by Paul Mosier
I look at her mouth, where the tumor had once pushed her teeth forward, drastically changing her appearance. The tumor has shrunk, and her face in profile is almost back to normal. Her hair is gone, but at least she got to keep her pretty eyebrows and eyelashes. For the moment, anyway. She’s also probably paler. She doesn’t get as much sun these days, and her blood isn’t as healthy.
I think about the tumor, still there, behind her upper teeth on the roof of her mouth. The chemo has made it retreat, but it’s still there, in her flesh and bone.
Be gone, cancer. Leave my little sister alone.
I think this, and look at my bald little sister who doesn’t even think of wearing hats unless she’s in the sun and Mom and Dad make her. I look at the little girl who talks herself into drinking medicine that tastes so bad it makes her throw up, who gets poked and bled and pumped full of poison that fights the cancer but batters her body. I look at the little girl who somewhere in her mind knows that she’s fighting for her life, but hasn’t allowed herself to cry.
Echo smiles in her sleep, and I wonder from what happy thought. I bend down and kiss her upper lip, the curtain the cancer hides behind.
“Cancer messed with the wrong girl,” I whisper.
9
MONDAY, I SIT at Milky’s Malts after school. It’s an old-fashioned diner a couple of blocks from the Village Arts Academy.
I’m here to meet Octavius, who told me in class he has some big surprise for me. I’m both excited and terrified. I don’t really know what sort of outcome I want from meeting him here, and I’m afraid to wonder about it.
I’ve ordered my malt already, strawberry with whipped cream and a cherry on top, and paid for it at the counter. I didn’t want to wait for him to offer to pay, especially if it meant I would wait and then it didn’t happen. So I’ve got who pays for my malt already figured out, and the server brings it just as he comes through the door.
“Hey!” he says. “Thanks for meeting me!”
“Sure thing.” I wipe my palms on my uniform skirt.
He slides into the booth across from me. “You already ordered?”
“Yeah. I hope you don’t mind.” I pull the cherry from the whipped cream and bite it from the stem. It tastes amazing. It’s the first thing I’ve been able to taste in forever. “I was hungry.”
“Ah, I was gonna buy.”
I smile, but not too much, and shrug. “Next time.”
He nods. “So, I’ve got something for you.”
“Really?” This time it’s very hard not to grin.
“Yeah. I hope you don’t think it’s creepy.” He stands his book bag up on the seat next to him and reaches for its zipper.
“I, too, am hoping I don’t think it’s creepy.” Nice and witty, I tell myself.
“Okay. Okay. Here it is.” He opens the bag with dramatic flair, reaches inside, and pulls out—a hat.
It’s a red baseball hat that says Team Echo in gold stitching. He looks pleased with himself as he hands it to me, then reaches in the bag for another, which he pulls on his head.
“What do you think?” He looks at me, eyebrows raised with hope.
Disappointment washes over me, drowns me. I stare at the hat, unseeing. I don’t want to look up at him because I don’t want him to see my eyes.
“Hold on.” I leave the table and hurry down the aisle to the bathroom, then rush inside and bolt the door.
I look at the hat in my hands. It’s the stupidest, ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. There’s no way I’m even trying it on. I look at my face in the mirror. I hate myself at this moment, for being such an idiot I’d think he’d get something for me that was really for me. But I hate him even more. First the “Echo’s Fight Song” mix, and now this. He just wants to cozy up to the celebrity sick kid, like everyone else. I was a fool not to see he’s only interested in Echo.
I splash water on my face, then dry it with toilet paper because they’re out of paper towels. I storm from the bathroom and down the aisle and drop into the booth across from him. I hold up the hat and shake it at him.
“This is the ugliest hat I’ve ever seen, and giving it to me is completely creepy.” I lean across the table, and he draws back in fear. “She’s my sister, not yours.”
He keeps looking from my eyes to my cheek. He looks hurt but also distracted.
“What?” I demand. I’m trembling with rage and every kind of bad feeling.
