by Karen Rivers
I close my eyes, but I stick my thumbnail hard into the palm of my other hand, to stop myself from sleeping for real. I lie for ages with my eyes shut, listening to him tip that dumb chair, listening to him turning those pages, listening to his loud breathing. I don’t even open them when I hear my inbox ping with a message, and then another one. I just ignore it. I play dead. I mean, maybe I’ll be dead soon enough, so it’s pretty stupid to waste alive time on it, but I do it anyway. It’s just easier than everything else. It’s the easiest choice to make. Dad used to always say, when one of us had a huge problem about something, “Water always flows downhill.” I think what he meant was sometimes you should just do the easiest thing, though actually I don’t think he has the saying quite right.
When the hour finally ends, Gav gets up and clears his throat. “See ya, I guess,” he says.
And I go, “I guess,” even though it totally blows my cover and now he knows that I was just pretending to be asleep all along.
Chapter 17
As soon as he leaves, I fall asleep in a hard crash, like my laptop when something goes wrong. It’s not a fade to black, it’s just instant blackness. I’m back on Mars and the moon Phobos is still in view, even though it’s so high up that we have to lie back to see it. Deimos is out of sight. Even as I watch, Phobos starts to split apart.
“Do you see that?” I say to the person next to me. My voice doesn’t want to come out right, but I somehow make the words sound like more than whistles.
“Duh,” says Elliott.
“Elliott?” I say, confused. “What are you doing here?”
Then, just like I’ve been rebooted, my eyes fly open and I’m awake again. Somehow I am on the couch. I don’t know how I got to the couch or when I came here. I think about asking, but then I decide not to. It seems scary to be somewhere and not remember getting there. Dad is watching the news on the TV. The weather reporter is saying that it’s flooding in Portland. It’s a state of emergency! The water is knee-deep in the streets. There is footage of a Walmart, with water in all the aisles, random items floating in it. It looks like the Apocalypse.
Dad watches with me for a few minutes and shakes his head. “Isn’t it something,” he says. “Never rains but it pours. Or, in some places, it just never rains.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. I stare at the screen intently, squinting, to see if, in the background somewhere, I’ll see Tig. I don’t want to miss seeing him, if he’s there.
They show a middle school, which is closed and deep in the water. “Schools are closed,” the reporter is saying. In the background, a group of boys splashes through the water on bicycles.
“They’re going to ruin those bikes,” Dad says.
I pick up the remote control and hit pause and rewind it a few seconds, then pause again. None of the boys are Tig.
“Wish they could send us their rain,” Mom says, coming into the room. “The lake needs a refill!”
Our eyes all drift to the window, where we can see how low the lake has gotten. It’s pretty bad. Well, it’s been bad all along.
That’s how we all are, that’s what we’re all doing, when the front door flings open and Iris comes running into the room. Iris! I’m instantly happy. She’s smiling her Iris-smile and she smells like Iris and right away, she jumps over the back of the couch and gathers me up in this huge hug. “Ish,” she says. “What is going on? How are you feeling?”
All I can do is blink at her and hug her back.
There’s this one mountain on Mars—well, there are lots of mountains on Mars, but one in particular—that’s called Olympus Mons. It’s three times bigger than Mount Everest. It’s so huge that if you were standing in front of it, you wouldn’t be able to see the top. You’d have to be miles away to see it. It’s so big, you can’t even imagine it when you think about mountains on Earth. Anyway, that’s how I feel about Iris compared to how I feel about everyone else. My love for Iris is Olympus Mons.
Iris’s being home changes everything. We are all talking at once and laughing and hugging and there are plates clattering on the counter and Elliott even agrees to play Pictionary with us after dinner. We play and nearly die laughing at the way Dad draws pretty much everything (it all looks the same!) and at how Mom can’t ever guess even the dumbest things like “chair” or “cow.” It’s the best night of my whole life. The best night ever.
I fall asleep with my face in the bowl of potato chips, though. Nothing’s perfect, I guess. I get super tired, super fast! There’s nothing I can do about it. They say that your body does a lot of its healing while it’s asleep. Let’s hope that’s true.
