“Are you okay?”
“Fine. My ass broke my fall.” He doesn’t appreciate my attempt at humor. He looks sick with worry, which makes me laugh.
“It’s not funny.”
“Sure it is.”
“Let me help you up.” I allow it this time. He refuses to try to sleep some more, but he’s too tired for us to do much. We end up playing crazy eights on his bed. It’s the dorkiest, most calming afternoon I’ve had in quite some time.
We play for about an hour before Jem’s eyes really start to droop again. I talk less, wondering if he might fall asleep without conversation to keep him awake. His is a subtle transition between waking and sleeping. His eyelids close, but he holds onto his cards awhile before his wrist relaxes and they slip through his fingers. I gather up the cards and set them on the nightstand. He doesn’t need more nightmares, so I cover him up too.
I consider seeking the company of Ivy or Elise while Jem sleeps, but I don’t really want to leave this room. Jem has a knack for objects. He knows how to arrange otherwise random, meaningless things to reflect his personality. Why should a scattered collection of bottle caps on his dresser say Jem? I don’t know, but it does. So I study the room, studying him.
He isn’t big on books, but there are a lot of notebooks on his shelf. They’re the kind designed for music students, with blank staves instead of lines. I flip through a few and find compositions I can’t read. The pages are thin with countless erasings and there are slash marks across sections that he scrapped in a rush. I wish I could read this. I want to know what kind of sounds creep through his mind when he’s in a creative mood.
Then I find the black notebook. It’s set up like a day calendar. It started last July, and on each day he has kept a record of what medications he took, how much and what he ate, and his symptoms. I shut the book as fast as I can and put it back on the shelf. Mom kept a book like that for Tessa, to show the doctors what was happening when they weren’t around. I don’t want to look at his book, and I bet Jem doesn’t either. That part is behind him.
I take Jem’s desk chair into the corner, where the sun shines in warmly, and open his nightstand drawer. I bet I can make a ball the size of a plum with all the stray elastic bands he has in here.
*
It’s almost an hour later that Jem wakes with a yawn. He looks around the room blearily, moving his eyes from the deck of cards on the opposite nightstand to the closed door, and sits up on his elbow with a defeated look.
“Do you need more sleep?”
Jem jumps when he realizes that I’m in the corner behind him. “Shit, Kirk,” he curses. He looks at the ball in my hands and says, “What are you doing?”
“Playing with rubbers.” My little joke gets a smile out of him. “Did you think I left?” I nod to the door. He was practically pouting in that direction a moment ago.
Jem nods. “Yeah. Sorry I dozed off. I’m not very interesting company.” He sits up and swings his legs out of bed, rolling his shoulders to slowly stretch. “Thanks for staying.”
Jem gives me a small smile that reveals way more gratitude than I can handle. He’s still waiting for me to run off again while he isn’t looking.
“Do I owe you an explanation for…you know?”
“Last week?”
“Yeah.”
Jem shifts slightly, contemplating. “If you don’t want to…”
“But I should.”
“It would be…appreciated,” he says, choosing his words carefully. I can see why the subject makes him skittish. I might talk myself into cutting him out again.
I put the rubber band ball back in his drawer and stand up. My first thought is to sit next to him on the bed, but then I think better of it. I don’t want to give this conversation the feel of a mushy heart-to-heart. I want to just explain my issues and get it over with.
After a few seconds Jem catches on that I’m just going to stand here like an idiot without sitting down. He reaches out for my hand and jostles it a little. “Tell me.”
His hand is warm and slightly sticky from sleep.
“I don’t… I don’t like it when people try to control me. Or manipulate me. Or when people try to pull shit over on me. It…” I drop his hand and run mine through my hair. “This isn’t coming out right. This is the worst explanation ever.”
Jem smirks. “I can imagine worse.” He snorts softly and his smirk fades. “Are you sure you don’t want me to leave you alone?”
“That’s the thing, I don’t.”
Jem tries and fails to hide his sense of relief.
“But you scare the shit out of me.”
“I’m sorry I worried you. I don’t usually forget me meds like that.”
“I don’t mean that. But as long as we’re on the subject, don’t do that again.”
He chuckles at me. “I’ll try not. Is it the dying part that scares you?”
I try not to think about the fact that he could easily relapse at any time. That is an ‘if’ that I don’t have enough energy to panic about from moment to moment.
“No.”
“So what did you mean?” An automatic hunch creeps over his shoulders. He’s so self-conscious that he’s conditioned to brace for pain.
“It’s frightening that…that if you asked nicely I’d probably give you anything you wanted; even the things I don’t want to give.”
He swallows and curls his fingers on his knees.
“You have the power to suck me dry and I absolutely hate you for it. I don’t want to go back to living like that.”
Jem takes my hand and turns it over, brushing his thumb across my palm. “I won’t, you know. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
I try to smile, but all I can manage is a spasm of my upper lip.
“You know…” He turns my hand again, studying my fingernails like they’re really interesting. “Good people don’t suck each other dry. They give as much as they take. Friends do that.” He looks up at me like I’m supposed to say something back.
“I’m not good with stuff like that.”