“Then I guess you don’t want to see the Team Echo T-shirts?”
I fling the hat at him, and it bounces off his chest and onto his lap. Then I grab my bag and leave. I slip on a napkin and lose my balance, bumping into another table, spilling an old man’s iced tea onto his grilled cheese. The old man raises his voice in protest as I turn away and rush to the exit. The bells on the door jingle angrily as I burst through it, and the cool outside air meets the wet of my eyes.
I stumble down the street, not knowing where I’m going, or where I should be going. I reach up to touch my face and peel off the scrap of toilet paper that’s apparently been stuck to my cheek since the bathroom.
After dinner, Dad and I walk with Echo to the gelato shop. I’m not so much in the mood for it after the Octavius fiasco, but when Echo feels like eating something, especially something with fat or protein in it, we have to drop what we’re doing and make it happen. Chemo makes people lose weight, and Echo was already skinny before cancer.
It’s a pretty evening. The leaves on the trees in the sidewalk planters have just begun changing colors. It occurs to me that I’ve noticed that the evening is pretty, and I wonder if it means I’ve gotten used to having a little sister who has cancer. But I feel guilty for thinking it’s a pretty evening, because every evening is pretty terrible for Echo. Even if she doesn’t realize it.
“I’m gonna get something pink!” she says through her mask. She always chooses by color. “What color are you gonna get, El?”
“I’m thinking I’ll get something pistachio-colored.”
“Pistachio isn’t a color!”
“It is at the paint store.”
She furrows her brow; her eyes look kooky. “We aren’t going to the paint store!”
“No? Then I’ll get something a very light whitish-green.”
The gelato shop is narrow, with a long counter and a row of small tables for two across from it. Echo skips back and forth along the counter, looking at the pinks, which include bubble gum, lobster bisque, peppermint, black cherry, birthday cake, and strawberry. I already know I’m sticking with pistachio.
“Can I please have birthday cake?” Echo asks the girl at the counter. “I can’t wait for my birthday!”
The counter girl looks at Echo’s bald head and germ mask and can’t hide her sadness. She tries to smile, but I know that, like me, she’s wondering if Echo will live to see another birthday.
“A single or a double?” she asks.
“A single!” Echo jumps up and down.
“You can have a double if you’d like,” Dad says. He never misses an opportunity to try to stuff Echo with more food.
“I’m not hungry enough for two,” Echo says.
“And a double of pistachio for me,” I add.
“Make that just a single, please,” Dad says. “And nothing for me, thanks.” He’ll spend money to get Echo to eat, but I can only get a single and he can’t get anything.
The counter girl smiles grimly and turns away to get our scoops. I gather napkins and a couple of little plastic spoons. The girl returns with our gelato cups.
“Can I have a sample?” Echo asks.
I look to Dad, but he’s got the bank app open on his phone, checking to see if we’re not too broke from medical expenses to afford two scoops of gelato. He’s oblivious.
The girl smiles. “What would you like a sample of?”
“Birthday cake!”
I roll my eyes. “You don’t get a sample of the flavor you’re already getting.”
“It’s okay,” the gir
l says. She takes a tiny spoon and dips it into the tub, then returns. “Here you go.”
“Thank you!” Echo lifts her mask to taste it. “Mmm. I’m glad I got that flavor.”
“That’ll be five twenty-five.”
Dad reaches for his wallet.
“Let me get that.” It’s a voice from behind us, a man ten years younger than Dad. He looks to the counter girl. “Please just add it to my order.”
The counter girl looks from the stranger to Dad. Dad looks from the girl to the stranger.
“Please,” says the man, who wears a sweater-vest over a plaid shirt. “It would make me very happy if you’d let me.”
“Thank you,” Dad says, managing a smile.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’re welcome.” The man smiles a kind smile.
I nudge Echo. “Say thank you, Echo.”
“Thank you! Thank you!”
The man smiles down at her. “You’re very welcome.”
