Delilah
The really crappy thing about being a teenager is that even if you have a legitimate, monumental problem—the sky is falling or the zombie apocalypse has begun or you’ve contracted the plague—you still have to do your geometry homework.
So in spite of the fact that I am having possibly the worst Tuesday of my life, and my boyfriend is trapped in a fairy tale, and my best friend is hooking up with his clone, I have to prove that two triangles are congruent.
The way I am selling this to myself is a promise: if I finish this proof, I will let myself take an hour to talk to Oliver before I have to drag myself away to write an essay about the fall of Troy.
Suddenly the door of my bedroom slams open. I turn, scowling, ready to lace into my mom again about privacy—but it’s Jules. “I can’t find him,” she says, completely on edge. “He’s not at home; he’s not answering his phone or his texts; it’s like he’s totally vanished.”
“Who?”
She blinks at me. “Edgar? Oh my God. Did you not even notice he wasn’t in school today? Seriously? You’re supposed to be his fake girlfriend.”
“Maybe he’s just sick. He’s literally been in a bubble for the past three months.”
“Or,” Jules says, her eyes flicking to the fairy tale on my dresser, “maybe he’s back in the bubble.”
“What? No he’s not.”
“Did you check?”
“I don’t have to. Oliver’s in there, which means Edgar’s out here.”
“When was the last time you talked to Oliver?” Jules asks.
A cold panic settles over me. If Oliver had sprung from the book again, he’d come straight to me. I know he would.
Wouldn’t he?
Jules and I both scramble for the book at the same time.
I fling it open to a random page—one where Oliver is riding Socks to Orville’s cottage, with his trusty dog trotting along beside them.
But I do it so fast that the saddle is facing backward with Oliver in it, and Humphrey has a turkey leg clamped in his jaws that Socks is hissing at him to hide.
As soon as they all see my face, however, they relax.
“Thank goodness it’s you,” Oliver says.
“Who else would it be?”
“You’d be sur—”
“Is Edgar in there?” Jules interrupts.
“Unfortunately not,” Oliver mutters. “Why?”
“Ughhh,” Jules groans. “You’re useless.”
“I beg your pardon….”
“Sorry,” I murmur. “I’ll talk to you later, okay?” I lower my voice to a whisper. “She’s having boy problems.”
I gently close the book, hugging it to my chest. “You seem awfully obsessed with Edgar, given the fact that less than twenty-four hours ago you were on a date with a different guy.”
“That’s kind of why I need to find him.” Jules flops down on my bed. “I broke things off with Chris today.”
My eyes widen. “Really?”
“Chris is great. He’s smart, and funny, and cute. But Edgar told me that if you soak a body in pineapple juice for a week, all the skin will fall off it.”
“Wow, he sounds dreamy,” I say.
“He gets me. And he’s wicked hot. Well. You know.” She glances up. “How long till you can break up with him?”
“How long till the gossip spreads that we’re sister wives?”
I’m smiling, but I’m also thinking about how it’s going to feel when I watch Jules and Edgar walking down the hallways at school, holding hands.
Whispering to each other. Existing in their own little world.
As happy as I am for Jules, I have to admit that it’s going to be hard to see her get everything she’s wanted while I lose everything I had.
All of a sudden Jules’s phone buzzes. “It’s him,” she breathes. “Finally.” But as she reads the text, her face goes white. She passes me the phone.
I know we don’t really know WHAT we are, but you’re the closest thing I have to a friend here, and I need you.
My mom’s in the hospital…and I just don’t know what to do.
Jules leaps off the bed. “Come on,” she says. “We have to go.”
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Jules so rattled before; very little shakes her.
But her eyes are dark with worry, and she has a death grip on my arm.
I want to be there for my best friend, but I don’t know if it’s my place to show up uninvited in a hospital room.
“I…don’t know if Edgar would want me there… .”
“You’re his fake girlfriend. You have to be.”
It’s not until I get in the car that I realize I’m still holding the book.
Hospitals creep me out. They smell like cleaning fluid and bleach, which you eerily know is just to cover the smell of puke and blood.
