This is all getting too big, and there’s still so much more shit I’ve been holding on to. “Or when I tell you that I don’t like video games and then you still come over when I told you I have work to do and make me play one.”

  “I wanted to show you something I love,” he says. “I read that book for you.”

  “I didn’t ask you to read it! You wanted to!”

  “So we just do the stuff you like and not the stuff I like?”

  “How about we just do the stuff that we want to do?” I say. “You like books. I don’t like video games. It’s not some contest.”

  “So what you want to do right now is go to the hospital and work for no money when you could be hanging out with me,” he says. “That’s what you’re saying.”

  “That’s a completely different thing. This isn’t about what I want to do. It’s about the fact that I made a commitment and I have a responsibility, and if I don’t show up everyone’s going to think I’m a flake.”

  “I just don’t get why you—”

  “You don’t have to get it!” I’m standing up. I don’t know when I stood up. “You just have to listen to me when I tell you it’s important to me. I’m sorry we can’t all bounce through life not giving a shit about anything, but that’s not me, okay?”

  He crosses his arms.

  “I have to go,” I say. I walk to the door too fast, and my hip aches. He tries to stop me, and it’s not until I’m halfway down the block that I realize it’s probably because I just left him in my house like this is some kind of TV show where people don’t have to worry about leaving their doors unlocked, and I’m two stops deep on the subway before I notice half of my hair is braided and the other half isn’t.

  What a fucking day.

  Maybe I should just…be easier. Be the kind of girlfriend who loves to watch her boyfriend play video games and who is happy to toss her life aside anytime he wants to hang out with her. Because if the situation were reversed, Sasha would do those things for me. Which would be a great revelation, I guess, if that’s at all what I wanted from him.

  It’s not my fault that he stood on my sidewalk and told me he loves everything about me and then apparently expected me to turn into some other person. He knew what he was getting into. I’m not going to change, not for anyone.

  I repeat the argument to myself all the way to the hospital and through my shift, and I get peak mad about half an hour in and then deteriorate into just exhausted from there. By the time my shift is over at eight, I’m just sleepwalking. I have to get home and finish my lab reports for Bio, and I can’t stop thinking about how close I was to having caramel marshmallow popcorn to eat while I did them, and now I’m going to just go home hungry because I’m too tired to socialize with the cafeteria people and we don’t have any food in the house. I don’t even stop by my dad’s office to say hi to him. I just leave.

  Except there’s Sasha, sitting on a bench by the reception desk.

  He doesn’t look great today. I noticed it at my house, but I didn’t really process it. I mean, it’s Sasha, so he always manages to look irritatingly handsome no matter how sick he is, in that sort of dying-from-consumption way, but he’s paler than usual and kind of shaky, and honestly my first thought when I see him here is maybe that he’s here because it’s a hospital and not because it’s me. But that’s stupid. This isn’t the ER. This is where you wait if you’re visiting someone.

  He stands up when he sees me. “Hi,” he says.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I have your key.”

  Oh. “Thanks.”

  He looks for it in his pocket. “I used to,” he says softly.

  “You used to have my key?”

  “No, I…” He finds it and drops it into my hand. “I used to bounce through life not giving a shit about anything,” he says. “Like you said.”

  I put my key in my jacket pocket and don’t say anything.

  “I think it was charming for a while,” he says. “You know, the sick boy who doesn’t worry. Playing against the type.”

  “Sure,” I say quietly.

  “But…see, the thing is…I do,” he says. “Care about things.” He’s watching me.

  It’s hard to look at him. It’s too much. It’s not enough, standing here and not touching him, with the receptionist at the desk, with people walking past us. “I know,” I say.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “You were right. And I’m gonna do better. I’ll listen more. I’ll stop trying to make you blow stuff off. I’ll stop, you know. Acting like I’m heartless. I’m not heartless.”

  “Sasha, I know you’re not.”

