One Last Song Part 4

She kept reading, but the air around us hummed with tension. I knew what I said next would matter. A lot. I found my brain darting from lie to lie to lie in a spastic, breathless attempt to come up with something convincing enough, something plausible enough, to tell Allie so she wouldn't ask any more questions. But the truth was like this giant mountain in front of me; I just couldn't see past it.

I'd seen a therapist for six weeks that summer who said it was important to be true to myself, that the friends worth having were the ones I could be myself with and not worry about what they thought. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was the fumes from the nail polish we'd just splattered all over our fingernails and toes, but whatever the reason, I ended up blurting out the truth.

"I cut myself," I said, my heart pounding so hard, my chest actually hurt from it. I was sitting on the floor, my legs crossed, and I ran my hands along the skin. I couldn't feel the scars anymore. "With my mom's shaver."

Allie looked up from her magazine, her blond eyebrows meeting the fringe of her hair. "Why?"

I shrugged. I was beginning to feel like this had been a bad idea. It was the first time I realized therapists were full of s.h.i.t. "I... I think I just wanted to try it. Shaving. I wanted to wear a bathing suit, so..."

"Nuh uh." Allie set her magazine to the side. "That's not from shaving. I've done that before and I didn't have lines all up and down my legs. You did that on purpose, didn't you?"

We locked eyes for a minute. Then I nodded. "Please don't tell anyone at school." My voice shook because I knew. Of course she was going to tell everyone. I would've if the tables had been turned.

"I won't," she said.

She lied. Nine-year-old girls are s.h.i.t at loyalty.

I put my hands in the pockets of my hoodie. "Nah, it's okay. I should probably head home anyway."

"Oh, come on!"

Drew and I turned at the voice. It was Zee, walking slowly up the path from the hospital to the car lot. "I can tell you're turning him down." She came up to me, out of breath. "It's not a date with this goofball-I'm gonna be there, too." She grinned at Drew, and he rolled his eyes.

"Thanks a lot, Zee," he said. "And anyway, I did tell her you were going to be there. Maybe that's why she doesn't want to come."

Zee punched his arm and they laughed. It was strange, as if friendship actually meant something to these two in spite of the fact that they'd both be dead sooner rather than later. What did they talk about when they hung out together? What do young people without futures talk about?

Curiosity ignited somewhere deep inside me. We weren't going to be at the hospital. Sh.e.l.ly and Linda wouldn't accidentally run into us.

When Zee turned to me, her smile had faded and her eyes were serious. "Look, I know what it's like to be newly diagnosed. All your usual friends look at you with that awful mixture of pity and thank-G.o.d-it's-not-me on their faces and you have no one to hang out with. Why don't you come out? I promise no one'll make you talk about it unless you want to."

"All right," I said, a weird thrill running through me. "I'd love to."

Chapter Ten.

Zee led us to her car, a bright yellow speedy thing that looked ridiculously expensive.

"You're getting in the back," she said to Drew. "I need time to get to know my new best friend."

Drew draped an arm around me, leaning in to mock-whisper a secret in my ear. Even through my heavy jacket, the parts of my back and shoulders he touched seemed to ignite with the hottest flame. I held my breath and watched his cane support his weight as leaned into me.

"Don't be afraid," he said. "She's this crazy with everyone. It's not just you."

His words curled around my ear. I wanted to close my eyes and take them in, but I pretended to laugh along with the two of them. When Drew moved away to get into the back of the car, I felt a pang of loss. "Absurd" didn't even begin to describe what I was doing, what I already felt for this guy.

The car smelled like fresh leather and lemon cleaner. Zee ran a hand over the dashboard. "Like my new baby? Twenty-second birthday present from my parents."

"It's beautiful," I said. I wondered who it'd go to when she died. Did Zee think about such things constantly, thoughts about her mortality and looming death eating away at her insides like tiny termites? Was she completely hollow, made up of jokes and laughter and mirth until she was back alone in her room?

I took out my phone and texted Mum to tell her I'd be late.

"You live around here?" Drew asked.

"Yes." I glanced at him in the rearview mirror. His blue eyes were all I could see, and flushed with the strange intimacy of the moment, I looked away. "My parents have a home in The Mills."

"Ooh la la, very nice," Zee said, signaling left at the stoplight. Her car tinkled. "I'm slumming it with my parents in Statestown."

"You're slumming it in your four-bedroom house?" Drew laughed. "I don't even want to know what I'm doing in my downtown studio apartment."

"You live by yourself?" I glanced at him in the rearview again before glancing away.

"Yeah. It's not as glamorous as it sounds. Zee's over there all the time, bugging me. I can never get a moment's peace. Maybe now that she has you it'll be different."

