Fear of Missing Out

by Kate McGovern

  I can hear Chloe getting out of bed, the blankets around her rustling as she shifts into immediate action. “Say no more. I’m on it. I’ll be over in an hour. Call your boyfriend—I’m going to need a key grip.”

  “Do you even know what a key grip does?”

  “Astrid, just call Mo.”

  * * *

  The lighting in my bedroom isn’t quite to Chloe’s taste, so she drags in a couple of extra standing lamps from the living room. Mohit perches on the bed, looking mildly skeptical about this whole undertaking.

  “Your room should be tidy but not sterile,” Clo says, looking around at my scattered clothes and the desk piled with notebooks and disorganized heaps of scrap paper.

  “Mohit, can you fix that?” Chloe nods toward the unmade bed. “Make yourself useful, at least.” When Chloe gets it in her head to do something, a project, we all know better than to question her directives. Mo feels it, too, I can tell. He gets up to do what she tells him.

  Chloe tidies the desk, hides a few random sweatshirts in the closet. Then she positions my desk chair in front of the bed and gestures for me to sit.

  “I’m going to look terrible. Can I please put some more makeup on?” I’m wearing moisturizer, mascara, and the tiniest bit of blush. I definitely look like I haven’t slept in years.

  “First of all, you’re beautiful. Second of all, you have cancer, remember?”

  “I do remember that, yes.”

  “So you can’t look like you just stepped off a runway. You’re asking for strangers’ money.”

  I sigh. She’s probably right.

  “Besides, like I said, you look hot. Mo, doesn’t she look hot?”

  “She always looks hot,” Mohit says absently from the corner where he’s picking up dirty laundry off the floor and shoving it into my closet. Still making up for telling me he doesn’t like my blue hair, I guess. I’ll take it.

  Chloe peers through the lens of her camera and adjusts the focus.

  “Where’d you get the camera, Clo?”

  “Mom A, obviously. I seriously cannot break it, or she will kill me.” Annalisa is an actual photographer with a studio of her own. She has many cameras, and I’m guessing this is one of the cheapest of the bunch, but still probably not something we want to have to replace.

  “All right, so, remember,” Chloe says. “You’re very charming. You’re very smart. You had a bright future ahead of you. Now you’re dying of cancer.”

  The words hang in the air around us. I glance at Mo, who averts his eyes toward the ceiling.

  Even Chloe’s face clouds over. “Sorry,” she says quietly.

  I don’t say anything, and the room stays silent and still for a long moment. It’s like we’ve been going and going and have only now stopped to acknowledge the madness around us. Because Chloe’s not wrong. I am dying of cancer. We are making a video to explain that to a bunch of strangers. I am asking them to give me their money in exchange for a chance—a tiny, slim, almost nonexistent chance—at some kind of resurrection. It makes no sense at all when you actually pause to think about it.

  Which, I guess, is why I don’t want to pause anymore.

  19.

  Hi, everyone. So this is awkward. Um, yeah, hi. My name is Astrid Ayeroff. Who’s named Astrid, right? No one else I know, except the Scandinavian woman who wrote Pippi Longstocking in, like, the 1940s.

  Anyway, my name is Astrid. I’m sixteen years old. I’m a junior in high school and, yeah, I have a high-grade astrocytoma, which is a tumor in my brain. Which means, in the short term, I’m dying. I know this is going to sound totally crazy, but I’m hoping you can help me, in the long term, one day, wake up again.

  20.

  I get a text from Mom around four: Could be a long night over here. L staying at K’s. Feeling OK? Love you. But then a few hours later, shortly after I’ve had a pizza with onions and peppers delivered—large, because I know Mom’ll need something to reheat whenever she gets home—I hear keys in the door.

  “Wasn’t expecting to see you until tomorrow,” I say as Mom dumps her bag in the front hall—doesn’t even bother to hang her coat, either—and slumps down next to me on the couch. Her face is pale, exhausted, like I remember her looking after the long, half-sleepless nights on the recliner next to my bed when I was admitted to the hospital last time around. She rubs her eyes hard enough that it looks like she might displace them from their sockets.

