It’s right before dinner when everything goes wrong.
I’m at the counter, halfheartedly checking my email (nothing from Mars Now, nothing from Tig). Buzz Aldrin is squawking in his cage like he’s trying to alert us to a fire. Iris is on the phone with her boyfriend in New York. And Elliott is lying on the couch, playing a loud video game on the Xbox. Every bullet and every crunching body sound hurts my head, almost as much as my empty inbox hurts my heart. I’m sleepy and cold and feel weird and wrong, like I’m on the cusp of something terrible, like I’m standing on the edge of a building, on a rooftop, wobbling in the wind.
I go, “Can you turn that down?”
“It’s not loud,” Elliott says, not looking up.
“Mom,” I say. “It’s too loud.”
“Turn it down,” Mom says, stirring the soup on the stove.
Rainy days are always soup days. She’s making three-bean soup, which is usually my favorite, but today the smell of it sticks in the back of my throat and feels like a ball of wool, choking me. I’m so mad and sad, because I love that soup.
“No,” says Elliott. “It’s not even loud!”
I don’t know how it happens, but next thing I know, I’m getting up and I have the whole bowl of apples in my hands and I’m dumping them on Elliott’s head. There’s a silence while we all watch the apples bounce one by one off her skull and onto the couch and the carpet, then she’s up and she’s so mad. I’ve never seen her so mad. And I know she’s going to punch me. And I also sort of know that I deserve it, but that still doesn’t make it less scary.
Then, in slow motion, she is flying over the back of the couch and trying to punch me and Dad comes running into the room and he’s holding me back and laughing because he doesn’t know what’s going on and also because he’s an inappropriate laugher. And I’m trying to push him off me and Iris is there, reaching over me to push Elliott away, and Mom is shouting, “STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!” and somehow Iris’s hand gets tangled in my hair and then there’s a funny tugging feeling on my scalp and then the room goes totally quiet and Iris is standing there, with my hair in her hand. Even Elliott’s mouth drops open.
“Whoa,” Elliott says. “Ish.”
I just blink. Tick, tick, tick. I guess my mouth is open, too.
“Oh, Ish,” Mom says, and then she’s hugging me.
Iris is crying. She’s just holding my hair in her hand, but she’s also trying to hug me with her empty arm and Dad has let go of me, and I feel like I’m falling.
“Don’t touch me!” I say, whisper-quiet. “No one touch me!”
“I’m sorry!” Iris is shaking really hard now. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know!”
Dad clears his throat. “We knew it might happen, I guess I just didn’t know it could be this sudden,” he says.
And I’m just standing there. I feel so embarrassed; I want to die. I want the floor to open up in a huge sinkhole. I want a meteor to crash through the ceiling. Something. Anything.
I don’t know what to say or to do or even to think. My head feels weird and light and exposed and naked and my face is hot pink from blushing uncontrollably and I’m shaking, just like Iris was. I walk away from all of them and push open the sliding glass door. I have bare feet and the deck is hot under them, even soaking wet from the rain, even though it has stopped, leaving the air misty-damp, the sun drying the rain so fast that it’s rising like smoke, in wafts.
I run across the deck quickly. I need to get away from them. From what happened. From my hair. My hair! My hands keep going to my scalp, searching and patting. The bare part of my scalp is as smooth and bald as a pool ball, like it doesn’t even remember hair being there, like it had been waiting under there the whole time for the roots to let go.
It’s not all gone. Just a huge chunk of it, a giant bald patch, like I’m a clown. My fingers rub the newly smooth skin spot. I picture Iris taking the handful of hair she’s holding and putting it in the garbage can under the kitchen sink. I imagine her washing her hands for the length of the song on Dad’s phone.
I’m not crying. I can’t.
I hurry down the steps to the shore of the lake, and the cracked, hard beach feels a tiny bit cooler than it has, a little bit slimy, a lot wet.
I keep walking and walking. The lake level is so low, I can practically walk to the island. I walk out on the muddy, cracked ground until my feet are in the water and then I just keep going. I’m wearing jeans and they are the worst in water, but who cares? I’m waist deep and then I’m swimming. Swimming is harder than it used to be, I guess because of what I’m wearing and from all the throwing up. My jeans don’t want to stay up. My arms don’t seem to want to pull me through the water, but luckily, I touch down with my feet before I drown.
And then there I am, on Lunch Island.
Alone.
I’ve never been here without Tig, not even once.
I step carefully, like I might be disturbing someone. That’s dumb, because of course there is no one here. I find our sign, MARS: 140 MILLION MILES. It’s gone crooked, so I straighten it. Today, according to my calculator app, Mars is actually 175,891,209 miles from Earth. Orbits! Think about it. Not that I’m going to change the sign, but it’s still good to know. Maybe we should have left some of the digits blank and left a piece of chalk so we could change it. I take my Sharpie out of my pocket and write in tiny letters along the bottom “Distance Fluctuates Due To Orbits!” Which makes me feel better. I don’t want to mislead anyone.