I looked at the way they laughed together, their easy banter. Was there something more there, just beneath the surface?

I'd only been to Sphinx once, in high school. The casual restaurant/bar had changed in four years. The crowd was less high school teens looking to get alcohol illegally and more young adult, people in college living alone. When we walked in, several of the patrons looked up and nodded or smiled at Drew and Zee.

"I guess you can tell we come here a lot," Zee said. "Hey, Ralph!" she called to a waiter. "Usual, please."

The guy flashed her a thumbs-up sign and looked at me. "And what about you?"

"Um, just a, uh, a coffee, please." I felt like my social bones were stiff with disuse, popping and creaking awkwardly at my effort to exercise them. I glanced sideways at Drew to see if he was staring, but he was already sprawled on a couch in the lounge area and pulling some papers out of his messenger bag.

I took a seat on a recliner and Zee collapsed melodramatically on the couch next to him, hoisting her feet up so her boots were on his papers. He pushed her legs off impatiently. "Not now, Zee."

She didn't seem to mind his tone. Rolling her eyes at me, she said, "He's on a mission and can't be disturbed."

I smiled a little awkwardly. "What mission?"

"It's always something new," Zee replied.

"It's important," Drew said, moving the sheet of paper on top to the back. He looked up at me. "It's a pet.i.tion for a TIDD member."

"Jack doesn't come to TIDD anymore, ergo, he is not a member," Zee said, as Ralph brought us our coffees. "Thanks, hon. Put it on my tab, will ya?"

I took my coffee and tried to pay, but Ralph shook his head, his hoop earrings jangling. "First time no charge," he said. "Hope you'll come back."

"Stop flirting with her and give me my coffee," Drew said, feigning annoyance. "What do I have to do to get some service around here?"

I watched them, my brain teeming with questions. How could they act like this, like it was any other day? Didn't they want to go skydiving or setting world records? Why were they wasting their time with me when these were their last days? I felt like this was all just a dream, a surreal, bizarre dream from which I'd wake up at any moment. Maybe Dr. Stone and I would discuss it at my next appointment-the implications of coffee and a yellow car.

When Ralph went back behind the counter, Drew set his coffee on the table in front of us. "Jack's too sick to come to TIDD meetings," he said, as if there had been no interruption. "That doesn't mean he's not a member anymore. I don't understand why you're so against this."

"It's just a bad idea for the group to be involved in something so divisive," Zee said, her eyes going dark in a way I was sure wasn't common for her. "We depend on the hospital administration for fundraisers and other things." She looked at me. "They've paid for family members' hotel rooms in the past, when people had to be hospitalized in a different city. They pick up the bill for stuff like that all the time. And they're totally against this plan."

I nodded and took a sip of my coffee. It scorched my tongue.

Drew sighed. "It's Jack's choice."

"Jack isn't... all there anymore. You know that. You've got to admit it."

Drew ran a hand through his hair, a gesture I'd always thought was annoying and pretentious on guys. On him, it looked genuine. I could see frustration in the tightness of his jaw. "That's not his fault. That's part of the very thing he wants to stop." He looked at me. "I'm sorry. We're probably talking over your head. The thing is we have a TIDD member who's too sick to come to meetings now. He's got encephalitis-a brain infection-as a complication of cancer. So he wants to pet.i.tion the court for physician-a.s.sisted suicide."

Physician-a.s.sisted suicide. I looked at Drew, sitting there with his cane balanced against the arm of the couch. I wanted to crawl inside his brain and see what he felt when he said those words. Was it frightening? Or did he feel like it didn't apply to him? I knew what I'd be doing that night: researching more about Friedreich's ataxia, just how quickly it progressed.

"I... see. That's, um, euthanasia. Right?"

"Right." Drew took a deep breath. "I think it should be his choice."

"Do you think the court will approve something like that?"

"It's considered a felony in New Hampshire," Drew replied. "But I'm hoping a pet.i.tion from the community might change the court's mind."

Zee made a noise somewhere between a snort and a laugh. "Are you kidding? Do you live where I live? This conservative little town's never going to approve of something like that. It'd hurt their delicate sensibilities too much. Besides, I'm with them on this one. The nature of Jack's disease makes it too close to call. How do we know it's really what he wants and not just what his addled brain is saying?"

Suicide. This guy, Jack, wasn't exactly talking about offing himself in the usual sense of the word, but he was asking to be able to choose how and when he died. I'd considered it once.

