Chapter 2
chapter
two
Tragedy is an icky slime that sticks. It’s the first thing anyone sees when they look at you, even if they try to ask innocuous questions that only hint at it.
It insulates, creating a barrier between you and the world.
By the time you figure out how to get rid of it, clean off the muck, what’s underneath it has gone rancid.
Bitter. And who wants to be around someone like that?
Tim told me to be nice to the girl with cancer because she doesn’t have a lot of friends. That was the exact opposite of a Be Yourself (Again) moment. I need to tuck the bitterness away, fold it into something smaller, less hazardous for people close to me.
I plaster a pleasant expression on my face, and smooth down my hair as I cross the empty dance floor to the bathroom. The band is playing Nat King Cole and I try to sync my hips casually to the music. I am happy. I am healthy. I am effervescent.
“Hey, Ruby,” someone says. Clara, face like a cat and long, pin-straight hair the color of cornsilk, struts toward me. She is, from what I can tell on Instagram, currently occupying Penelope’s best friend spot.
“Hey,” I say breathily as she wraps me in a Prada-scented hug.
“Love your hair. Slaying the short look.”
“Oh, I’m, uh, growing it out.”
Clara watches me with an expression of polite apathy.
I should continue the small talk, find something inane to comment on. “This wedding is gorgeous.”
“I know right?” Clara looks around. “I’m so impressed they pulled it off. Fanciest shotgun wedding I’ve ever seen.”
I blink, slow. “Shotgun wedding?”
Clara covers her mouth, giggling. “Oops! I thought everyone knew. Izumi’s like four months pregnant. She’s barely showing, though, I can totally see why you’d never know.”
It’s like a scab being picked open, warm blood trickling out with a pain both dull and sharp.
Anxiety tugs in my gut, a whisper that snakes through my insides, telling me that I’m only here because they feel bad for me.
That I’ll never escape being that one satellite friend who went through something horrible.
I have to close my eyes. I’m at Izumi’s wedding, present and healthy, but I’ve learned the hard way that reality is easily warped.
One day you could be laying on the couch with your boyfriend, half-seriously looking at two bedroom lofts in West Loop, and the next your nurse anesthetist is wheeling you into the operating room, a full staff of surgeons and nurses waiting with scalpels and needles and drugs to cut the cancer from your body.
All it takes is one itsy bitsy cancerous cell to make a break for it in my bloodstream, and all of this could come crumbling down.
The cancer could take root in my bones or my lungs or my brain.
They say you have years, not decades, when you get diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer.
Can you imagine trading fifty years for five because of one pesky, errant, mutant cell? What kind of justice is that?
I gulp down as much air as I can, considering my throat is closing.
“It’s crazy, Craig and I are, like, so far from having kids,” Clara rattles on, oblivious to my impending meltdown. “We have so much we want to accomplish career-wise.”
“I have to—” I point toward the hallway.
“Sorry. Bathroom. Got to—yeah.” I pinball my way out of the reception hall.
“So good to see you!” I call back to Clara before I take off at a power walk toward the only private space on this floor: a single stall, all-gender bathroom that all genders will need to do without for a few minutes.
There is a category five hurricane gathering in my amygdala.
I slam the door just before I descend into the Dark Place.
Here, the floodgates open at will. The moments are few and far between, and hard to predict, but they still happen.
The past and the future bleed together into something murky and out of my control.
I’m in the treatment chair, life-saving poison being pumped directly into my heart.
I’m looking at my chest for the first time, my breasts gone and replaced with sacs of saline, lined with bruises and scabs.
A nurse is holding my face, trying to get me to calm down as the propofol hits my IV, and a doctor prepares to extract what could be my only chance to have biological children.
My breaths are short and wet and studded with tears.
I yank out a few scratchy paper towels from the dispenser and scream into them.
“I am healthy,” I whisper. “There is no cancer in my body,” I repeat over and over.
I try not to stay in the Dark Place too long.
It’s a place where I scream and thrash against the Universe itself.
The place where I remember my body before cancer burned it down, my mind before treatment destroyed it, now barely rebuilt, full of sparsely paved cracks.
The place where I imagine wasting away slowly in a hospital bed, one tiny lesion stealing the life right out from under me before I even have the chance to turn forty.
It’s a chorus more tragic than an ancient Greek play.
I scream into my paper towel muffler until the tears stop.
“You are not a tragedy,” I admonish myself, cleaning up my smeared makeup in the mirror.
“You’ve just used up your quota of bathroom crying for a month.
” I roll my shoulders with the dignity of a seasoned public cryer and straighten the bodice of my dress so that it hangs on my chest evenly.
My eyes are a little red, but nothing I can’t chalk up to allergies.
Other than the small scar on the right side of my chest where my port sat, you’d never be able to tell that anything has happened to me.
Someone cranks the door’s handle. In a split second of rib-shattering panic, I realize I never confirmed if I bolted it.
I lunge, but the door opens before I can stop it, and I lock eyes with the person on the other side.
Two blue-green irises glow next to olive skin. It’s a color that, if I had to describe it—knife to my throat—looks a lot like seaglass. Like an ocean rippled with whitecaps. Framing his face are long, thick tufts of dark hair, and draped on his tall, lean body is a jet black tuxedo.
It’s the Mystery Man who was sitting next to Josh. And my God, he’s attractive. But not in an intimidating way. He’s attractive in the way sunlight is. In a way that feels like a law of nature: it’s important to be around it.
“Sorry,” he says softly, eyes widening at the strange surprise of finding someone in an unlocked bathroom.
He smiles, a lopsided grin as disarming as the rest of him, taking in all of my bathroom-panic-attack glory.
“I didn’t realize this was occupied.” His voice is low and velvety, rocks tumbling over a waterfall.
We’re connecting beyond eye contact. Soul contact.
He’s a screenwriter, about to pen the next Pulp Fiction.
We will live in a midcentury ranch in Topanga Canyon, with a long row desk and one gifted child who hates us.
“Dreams” plays on the record player while we bake brownies that are actually just avocado and cocoa powder—
“I have one in my purse—” a voice purrs. A desi girl with dark slicked-back hair and a plunging velvet dress wraps her arms around Mystery Man. “Oh, shit.” She giggles when she catches sight of me, hiding her face in his neck.
Safe to say the record player has scratched.
“No—I’m, uh, done.” I shake my head, ridding myself of that delusional daydream. Obviously this is the kind of guy who has trysts in public bathrooms. I didn’t realize that happened outside of movies, but this man is clearly breaking down barriers.
“It’s—all yours,” I mutter, hoarse. Let’s review: I just had a meltdown in a public bathroom at a shotgun wedding, which everyone was aware of but me, interrupted by a couple looking for a place to bang. Have I missed anything? I believe this is what the poets call rock bottom.
I avoid eye contact (and anymore misread soul contact) with Mystery Man and his girlfriend, rushing out of the bathroom and throwing a thin “bye” in their direction.
I clutch my purse to my chest and hug the wall as I meander back, stopping at the reception hall’s threshold.
Izumi’s maid of honor delivers a teary-eyed, laughter-filled speech about how Izumi and Tim are soulmates.
The hall is a utopia for just one night, a celebration of love as everyone laughs and whoops and claps at all the right points.
Everyone basks in the light of this collective moment.
Belonging is an effortless fizz in the air as potent as the signature cocktails.
It’s perfect and encased in glass with glitter swirling all around.
I’m stuck on the outside, shaking the snow globe, trying to find a way in.