Then I’m hit with this weird, skin-crawling wave of embarrassment. Why did I come here? The wind is hot and it blows on the part of my skull that is naked. It will probably get sunburned and pink like one of those hairless baby rats. The main thing that I am thinking is that I can never go back to school now, not ever. I think about Kaitlyn’s braids. She has so much hair! It isn’t fair and it isn’t fair and it isn’t fair.
I sit down, but I don’t lean against the sign so it doesn’t fall over. It’s not even pointing at Mars anymore, just to Oregon. Which is where Tig is right now, doing some normal non-sick-kid stuff, like eating a sandwich or playing Mars Defender on the Xbox.
When Gavriel was here, the emails that pinged in were from Tig. There were two of them.
The first one said:
Mom says you have a brain tumor!!!!!!!!! Is that true? Are you OK? Ish, it’s gonna get better. It has to. I know it.
The second one said:
I’m going to come and see you. Wait for me.
I read the second one a bunch of times. Wait for me. Like, what, I’m going to up and die before he can get here from Portland? It’s only a fifteen-hour drive!
Wait for me.
It’s actually sort of old-fashioned and maybe even romantic, but I don’t want Tig to be romantic. I don’t want anything like that. I just want to be his BFF. I want to build a fort on Lunch Island like we always said that we’d do. I want to sleep here one night with him and look at the stars and see who can find the most falling stars and who can find the most constellations and if we can find Mars through the telescope. I want to make a campfire and have s’mores.
Wait for me.
“I just want to go back to normal,” I tell the sign. The breeze blows my words smoothly into small diamond-topped ripples on the lake. The leaves of the tree rustle like they are agreeing with me, yes, yes, yes, yes. “Yes,” I tell them. “Exactly.”
I gather up a bunch of rocks and start building a fire pit that we can use when Tig comes. If he comes, I mean. Maybe he was just saying that to be nice. The rocks are heavy and I’m sweating. One rock at a time. It feels kind of good, like it used to feel when I worked out, my muscles trembling a bit from the effort, my lungs hurting from trying to breathe fast enough to keep up. I should do this all the time. I should do this every day so that I’m strong for Mars. I haven’t been running around the lake. I haven’t been doing anything. Maybe all the throwing up counts. My abs are as strong as steel.
I lift and place the rocks and lift and place the rocks until my arms are shaking and I have to stop. The thing with chemo is that it is the worst and also, it sucks all the energy out of me, leaving me as floppy as a piece of paper. I feel like I’m constantly carrying something heavy but that heavy thing is me. Now gravity is all wrong, there is too much of it. (Which there is, on Earth! On Mars, we’ll actually be healthier. There will be less pressing down on us! Which, if you think about it, is what gravity is doing, squashing us like ants under a giant thumb.)
I lie back on the warm rock next to the future fire pit. I close my eyes, just for a minute. I can hear a bee buzzing, but I can’t be bothered to worry about its stinging me. So what if it does? I have a brain tumor! My hair is falling out! A bee sting is nothing. The breeze feels slightly cool, which is nice. It smells like the lake always smells, like the hot, dry rock always smells, like Lunch Island always smells. I like it when things stay the same. I like that I can close my eyes and smell home. I guess I’ll miss that on Mars.
If I get to go at all.
I’m starting to think that I won’t. I squeeze my eyes shut even harder. “I’m still going!” I whisper to the rock, and the rock takes my words and makes them as true as fossils, seals them forever. “I’m going to be OK.” I try to make it sound like I believe that.
I’m just starting to dream—I’m on Mars and I’m so relieved because I haven’t dreamed of it for the last few times I’ve slept and I thought maybe it was gone, that I’d lost it—when I hear something splashing in the water. I can’t be dreaming if there is splashing, because there’s not enough water on Mars for splashing. It takes me a few seconds to figure out that it means that I’m awake, after all. I unglue my eyes, which is harder than it sounds, and I sit up. I’m dizzy. I wish I had water so that I could stop myself from throwing up. I dry heave a little bit, but nothing happens and it passes. I can see Iris coming through the water. She’s not swimming, she’s walking. I wave and she waves back. She’s so pretty it makes me want to cry. She looks like a goddess or an angel or something too perfect to be real.
“Hey,” Iris says, finally climbing up on the rock. “What are you doing?”
“Me?” I go. “Um, just sitting here. What are you doing?”
“This lake is a weird color,” she says, almost like I haven’t said anything. “I bet this water gave you that tumor. Mom and Dad should move. They should sue someone. It’s not right.”
I look at the water, which looks the same to me as it always has, green and cool. I don’t mention the perchlorate. It seems kind of beside the point now. Water bugs skim the surface. From this angle, you almost wouldn’t know that the lake was shrinking, that it used to be huge and now it’s just basically a pond.
