“Ice cream to celebrate?” Mom asks.
I nod, reaching deep for the same level of excitement that she has. Maybe ice cream will help. With chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate. I trail behind Mom through the subway to the ice-cream shop that has always been an ice-cream shop—just cycles through different chains and independents. It’s back now to the original chain of my childhood.
Ping! I pull my phone out, hoping for a message that will break through my fear.
TUMOR SQUAD
Luis
We are a go for the Morelands trip!
Medical Coach
Huh?
Caitlin
Tumor Squad … really.
Luis
The one and only!!
I figured if Ellie can have a medical coach, I can have a team, a squad.
Medical Coach
What is this exactly?
Ellie
I would actually like that answer as well.
Medical Coach
And who are these numbers?
There’s a quick succession of texts with people spouting off their names.
I get a side text from Ryan.
Medical Coach
What is Luis talking about?
Ellie
Isn’t it obvious? We’re helping a friend celebrate before surgery. Don’t you do something similar before big games? Isn’t this a sports thing?
Medical Coach
We already covered how you don’t know sports.
Ellie
Ah yes, we did.
You’re going.
I don’t get a reply, but the messages are already stacking up on Tumor Squad.
TUMOR SQUAD
Veronica
I already signed everyone up.
Luis
It’s to accompany me on a farewell tumor trip.
This weekend.
Medical Coach
This cannot be doctor approved.
Luis
Caitlin words of wisdom?
Caitlin
I don’t think the medical establishment is getting us out of this.
Luis
Face it—you’re going.
Oh Ryan, I think, and add an eye roll. Reading these texts blocks out my impending surgery, but then it hits me again and I get a new injection of adrenaline. Just the flight response kicking in. I force myself to follow Mom through the subway and not sprint for the nearest exit.
Feeling better about the whole surgery thing—or at least pretending to—I text Brooke.
Ellie
I’m coming to see him at Morelands this weekend.
Sunlight filters in through the window high above and I tilt my head back, catching the winter rays. This is going to be okay. Surgery will not kill me, I tell myself, even as my stomach flip-flops. I will see Jack this weekend—which is almost all I need to push through this.
“What has you all smiling?” Mom asks, her voice lighter than it has been in a while.
“Thinking about this weekend,” I say, testing the waters. Maybe Mom will finally be on board. After all, I agreed to her surgery demands.
Mom presses her lips together, and I hope she’s not about to rain on my parade. Again.
“We’ll see,” Mom says. She wraps an arm around me like I need to be protected, cradled against the outside world.
Caitlin sits at a table inside, finishing up a social media story, and she turns the camera on me. “And um, look, it’s my friend Ellie,” Caitlin says. I wave my hand in a gesture that says No. But Caitlin drags me into frame. This is payback. “Uh, say hi, Ellie.”
I give a wave and duck out of the camera. This is Caitlin’s thing and I … it feels too close to what I want, but I’ll get it only if I parade my disability around.
“Ahh, we’re headed to Morelands this—uh—weekend with some of our friends from the Home.” She gives her followers a small finger wave. I drop into a seat while Mom gets in line for ice cream.
Caitlin rewatches the story and I see her finger hover over the delete button.
“Post it,” I say. Mom once wrote a whole post about that on her blog: how rare and special it was to see two kids with VACTERLs together. And she wasn’t wrong.
“There’s some bad lighting, and I definitely said um too many times—” She’s about to go on about the technical issue when she stops. “Are you okaying me putting a video of you on A Patient Life?”
“Ninth wonder of the world right here. But you have to post it. No filter, no nothing.” Caitlin chews her lip. She’s used to control, to ordering things just as she likes them. “You want to be more off-the-cuff, here it is. Just like what will happen with your interview.”
Caitlin takes a big bite of ice cream, her face taking on a prayerlike quality as it slides down her throat. This close to her routine surgery, solid food becomes an issue for her. Deep bruises dot her skin. Supposedly, Coffman has the best phlebotomists, but Caitlin’s veins never cooperate. She comes out looking like a Jackson Pollock and refuses to hide their dirty work.
“Vampires again?” I ask, nodding to her arm.
“Incompetent phlebotomists, but what else is new?” Caitlin sits back in her chair, arms folded over her chest.
Mom drops my ice cream off. “Are you going this weekend, Caitlin?”
I hold my breath; Caitlin can be the deciding vote on this whole thing. One word in the negative, and there is no way that Mom will let me on the bus.
Caitlin drags her spoon around her dish. “Hmmm, yeah. I think so, a few more details to work out.” She takes a big bite of ice cream. “But probably yeah.”
“I hope you both can go—I wouldn’t feel comfortable with Ellie going by herself.”
Hope freezes in my veins. If Caitlin doesn’t go, then I won’t get to see Jack.
Caitlin licks the last of her ice cream off her spoon and sets it down with great care, as if she’s setting a dinner table for the queen of England. She does not even try to stifle her eye roll. Of course, that. We’ve fought against parental override our entire lives.
“Don’t get too comfy yet,” Caitlin says.
“I have a firm date with the sharp end of a scalpel. Comfort is not on the list. The least we can do is get out of this place for a few hours.”
Caitlin raises her eyebrows. “And I take it this was the medical coach’s doing?” I don’t miss the edge in her voice. The one sharp enough to cut into me for choosing someone else over her. And not just someone—but someone with less experience. Who’s not VACTERLs.
“It’s not a big deal. He’s just … easy to talk to.”
Caitlin grabs her spoon from the table and I know that was the wrong thing to say. She sits back in her chair.
“Since when are you not all in on stuff like this—you could do a whole series on Luis’s trip to Morelands.”
“I guess we can play it this way.” She studies me for a long moment. “Did he have you talk to your mom?”
“What?”
