by Paul Rudnick
When Sophie’s mom said this I thought it was wonderful, but I also looked at Heller because I knew she’d just been put under a lot of pressure.
“A few months ago,” said Sophie’s dad, “when things weren’t looking so good, Sophie told me, and I’m quoting her, she said that the worst thing about dying would be that she’d never get to see Heller Harrigan in the Angel Wars movie. Sophie’s condition has stabilized, at least for right now, and thanks to all the phenomenal people at Make-A-Wish and especially because of Heller Harrigan, today is going to be a very special day.”
“Heller Harrigan,” said Barbara, “I’d like you to meet our number one daughter and your number one fan, Ms. Sophie Schuler.”
Wyatt squeezed my hand, which I appreciated because all during this first part of the ceremony I’d started feeling frantic because the chair I was sitting on wasn’t made of wood but some sort of metal, with an upholstered vinyl seat. Since I wasn’t near anything else made of wood that I could knock on, my brain raced ahead and I could feel my thoughts fumbling for a substitution. I noticed that there was a wooden table at one side of the stage holding a display of the Angel Wars books and action figures and my brain made a deal with itself: If I could imagine myself knocking three times on that wooden table then no one would get sick and Heller wouldn’t harm Sophie and everything would be okay. If thinking that way sounds crazy, it wasn’t. Imagining myself knocking on that table was the only thing keeping me sane.
As everyone stood up and applauded, Sophie Schuler walked out onto the stage. She looked younger than thirteen and I don’t know why this surprised me but she was a little plump. I’d always assumed that someone who’d been so sick would be skinny and delicate but Sophie was sturdy, with flushed round cheeks and a sort of squashed fishing hat covering her bald head. Sophie looked incredibly happy and unbearably nervous, which I’d noticed was the way a lot of Heller’s fans looked—as if they couldn’t wait to meet Heller but as if they were also on the verge of bursting into tears or running away to find a bathroom.
“Hi, Sophie,” said Heller, opening her arms, and as she and Sophie hugged I glanced at the wooden tabletop, although now my brain was telling me that I couldn’t keep using the tabletop because it was becoming too familiar and therefore useless. So my eyes darted all over the room, settling on a pair of double doors that I hoped hadn’t just been painted to look like wood.
“It’s so great to meet you,” Heller told Sophie, with her arm around her. “Everyone’s so glad you’re here.”
Heller was doing fine. She’d explained to me that when she’d met other sick children, she’d trained herself never to ask “How are you?” because it put the child in an awkward position. “I mean, what’s the kid supposed to say?” Heller had told me. “I need a heart transplant only they still can’t find a donor, but aside from that I’m just peachy?”
Heller handed Sophie a microphone, which Sophie clutched in both her hands while she turned to face the crowd. She started to talk a few times but she was overcome with nerves and excitement.
“Hi,” Sophie finally said, which made the crowd laugh and applaud as Sophie smiled and bobbed her head. Everyone was rooting for Sophie. “Um, I just want to thank the Make-A-Wish Foundation for doing all of this,” Sophie continued, at first in a whisper, but when Heller squeezed her shoulders, Sophie’s voice grew stronger: “I want to thank my parents for coming here with me from Massachusetts and I want to tell Sarah Smilesborough that the Angel Wars books are the best books ever and I really mean it, and everyone who’s ever read the books, which is probably everyone in the whole world, they all know it.”
As everyone clapped, Sarah Smilesborough clapped her hands in Sophie’s direction to thank her, and I could see that Sarah was smiling and crying at the same time, like most of the people in the room. This allowed me to relax a tiny bit and stop looking for other wooden surfaces to knock on because sometimes when I start feeling a different extreme emotion it can replace the anxiety.
“Most of all,” said Sophie, “I just have to say one thing. Today is the best day of my whole life because of one person.”
Sophie’s voice had become a whisper again but then she said, in a cross between a railroad whistle, a blood-curdling scream and the sound of a thousand cheerleaders right after they’d had too much diet soda, “HELLER HARRIGAN!!!!!!”