“If it was the water, Tig would have a Brussels sprout, too,” I point out. “I mean, a tumor.”
Iris frowns. “Maybe,” she says. “It’s not fair.”
“What isn’t?” I say. “That I have Nirgal and he doesn’t? He doesn’t deserve it either! Why shouldn’t it be me?”
“It just shouldn’t!” she says. “You don’t deserve it!”
“Neither does he!”
“But why you?”
“I don’t know!” I shout.
“That stupid factory! They’ve basically killed you!” she shouts back. “Don’t you get it? You’re going to die! Why aren’t you mad?”
“I am mad!” I shout. “I’m mad at YOU!”
I’m crying now. Why is she making me cry? She’s supposed to make everyone happier! It’s her job!
“I’m sorry,” she goes, looking stricken. “I was just, I don’t know what I was thinking, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry, Ish.”
“Whatever,” I say.
“I was thinking out loud. I shouldn’t have said any of those things. You aren’t dying.”
“You’re right, you shouldn’t have. I am dying. I guess I am. No one wanted to say it, so I guess I should thank you for being the first person brave enough to put it into words. But I hate you. I unthank you. I wish you hadn’t come home,” I lie. I’m crying so hard that my words come out like tadpoles stuck in mud, bubbles in between each sentence. I choke-sob. She’s crying, too. Pity party on Lunch Island, table for two!
“I didn’t mean that last part,” I say, hiccupping.
“I didn’t mean that Tig should have a brain tumor,” Iris says. “I just wish that you didn’t. You call it Nirgal, huh?”
I shrug and roll my eyes. I wouldn’t give my brain tumor to someone else, even if I could, but I wish it wasn’t mine. Duh. Of course I wish that. “Don’t ask me why I call it Nirgal, OK?”
“OK.” She puts her hand on my leg. “I’m so sorry about your hair.”
I nod. “Me, too!” I say. I try to slow my breathing back down to normal. I take her hand off my leg, gently. Then I wipe my eyes on my T-shirt, which is mostly dry now. “I knew it would fall out, I just thought it would happen slowly, not all at once like that.”
“Yeah,” she says. “It was like it just let go!”
I giggle. Her face when she saw my hair in her hand! I mean, it wasn’t funny but it also sort of was.
“Are you crying again?” Iris asks.
“No,” I say. I shake my head. Suddenly, I’m laughing really hard. “I always hated my dumb hair.”
“What’s funny?” Iris looks worried, but it’s too late, I can’t stop laughing. I think I’m going to pee my pants, that’s how hard I’m laughing. A bunch of geese fly by, honking, like they are laughing, too, and finally she joins in a little at first, then a lot.
When we’re done, we sit quietly without talking and watch the sun setting behind the hills. It’s really pretty, but once the sun goes away the water turns black. It looks a little scary. It looks a little dangerous. Leeches, I think.
“Come on,” Iris says. “I’ll give you a piggyback ride back to the house.”
I climb on. “Are you sure?” I ask, as she wobbles around unsteadily. “I’m heavy.”
“No, you aren’t,” she says. “You don’t weigh anything! You’re like a feather.”
“Am not,” I say, but she’s sort of right. I can see all my rib bones now, jutting up under my skin. My hips pop up like fists. Yesterday, I tried to ride my bike around the lake like I used to, but it’s as if all my muscles just went away and left nothing holding up my bones. My calves are soft skin, nothing more. I don’t know where all my toughness went. I only made it a block before I got sick and had to come home, wobbling the whole time. “I am not a machine,” I murmur.
“Of course you aren’t,” Iris says. “Machines don’t have hearts.”
Iris wades through the water. I can feel the pull of it, the current she’s making with each step. I want to let go and just float on my back, just float away, but I keep hanging on. By the time we get back, I’m shivering.
I go up to my room without saying anything to Mom or Dad or Elliott, who are sitting in the living room, watching a show, pretending to not be watching me. Yesterday, I saw Mom hugging Elliott and she didn’t push her away. Maybe this brain tumor is good for something, after all.
I walk by Buzz Aldrin’s cage. “Squawk,” he goes. Then, “Houston, we have a problem.”
“True fact,” I tell him. His feathers are patchy and sparse. He’s molting, just like me.
“Ish?” Mom calls.
“Come in and watch with us!” Dad says.
I don’t answer or go in there because that way they don’t have to talk to me. They don’t have to think of what to say that isn’t, “You’re going to die.” If it’s true, then it must be what they are thinking all the time! Mom must be thinking about it while she works, spooning porridge into the old people’s mouths, helping them walk down the hall, pushing their wheelchairs outside for fresh air. She must be thinking how it isn’t fair that I’m not going to be an old person. Not ever.
I crawl into bed, and I start dreaming before I’m even all the way under the covers, that’s how tired I am. That’s how hard it is now, to even just stay awake, even when I’m so mad. Even when I’m so scared. Even when I want nothing more than to not be alone.