Chapter Ten Portland, OR 2004
Chapter Ten
Portland, OR
There were only sixty minutes in an hour and twenty-four hours in a day. Seven days in a week and fifty-two weeks in a year.
Scarlett was starting to get seriously annoyed about all of it.
With that much time to call her own, she should have been able to spend a hefty chunk of her days with Chrissie.
Even though they went to different schools, nightly chats on the phone helped take the edge off, and whenever Chrissie had an afternoon to spare, she pedaled her bike over to the apartment so they could watch Charmed together.
Unfortunately, afternoons to spare were becoming harder and harder to come by.
“I’m sorry, Scarlett, but I have piano practice” was the most common excuse, but there were other ones in there, too. About chores and homework, Chrissie’s discomfort with bicycling on the highway after dark.
The solution to this problem seemed easy enough to Scarlett: Chrissie could just stay the night with her. Grandma was happy to make another school stop in the morning, and what was there waiting for Chrissie at her big, stupid house anyway?
A mom who couldn’t look at her without seeing her dead son? A dad who worked and worked and worked until he could drink enough whiskey to collapse on his bed at night?
“I told you those things in secret,” Chrissie said one day while the two of them sat on the beach of Powers Marine Park, their bare toes digging deep into the wet sand. The park was located almost exactly halfway between their houses, so they often found themselves meeting up there.
Today was overcast, so they were huddled under a blanket that Chrissie had packed in the little white basket affixed to the front of her bike.
Scarlett would have been warm enough in her favorite oversized hoodie and the fluffy beige Uggs she’d had to beg and beg Grandma to buy her for her twelfth birthday, but thanks to her fancy private school’s dress code, Chrissie was chronically undressed for the weather.
Chrissie always looked so pretty in her pleated khaki skirt and the fitted blue blazer, her (for now) long hair in two tight braids, but she also looked miserable, like she was wearing someone else’s skin.
In her most private thoughts, Scarlett coveted a similar dress code so she could do things like roll the waistband of the skirt up a daring six inches or sew her white blouse extra tight around the bosom the way the cool girls always did in the movies, but she’d never say so to Chrissie.
Chrissie would have been too scandalized. She didn’t like anyone to see her knees, let alone the shape of her bosoms, which were so much bigger and better than her own.
“I’ll ask if I can sleep over the Saturday after this one,” Chrissie promised as she huddled closer to Scarlett for warmth. “Maybe I can even stay the whole weekend.”
But that was a whole nine days away (two hundred and sixteen hours), and Scarlett was having none of it.
“Why not this weekend?” she asked. “Or both? You know I’m right about your parents. They won’t care whether or not you’re there.”
She regretted the words the moment they left her mouth. Not because she was wrong—Chrissie’s parents wouldn’t care—but because Chrissie seemed to shrink into herself hearing them.
“I have a recital this weekend,” she said as she traced swirls into the sand with her pointer finger. “And they both promised to be there.”
Scarlett was forced to accept this. She didn’t want to, and she didn’t believe that Chrissie’s parents cared two straws about the upcoming recital, but part of being the Very Best Best Friend was pretending to agree with something even it was the last thing you wanted to do.
She was proven right when she and Grandma entered the recital hall that weekend, Grandma all dressed up in her best church clothes and hat. The two of them sat in the front row so Chrissie would be sure to see them, so they missed it when Chrissie’s parents came in.
They didn’t miss it when the Thomases left, though. No one in the hall did.
“I have to get down to the job site,” Chrissie’s dad hissed after a drum solo that made the entire room shake. “I’m sorry, Moira, but this deal with the developers is too important. They’re trying to pull one over on me with the import taxes.”
“And what about my Junior League meeting? I had to move a lot of things to be here, and you know how long they draw out each performance to justify the costs of—”
The rest of the argument was cut short by the arrival of a short, cherub-faced violin player who screeched like a pair of cats in the alley behind the apartment, so Scarlett didn’t hear the rest. She and Grandma peeked over their shoulders, though, to find that Chrissie’s dad had made good on his threat to leave, leaving Chrissie’s mom sitting next to an empty seat.
