Z O E Y
Today when I got to the hospital after school, Richard and Sam were nowhere to be seen. Usually, they waited for me by the big revolving glass doors, and then Richard went back to the office, and Sam and I went up to Tristan's room, where we spent the rest of the day until Richard came back to take Sam home, and give me a ride to mine. Most days, he was right on time. Not today.
Today he was late. I waited, a song playing through my earphones, my eyes following the people coming in and out of the hospital. After almost half an hour, I decided to call Richard. The palms of my hands were sweating. He didn't pick up. I left a message and went up to Tristan's room all by myself.
Nurse Flynn smiled at me when she saw me in the hall, but it was sad smile, and she didn't come up to me to tell me how she was liking the book I had let her borrow like she usually did. I decided she was busy.
There was an unsettling silence around, and for a moment, turning the corner, I thought I had lost my hearing. There was no beeping from the machines in Tristan's room. No nature sounds either from the documentary usually playing on tv.
When I walked in, there was no Tristan. His bed was empty. The curtains were closed. The tv was off, the machines too. Only the lights were on. I tried to breathe. Tried to think. Maybe I was in the wrong room. Maybe I had taken the wrong turn, opened the wrong door.
Except the flyer about facing cancer was still on the bedside table, and on the back of it, the words, because we'll beat it together, and Tristan's drawing of a stick figure beating up another one with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire while others tried to stop it but failed. Above it, he had written, I came back for you.
I was in the right room, and before I knew it, I was crying, and my throat was closing up, and I was wiping my eyes, again, and again, and again, and it was no use, no use at all. I just went on crying more, and more, and more.
"Zoey?"
I wiped my eyes again, harder this time, and took a deep breath.
"What happened?"
I turned around, and said, "I'm sorry, I â"
"Why are you crying?" It was Tristan. He was right there, standing in front of me, looking worried, and confused, and alive. "What happened?"
I tried to breathe, tried to say, "Nothing â"
But he stopped me, "What do you mean, nothing? You're crying."
I tried to smile too, tried to say again, "It doesn't matter â"
And again, he stopped me, stepping closer, and pulling my hands away from my face so he could look at me and I could look at him as he asked, "What's wrong with you?"
I shook my head, and he shook his. Then he touched my cheek with the back of his fingers. He was wearing the clothes he had on when he was brought in, a t-shirt and jeans, both stained in weeks-old blood, and no shoes, just socks. There was blood on them too.
He touched my chin, said "My eyes are up here."
I looked up at him, "Where are your shoes?"
He shrugged, "I never got a chance to put them on, did I?"
"I guess not."
"What happened to you?"
I looked at the door, "Where's everyone?"
He shrugged again, "Richard's probably out there paying a doctor to make me stay â"
"You got discharged?"
"I did but Richard wants me to try chemo again."
"Oh."
"Why were you crying?"
"What does Doctor Hanson think?"
"I don't fucking care what he thinks." He shrugged again. "I'm not doing it."
I didn't say anything. I didn't think I should. I didn't know what he had gone through. Years and years of going from foster home to foster home, and then, just when things were starting to get better, a diagnosis, a death sentence, more years of bad luck, of getting in and out of the hospital.
I had looked up the symptoms. There were fevers, and nosebleeds, and headaches, and nausea, and seizures...
"You think I should do it too," he said.
I swallowed hard and looked down at our feet pointing at each other, my clean shoes, and his dirty socks, "You know, the other day I thought you were just trying to make me feel bad, saying I was like all those terrible things that got out when Pandora opened the box. I didn't know anything had been left inside, but I looked it up when I got home. It was hope, wasn't it?"
He was smiling when I looked up, "I was on a lot of painkillers that day."
I smiled too, leaning back against his empty bed, "Some people think hope was left in the box on purpose, to punish humanity even more, so they would have to live out their days without ever thinking that things could get better. But there are other people that think hope was actually the worst evil of all, that it was good that it didn't get out, because the possibility of things getting better is only an illusion, a false promise that just makes everything worse."
He didn't have to tell me which one he agreed with. I already knew. In any case, he wasn't going to tell me. Instead, he asked me, "What do you think?"
"I think people believe whatever makes life easier for them, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that," I said, and then a breath, a pause. "I understand why you don't wanna do chemo again."
He laughed, "Sam thinks I'm the most selfish person in the world."
"We're all selfish."
"Not you."
I was right under the room's bright sterile lights. I could feel them burning on me. I leaned further back against the bed, away from them, and shook my head.
Before I could say anything, he asked, "Why were you crying?"
I told him the truth, "Your bed was empty. I thought you..."
"Oh." I got ready for him to call me selfish after all, for making it about myself when he was the one who was dying, but instead he smiled, teeth and everything, and said, "You care."
"Well, I â"
"That's fucking embarrassing. How long have you had a crush on me?"
I could have laughed, "I don't have a crush on you."
He reached for my broken hand, "I thought you said you would never lie to me."
I watched him move his fingers along the cast, felt them on my skin, slow, soft. Then I swallowed hard, and said, "I just think you deserve better."
He grabbed my hand in his. The bright sterile lights were on me again, but I hadn't moved from where I was sitting on the bed, only him. He was closer. He was pressing my fingers against his mouth, and I was burning up under all that light.
"Does it hurt?" he asked.
I said, "No."
He looked up at me, "Are you lying again?"
I shook my head.
"But you were lying before?"
I didn't answer, and he didn't insist. Instead he kissed me. His hands touched my waist, and I wrapped my arms around his shoulders, and kissed him back. We were both liars, leaning closer, and closer, until we were as close as skin.
He moved his hands for my legs, I moved mine for his face, felt his jaw move under my fingers, his mouth against mine, soft, and slow, like his hands. This was reading such a good book, I had to cover half of the page so I wouldn't try and read it all at once. It was forcing myself to finish a line without looking for the next, and the next, and the next.
Then he pulled away, and said, "This is wrong."
I opened my mouth to ask why, but he leaned in, and kissed me again before I could, and none of it was wrong, so it didn't matter. It didn't matter at all. I put my arms around him again, and he put his hands on my face, and there was so much light, warm, and bright.
But he pulled away again, just enough that he could say what he had to say, his hands still on my neck, his forehead on mine, and his breath, hot, and heavy.
"I'm sorry. I can't do this to you," he said. "I like you too much."
I didn't understand, "What are you talking about?"
"I don't know if you're just doing this to make me feel better because I'm dying, and you think you have to, or if you actually want this, but either way, it's wrong. It's like giving a dying puppy to a kid. You're setting yourself up for â"
"I'm not a kid."
"And I'm not a puppy," he said. "Listen, you really don't owe the world shit. If anything, the world owes you, because you're this amazing thing. You... You have no idea, do you?"
I opened my mouth, but no words came out, not this time.
"If we stop now," he said, "you might even meet someone in time for graduation. Someone you can take to prom. I'll be fine. I won't even be jealous. I promise."
It was hard to breathe. He wouldn't be jealous, he said. Promised. It was a joke. Dead people couldn't be jealous. He was smiling as he said it, a sad, terrible smile, and my hands were closed in fists, and so was my throat, and my stomach, and I still didn't say a word. My favorite characters would have gone down fighting, but not me. I couldn't even breathe. I wanted to stop this like closing a book halfway through, but I couldn't. I just couldn't. He kept going. The pages kept turning. There was nothing I could do.
"You're not gonna say anything?"
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
"It's probably better if you don't actually."
I held my breath in my chest until he turned around, felt it sting as he walked away, and when he finally left the room, I let it out. I was crying again, but this time I didn't try to stop it. I knew I couldn't. I just sat there, crying in the dark.