  He shrugs a little, this sad smile on his face. “It’s not charming anymore,” he says.

  It’s too much power. I’m scared. “Just not to me,” I say.

  “Well, who else do I need to be charming for?”

  I fold into his arms, in front of anyone who’s looking. He wraps himself all the way around me.

  I didn’t ask him to change. I didn’t ask him to apologize. He just shows up and says he’ll be different because I don’t like something about the way he is. It’s sweet, and it’s thoughtful, and…I wouldn’t do it for him.

  But he didn’t ask me to. He said I was right, so I don’t have to.

  I let him hold me for a while, and I feel comforted and safe and guilty.

  “Can you please keep coming up with funny answers for my column, though?” I say. “People really like them.”

  “I don’t care about people,” he says. “It’s your column. Do you like them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I will.”

  Are you where you’re

  supposed to be?

  Interesting question! Well, it’s ten p.m., and I’m at home, for once, so I would say yes, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. But I won’t lie to you. I do have some nagging worry about a patient I left with a rather new doctor overnight and some financial paperwork that I still need to go over, and there’s always a part of me that feels guilty for relaxing in my beautiful home with my beautiful daughter when there are so many people still working at the hospital and so many patients who can’t go home. So I suppose where I’m “supposed” to be is really a relative term, huh? But I bet you did that on purpose, to make us think about what “supposed to” really means. You’re very clever with these questions.

  —John Garfinkel, 49, Physician in Chief at Linefield and West Memorial Hospital

  No, not in any sense of the word. First, I’m going to AP Psych, which I shouldn’t even be in, because I wanted to take AP Art, but the college counselor told me that AP Psych would look better on my applications, and yeah, okay, it worked, I got in to NYU, but they even told me in my interview tha
t they wished I was taking AP Art because it would have shown them that I’m passionate about what I do and I’m not just trying to win points by taking something like Psych. Also, I’m late for Psych.

  —Siobhan O’Brian, 17, artist

  No! At my age? I deserve to be somewhere warmer than this. You know, I have a girlfriend, and she and her husband just moved to Aruba. Aruba! Imagine moving to Aruba. That’s not something they tell you is possible, you know? They say no, that’s a vacation, then you have to come home. And we just believe it! But people do it. Probably someone new moves to Aruba every day. Why not me!

  —Judy Bluth, 79, retired chef

  Right at this moment? Looking at that boy, sitting on this train? Yes. Look at him. Yes, we are.

  —Claire Lennon, 17, dead

  No. We should be in Disney World. We’re very sick! Why aren’t people constantly taking us to Disney World?

  —Sasha Sverdlov-Deckler, 16, gravely ill

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sasha and I are in sync.

  I’m judging myself for being so worried, for the neurotic way that I can never calm the fuck down and enjoy anything, except…I am, right now. I’m doing it. I am enjoying something.

  I’m enjoying him.

  And he’s trying. I can tell. He pauses, sometimes, when he’s talking, and then he’ll say something more patient or thoughtful than he would have said before we fought at my house. He doesn’t push when I tell him I have a paper to write and I can’t hang out. He listens to me rant about how stressed out I am about this college stuff and doesn’t tell me I’m overreacting or suggest some dumb solution. He just listens.

  And I was right; this was what we needed. We’re a finely tuned machine now, performing some choreographed relationship dance. We circle around each other. He comes up behind me and wraps his arms around my waist, and I forget how to breathe and don’t mind.

  One thing no one ever told me about relationships—and it’s honestly a good thing they didn’t, because it sounds so stupid and overdramatic that I never would have believed it—is that desperate, deep sense of loss you get every time a kiss stops or he lets go of your hand. He’ll still be right there, but the fact that I was just touching him and now I’m not makes me feel this gnawing at the bottom of my throat, every time. He pulls back from me, and it’s like I’m watching it in slow motion, trying to will it not to happen, and I feel a bit of me pull away with him, like it’s attached.