Gavriel shows up ten whole days later. What a great “friend.” (Those are ironic air quotes, in case you didn’t guess that.) Ten days that I’d spent throwing up, getting radiated, sleeping dreamless days away. Ten days that I spent writing emails to Tig and not sending them. Ten days of hitting Send/Receive on my email only to get nothing back except junk mail and jokes from Iris that carefully avoid any mention of the C-word. Ten days of Elliott not asking me how I am. Ten whole days of crying and crying and crying. I’ve cried enough to refill the whole lake with my tears, for goodness’ sake. But the lake level is still super low and the weather is still too hot and Dad is still telling Dad-jokes and drinking water and ten days doesn’t change anything but it also changes everything. It’s pretty much erased how funny Gavriel was in the hospital. But it hasn’t erased “Fish.” It hasn’t erased “She’s wet her pants!”
Now he is standing in my bedroom doorway, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot. I swallow acid and madness.
I have my sketch pad open on my lap, so I start to sketch him, just because. I draw arrows. “Ugly hair” I write, with an arrow. “Blank expression.” I use my best scientist/explorer handwriting. Perfect capital letters that look practically like a computer did them. I draw an arrow to his armpits. “Boy-smell,” I write, even though it isn’t true. I can’t smell him from here. He probably smells fine. It’s a metaphor, that’s all.
“Mom said I had to come,” he offers.
I’m on my bed, fully dressed. The curtains on my Mars pictures are moving a little in the hot breeze that’s blowing through the open (real) window. It makes it look even more real. I look at him looking at the wall of “windows.” I try to see if he thinks it’s dumb or not.
“Sorry,” he mumbles.
I’d feel bad for him if I wasn’t so mad. I shrug. I’m not sure what he’s sorry for. For not coming sooner? For looking at my wall? “You came,” I say. “Now you can go, I guess.”
He steps closer. Now I can smell him. He smells like water. That’s weird, but it’s true, so there you have it.
“I can’t,” he says quickly. “Mom said I have to stay for, like, at least an hour.”
“Are you on house arrest?” I go. “Is this your civic duty? Penance? What is with your mom and ‘an hour’?”
“I don’t know,” he says. He frowns. “She does sort of do that a lot. An hour of homework. An hour of reading before bed. I guess she likes hours for some reason.”
“What did you do?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“To be punished for an hour.”
He shrugs. “Nothing,” he says. Then he almost smiles. “Well, maybe some stuff.”
“Fine, don’t tell me, then.”
“OK, I won’t.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I like your room,” he says. “Mars, huh.”
“Yep,” I say. “Mars.”
“I’m pretty into that stuff, too,” he says. “I’ve been Googling since I read that book in your hospital room. Mars Now is a private project that’s going to go before NASA even. Have you heard of it?”
I give him the stink-eye. “Yeah,” I go. “I have.”
“Mars looks cool,” he says. “The way they talk about it being a new society and stuff. Terraforming. I think I’d be scared to go, though. You can’t come back very easily. You can’t change your mind. Anyway, I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up.”
“You probably would be scared,” I say. “But they need doctors on Mars, too.” I squint at him, remembering my dream. I don’t think it was a dream. I should stop being mad at him, because I think he’s going to be one of my best friends. I know that he’s going to go to Mars. I can’t tell him that, though! He’d think I was nutty.
He clears his throat. “Can I sit down or something? I feel, um, weird just standing here.”
I give him the stink-eye until I’m sure he’s noticed that I’m doing it. Being so mad is exhausting, it’s like always being clenched like a fist, but inside. I sigh. “Fine.”
Iris is coming home tonight. I wanted to be getting ready for Iris, but I didn’t know what to do to get ready except stop throwing up. When Gavriel showed up, I was sipping tiny amounts of ice water. If I gulped, I barfed. It had to be such a small amount that it barely wet my mouth. My room probably stinks like throw-up, I realize. I look at him to see if he’s making a face. I would. What is he doing here? Who is he to me? I don’t have friends. He isn’t my friend. I have Tig! I guess I love you.
“So,” he says. “You’re not missing anything at school.”