The lights always flicker. People walk through the halls crying sometimes, and it’s like a scene straight out of a horror movie.
I think the reason sick people recover is just so they can get the hell out of there.
Edgar texted Jules the floor where we’re supposed to meet him.
When we get off the elevator, there’s a nurses’ station straight ahead.
Jules gets us visitors’ passes, and we walk in silence down the hallway.
Just before we reach Jessamyn’s room, Jules turns to me.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to him. ”
“Then don’t say anything,” I tell her. “Just be here so he has someone to talk to.”
We peer through the open doorway, and both of us abruptly stop.
Jessamyn is lying in the bed, asleep. She looks tiny, ethereal, like the fairies in Oliver’s book. Like she’s already halfway disappeared.
The thing about a mom is that she’s always there.
She’s the one who rubs your back when you have the flu, who manages to notice you have no clean underwear and does your wash for you, who stocks the refrigerator with all the foods you love without you even having to ask.
The thing about a mom is that you never imagine taking care of her, instead of the other way around.
My mom has worked two jobs most of my life, just to keep us afloat.
When she’s not cleaning her clients’ houses, she’s…
well…doing the same thing in our house. I can’t picture her taking a sick day, much less being in a hospital.
To be sitting at her bedside, the way Edgar is at his mother’s now, would be like waking up one morning to find that the sky was green and the grass was blue.
I try to remember the last time I thanked my mom for everything she does for me, and I can’t. With a pang, I resolve to do it as soon as I get home. I guess we all assume that tomorrow we’ll say those words, or hug her just because. I bet Edgar thought that too.
His arms are folded on the mattress, and his head is pillowed against them. “Edgar,” Jules says, and he looks up.
He glances at his mom, making sure she’s still sleeping. Then, holding a finger to his lips, he steps into the hall and closes the door gently behind him, leading us into an empty lounge. On the television, SpongeBob is playing, muted, with subtitles.
Jules throws herself into his arms. “You came,” he says, relieved.
“What happened?” I ask.
“She fainted,” Edgar says. “Again. And I know you thought she was all better now, and that it was probably nothing.” To my shock, his eyes fill with tears. “But the thing is…it wasn’t nothing.”
The explanation tumbles out in a rush of syllables and grief: Glioblastoma. Neural subtype. Fatal.
I stare at him. I don’t think there are any words in the English language to express how I feel right now. Edgar’s mother was dying of a brain tumor, and Oliver and I were too selfish to bring him back here to spend time with her.
“I’m sorry,” I manage to say. “I’m so sorry.”
“How long?” Jules whispers.
“Months.” Edgar wipes his eyes with the back of his hand.
“It could be a little longer if she got chemo and radiation, but it’s only like a stay of execution—it means she gets fifteen months of puking and baldness, and wishing she were dead, before she really is.
When my dad died, it took years. It was a living hell.
My mom doesn’t want to go through that. She doesn’t want me to go through that.
” He buries his face in his hands. “I can’t lose her too,” he whispers. “I’ll be completely alone.”
What happens to you, if you don’t have parents? Are there even orphanages anymore? Oliver never mentioned any grandparents or uncles or cousins visiting. I think of Edgar rattling around in his house, all by himself, suddenly having to be the grown-up.
Edgar sinks into a chair. “I can’t stop thinking of all those stupid video games I used to play.
My mom would say, ‘Hey, let’s take a walk,’ or, ‘Want to run errands with me?’ I blew her off, every single time.
And instead I’d pick up that stupid controller.
” He looks up at me. “In a video game, when you die, you get a reboot. You start over. How come real life isn’t like that? ”
I watch Jules fumble for something in her pocket. She takes out a small piece of coral, curved like a J, and rubs her thumb over the edge. Then she looks at me.
When you’re best friends with someone, you don’t have to speak to know what she’s thinking.
You don’t have to hear her cry to know that she’s breaking into a thousand pieces inside.
Jules presses the coral into the palm of Edgar’s hand.
“Life can be like that,” she says. “Go to the place where you’re invincible. ”