Then, on the first day after Iris comes home, the sky grays up, thick and heavy. It’s like she brought the rain with her. Everyone is holding their breath. “Is it going to rain again? For real, this time? Is it?”
Even I can’t take my eyes off the sky, just in case it starts. I go out and lie in the hammock, half napping, half waiting. I want it to rain so bad. I can feel how much the lake wants the rain, how the trees are curling their leaves up toward the hopeful sky. But instead of being a relief, it’s making me really sad. I don’t know why, but it is. Maybe the Brussels sprout has spread into the part of my brain that makes everything sad and is resting there, gently, like a person leaning against a wall in the shade.
I sniffle a bit and let the hammock stop swinging. I hear footsteps on the deck, so I turn my head carefully to see who it is. I always have to be careful when I turn my head now because, if I do it too fast, I get dizzy and the pain falls from one side of it to the other, like a ball dropping in a cup. I hate how it feels.
It’s Elliott. I think about pretending to be asleep, but it’s too late.
She goes, “The air smells like rain, even.”
Elliott’s barefoot and wearing old cut-off jean shorts and a T-shirt of Dad’s that practically comes to her knees. Her hair is sticking up all over. We both stare at the sky.
Then for some reason, I say, “Why do you care if it rains? It’s not like you care about the lake or the trees or anything.”
Elliott sits down next to me, so hard that I’m practically ejected from the hammock. She stares at me. “You’re pretty mean to me, you know,” she says quietly. “I’m trying to cut you slack because you have cancer or whatever, but I have feelings, too.”
I’m kind of taken aback. I mean, obviously Elliott has feelings. But . . . does she? She’s so hard and tough, like one of those insects that have their skeleton on the outside. I don’t know what to say, so I shrug.
“Well,” Elliott says. “It would be OK if you stopped for a while. I’m trying to be nice to you.” She blinks, like she’s about to start crying. “I don’t want you to die.”
“I’m not going to die,” I mumble. I lie still and cross my hands over my chest, like I’m already dead, to try it on for size. It doesn’t feel good. “I’m fine.”
“You have a brain tumor!” she says. “You aren’t fine.”
“Um, that’s very reassuring,” I say. “Thanks.”
“You know what I mean!” she says. “Stop trying to make everything I say into something bad!”
“I’m not!” I say. “But most stuff you say is bad! Why do you hate me anyway?”
“I don’t hate you!” she says. “You’re just always mad at me!”
“I’m not!” I yell. “You’re always mad at ME!”
We look at each other. We actually have the exact same color eyes. Looking at her eyes is like looking at myself, but without all the freckles and red hair to distract you. Her eyes make me think of the lake, but when it was full of chemicals. I decide not to say that bit out loud.
And then it starts to rain. It’s just a few drops plopping down at first, but big drops, like tiny packages of water being sent to the Earth from space. They splatter in a pattern on the wooden deck, on our bare legs, on our hair and faces. Then she reaches over and gives me a hug and lies down and we lie there for ages, her hugging me (which is as
weird as it sounds, yes) and swinging in the hammock and the rain plopping down harder and faster all around us, puddling on the deck, soaking through our clothes, trying to fill the lake up with all its hope and wetness.
Chapter 18
It’s right before dinner when everything goes wrong.
I’m at the counter, halfheartedly checking my email (nothing from Mars Now, nothing from Tig). Buzz Aldrin is squawking in his cage like he’s trying to alert us to a fire. Iris is on the phone with her boyfriend in New York. And Elliott is lying on the couch, playing a loud video game on the Xbox. Every bullet and every crunching body sound hurts my head, almost as much as my empty inbox hurts my heart. I’m sleepy and cold and feel weird and wrong, like I’m on the cusp of something terrible, like I’m standing on the edge of a building, on a rooftop, wobbling in the wind.
I go, “Can you turn that down?”
“It’s not loud,” Elliott says, not looking up.
“Mom,” I say. “It’s too loud.”
“Turn it down,” Mom says, stirring the soup on the stove.
Rainy days are always soup days. She’s making three-bean soup, which is usually my favorite, but today the smell of it sticks in the back of my throat and feels like a ball of wool, choking me. I’m so mad and sad, because I love that soup.