“You’ll learn,” Jem says, and squeezes my hand. “It’s okay to take, too, Willa. You don’t have to give all the time.”
The clock on his nightstand beeps to announce the turnover of the hour. It’s five o’clock.
“I should go. I have to make dinner for Frank.” I slip my hand out of his grasp and his hovers there for a few seconds, like he wants me to put mine back. Jem reluctantly says goodbye to me—after extending an invitation to dinner no less than three times.
“Would you like to have dinner with us tomorrow?” he says when all attempts to get me to stay tonight fail.
“I can’t,” I tell him as he walks me to the door. “I made plans with Hannah.”
“Oh, okay. Some other time, maybe.” He almost manages to hide his disappointment, too. I can’t help but think poor guy as I give him a one-armed hug goodbye. He might be in better shape if he’d gotten sick in Ottawa, where he had friends to rally around him. This perpetual loneliness isn’t good for him—it’s made him a philosopher on ideal friendship, of all things. Like such a thing even exists. It didn’t in St. John’s, and it won’t in Smiths Falls. Not for me, and not for him either, judging by the way people treat him at school.
No one appreciates Jem properly, anyway. All they see is his disease. He’s beautiful, and you don’t have to look that closely to see it. You just have to look.
Monday
I have to study for French today at lunch, because I can’t possibly cram enough for this test. I scarf down half a sandwich en route to the library. Mrs. Gilmore gives me a dirty look when I walk in still chewing the last of it, so I stand in the vestibule and glare at her until I swallow. Nitpicky librarians…
The carrels are all full, so I circle around to the area of worktables. These aren’t used as much because Domme Gilmore watches them like a hawk and chews out anybody who raises their voice above a whisper to speak to their colleagues around the ta
ble. I park myself at an empty table and set my books up across the surface, taking up as much space as possible to throw people off the idea of sitting near me—I need to study.
Frau Gilmore gives me the eye for using the opposite chair as a footrest. My shoes aren’t even muddy, damn it.
I feel a tug at the back of my head and a twist as a lock of my hair gets wrapped around a finger. Ugh. Paige greeted me like this last week, when she was entertaining thoughts of giving me a new haircut for fun. Flattery is always the best way to distract Paige, so I say, “Hey Gorgeous.”
My hair stops twisting. I look over my shoulder and instead of petite Paige Holbrook standing there, it’s Jem. Damn it all to hell, he’s going to tease the crap out of me for saying hello like that.
“Uh, hi.”
He stares at me for a few seconds, slowly unwinding my hair from his index finger, before he pulls out the adjacent seat and sits down.
“Hey Beautiful,” he says quietly, not looking at me. I can’t decide if he’s trying to embarrass, guilt, or tease me.
Jem reaches under the table for my backpack. “I’m borrowing your Soc notes.” Normally I would be annoyed by the fact that he didn’t ask before taking, but part of my grade is tied to his, so I let him catch up on the material without complaint. As long as he copies my notes quietly and doesn’t interrupt my cram session, I will try to abide his presence.
“Who did you think I was?” he asks as he flips through my notebook.
“Paige.”
“Reeeally?”
“Bugger off.”
Jem smirks as he copies my diagram of human fertilization. He starts to sing under his breath, “Willa and Paige, sitting in a tree—” My lab partner has the intellect of a third grader. I haven’t heard that song since primary school.
“Shut up.” I bump my shoulder against his. Jem bumps me back.
“F–u–c–k–i–n–g,” he continues, trying not to laugh. “First comes love, then comes a civil union at the courthouse, then comes…” He pauses to think. “Baster babies?”
“You are a moron, Harper,” I say slowly.
“But I can still set up a camera in the corner, right?” It’s unbelievably difficult to resist the urge to bitch-slap him with my notebook. But I can’t let him get a rise out of me. Then he wins.
“Fine, set up a camera.”
Jem laughs at me.
“I need to study.”
Jem steals my book from under my elbow and flips through it. I just lost my page.
“You really suck at this subject, don’t you?”
I lean over to grab my book back and Jem scoots his chair sideways, holding the book out of my reach. “Harper,” I warn him.
“Want me to quiz you?”
“No, I want you to give me my book back and shut the hell up so I can learn this garbage.”
He doesn’t listen. “Comment ça va?”
“I’m ready to punch you, that’s how I am.”
Jem smirks and shakes his head. “Non, à la français.”
“This isn’t an oral test, it’s a written one. Give me the book.”
“You’ll remember it better if you speak it.” Still, he hands my book back. I start flipping to find my original page and he says, “Je souhaite que tu saches comment je t’aime.” I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of watching me look up what the hell that means. Stupid smug polyglots.
To his credit, Jem dutifully shuts up and lets me work for the rest of the period. He copies my Soc notes, getting sidetracked every now and then to doodle in his margins. At the end of the hour he packs up my notes and puts them back in my bag.
“Why do you keep all this crap in here?” he says when he opens my backpack. I don’t think I’ve cleaned that thing out since sixth grade. Atlantis could be buried at the bottom for all I know.
