CHAPTER THREE

Haunted

The doctor walked in holding X-rays underneath his arm. Unlike Dr. Resin, this man looked like a doctor, with wispy gray hair, round spectacles, and rings underneath his eyes. He was the real deal.

My mom had come from a meeting, and she sat in her pencil skirt and ruffled blouse with Angela in the metal chairs beside my bed.

“I’ve been reviewing your files and your X-rays, and I’ve got some difficult news.”

Just the look on the doctor’s face made my stomach twist. Right then I knew. I’d eluded it for years, but it always hung in the corner of my consciousness as a dark inevitability.

He clipped up the X-ray and clicked on the switch. An ugly black clot lay right where my leg had split. “The cancer’s come back.”

Emptiness barreled a hole through my heart. My mom gasped and clutched her chest with her palm, wrinkling her nicely pressed floral shirt. She reached out with her other arm and squeezed my hand, but her fingers felt brittle around mine. “Oh, honey.”

The doctor continued before the barrage of questions came. “We went ahead and had multiple X-rays and a PET scan.”

He clipped up a few more, but I couldn’t stand to look at them. I stared at my broken leg instead.

“It’s spread up her leg to her spine and from there to several of her organs, including her liver and kidneys.” He stood there and waited for us to digest the bad news.

“What do you mean, it’s back?” Angela stared at me like I’d lied to her all this time. I had. I wanted to be considered normal. I didn’t want pity friends.

“I’m sorry.”

“You never told me.”

I shrugged, regretting bringing her into the hospital room. I didn’t want her to have to suffer like me. “I thought you might have seen the episode of American Idol.”

Angela’s eyes widened. “You were a contestant on American Idol, and you didn’t tell me that either?”

“No, no, no.” I shook my head. If it was any other afternoon, I would have laughed out loud instead of verging on tears. “I had osteosarcoma as a kid, a nasty bone cancer. They cured me. I was cancer-free for seven years. American Idol did a special where the contestants serenaded sick kids. There was a segment about me and my family.”

She shook her head, tears running down her face. “I never saw it. Geez, isn’t that something you’d tell your best friend?”

My mom interrupted us to ask the doctor what I was too afraid to ask myself. “Can she beat the cancer again?”

He shook his head and shut off the X-ray screen. “The cancer has progressed to stage four, ma’am. It’s not likely.”

I glanced at my body. My limbs looked so fragile and thin underneath the hospital gown. I’d been queasy the last few weeks. I forced myself to sit up straighter as if I could will him to be wrong. “I feel fine.”

His mouth was a thin line. “Many people do until the last few weeks.”

I thought about Timmy, my mom, Angela, and my dad. I wanted to be there for them. I didn’t want to leave them behind.

“Is there anything we can do?” My mind scrambled around all the different treatments I’d heard of. “Chemotherapy, lasers, drugs, anything?”

His face was as blank as a mask. I wondered if he felt anything underneath his clinical façade.

I hated him for being so businesslike.

“I’m sorry, but it’s too late.”

The anger swirled up inside me like a tornado waiting to strike. I wanted to throw my pillow at him, or maybe something a little harder, like a shoe. I’d already dealt with this and now I had to do it again. Except this time there was no winning.

My mom must have seen the anguish in my face. The earlier bout had almost killed me, reducing me to a skeleton. I’d used all of my courage to fight it, and I wasn’t sure I had anything left to give.

She wrapped her arm around me and we faced the doctor together. “I’m not going to take no for an answer. We’ve beat it before, and we’ll do it again. Money is not an issue.”

The doctor rubbed his eyes and his chin, like he’d gone through this a thousand times before with a thousand other unlucky girls like me. “Well, there’s an experimental technology being developed right now. It’s highly controversial and very expensive. Truthfully, I’m not sure anything will come of it.”

My mom nodded at me like she’d fix it just like she fixed my Lexus when I crashed it into the neighbor’s mailbox. It had a shiny new fender the next day.

“Sign her up.”