“No,” says Elliott. “It’s not even loud!”
I don’t know how it happens, but next thing I know, I’m getting up and I have the whole bowl of apples in my hands and I’m dumping them on Elliott’s head. There’s a silence while we all watch the apples bounce one by one off her skull and onto the couch and the carpet, then she’s up and she’s so mad. I’ve never seen her so mad. And I know she’s going to punch me. And I also sort of know that I deserve it, but that still doesn’t make it less scary.
Then, in slow motion, she is flying over the back of the couch and trying to punch me and Dad comes running into the room and he’s holding me back and laughing because he doesn’t know what’s going on and also because he’s an inappropriate laugher. And I’m trying to push him off me and Iris is there, reaching over me to push Elliott away, and Mom is shouting, “STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!” and somehow Iris’s hand gets tangled in my hair and then there’s a funny tugging feeling on my scalp and then the room goes totally quiet and Iris is standing there, with my hair in her hand. Even Elliott’s mouth drops open.
“Whoa,” Elliott says. “Ish.”
I just blink. Tick, tick, tick. I guess my mouth is open, too.
“Oh, Ish,” Mom says, and then she’s hugging me.
Iris is crying. She’s just holding my hair in her hand, but she’s also trying to hug me with her empty arm and Dad has let go of me, and I feel like I’m falling.
“Don’t touch me!” I say, whisper-quiet. “No one touch me!”
“I’m sorry!” Iris is shaking really hard now. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know!”
Dad clears his throat. “We knew it might happen, I guess I just didn’t know it could be this sudden,” he says.
And I’m just standing there. I feel so embarrassed; I want to die. I want the floor to open up in a huge sinkhole. I want a meteor to crash through the ceiling. Something. Anything.
I don’t know what to say or to do or even to think. My head feels weird and light and exposed and naked and my face is hot pink from blushing uncontrollably and I’m shaking, just like Iris was. I walk away from all of them and push open the sliding glass door. I have bare feet and the deck is hot under them, even soaking wet from the rain, even though it has stopped, leaving the air misty-damp, the sun drying the rain so fast that it’s rising like smoke, in wafts.
I run across the deck quickly. I need to get away from them. From what happened. From my hair. My hair! My hands keep going to my scalp, searching and patting. The bare part of my scalp is as smooth and bald as a pool ball, like it doesn’t even remember hair being there, like it had been waiting under there the whole time for the roots to let go.
It’s not all gone. Just a huge chunk of it, a giant bald patch, like I’m a clown. My fingers rub the newly smooth skin spot. I picture Iris taking the handful of hair she’s holding and putting it in the garbage can under the kitchen sink. I imagine her washing her hands for the length of the song on Dad’s phone.
I’m not crying. I can’t.
I hurry down the steps to the shore of the lake, and the cracked, hard beach feels a tiny bit cooler than it has, a little bit slimy, a lot wet.
I keep walking and walking. The lake level is so low, I can practically walk to the island. I walk out on the muddy, cracked ground until my feet are in the water and then I just keep going. I’m wearing jeans and they are the worst in water, but who cares? I’m waist deep and then I’m swimming. Swimming is harder than it used to be, I guess because of what I’m wearing and from all the throwing up. My jeans don’t want to stay up. My arms don’t seem to want to pull me through the water, but luckily, I touch down with my feet before I drown.
And then there I am, on Lunch Island.
Alone.
I’ve never been here without Tig, not even once.
I step carefully, like I might be disturbing someone. That’s dumb, because of course there is no one here. I find our sign, MARS: 140 MILLION MILES. It’s gone crooked, so I straighten it. Today, according to my calculator app, Mars is actually 175,891,209 miles from Earth. Orbits! Think about it. Not that I’m going to change the sign, but it’s still good to know. Maybe we should have left some of the digits blank and left a piece of chalk so we could change it. I take my Sharpie out of my pocket and write in tiny letters along the bottom “Distance Fluctuates Due To Orbits!” Which makes me feel better. I don’t want to mislead anyone.