“It’s a necessary mess,” I tell him. I just don’t feel like cleaning it. Someday the problem will get so bad that I’ll just have to give up and torch the whole backpack.
Jem starts going through my mess, picking and reading scraps of notes taken Lord knows when. He finds about six empty pens, a few dead batteries, band-aids for gym class, and a crumpled bag of mints.
“And I thought my sister’s purse was bad,” he mutters.
“Oh shut it.”
Jem pulls out a piece of folded notepaper and pauses. He studies it for a second, peeking past the corner, and then looks over at me. “Did you even read it?”
I snatch the note out of his hand and stuff it down my shirt. I did read his apology note, thank you very much. And I hung onto it too.
“Willa?”
“I read it, okay? Bugger off.”
“How come—” I clap a hand over his mouth.
“We’re not going to talk about this right now.”
Jem mumbles something behind my hand that sounds like “When?”
Uh, never? When I’m drunk? When the Wizard of Oz beams down and puts a watchamacallit in my chest?
“When we’re a hundred and five, okay? Save the date.” I take my hand off his face, grab my books and my backpack off his lap, and bolt.
*
Sometimes I wonder why Hannah hangs out with Paige and Diane—she’s so genuine and they’re so not. Her parents are out of town for the evening and she asked me to help her watch her little brothers; a favor I wouldn’t do for anyone else. But Hannah is an angel, and it turns out the Trilby boys are extremely well behaved.
She asks me how Jem is as we put together supper for the kids. For a second I panic—does she know about the fight on Saturday? Did she notice I avoided him all week? Does she know about the note on my windshield? Or is she referring to the whole day I spent with him yesterday? But then I realize that these worries are senseless. No one notices Jem, except in a bad way, and he’s the only other person who could have spread the news of our fight. Who would he have told?
“He’s okay.”
“Just okay?”
“He’s better than he was.”
Hannah nods. “He can be really sweet, can’t he?”
“When he wants to be, yeah.”
Hannah smiles and slathers more peanut butter on a celery slice. She’s making frogs on a log with raisins. “I think you two would be a really cute couple.” The way she says it surprises me more than the statement itself; she’s not scheming or giggly or sarcastic. She says it like she means it. And as for the statement itself—for some reason it doesn’t surprise me. It feels natural, which is completely weird.
“I don’t think that either of us is in a relationship mindset.”
Hannah shrugs. “It was just a thought. You two seem like really good friends.”
We are. And it works that way. Perfectly.
Right?
Tuesday
Jem and I manage to spend the entire Soc period arguing over how to organize the results of our experimental model for the term project. Hannah was wrong. We wouldn’t be a cute couple. If we can argue for over an hour about bar versus line graphs, we’d be that couple that annoys each other to death. We only work as friends.
But hate sex has its merits…
I make beer batter fish for supper, do two loads of laundry, and polish off an English essay before climbing into bed that night. Jem doesn’t text me about music like he usually does, so I assume he’s tired and went to bed early. That’s fine by me. He hasn’t been sleeping well, anyway.
But just in case, I send him a Goodnight text. He doesn’t get back to me. Poor guy must be out cold.
*
My ringtone is in my dream. I claw my way to the surface of consciousness and roll over, taking my time about it. It’s nearly midnight. This better be good.
“Hello?”
“Willa?” I notice the difference in Jem’s voice immediately. It isn’t smooth or sleepy or hopeful, like it usually is when he calls me at night—it’s low and shaky and distant.
“What’s wrong?” The way he breathes makes it sound like
he’s shivering. I sit up and draw my knees in, ready to swing them out of bed and…what? Drive over there in the middle of the night?
“Not feeling well.” His voice is so tight that it trembles with the effort to remain level.
“Are your parents home? Elise?”
“They know,” he assures me. “I told them to leave me alone. They can’t help.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Stomach.” I can hear his wince over the phone. And he doesn’t show pain willingly unless he’s in serious agony.
“I know it sounds counterproductive, but sometimes the best thing when you feel sick is to try to puke.”
Jem groans softly on the other end of the line. “I did. A lot. There’s nothing to bring up anymore, but I still feel horrible.” And he was feeling so well just this morning.
“You took two Oxy, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” he admits with defeat. “I was hurting…”
“You don’t have to justify it to me.”
Jem blows out a fortifying sigh. “Can you…just talk to me? Please?”
“Uh…Paige is trying to get me to go to prom?”
Jem snorts. “Why?”
“A bigger group makes a limo cheaper.”
“Do you want to go?”
“Absolutely not. Come on, it’s prom.”
“We’ll make plans that night,” Jem promises quietly. “Give you an excuse not to go.”
“Thanks.” His quick breathing turns sharp. “Jem?”
“It hurts,” he murmurs. I can just picture him curled up in the fetal position, holding his stomach and sweating in pain. And he sent everyone away—he wanted to suffer this alone. When there is nothing anyone can do, and attendance would make others fret, it’s best to beg for solitude.
“Are you in bed right now?” I ask softly. I use that slow, sleepy voice that parents of young children use to coax their little ones to bed.
“Yeah.”
“Can you feel your heart beating?”
“What?”
“Without touching your chest—are you aware of your heart beating?”
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