Chapter Ten Portland, OR 2004 #2
But here she always tuned them out. She already knew all the terrible and painful things that might happen to her over the course of her lifetime, but what she was more interested in was what that life held for her beyond the doom and gloom.
Why didn’t they tell her what the chances were of her someday visiting Paris in the springtime?
Or which of the Jonas brothers was most likely to see her across a crowded street and declare his everlasting love for her?
For once, however, Scarlett was grateful for all the medical jargon they threw at her head every time she set foot in that office.
“They think I might be exhibiting B symptoms,” she said with a determined lift of her chin. “They’re especially worried about my lymph nodes.”
Chrissie didn’t react as she nodded to the housekeeper and kept walking, her footsteps soft as she led the way down the hall toward the outdoor patio—the same patio they’d broken into a few years back.
Scarlett hadn’t been inside the house since then, but it seemed fitting that they’d return to the scene of their original crime.
But the moment she safely closed the door behind them, Chrissie’s face started to crumple. “Oh, Scarlett. I’m so sorry. What does your grandma say? Is she okay? Does she need anything?”
Scarlett shrugged, feeling like Chrissie was stabbing her in the heart on purpose. Of course her first thought was for someone other than herself. Selflessness was baked into her DNA along with her weird rogue twin.
“You know Grandma. She’s buying bone broth by the case and starting up the prayer circle again.”
Since Scarlett had requested sun, sun was what Chrissie planned to give her. She started moving the furniture around to make space for them to spread out, soundly rejecting all Scarlett’s attempts to help her.
“There. We should have a good twenty minutes before the shade will hit us.” Chrissie stood appraising her work, her lower lip between her teeth as she struggled against tears. “Should I put on the new Kelly Clarkson album to distract us, or did you want to talk?”
“Talk,” Scarlett said firmly.
This was her first mistake. Of all the people in the world who knew how little Scarlett liked talking about illness—particularly her own—Chrissie was at the top of the list. But she was a good friend and accepted this with a solemn nod as they settled onto the sun-warmed patio bricks.
“It sounds like they’re just doing tests right now, yeah?
” Chrissie asked. They lay side by side on their backs, their fingers clasped together as they looked up at the puffy white clouds.
Chrissie’s grip was so tight that it made Scarlett’s heart squeeze just as much.
“So it’s not officially cancer yet? It could just be the bad flu that was going around last month. ”
Scarlett hesitated. “Yeah, just tests so far. But I’m scared, Chrissie. Real scared.”
That was her second mistake. Fear wasn’t an emotion that Scarlett Sanderson allowed herself to feel, let alone show.
“You’re scared,” Chrissie said slowly. “Of what, exactly? Being sent back to the hospital? The medical bills? Or—” She didn’t say the word they both heard hovering on her lips: dying.
That was where the third—and final—mistake came in. Scarlett had armed herself ahead of time, preparing her speech in front of the bathroom mirror until big, fat crocodile tears streamed down her face, but she hadn’t bargained on Chrissie looking at her like that.
It was the same look she’d worn at the hospital after her brother died. Like she wanted to shatter into all those broken pieces her grandma had warned her about…and like she’d fight to keep herself together with every breath she had.
“I’m afraid of falling behind in school.
” Scarlett blurted the words with none of the calculated despair she’d shown the mirror, an uneasy pang of guilt throwing all her carefully laid plans out the window.
“I’m already failing English, and I don’t want to be held back.
Grandma and I were talking about it, and she thinks that if you tutored me—in the afternoons and evenings, I mean—I should be able to keep up with my classes. ”
Scarlett barely stopped to breathe before she kept going. “I know it’s asking a lot, and your parents might not like it, but it would help me get through this so much easier and—”
Chrissie let go of Scarlett’s hand and sat up.
She was still dressed in her school uniform, now rumpled by the day and smudged with dirt from the patio, but it was her eyes that drew Scarlett in.
Those big blue eyes were usually so soft and understanding, like a hidden pond you couldn’t resist jumping into.
Now they were narrow and flashing, and Scarlett was registering that change in a big way—and she started panicking in an even bigger one.
“You think your cancer is back,” Chrissie said flatly.
“The doctors think it might be back,” Scarlett corrected her.
“And you aren’t sure yet if that means you have to go through chemo and radiation again.”
Bright red warning lights were starting to flash in the metaphorical distance, but Scarlett saw no way of backing down now.
“It’s too soon to say for sure, but I could be back on the drip any day now,” she said.
“You know how it goes… Everything is fine until it isn’t.
” She soothed her conscience with the thought that she wasn’t telling complete lies.
These were all things she’d been told by medical professionals so many times that she could recite them in her sleep.
“But your grandma still let you hop on a bike and ride three miles—on the highway—to come ask me if I’ll help you with diagramming sentences?”
In that moment, Scarlett knew she was done for. She might be able to convince Chrissie that her own personality had undergone a change by this devastating relapse, but they both knew that Grandma was the one part of her life that never failed to rise to the challenge.
Fully aware of the pitfalls now, she did her best to backtrack.
“I snuck out without her knowing” and “Don’t tell her or she’ll just blame herself” worked for a few minutes, but the more animated Scarlett’s attempts at persuasion got, the less she looked like a girl with one foot in the metaphorical grave.
The sweat on her upper lip alone was a dead giveaway.
“Please, Chrissie,” she tried in a last-ditch effort. She clutched her friend’s hand as though her life depended on it—and in many ways, it did. “I can’t do this alone. You’re the only one I trust to take care of me.”
Chrissie eyed Scarlett in a way that made her feel like both the worst and the best person in the world. The worst, because she was a liar and Chrissie knew it, and the best, because having a person who saw through you like that—without even having to try—was the most amazing feeling in the world.
Chrissie opened her mouth to speak, but the clicking of footsteps stopped her before she could make a sound.
“Oh, here you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.
” Chrissie’s mom appeared in the doorway to the patio, looking both startled to find that her daughter was sunning herself when there was homework to be done and annoyed that she was doing it with a guest in tow.
“Hello, Scarlett. I didn’t realize we had you scheduled for a visit today. ”
This was said with such cold formality that Scarlett was tempted to hide behind Chrissie. She didn’t know how her friend could stand it. Give her yelling and screaming any day—litter the floor with temper tantrums. Anything was better than this complete and total lack of emotion.
“We didn’t have it scheduled,” Chrissie said as she got to her feet. She brushed herself off and straightened her skirt, the movements as mechanical as her expression. “This is a surprise visit. Scarlett has some…news.”