We turn from the counter and the generous man. But directly behind him is a face I recognize. It’s Sydney, the girl who sits to my left in Mr. D’s class. The girl who always groans if I say anything that sounds halfway smart, anything that makes Mr. D happy. My mashed-potato-slinging nemesis. She stares at me with a strange expression, and then at Echo.
“Excuse me,” I say, ’cause she’s kinda in the way. She steps aside, but stares at us, mouth agape, as we move past.
Wonderful. Now that she knows, the whole school will know. That I’m the girl with the sad life, with the sick little sister, who has to eat charity gelato.
Even ice cream has become miserable.
And school is about to get unbearable.
The next day at school is the worst ever. I refuse to even look at Octavius, and so I don’t say a word to anyone, and nobody says a word to me. But everyone looks at me when I walk past. They look at me like they know something about me I don’t want them to know. And I feel like they’re whispering, Ooh, poor girl. Her sister has cancer. She can’t have fun because she’s too sad.
On my way home, dogs out for their walks can smell the sadness on me. They hide behind their owners’ legs as I go by. When Mom says hello to me on my way in the door, it’s the first words spoken to me since she said good-bye as I left in the morning.
In the kitchen I hear my phone vibrate on the counter. I pick it up and see a message from Maisy.
Hey El! I miss you soooooooo much. How r things?
“Things are wonderful,” I say to the empty kitchen. I don’t text back, then leave the phone on the counter and open the pantry. All the food looks tasteless, but I spot a neglected old friend below the bottom shelf. My tennis racquet. I grab it and a can of balls and storm through the living room, past Mom, and out the door.
Down the stairs and outside, I stand on the front steps and look up and down the block.
“Welcome to the almost-Greenwich-Village Tennis Club,” I announce to nobody. I pop the lid off the can and roll the three balls into my hands. Down the steps to the sidewalk, I spin around, looking for a place to hit against. But there are no clean stretches of empty wall. Instead there are windows every few feet, basement windows and steps and iron rails, and window boxes with flowers, not to mention trees in planters and parked cars packed into every possible space on the street.
No matter. I drop a ball onto the sidewalk, and as it comes back up I whack it with my best forehand groundstroke. I manage to hit a brick wall across the street in a space between windows, and it bounces back my way. I meet it in the street and whack it with my backhand. I’m out of practice but you wouldn’t know by the force of my swing. The ball hits the door of a town house and bounces back. This time I catch it on the second bounce and whack it with another backhand, into the side of a parked van. I have little time to react to the return but manage a forehand drop shot that lands in the downstairs well of a basement.
I call out the score. “Fifteen-love.” A messenger on a bicycle smiles as he rides past. I drop another ball and mash it. This time I miss the wall. It bounces off a first-floor window and comes back through the branches of a small tree in a planter. I whack it back across and it short-hops the wall and goes high. I wait for it, maneuvering with stellar footwork, and meet it with an overhand smash that rips the face off a flower in a window box across the street.
“Thirty-love.”
The last ball I drop and smack, but it’s way too low and thumps into the side of a fancy car right across the narrow street. The car alarm sounds, bouncing off buildings as the ball rolls down the block. I stand with my arms at my sides for a moment. Then a guy leans out the third-story window of the town house across the street, glaring at me.
“Sorry,” I call up.
He points his key at the car and clicks the alarm off, then closes the window and disappears.
I turn to fling my racquet away, but before I can I see my dad, standing at the top of the steps to our apartment. He has his hands in his pockets.
“You miss tennis?”
My shoulders sag. I nod.
He looks around, up and down the block. “It’s a nice day for it.”
I point across the street with my racquet. “I just killed a flower.”
“How was school?” He’s acting like I’ve been playing tennis, not like he’s just witnessed me having a tantrum. I decide that’s pretty generous of him.
I look him up and down. “Aren’t you supposed to be teaching babies to paint? Did you get fired too?”