* * *
“Oh my God,” said Heller five minutes later in her hotel suite after Mr. Markopoulos had presented Sophie and the Make-A-Wish people with a huge, six-foot-long check for $100,000 and all of these white and gold balloons had been released from nets on the ceiling and the ceremony had ended. “That was surreal, even for this weekend. I mean, I couldn’t even begin to process what was happening, between Sophie and the fried Angel Wars chicken wings and all of those balloons. It was like Sophie was running for president and then she won the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes and Dancing with the Stars.”
“Sophie is so adorable,” I said. “I couldn’t stop sobbing. She’s the cutest little girl I’ve ever seen.”
“Which makes me feel so useless.”
“But you’re not! Sophie worships you!”
“Maybe she shouldn’t. I’m just some ridiculous Hollywood jerk. I wish I was a doctor or a nurse or doing research or something that could actually help.”
There was a knock on the door and Sophie came into the suite. Something was weird about her. She wasn’t crying and trembling just because she was standing near her idol. She looked at Heller and then she looked at me as if she was sizing us up. She pulled off her hat and while she was mostly bald she had a samurai topknot tied with a rubber band sticking right up from the middle of her otherwise shiny head.
“All right, bitches,” said Sophie. “Let’s get this party started.”
Heller and I looked at each other and turned back toward Sophie.
“What?” said Heller.
“Okay okay okay,” said Sophie, and then to me, “You’re the cousin, right? Catherine?”
“Caitlin,” I said. “Catherine is my sister.”
“Whatevs,” said Sophie, looking at me as if I might be brain damaged, which I completely understood.
“Sophie?” said Heller.
“Nice,” said Sophie, pointing at the suite with both hands. “Major. Five-star. Ginormous. Yeeps!” She calmed herself down. “Okay okay okay. First offs, I am a huge fan and I love the Angel Wars books and Anna Banana—YOW! And okay okay okay, I do have acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which has a survival rate of fifty-seven percent, which is fab except that in my case, after my first round of chemo and a pretty good year and a half, it came back. Ouch! Eek! Yay for leukemia! So I had like another round of even stronger chemo and now, yippee, I’m back in remission and my doctors, who I love and hug and kiss, mwah mwah mwah, they’re saying, and this is the kind of word they use, right, they’re all ‘hopeful,’ so yay for me! I love the Make-A-Wish people and my parents and whoever that dude was who handed me that big fat check and who I guess owns the entire world. But that’s not why I’m here. No, sir! I’m here so I can spend the whole day with, oh my God, I can’t believe I’m looking right at you, slap me and pinch me and make me scream—AHHHHHH!!!!!—Heller fucking Harrigan, who I fucking love, and I know I shouldn’t be cursing but, number one, I’m a cancer kid so I can say whatever the hell I want and number two, sometimes I like to curse because it makes me feel JUST LIKE HELLER FUCKING HARRIGAN!!! ’Cause as far as I’m concerned, you are not just Anna Banana and Lynnea, which already makes you like, um, excuse me, the grand intergalactic wonder goddess of all time, I mean PLEASE, but you have also been through all sorts of crappy, yuck-o, butt-wipey stuff in your life and you still kick major sassafras Hollywood ass! That’s why you’re gonna help me! Yes! Yay! BOOM!”
Sophie grabbed a cushion from the couch and smashed it on top of her head and kept it there. Heller and I looked at each other, floored. For the first time ever, Heller was not the most outrageous person
in the room.
“Um, okay, Sophie … ,” Heller began.
“No!” said Sophie. “Please don’t. Please please please don’t start talking to me like you’re a grown-up and I’m a baby, because you’re not all that much older than me, okay?” She turned to me. “But you’re really old, right?”
“What?” I said. “I’m not old! I’m two months younger than Heller!”
“Really?” said Sophie. “I guess maybe it’s the way you’re dressed or, like, your hair. ’Cause at first I thought that maybe you were, like, Heller’s mom or her weird aunt or something.”
“That’s not true,” said Heller. “Catey is more like my strange grandma who never leaves the basement because she’s hiding from the space aliens and she needs to feed her imaginary cat.”
“HELLER!”
“Nice!” Sophie told Heller as they high-fived.
“That was not nice!” I protested.