She perched ramrod-straight in her own, her purse clutched in her lap and her face looking so bored at the thought of making it through another hour that Scarlett wanted to scream.
Today wasn’t supposed to be about them. It was about their daughter—the daughter who did everything they asked and nothing they didn’t, who had refused a sleepover of epic proportions in the vain hope that she might get their whole attention for all of five minutes.
In that moment, Scarlett came up with several excellent plans of action.
Plan number one involved pulling the fire alarm so that the entire recital crashed and burned around them.
Plan number two achieved the same results without a fire alarm, but with Scarlett jumping up onto her chair and screaming all her fury and outrage until there wasn’t any left inside her.
Plan number three, however, was different. Smarter. Sneakier.
And much more difficult to put into action.
“Don’t they know how much they’re hurting her?
” Scarlett asked her grandmother after the cherub-faced boy finished his violin song and Chrissie took the stage.
She seemed so grown-up in a floor-length dress of dove gray, but the moment she scanned the crowd to find her mom sitting alone, she looked like she wanted the stage to open up and swallow her whole.
“We have to do something, Grandma. We can’t let this keep happening.
They won’t stop until she’s as broken inside as they are. ”
But even though Grandma looked like she wanted to burst right out of her skin, she only pursed her lips and gave a light tsk.
“She doesn’t need us to fight on her behalf,” she said. “She only needs us to be here.”
“But—”
“But nothing. That girl is stronger than you know. She’s already been broken and put back together more times than most people five times her age. And what’s more important—she’s done it with grace and dignity every step of the way.”
Scarlett assumed this was a commentary against her own nature, which contained nothing even approaching grace and dignity, but she didn’t take it as an insult.
Instead, she smiled and waved until Chrissie noticed her.
She clapped harder than anyone else once the sad, beautiful song was over.
And she decided right then and there that she’d stop at nothing—and she meant nothing—to ensure that Chrissie didn’t suffer a second more than she had to.
* * *
“I know I’m not supposed to just stop by like this,” Scarlett announced as she arrived, uninvited, at Chrissie’s front door after school a few days later. “But I have terrible news. It’s about my Hodgkin’s.”
Chrissie reacted to this news exactly as Scarlett expected—with a cry and a hug and the door thrown wide open.
“Come in,” she said over the sound of the Thomas family housekeeper running a vacuum cleaner in the background. “You can stay as long as you need. My parents won’t be back until late.”
Then, with a peek over Scarlett’s shoulder, “Don’t tell me you rode your bike all the way here!
Do you need a glass of water? To sit down?
” Chrissie was already halfway through her house and pulling out a chair from the kitchen table.
“I think my mom still has the tea your grandma gave her. It’s probably super stale by now, but the smell might make you feel better. ”
Each suggestion was offered more and more urgently—and sounded more and more like torture. When Scarlett had pictured this conversation playing out inside her head, she’d forgotten just how much she hated being treated like an invalid.
“Can’t we go outside and work on our tans or something?
” she asked. But then she noticed the notebooks laid out across the table and hesitated.
She hadn’t pictured this part, either—the life Chrissie led that didn’t involve her, this entire half of her she wasn’t allowed to touch.
“Oh. Um. Are you busy? Should I come back?”
“I was just studying.” Chrissie waved the mountain of biology textbooks away. “I have a test tomorrow, but it’s not important. Not anymore. Tell it to me straight. How bad is it?”
If she were to tell the truth, this answer would be an easy one: Pretty good, all things considered.
At this point in Scarlett’s life, she was an official six years in remission.
She still had to go to the doctor an annoying number of times, and her grandma was still obsessed with “health-forward” food combinations like acai-and-spinach smoothies, but she’d managed to avoid the hushed and always lingering specter of relapse.
“Your long-term risk of a secondary malignant neoplasm is four times higher than average,” the doctors would drone every chance they got. “Particularly in the breast and respiratory systems. And that’s not counting the cardiovascular and gastrointestinal disorders that—”