Then I’m hit with this weird, skin-crawling wave of embarrassment. Why did I come here? The wind is hot and it blows on the part of my skull that is naked. It will probably get sunburned and pink like one of those hairless baby rats. The main thing that I am thinking is that I can never go back to school now, not ever. I think about Kaitlyn’s braids. She has so much hair! It isn’t fair and it isn’t fair and it isn’t fair.
I sit down, but I don’t lean against the sign so it doesn’t fall over. It’s not even pointing at Mars anymore, just to Oregon. Which is where Tig is right now, doing some normal non-sick-kid stuff, like eating a sandwich or playing Mars Defender on the Xbox.
When Gavriel was here, the emails that pinged in were from Tig. There were two of them.
The first one said:
Mom says you have a brain tumor!!!!!!!!! Is that true? Are you OK? Ish, it’s gonna get better. It has to. I know it.
The second one said:
I’m going to come and see you. Wait for me.
I read the second one a bunch of times. Wait for me. Like, what, I’m going to up and die before he can get here from Portland? It’s only a fifteen-hour drive!
Wait for me.
It’s actually sort of old-fashioned and maybe even romantic, but I don’t want Tig to be romantic. I don’t want anything like that. I just want to be his BFF. I want to build a fort on Lunch Island like we always said that we’d do. I want to sleep here one night with him and look at the stars and see who can find the most falling stars and who can find the most constellations and if we can find Mars through the telescope. I want to make a campfire and have s’mores.
Wait for me.
“I just want to go back to normal,” I tell the sign. The breeze blows my words smoothly into small diamond-topped ripples on the lake. The leaves of the tree rustle like they are agreeing with me, yes, yes, yes, yes. “Yes,” I tell them. “Exactly.”
I gather up a bunch of rocks and start building a fire pit that we can use when Tig comes. If he comes, I mean. Maybe he was just saying that to be nice. The rocks are heavy and I’m sweating. One rock at a time. It feels kind of good, like it used to feel when I worked out, my muscles trembling a bit from the effort, my lungs hurting from trying to breathe fast enough to keep up. I
should do this all the time. I should do this every day so that I’m strong for Mars. I haven’t been running around the lake. I haven’t been doing anything. Maybe all the throwing up counts. My abs are as strong as steel.
I lift and place the rocks and lift and place the rocks until my arms are shaking and I have to stop. The thing with chemo is that it is the worst and also, it sucks all the energy out of me, leaving me as floppy as a piece of paper. I feel like I’m constantly carrying something heavy but that heavy thing is me. Now gravity is all wrong, there is too much of it. (Which there is, on Earth! On Mars, we’ll actually be healthier. There will be less pressing down on us! Which, if you think about it, is what gravity is doing, squashing us like ants under a giant thumb.)
I lie back on the warm rock next to the future fire pit. I close my eyes, just for a minute. I can hear a bee buzzing, but I can’t be bothered to worry about its stinging me. So what if it does? I have a brain tumor! My hair is falling out! A bee sting is nothing. The breeze feels slightly cool, which is nice. It smells like the lake always smells, like the hot, dry rock always smells, like Lunch Island always smells. I like it when things stay the same. I like that I can close my eyes and smell home. I guess I’ll miss that on Mars.
If I get to go at all.
I’m starting to think that I won’t. I squeeze my eyes shut even harder. “I’m still going!” I whisper to the rock, and the rock takes my words and makes them as true as fossils, seals them forever. “I’m going to be OK.” I try to make it sound like I believe that.
I’m just starting to dream—I’m on Mars and I’m so relieved because I haven’t dreamed of it for the last few times I’ve slept and I thought maybe it was gone, that I’d lost it—when I hear something splashing in the water. I can’t be dreaming if there is splashing, because there’s not enough water on Mars for splashing. It takes me a few seconds to figure out that it means that I’m awake, after all. I unglue my eyes, which is harder than it sounds, and I sit up. I’m dizzy. I wish I had water so that I could stop myself from throwing up. I dry heave a little bit, but nothing happens and it passes. I can see Iris coming through the water. She’s not swimming, she’s walking. I wave and she waves back. She’s so pretty it makes me want to cry. She looks like a goddess or an angel or something too perfect to be real.