“I’m sorry, really and truly, maybe you have a disease too, like that one that makes little babies look a hundred years old, right?” said Sophie. “I’m sorry! I get all, I don’t know, weirdybots and I just say stuff. I only have today and I know I’m supposed to hang out with Heller while she does interviews and a fashion shoot and makes a public service announcement for kids like me, which I will totally help with, look at me, I can stand next to Heller and make my eyes look really big and sad, like in those ads to get people to adopt abused puppies.”
Sophie stood next to Heller and widened her eyes and made her feet pigeon-toed.
“Cool, right? I know that just spending, like, a regular day with Heller would be super amazing and super fun and that I’d get all sorts of fun free stuff, which I still totally want anyway, but—that’s not what I need.”
“What … what do you need?” asked Heller.
“Okay,” said Sophie, putting her palms together and walking in a circle. “I’ve been thinking about this, like, a lot, like it’s been filling up my whole brain and leaking out my ears, and it’s the big secret reason why I did the whole Make-A-Wish thing in the first place—BOOM! My parents are great but if it was up to them, I’d spend my whole life in bed or on a couch with a blanket over my knees, right, just like looking out the window with a book of fairy tales in my lap, I mean, no. Ewww. It’s probably ’cause they’ve already had to deal with me almost dying, like, twice, so they’re scared shitless and beyond. They get all worried that if I go outside or jump around or eat anything that might actually taste good, I’ll keel over right there in the living room and all of their worst nightmares will come true, which I totally get because having a sick kid is probably every mom and dad’s worst nightmare, right?”
“They must be so concerned,” I said, sounding like my own mom.
Sophie was staring at me as if she was trying to decide whether to shoot me or hand me the gun and let me do it myself.
“You read that book, didn’t you?” Sophie said to me. “That Arise All Ye Fools book? This is so weird ’cause I’m, like, psychic or something, ’cause I can always tell when someone’s read that book ’cause they get this sort of look on their face? You know?”
“What look?” I asked.
“Sort of half like you’ve just seen a unicorn flying over a rainbow, and half like you’re constipated and really trying to pinch one off. All of these whack job girls at my school who read that book, they got all moony and drippy and oozy about how cancer is just SO SAD and SO DREAMY and then they read that book, like, twenty-eight more times while they’re scarfing down a few more pints of that pistachio ice cream with the chunks of Oreos in it. Then they text their BFFs and they go, ‘If I had a really cute boyfriend with cancer, I’d be SO NICE to him. I’d, like, play my guitar and sing him a special CANCER SONG. I’d write him a CANCER POEM.’ ”
“Sophie!” I said.
“She’s right,” said Heller. “When they made that movie out of Arise All Ye Fools, I auditioned for it, for what’s that girl’s name, Foxglove or Wind Spirit or Carburetor?”
“It’s Ariel!” I said.
“Ariel, right,” said Heller. “They asked me to read that scene where Ariel and James go up to the roof of the hospital and pretend that they’re, what was it, King Skybutt and Queen Zithead?”
“King Skywards and Queen Zephyr!” I said.
“Fine,” said Heller, “and I was doing a really good job, until I started cracking up. I mean, when Ariel had to keep calling that guy sire and milord, I just lost it, I was practically rolling on the floor. I kept apologizing and I told the casting director that I was having a reaction to my allergy medication but I don’t think he bought it and I didn’t get the part.”
“BOOM!” said Sophie as she and Heller high-fived again. “CANCER BOOK BOOM!!!”
“I think you’re both insensitive and heartless and disgusting!” I said. “Those books are beautiful! They’re about people’s souls!”
“My soul doesn’t want to, like, call anyone my liege, okay?” said Sophie. “I’m just gonna say this, like, right out, but I don’t know if my soul is gonna be, like, around for very long. And ’cause you’re the most amazing and awesome and all-powerful Heller Harrigan—HELLER HARRIGAN, RIGHT IN FUCKING FRONT OF ME!!!”
Sophie reached out her arm and touched Heller’s nose with her forefinger and then waved her arm in the air, howling, “YOW! BOOM! I TOUCHED HER! HELLER HARRIGAN DNA! ON MY FINGER!!!”