Once, when I was in the eighth grade, I'd been admitted to the hospital. I had a severely upset stomach and a high fever, and they were working hard to try to find the cause for my infection. I remember it was the middle of the night, and I'd been up and down, alternatively throwing up and thrashing around and even having the occasional seizure when Mum came in to the room. She sat with me, took my hand, and asked me very seriously if what I wanted was to die. She said she'd watched me suffer so long that she was seriously trying to understand my motivation. Surely it wasn't just that I liked being sick, right? What kind of f.u.c.king weirdo likes being sick?

I thought about Mum's question long and hard, I really did. My feverish thirteen-year-old brain could see she truthfully wanted to understand me. I thought she deserved my serious consideration of the matter. But then I realized that I didn't want to die. What she didn't understand, what no one understood, was that I enjoyed that place right there in the gauzy veil between life and death. I liked feeling powerless and sick and diseased.

When they found out what the cause of my infection was, they discharged me immediately and gave my parents a referral to yet another therapist.

I'd been imbibing fecal matter.

Chapter Eleven.

Zee insisted on dropping Drew and me off, even though I told her I'd be happy taking a cab. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as she drove, her head bobbing in time to the Bob Marley track on her sound system. One of her braids was coming undone, and a strand of wispy red hair stuck out at an odd angle. I had the intense urge to tug on it, see if it would fall out. Her body was likely still radioactive from all the chemo. I remembered reading somewhere that the poison from those toxins remained in a patient's body long after treatment itself was over.

To me it seemed an unfathomable luxury to be a cancer patient. The world was made to sympathize with cancer patients. They were heroes of billboards on the interstate, of touching ads with tender music that interrupted our favorite TV shows. We cheered on celebrities who developed, and fought, cancer, shaving our heads when they lost their hair in a show of moral support.

When we pulled into the gates of The Mills, Drew let out a whistle. "I knew this place was supposed to be ritzy, but I'd never been inside myself."

I spread my hands out magnanimously. "You're welcome."

Zee did that snort-laugh thing.

"Where did you grow up?" I turned slightly so I was half facing Drew. That was about as much as I could handle right then. It was like he had a superpower, like he could light me on fire simply by looking at me. Even as I thought it, I knew just how cliche it sounded.

"New York City," he said. He tapped the head of his cane against the open palm of his hand as he talked. I watched, hypnotized. "I loved it, but when it came time for college, I wanted to go somewhere quieter." A laugh, a rumbling sound deep in his throat. "I know, I know. Most kids want to go somewhere to party when they're in college. Not me. I'd had enough of that growing up."

Zee rolled to a four-way stop sign and I directed her.

"What do you mean?" I asked. "Were your parents gone a lot or something?"

"Ha. No. The problem was that they were never gone." His eyes ran over my face, as if he was a.s.sessing my willingness-or ability-to hear his story. "Look, I don't want to lay all this on you the first time we meet. I might scare you off." He grinned. "Why don't you come hang out with us Thursday night and I'll tell you more?"

"Oh, yeah. Come out with us! Pierce'll be there, too." Zee bounced slightly in her seat.

"Come out where?"

"Sphinx again. We never go anywhere else." Drew grinned. "It'll be fun, though. We'll chill, drink a couple of beers-"

I shook my head at him. "I can't. I'm only eighteen, remember?" I felt weird saying that, like I was a child compared to these two with their serious illnesses and legal ages.

"Oh yeah, she's a young 'un," Zee said. "That's okay, they just won't stamp your wee hand and you can sit sipping your Diet c.o.ke like a good girl."

I laughed.

"So?" Drew asked, the cane hitting his palm just a touch more rapidly. "Will you come?"

I pointed, and Zee pulled up in front of my house.

"Sure." I handed him my cell phone, my heart racing. "Put your number in there so I can text you if anything comes up." It was, hands down, the bravest thing I'd ever done in my life.

I stood on the driveway and waved as Zee's bright yellow car zipped off, a little spot of jaundiced sun on the gloomy street. I clutched my cell phone in my hand, just a tad heavier now with Drew's number and Zee's, too. When I couldn't see them anymore, I keyed in the code for the garage and walked into my waiting house.

My fingers played with the syringe in my pocket as I stuck my boots by the mudroom door and ventured out into Mum's craft nook. She sat hunched over the roof of her dollhouse doing something to the shingles, her usual cup of tea sitting off to the side.

"I'm back." I held my arms out to the sides, like I was displaying my body for her to inspect. When I realized that, I let my arms fall back down.

"I hear." She didn't look up. The weird scorching smell of the wood glaze she used traveled up my nostrils.

"I ended up volunteering late at the hospital today." I pulled out a barstool and sat down, hooking my feet on the spindles underneath.

She took a sip of tea, glanced at me, and returned to her work. "All right."