  “Things kicked into gear shortly after I texted you. Baby was born around six.” Mom rests her head on my shoulder. “You all right?”

  I nod. “What was it?”

  “What was what?” Mom’s eyes are closed. She breathes heavily, deep-inhaling through her nose and long-exhaling through her mouth.

  “The baby, duh.”

  “Oh. Baby girl. Full head of hair. Born in the water.”

  “Like Liam.” Liam was born in the water, at home in the middle of a freak April snowstorm that closed school for three days. It didn’t really matter about the snow; my mother had been planning to have him at home anyway, in a blow-up birthing pool she’d rented from a hippie website. She worked in a hospital, but she’d had a homebirth with me and insisted on having one with Liam, too, even though all signs pointed toward him being a giant baby. We were in the country house then, in the woods. It was dark except for the light coming off the moon and the snow. And quiet, except for the sound of my mother’s breath and my father’s barked, anxious questions for the midwife—Mom’s favorite colleague, stuck at her own house in the snow—over speakerphone. I was eight, and I spent the night in my bedroom with the door cracked, awake and listening.

  Liam was born just before sunrise. Mom had called my name a moment before, and I’d gone to the side of the pool. I watched her arch her back and tip her head toward the ceiling, and then there was Liam, swimming under her.

  He’s eight now, the age I was then. I wonder if he’ll remember my death as clearly as I remember his birth.

  “Yes, like Liam. Only this baby didn’t weigh ten ever-loving pounds, fortunately for her mother.” Mom yawns. “Is there food?”

  She goes into the kitchen and I hear her reheating a slice of pizza in the toaster oven. When she returns to the couch next to me, I take in her face while she isn’t paying attention. She closes her eyes, focusing—as she does—on exactly what she’s doing in this present moment: chewing pizza, in this case. The look on her face, so much pleasure for one slice of reheated veggie, makes me dread the conversation we’re about to have.

  “Hey, Mom? Can I talk to you about something?”

  “Always.”

  I hesitate again, but then I dive in. I tell her about Carl Vanderwalk at the symposium, and about the American Institute for Cryonics Research and their vision of a future where death is just one more thing that happens. She listens, her face immobile, until I’m done.

  “Astrid…” She halts after my name. It floats in the air.

  I want to say something to fill the space, but as with Mohit, I know better. I should just give her the silence.

  “Astrid,” she repeats after a moment. “We’re not there, yet.”

  “What is ‘there,’ Mom?” I know what she means. I don’t know why I want to force her to say it out loud.

  “You’re not … We’re not talking about the—the end.”

  She won’t say it. She won’t say “death.”

  “We are, Mom. I am.”

  “I’m not, though.” Her voice catches. I reach for her hand and squeeze it, something I never do, and she lets me.

  “I didn’t pass out in school because I had the flu or something,” I say.

  “I know that.” She’s speaking very softly. “But the chemo will do what it’s supposed to do.”

  “I’m going to die this time.” I didn’t notice her starting to cry, but now I see that her face is soaked. She doesn’t wipe any of the tears away. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry to leave you.”

  She lets out a sob, then qui
ckly reins it back in, a hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry, Astrid. You shouldn’t see your mother like this.”

  “Mom, it’s not your fault. You just got a dud.”

  Mom laughs, that garbled, it’s-totally-not-funny-but-we’re-going-to-laugh-anyway-because-what-the-hell-else-are-we-supposed-to-do kind of laugh. Then she pulls herself together.

  “Astrid.” She shakes her head, her face turning serious all of a sudden. “You have a place in a clinical trial for pediatric brain cancer—basically one of the most promising ever, according to Dr. Klein. We kicked this once already. We can kick it again.”

  “Mom—”

  “No, listen to me. I’m your mother. I’m not letting you just give up on your life.”

  “I’m not giving up, Mom. I’m doing the trial, aren’t I?” The voice in the back of my head keeps asking me why: Why spend my last however many good months seeing doctors and lab technicians and trying to stay very still in the dark tube of an MRI machine? But I don’t say that thought out loud to Mom.