Heller and I exchanged a glance, wondering if Sophie might be genuinely crazy. Sophie caught our glance, nodded, and sat down, using a more straightforward voice.
“So I need you to help me do three things.”
“You mean like a bucket list?” asked Heller.
“Um, NO,” said Sophie, rolling her eyes, and I know this is a terrible thing to say but all I kept thinking was that for a girl with cancer, Sophie was being awfully sarcastic.
“I’m sorry if I’m sounding like a snot or a butthead or a mega-douche,” she said. “It’s just—there’s stuff I need to do. It’s not like on those bucket lists where really old people want to, like, I don’t know, go to Paris or touch a pyramid or something. These are things I, like, really need to do, not ’cause I’m sick, or not just ’cause I’m sick. So it’s not a bucket list—it’s more like a jailbreak.”
Sophie was looking at Heller and me with an openness, and a seriousness, as if she was trusting us. Sick people can’t afford to waste time so they get right to the point. Although I had the feeling that even before Sophie got sick, she’d always been a very hyper and direct person.
“What do you need?” asked Heller.
Sophie sat completely still and looked both ways, as if government agents might be eavesdropping. In her most important, hushed voice, the sort of voice she might use on a witness stand, she asked, “Have you ever had Sweetcakes?”
“Excuse me,” said Heller. “Of course we have. We’re Americans and they’re America’s favorite cupcakes. When I was doing drugs I would live on them. I would hallucinate about them. I would have sex with them.”
“I have only eaten one Sweetcake in my entire life,” I said. “Strictly by accident.”
“By accident?” asked Heller. “What, did someone tell you it was a new kind of communion wafer? With frosting?”
“No,” I said. “My parents don’t want us to eat processed sugary foods with lots of white flour, because they’re not healthy and they make people go on rampages and do terrible things.”
“Like what?” said Heller. “Smile? Lick their lips? Ask for more?”
“So how did you end up, like, eating only one?” asked Sophie.
“My sister Calico loves Sweetcakes,” I confessed. “She saves her allowance and sneaks off and buys them and then smuggles them into our room and hides them under her bed. Which is why we started getting mice in our room. When my dad came in to investigate, Calico panicked because she still had one of those double packages, so she shoved one Sweetcake into her own mouth and the other into mine.”
“Like, didn’t you LOVE it?” asked Sophie. “Didn’t your mouth and your taste buds and your, like, whole everything just go BERSERK?”
“Did you come?” asked Heller.
“NO I DID NOT! All of that sugar made me jittery and … I’d just rather have some carrot sticks from our garden, or a nice crisp apple!”
“Are you homeschooled?” asked Sophie.
“Exactly,” said Heller. “Sophie, you have to understand something. Catey is morbidly uptight and emotionally dead and she actually enjoys wearing those kneesocks, which are like leg condoms, but when it comes to sugar she’s a pathological liar.”
“I am not!” I protested. When I’d eaten that Sweetcake I’d been very conflicted because when my dad walked into our bedroom I’d had a mouthful of cupcake, which I’d had to swallow to protect Calico. Ever since then I’ve associated Sweetcakes with deceit and choking to death and mouse droppings.
“You just want us to get you some Sweetcakes?” Heller asked Sophie. “What, like a hundred packages?”
“No,” said Sophie. “Nope nope nope. It’s major. It’s sort of like—majestic. When I was doing chemo, the chemo would take over my whole everything, right? They give you separate drugs so you won’t upchuck but you still end up with no appetite and total brain fog, and your whole body just feels like it’s been run over by a bus and like it wants to upchuck but it can’t. I totally hated not being able to eat anything because I have a sweet tooth the size of Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, which is where the closest Sweetcakes factory is located. Which is something I know because I’ve done a lot of research into Sweetcakes production, I mean, a lot. I mean, I’m, like, the Sweetcakes AUTHORITY.”
Sophie had a gleam in her eye, the way my brothers do when they talk about any video game that involves grizzled mercenaries wearing eye patches, gang members wearing bandanas, melting zombies or preferably all three killing one another. I was also starting to understand why even though Sophie was sick she was still round. The more I thought about it, maybe Sophie being round was an optimistic sign.
