Part 3 (1/2)

”I'm good. How are you?”

”I don't even know anymore. Is that diet?” I nodded and handed it to her. She sipped through the straw. ”I do wish you were at school these days. Some of the boys have become downright edible.”

”Oh, yeah? Like who?” I asked. She proceeded to name five guys we'd attended elementary and middle school with, but I couldn't picture any of them.

”I've been dating Derek Wellington for a bit,” she said, ”but I don't think it will last. He's such a boy. But enough about me. What is new in the Hazelverse?”

”Nothing, really,” I said.

”Health is good?”

”The same, I guess?”

”Phalanxifor!” she enthused, smiling. ”So you could just live forever, right?”

”Probably not forever,” I said.

”But basically,” she said. ”What else is new?”

I thought of telling her that I was seeing a boy, too, or at least that I'd watched a movie with one, just because I knew it would surprise and amaze her that anyone as disheveled and awkward and stunted as me could even briefly win the affections of a boy. But I didn't really have much to brag about, so I just shrugged.

”What in heaven is that?” asked Kaitlyn, gesturing to the book.

”Oh, it's sci-fi. I've gotten kinda into it. It's a series.”

”I am alarmed. Shall we shop?”

We went to this shoe store. As we were shopping, Kaitlyn kept picking out all these open-toed flats for me and saying, ”These would look cute on you,” which reminded me that Kaitlyn never wore open-toed shoes on account of how she hated her feet because she felt her second toes were too long, as if the second toe was a window into the soul or something. So when I pointed out a pair of sandals that would suit her skin tone, she was like, ”Yeah, but . . .” the but being but they will expose my hideous second toes to the public, and I said, ”Kaitlyn, you're the only person I've ever known to have toe-specific dysmorphia,” and she said, ”What is that?”

”You know, like when you look in the mirror and the thing you see is not the thing as it really is.”

”Oh. Oh,” she said. ”Do you like these?” She held up a pair of cute but unspectacular Mary Janes, and I nodded, and she found her size and tried them on, pacing up and down the aisle, watching her feet in the knee-high angled mirrors. Then she grabbed a pair of strappy hooker shoes and said, ”Is it even possible to walk in these? I mean, I would just die-” and then stopped short, looking at me as if to say I'm sorry, as if it were a crime to mention death to the dying. ”You should try them on,” Kaitlyn continued, trying to paper over the awkwardness.

”I'd sooner die,” I a.s.sured her.

I ended up just picking out some flip-flops so that I could have something to buy, and then I sat down on one of the benches opposite a bank of shoes and watched Kaitlyn snake her way through the aisles, shopping with the kind of intensity and focus that one usually a.s.sociates with professional chess. I kind of wanted to take out Midnight Dawns and read for a while, but I knew that'd be rude, so I just watched Kaitlyn. Occasionally she'd circle back to me clutching some closed-toe prey and say, ”This?” and I would try to make an intelligent comment about the shoe, and then finally she bought three pairs and I bought my flip-flops and then as we exited she said, ”Anthropologie?”

”I should head home actually,” I said. ”I'm kinda tired.”

”Sure, of course,” she said. ”I have to see you more often, darling.” She placed her hands on my shoulders, kissed me on both cheeks, and marched off, her narrow hips swis.h.i.+ng.

I didn't go home, though. I'd told Mom to pick me up at six, and while I figured she was either in the mall or in the parking lot, I still wanted the next two hours to myself.

I liked my mom, but her perpetual nearness sometimes made me feel weirdly nervous. And I liked Kaitlyn, too. I really did. But three years removed from proper full-time schoolic exposure to my peers, I felt a certain unbridgeable distance between us. I think my school friends wanted to help me through my cancer, but they eventually found out that they couldn't. For one thing, there was no through.

So I excused myself on the grounds of pain and fatigue, as I often had over the years when seeing Kaitlyn or any of my other friends. In truth, it always hurt. It always hurt not to breathe like a normal person, incessantly reminding your lungs to be lungs, forcing yourself to accept as unsolvable the clawing sc.r.a.ping inside-out ache of underoxygenation. So I wasn't lying, exactly. I was just choosing among truths.

I found a bench surrounded by an Irish Gifts store, the Fountain Pen Emporium, and a baseball-cap outlet-a corner of the mall even Kaitlyn would never shop, and started reading Midnight Dawns.

It featured a sentence-to-corpse ratio of nearly 1:1, and I tore through it without ever looking up. I liked Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem, even though he didn't have much in the way of a technical personality, but mostly I liked that his adventures kept happening. There were always more bad guys to kill and more good guys to save. New wars started even before the old ones were won. I hadn't read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.