  “I’m not giving up,” I repeat. “But I want to explore this. As an option, if it comes to that.”

  Mom starts to protest again, but I put my hand up to stop her.

  “Come on. You’re an intelligent human being. You’re a medical professional. You know no treatment is guaranteed to work.”

  She sits back against the couch cushions. Her eyes sparkle with just a hint of moisture. I expect her to say something, to keep pushing me, but she’s quiet.

  I go on. “Even if cryopreservation doesn’t work for, like, a hundred years and everyone I know is dead by then—or even if it never works and my body just sits in a freezer for eternity—I might as well be part of science. I can’t be part of science if I’m rotting in the ground.”

  She remains quiet for a long time. Like, a long time. Almost more time than I can handle. “And here I was, thinking we’d keep you on the mantel,” she says finally, a wry half-smile creeping over her face.

  “That’s great, Mother. I’m glad you’ve got a plan.”

  Mom takes a long, hard breath, then lets it out. “Oh, Astrid, my girl.”

  She leans into me, putting her head in my lap and pulling her legs up onto the couch. I stroke her hair, all soft auburn curls that I didn’t inherit, although she’s got way more gray hairs now than she did a couple of years ago.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Don’t understand what?”

  “What it is to have a child.”

  “Please, Mom.”

  “I’m serious. You have no idea what it means to be a parent. There’s nothing, Astrid—”

  She cuts herself off. I watch the top of her head, resting in my lap. Her body rises and falls with her breath, and I twist my fingers in her curls.

  “There was a moment, a few weeks after you were born, when I was up with you in the middle of the night. Did I ever tell you this story?”

  I shake my head. She smiles, picturing whatever she’s picturing. Baby Astrid, I guess.

  “I was awake with you, not because you were crying but because you weren’t crying. You were sleeping, perfectly fine. But there I was, wide awake, checking to see if you were breathing. I remember that moment of all the times I was up with you in the middle of the night because it was the first time I realized that I was never going to be free from worry again.”

  “See, this is why I’m glad I’m not having kids.”

  “Oh, cut it out.”

  “Mom, seriously. I don’t want you to spend your life worrying about me.”

  “It’s not a choice! It’s life. It’s biology. My point is just that I’m never going to stop trying to keep you on this earth. Even if I have to hover over you and watch you take every breath. So no, Astrid, I’m not going to entertain the notion of your body in a deep freeze. And you don’t get to tell me that I have to accept the end of your life. I’m your mother, and it doesn’t work that way.”

  But I’m me, I think. Still, I decide to leave it be.

  * * *

  Later, with my mother snoring down the hall, I open my email and start a new message.

  Dear Dr. Fitzspelt:

  It was a pleasure to meet your colleague, Dr. Carl Vanderwalk, at the neuroscience symposium a couple of months ago. When we met, I mentioned that I am dying. That’s still true. I don’t know for sure whether or not I want to pursue cryopreservation, but I would like to know more.

  Dr. Vanderwalk suggested I contact you. If you’ll have me, I’d like to come to Arizona to see your facilities. Do you give tours?

  Thank you for your time.

  Sincerely,

  Astrid Ayeroff

  I watch the video one more time on my phone. I can barely bring myself to look at my on-screen face: the shock of stringy hair, perpetually bed-headed because even though I’ve had it short twice now, I still haven’t learned how to do anything useful with it except turn it blue. And the dark circles under my eyes, a sharper angle to my jaw—small signs of illness creeping in that probably no one but me notices yet.

  Well, I’m sure my mother notices. My mother notices everything. There’s a knot in the pit of my stomach when I think about how she’ll react when she sees this.

  On-Screen Astrid looks straight at the camera and introduces herself. Then there’s the wind-up, and the pitch.

  My hope is to freeze my body through cryopreservation. This is a new and rapidly evolving science in which bodies are preserved at the time of death. The goal is to be able to wake people up one day. Scientists don’t know what will be possible decades from now. I don’t know either. I’m asking you, friends of the internet, to help me find out.