He shakes his head. “Nope. In-service day at the Academy of Privileged Toddlers. No school.”
“Oh.”
He sits on the stairs leading up to our apartment, and I join him. He’s right about the day, which is a little crisp, but clear. It’s a perfect day for tennis if there were a court to play on. I think about what the kids at my old school would be doing on a day like today and decide the girls would be playing tennis in the basement gym. Or basketball.
Dad looks at his cell phone, then nudges me. “You never answered my question.”
“School? It was possibly the worst day ever. But I got through it.”
He nods. He doesn’t try to talk me out of feeling that way about it. I stare the short distance to the town houses across the street, but I can see him out of the corner of my eye.
“Good,” he says.
“The girl from Mr. D’s class who saw us with Echo at the gelato shop has apparently told the whole school about her cancer. So today everyone stopped talking when I walked past. It’s like they held their breath.”
“Maybe you’re imagining it.”
“Or maybe she’s told the whole school about me and my sad life. And how a stranger paid for our ice cream because we don’t have any money.”
“That was very thoughtful of him,” Dad says quietly. “Not everyone is gonna understand it.”
I’m sure he’s come out here because of something unpleasant. Bad news about Echo, or all of us. I’m too accustomed to bad news to worry much about it. I’ll just let it come, like I’m buried in sand and the tide is rolling in to drown me.
“Your mom says Maisy has been texting and emailing you for weeks but you’ve been avoiding her.”
“What makes Mom think that?”
“Maisy’s mom called her.”
I let that sink in. I picture it. “I suppose Mom told Maisy’s mom about Echo’s cancer?”
“I think there’s a very strong possibility that came up.”
I frown at the street below.
“Don’t you still want to be friends with her?” he asks.
I watch a bird fly frantically past. “It’s just . . .” I don’t have a complete answer.
“Sometimes I blame myself,” Dad says. “Like if I made more money, you guys would see the dentist and the doctor more often. Maybe they’d have caught it sooner.”
I wait for more, then glance at him. He’s staring through the sidewalk.
“You’re a good dad.” I put my
arm around him. “The best. The cancer grew so fast. That’s what the doctor said.”
“Thanks for saying that.” He puts his arm around me, returning the favor. “Thanks for lifting me up.”
“All for one, all four one.” I say it without even a trace of sarcasm.
I look up and down the street, at the trees in the planters with their leaves dressing for autumn, the pretty old town houses with fancy ironwork on the steps. The flowers in the window boxes, even though one of them is missing its face thanks to my careless overhand smash. “This really is a lovely place. Manhattan, and the Village. Especially if you like people.” I bounce the face of my racquet off my foot. “And I do like people. I’m just having a tough time at the moment. It’s entirely my fault I don’t have any friends.”
“Oh, you’ve got friends,” Dad says, and looks back down the block as if expecting someone. He glances again at the phone in his hand, the hand that isn’t on my shoulder, then sets it down and wipes a tear away with his palm. I wipe mine away with the arm of my sweater. Tears are too commonplace now to be embarrassing, for either of us.
“So what’s the bad news?” I ask.
There’s a pause, so I turn to him.
“No bad news,” he says.
“Then why do you look sad?”
“I’m sad that you expect bad news.”
I lean into him and close my eyes.
It’s perfect, just for a moment, just the love between me and Dad. Then there’s the sound of someone clearing their throat, and Dad leans away from me. Maisy is standing at the bottom of the steps, holding a single yellow rose, looking at me questioningly, measuring my expression. My hand covers my mouth, but I feel myself rising to my feet.
“Why are you shutting me out?” she asks. “It’s not fair.”
Dad rises and goes inside our building. I sit back down. “There’s a lot of not fair going around. Just ask Echo.”
Maisy throws the rose onto the sidewalk. Her fists are clenched at her sides. “Being friends isn’t supposed to be like that. When you’re in pain I’m supposed to be in pain. Your fear is supposed to be my fear. Otherwise what’s the point?”
