Past the Broken Bridges

Chapter One Sawyer

Chapter One

Sawyer

2018

Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. They say bad things happen in threes, but I don’t want to believe that. Because the more you worry about when the other shoe is going to drop, the less you let yourself live. And if there’s anything I’ve learned over the past five years, it’s that life is too precious to be wasted on fear.

Nurse Katherine beams as she caps off the last test tube and sets it back in the holder, breaking my focus from the ugly round clock on the wall that tells me I’m minutes away from well-deserved freedom. “So what now, Sawyer?”

I look from the middle-aged woman I’ve come to consider a friend over the last six months to the woman I got my red hair and baby blue eyes from, who’s sitting quietly in the chair by the examination table. She looks nervous because we’ve had this conversation plenty of times over the last year, but she’s never discouraged me from what I want to do.

Not after the long battle I faced.

Turning from my mom to Katherine, my favorite nurse in the oncology unit, I smile. “I’m going to college. An actual college.”

Katherine’s eyes brighten at the news I’ve only told a few close family members. Dad is proud of me. Bentley, my little brother, told me he wanted my room when I left, and Aunt Taylor insisted on hosting a going-away party. If my grandparents were still alive, I’m sure they would be as happy for me as Katherine. Or maybe as nervous as the look on my mother’s soft face. “I think that’s wonderful! You’ve taken online courses for credits, right?”

Giddiness takes over, making it hard to sit still. I’ve told her about the courses I didn’t find challenging enough and how badly I wanted to go on campus somewhere. For obvious reasons, namely my lack of immune system thanks to the chemicals being pumped through my body, I had to push those dreams away. Temporarily. “Yes, and I already double-checked to see that they transfer to the college I’m attending so I won’t start as a twenty-one-year-old freshman like some weirdo.”

Katherine pats my knee and peels her gloves off, tossing them into the trash bin by the sink and turning on the faucet. “Where did you enroll?”

Licking my chapped lips, I peek at Mom again. Her eyes glisten with concern and pride. I know she’s happy for me, but it’s not easy for her when we spent so long together bonding over something so tragic. “I got accepted at Louisiana State.”

Katherine’s eyes dart to my mother before coming back to me, as if doing the mental math of the distance between New York and Louisiana. “LSU, huh?”

She’s a mom, so I’m sure she sympathizes. It isn’t like mine can come with me to school, and I doubt she’d want to even if she could. I’ve missed the Bayou State since we left it thirteen years ago, but I know she feels differently. They lost everything when the levees failed after Katrina.

I only lost Paxton.

Despite Mom’s hesitancy toward my determination to move down south and escape New York’s cold weather, she says, “We’re very proud of Sawyer. She’s worked so hard for this.”

Katherine must know how difficult that is for her to admit, so after she dries her hands, she brushes Mom’s arm. “If there’s anybody who can handle college, it’s our girl. Isn’t that right?” She turns to me with a wink and grabs the tube holder off the counter. “By the way, I’m loving the blond. Are you going to keep it or try something fresh for your new adventure?”

Touching the ends of the wispy hair tickling my shoulders, I smile at the woman I’ve grown so close to. “I’m not sure yet. I kind of miss the red.”

Mom laughs at the statement that I’ve made plenty of times before in my head. “You used to hate your natural color. Remember how you’d beg me to let you dye it? You wanted the most God-awful colors too.”

Okay, the black I wanted would have been a terrible choice against my pale skin. I probably would’ve resembled one of those creepy porcelain dolls they make horror movies about. “We all had an emo phase, Mom,” is my grumbled defense.

That phase also included thick eyeliner that I still don’t know how to apply correctly, plus My Chemical Romance–and Avril Lavigne–inspired punk-rock outfits. I’d like to think I pulled it off.

Sometimes.

The thin pieces of hair around my finger don’t compare to what my desired red locks, not quite orange but a mixture of dark red and copper, were years ago. I’m glad Mom didn’t let me destroy the healthy strands. They used to be so thick that hairdressers had a field day layering them during haircuts and telling me how pretty they were. I’d hear the same thing every time I sat down in the spinning chair and got the cape draped over me: Be lucky to have what some women pay hundreds of dollars to get.

My lips twitch downward.

Haircuts used to be so mundane—just something I did every six weeks with my mother and grandmother in North Carolina. Maintenance cuts, really. Mom would complain about how expensive it was but would fight Grandma Claudette whenever she’d try to pay for each of us. I miss those days.

I miss having people play with my hair and massage my scalp. I miss the ego stroke that came with the unique color people said made my eyes pop.

I miss life before I was sick. Before all the treatments and tears and hard days, when all I had to worry about was eating my vegetables so I could go outside and play.

That life feels like it was ages ago, and I don’t even remember who I was before the cancer. Who knew one little trip to the doctor’s office for what we all thought was a cold could change so much?

Whenever I start feeling sad about the things I can’t change, I think of what Mom always told me when I’d look into the mirror at my bald head and start crying.

Better your hair than your life.

And she’s right. So right.

“Sawyer?” I hear, snapping my eyes up to where Katherine is standing by the open door.

Releasing the hair and dropping my hands into my lap, I sit straighter. “Sorry, what?”

“I said good luck with everything,” she repeats with the same warm smile that’s made me feel at home since the day I walked into the treatment center for yet another round of chemo. “And as much as I adore you, I hope I never see you again.”