Caitlin checks to see where our moms are, but with us now old enough to not kill ourselves without supervision, they give us some privacy. “Did you talk to your mom about what she posts online? You keep hiding from this—your mom posts details of your life without your consent. I try and practically get death threats; your mom does it and it’s ‘no big deal.’ Tell me, does your medical coach have an answer for that?”
“She deserves her own space.”
Biggest eye roll yet.
“You deserve control of your life.”
“The point is, I’m going to have surgery.” Team player—wasn’t that Ryan’s advice? “And before next week when I am having surgery, I want to see my boyfriend not surrounded by all of this.” I throw my hands up. Jack couldn’t take the Family Care Home, there’s no way he could handle the hospital.
Caitlin shakes her head like she’s trying to fully understand what I just said. “You mean your boyfriend, Jack?…”
“Yeah,” I say, unable to look at Caitlin. There’s a pressure on me, in me, that somehow this too will be too much.
“And I would get to meet him—like a proper introduction?”
“I mean he’s not quite up on his bows—” My fingers sweat around my spoon. I just agreed to let my hospital friend meet my boyfriend. That was a line I held for so long, and yet now it doesn’t feel so bad.
“Name and Social Security number will do just fine,” Caitlin says, tossing her head, getting the curls out of her face. With her pinkie she untucks the gauze wrapped around her arm, exposing the pinpricks that line her inner elbow. “As much as I want to meet Jack—I will go on one condition,” Caitlin says.
I raise an eyebrow. Go on.…
“You have to tell your mom to stop the blog.”
Shots. Fired.
“Why can’t you just let me live my life the way I want?”
“Because you’re killing yourself over this. And I don’t like it when people are mean to my friends.”
Should have known better. There are lots of things I will do for Caitlin. Hell, I would donate my one kidney for her. But what she’s asking may be a step too far. “It’s fine.”
Caitlin holds up her phone with Mom’s latest blog on it.
“She is two steps shy of going full-on vlogger of your life. How many posts are going up while you’re in the hospital?”
“How can I just take that away from her? And what about the good she does? It would be like taking away A Patient Life—it’s part of who she is.”
Caitlin shakes her head. “No, no, no. Do not compare what I do to what your mother does.”
“You’re right, because my mother would for sure take that TV spot because of what she could do with the exposure.”
“This isn’t about me—”
“Why does this matter to you?” The question is out of my mouth before I can stop it.
Caitlin blinks and stares at me like I’ve smacked her. She’s always meddled in my life, especially when it comes to Mom’s blog. But I’m done. Yes, it drives me absolutely up a wall that she does it. Yes, I live in fear of my friends finding it. And yes, it fixes some small part of my mom.
The community, the venting, it’s all part of what sustains her. How can I just come along—again—and tell her to scrub it all? Her oldest post talks about when she was pregnant with me and the only thing she wanted was a healthy baby. As a concept, I understand it. But now I feel like I’ve been a disappointment from day one.
Couldn’t even be the only thing she wanted: a healthy baby.
I would rather let my relationship with Mom sour than take one more thing from her.
“It makes you miserable.”
“And I’ve already said what I am going to do about it.”
Caitlin jabs her spoon at her empty container; she’s not happy. I have always let her have this fight. I have demurred and said the same things over and over again. Maybe Ryan’s lessons about listening, about asking the right questions, are finally kicking in.
“She shouldn’t—”
“And how did your mom take it?” I shoot back. Our moms may have started blogging at the same time, but only my mom continued.
Caitlin sucks a breath in through her teeth. “Honestly better than I expected. It wasn’t exactly a doctor checkup. Below surgery for sure, though.”
“Well, I’m glad she understood it.” And I am, happy for my friend, that is, but I just want her to understand that what works for her doesn’t work for everyone.
“Look, I watch you freak out about this. It’s always This is going to ruin my life. It’s going to kill my friendships. It bugs you so much that it’s causing you to freak out over your boyfriend knowing anything—over me knowing anything. You refuse to let anyone in, and we have to have this conversation ten times for you to even stand up to me. Are you willing to give up your life—Jack, friends, and all—for your mom?” Her words hit like a rock on a lake and sink into me fast. She’s never made this point before, but the venom in her voice is enough to clue me in to the fact that she’s been thinking about this for a while.
“That’s an oversimplification.”
“When do you get to matter?”
I stir my melting ice cream, trying to find the words. “What am I supposed to say? Hi—I know this is strange and you started this for me, Mom, but I just want you to stop blogging? Also while we’re at it, could you maybe consider deactivating your social media accounts?”
“I mean if you want to say that, sure, go with that. Anything is better than silence. Just talk to her—then we can focus on Jack and how we can use the Morelands trip to bring him into the fold.”
I lay out my plan and how it starts with this weekend. Morelands is normal for us, a safe place that’s not the hospital. My plan is going to work: I will be home by this time next week and I can explain everything to Jack. I will be healed. Be back to my normal self. I don’t dream of being everyone else’s normal, I just want my normal back. That’s all.
Caitlin laughs.
I see Jack almost every day at home. He knows what I like. We share the same interests, mostly. He saw me before I was totally ready to see myself.
I’m not throwing that all away.
That may be Caitlin’s style, but it’s not mine. Long-term. Stability. Normal. Dating another sick kid, that’s a whole other layer that I frankly am not signing up for. I have state championships to focus on, and hopefully nationals—fuck, I have to get well myself first.
Ping!
Ping!
Ping!
Messages come in one after another, the screen flashing with Medical Coach.
“Shut up, phone,” I say, and flip the device over.
“You were saying?” Caitlin says. “You want me to go to Morelands this weekend, talk to your mom. Let her know what you’re feeling.”
Like they know we just finished, our moms round the corner, smiles in place.
Great. Just great.