“I know,” I say. “I don’t care, anyway. I don’t have to go. My mom said. Having cancer trumps school, it turns out. So I win. Ha-ha.” It’s a fake laugh. I actually say the ha and the ha. Obviously, cancer is not funny.
“Oh,” he says. “I guess you do? In a weird kind of way. Anyway, Kaitlyn and Bea got into this huge fight, like with fists and stuff. Now the whole class is either Team Kaitlyn or Team Bea.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Want to know what it was about?”
“Nope.”
“I’m Team Bea,” he says. “I don’t really know either of them, but she was kind of right.”
I shrug. “OK.” I think about Kaitlyn’s hee-haw laugh. “I guess I’d be Kaitlyn,” I say. But then I remember how Bea was crying when I had my seizure. She’s probably a better person than Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn definitely hee-hawed when I wet my pants. “I don’t care about those girls.”
“How come you don’t have a best friend?” he says. “Why do you hate everyone? No one says bad stuff about you. They all want to make things for you. Raise money to buy you, like, a pony or a trip to Disneyland or a cure or something.”
Instead of answering him, I stare right through him. I make his molecules disappear with my eyes. I take a tiny tiny tiny sip of water, the amount a bird would take in its tiny beak. An Angry Bird. Just enough. Through the wall between my room and Elliott’s, I can hear the beat of her music, which she’s listening to on headphones. She’ll probably be deaf before she grows up. Sad. But not really, because she’s Elliott.
Gavriel breathes too loud. His breathing fills up the whole room.
Downstairs, I can hear Buzz Aldrin squawking. Sometimes he gets going and doesn’t seem to remember how to stop. Or maybe he just suddenly realizes he’s in a cage, he’s always been in a cage, and he’s pretty much trapped forever. Maybe Buzz Aldrin has the equivalent of what Mom’s dementia patients have. Maybe he’s yelling, “I left something burning back at the nest!” Maybe he thinks he’s just waiting for a ride back to the Amazon rain forest or wherever he came from, right after he gets out of that cage.
Fish-boy tips back in my desk chair and then rights himself and then he does it again. And again. He’s probably going to break it. I take another tiny, microscopic sip of water. The chair falls over and crashes to the ground and he hits the floor hard. I try not to laugh, but I do anyway.
“Not funny,” he says from the floor, but he’s grinning.
“I’m tired,” I go. “You can stay here, but I’m going to sleep.”
He shrugs. “OK,” he says. “Can I read your book again?”
“Fine,” I say. I take it out from under my pillow and pass it to him. I read it again last night, instead of sleeping, and this time it was different to me. It made me feel sad. It made me feel lonely. It made me not want to go to Mars. I can’t tell Gavriel that, though. He probably wouldn’t get it.
I lie back on my bed and close my eyes. Ever since I started chemo, my Mars dreams have gotten even weirder and more intense. Mom says I talk in my sleep. I don’t think Gav would tell—he’s always super nice on Mars—but I don’t want to give him anything to take back to the class to say about me, just in case. I picture them all laughing, heads bent together. I’m so mad at them for all being healthy. It isn’t fair. Plus, I’m mad at them for being nice to me when I don’t think I deserve it. I’m mad for every reason.
I close my eyes, but I stick my thumbnail hard into the palm of my other hand, to stop myself from sleeping for real. I lie for ages with my eyes shut, listening to him tip that dumb chair, listening to him turning those pages, listening to his loud breathing. I don’t even open them when I hear my inbox ping with a message, and then another one. I just ignore it. I play dead. I mean, maybe I’ll be dead soon enough, so it’s pretty stupid to waste alive time on it, but I do it anyway. It’s just easier than everything else. It’s the easiest choice to make. Dad used to always say, when one of us had a huge problem about something, “Water always flows downhill.” I think what he meant was sometimes you should just do the easiest thing, though actually I don’t think he has the saying quite right.
When the hour finally ends, Gav gets up and clears his throat. “See ya, I guess,” he says.
And I go, “I guess,” even though it totally blows my cover and now he knows that I was just pretending to be asleep all along.