I laugh. “Back at you, Kitty Kat.”

She waves us off and walks out.

I barely have time to climb off the table when Mom asks, “What were you thinking about?”

I hate that she knows I was lost in my head, but I don’t want to dwell on any of it anymore. It doesn’t matter. After five years of off-again, on-again remission and treatments, I’m done.

Done-done.

It was hard enough going from being on the rise of popularity at fifteen to a social pariah nobody wanted to talk to. Like my cancer was contagious—like I w as. Switching to homeschooling wasn’t what I wanted to do, but it was the only way I could keep my sanity during a period of time that was already difficult to navigate.

I don’t want to keep hiding, and I don’t want to keep letting the cancer win.

I turn to my mother, who’s extending my winter coat out to me. “I was thinking that we should get chicken nuggets,” I say. “I promise I’ll save some for Bentley this time even though he’s a total dweeb.”

The woman who’s been through hell and back with me stands with suspicious eyes as I shove my arms into the sleeves of my coat. I’m sure she knows that isn’t what I zoned out thinking about, but she doesn’t pressure me into the truth. “Do you mean that this time, or are you going to tell your brother that you got him nuggets and then feed them to Maggie in front of him?”

I giggle, walking out the door with a newfound sense of freedom, knowing it’s time to move on to bigger and better things. “I can’t do the same thing twice or he’ll expect it. Duh.”

Mom sighs.

I grin. “He deserved it after eating the last Pop-Tart that he knew I was saving.”

“You two are something else,” she mutters.

“But you love us.”

She kisses my temple. “More than life, baby girl. More than life.”

I look back at the clock in the lobby when we get my final set of paperwork from the clerk.

Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock.

My skin buzzes with anticipation, excited to see the sun. To feel it on my too-pale skin that Mom makes me slather in layers of sunscreen in the summer and lotion in the winter.

And at the end of the day, I share my chicken nuggets with my little brother, watch his favorite dorky movie about rings and hobbits, and endure his gross habit of dipping his popcorn in pickle juice.

Because I know our time together is limited.

* * *

Swiping at the foggy mirror until a blurry image of my face appears, I readjust the soft coral towel around my torso to make sure it’s covering all the essentials.

When I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at sixteen, treatment was brutal. The only good news was that the type of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma I had tended to respond well to chemotherapy. Usually .

The first treatment was six months. After the first two infusions, the hair on my scalp felt so tight that it was too uncomfortable to keep. I’d asked Mom to cut it, but she’d been too emotional. So I went into Dad’s closet, found his old hair clippers, and took as much as I could off myself until she came into the bathroom and gasped at the mess of hair on the floor.

“Baby, what did you do?”

I pass her the clippers and whisper, “Please?”

It was hard for both of us, but she held back her tears and helped me finish until there was nothing left but skin. And when we looked at the floor and saw the scattered pieces of what made us look so much like each other, we both cried until our blue eyes were rimmed with red.

A few days later, Mom surprised me with my first wig. Red. Not quite like our natural color, but close. The highlights were prettier than the copper ones we had, and it helped us pretend that things were okay. At least for a little while.

Dad told me I was beautiful either way when we video-chatted from his naval base in Louisiana, where he’d stayed after Katrina, but it took me a long time to feel that way and believe it.

Touching the fuzzy hair slowly growing in haphazardly, I fight a frown at the prickles that tickle my fingertips. “I look like a chia pet,” I mumble to myself under my breath.

My fingers graze down the sides of my face, tracing the sunken cheekbones that have given my normally round face a chiseled look that I don’t love or hate. A pair of rough, chapped lips meet the pad of my thumb, reminding me that I need to buy more lip balm before I go anywhere. Then my fingers go downward, the smooth skin of my neck allowing for a sullen breath to escape, until my fingertips touch the raised skin of the old port in my chest where all of my medications used to go.

Goose bumps cover my arms when I drag my finger pads over the sensitive lump, where a long, pink scar remains. As much as I hate looking at it, it’s a reminder of what I faced. I’m stronger because of the tribulations that came with the sickness. Each time it came back, I fought harder.

Knew what to expect.

Handled it.

For me and my future.

For Mom.

For Dad.

For Bentley.

I’d like to think I’m better for it now because I’m not nearly as scared as I used to be about where life could take me. Now it’s about taking it by the horns and choosing where to go from here.

Standing taller, I give my lean frame, hidden mostly by the bulky towel, one last look before walking into my attached bedroom, where it looks like a tornado tore through. I’ve never liked packing, so I always wait until the last minute to do it.

Because no matter how excited I am to go back to a place where seafood, pastries, and jazz music greet you on every corner, I know this time will be different.

And as I look around the robin’s-egg-blue room I picked out when we moved into the house, I’m hit with nostalgia. Because I don’t know when the next time I’ll see it will be.

Three hours later, in my cotton pajamas covered in ninja ducks that Aunt Taylor bought me for Christmas, I click the last two locks into place on my suitcase and study the empty closet behind me.

Mom walks in and wraps her arm around my waist, her hold gentle but firm at the same time. “Are you positive about this?”

Stay , she’s asking.

I look at her and nod. “I’m sure.”

I can’t is what I really tell her.

Her hand reaches out and caresses the side of my face, her eyes lifting to my patchy scalp. I see her throat bob and her eyes glaze before she takes a deep breath.

She knows I need to do this.

For the first time in what feels like forever, I’m finally going to live .