  Here’s the thing: I have to come up with around $31,000 to cryopreserve myself. Some of that will cover the cost of a trip to Arizona, to visit the cryopreservation lab and learn more about the process. The rest would go toward the preservation itself. It’s a big investment, and I normally wouldn’t do this—make my story public, and ask for help from strangers. But my mom is raising me and my little brother on her own, and she’s already got a kid with cancer on her hands, so I really don’t want to be any larger of a burden on her than I already am. So I’m asking. If you’re interested in this future science—which I realize sounds totally bananas—or you just feel inclined to donate to The Association of Random Freaks on the Internet Who Believe Death Might Not Be the End of Life, current membership: one, now’s your chance.

  On-Screen Astrid pauses again, and a crack appears in her stoic facade. I remember this moment, the emotion of it catching me off guard. I wanted to yell at Chloe to turn the camera off, but I bit my lip instead, and pushed back the tears that threatened to humiliate me in front of the people of the internet.

  Seriously. Thank you.

  My stomach floods with anxiety, thinking about people—strangers and, maybe worse, nonstrangers—watching this. Kids at school. Neighbors. Mohit’s parents, his sister in business school. My mother.

  Mom doesn’t have to like this, but she can’t stop me from asking questions.

  I text Chloe, and tell her I’m ready to go live.

  21.

  Things I’ll miss when I’m dead (a partial list, continued):

  The sound of my mother telling my brother a bedtime story in the other room when they think I can’t hear them

  Scrambled eggs

  Eggs over easy

  Eggs of all kinds, really

  Chloe bossing me around

  The internet, maybe

  22.

  The planet doesn’t stop rotating when I ask the internet for help bringing me back from the dead. Mostly, no one pays any attention at all. The views tick up gradually—fifteen, then twenty. A few donations come in, mostly from people I know, classmates and teachers. A week goes by and, basically, nothing much happens. I’m beginning to wonder if Chloe was wrong: there are too many interesting things on the internet; no one cares about my story.

  It’s unseasonably warm on Wednesday, but pour
ing rain. As usual, Mohit rushes off to MIT the minute the last bell rings, and Chloe has math team, so I get the bus home by myself to avoid the downpour. In our empty apartment, I take a Coke from the fridge and slouch at the kitchen table, my phone in front of me. Mom reminded me for the umpteenth time this morning as she was leaving the house, “Please, Astrid, for the love of god, call your father.” I may as well get it over with.

  The phone rings through to the main lodge at the Ranch, as I know it will. A young woman answers. When I tell her who’s calling, her tone turns saccharine, and she earnestly informs me, “Your dad has been so worried. He’ll be grateful to hear from you.” She tells me she’ll get the message to him right away, and he’ll call back.

  I wait, staring out the kitchen window at the street below. Five minutes later, the phone vibrates against the table.

  “Astrid, my darling girl.” He’s out of breath, as though he’s run from his tiny house to the lodge, eager to speak to his dying kid.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. How are you? And … Suzanne?” She’s barely that much older than Astrid, I remember Mom saying to her friend Thea, several glasses of wine in, when they thought I wasn’t listening. To be totally fair, that was a touch hyperbolic of her. Suzanne may not be as old as Dad, but she’s definitely old enough to be legally wed.

  “We’re…” My father hesitates for a moment. “Well, we’re all right. I don’t want to talk about us. Astrid, are you feeling run-down? How’s your energy?”

  Outside, the bus pulls up, number 77, the same one I took home earlier. I hear the wheels exhale toward the ground—it’s a kneeling bus—and then the wheelchair ramp unfolding. An older woman in an electric wheelchair rolls herself down to the sidewalk and buzzes away down the street, her plume of white hair covered by a plastic shopping bag fashioned into a shower cap.

  “I’m fine, really, Dad.”

  He’s quiet for a moment, then clears his throat. “Astrid, you know, I’ve said this to your mother, and I … I really wish you would both take me more seriously when I say that the way you live your lives is not conducive to … healing.”