Twenty pages from the end of Midnight Dawns, things started to look pretty bleak for Mayhem when he was shot seventeen times while attempting to rescue a (blond, American) hostage from the Enemy. But as a reader, I did not despair. The war effort would go on without him. There could-and would-be sequels starring his cohorts: Specialist Manny Loco and Private Jasper Jacks and the rest.

I was just about to the end when this little girl with barretted braids appeared in front of me and said, ”What's in your nose?”

And I said, ”Um, it's called a cannula. These tubes give me oxygen and help me breathe.” Her mother swooped in and said, ”Jackie,” disapprovingly, but I said, ”No no, it's okay,” because it totally was, and then Jackie asked, ”Would they help me breathe, too?”

”I dunno. Let's try.” I took it off and let Jackie stick the cannula in her nose and breathe. ”Tickles,” she said.

”I know, right?”

”I think I'm breathing better,” she said.

”Yeah?”

”Yeah.”

”Well,” I said, ”I wish I could give you my cannula but I kind of really need the help.” I already felt the loss. I focused on my breathing as Jackie handed the tubes back to me. I gave them a quick swipe with my T-s.h.i.+rt, laced the tubes behind my ears, and put the nubbins back in place.

”Thanks for letting me try it,” she said.

”No problem.”

”Jackie,” her mother said again, and this time I let her go.

I returned to the book, where Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem was regretting that he had but one life to give for his country, but I kept thinking about that little kid, and how much I liked her.

The other thing about Kaitlyn, I guess, was that it could never again feel natural to talk to her. Any attempts to feign normal social interactions were just depressing because it was so glaringly obvious that everyone I spoke to for the rest of my life would feel awkward and self-conscious around me, except maybe kids like Jackie who just didn't know any better.

Anyway, I really did like being alone. I liked being alone with poor Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem, who-oh, come on, he's not going to survive these seventeen bullet wounds, is he?

(Spoiler alert: He lives.)

CHAPTER FOUR.

I went to bed a little early that night, changing into boy boxers and a T-s.h.i.+rt before crawling under the covers of my bed, which was queen size and pillow topped and one of my favorite places in the world. And then I started reading An Imperial Affliction for the millionth time.

AIA is about this girl named Anna (who narrates the story) and her one-eyed mom, who is a professional gardener obsessed with tulips, and they have a normal lower-middle- cla.s.s life in a little central California town until Anna gets this rare blood cancer.

But it's not a cancer book, because cancer books suck. Like, in cancer books, the cancer person starts a charity that raises money to fight cancer, right? And this commitment to charity reminds the cancer person of the essential goodness of humanity and makes him/her feel loved and encouraged because s/he will leave a cancer-curing legacy. But in AIA, Anna decides that being a person with cancer who starts a cancer charity is a bit narcissistic, so she starts a charity called The Anna Foundation for People with Cancer Who Want to Cure Cholera.

Also, Anna is honest about all of it in a way no one else really is: Throughout the book, she refers to herself as the side effect, which is just totally correct. Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible. So as the story goes on, she gets sicker, the treatments and disease racing to kill her, and her mom falls in love with this Dutch tulip trader Anna calls the Dutch Tulip Man. The Dutch Tulip Man has lots of money and very eccentric ideas about how to treat cancer, but Anna thinks this guy might be a con man and possibly not even Dutch, and then just as the possibly Dutch guy and her mom are about to get married and Anna is about to start this crazy new treatment regimen involving wheatgra.s.s and low doses of a.r.s.enic, the book ends right in the middle of a I know it's a very literary decision and everything and probably part of the reason I love the book so much, but there is something to recommend a story that ends. And if it can't end, then it should at least continue into perpetuity like the adventures of Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem's platoon.

I understood the story ended because Anna died or got too sick to write and this midsentence thing was supposed to reflect how life really ends and whatever, but there were characters other than Anna in the story, and it seemed unfair that I would never find out what happened to them. I'd written, care of his publisher, a dozen letters to Peter Van Houten, each asking for some answers about what happens after the end of the story: whether the Dutch Tulip Man is a con man, whether Anna's mother ends up married to him, what happens to Anna's stupid hamster (which her mom hates), whether Anna's friends graduate from high school-all that stuff. But he'd never responded to any of my letters.

AIA was the only book Peter Van Houten had written, and all anyone seemed to know about him was that after the book came out he moved from the United States to the Netherlands and became kind of reclusive. I imagined that he was working on a sequel set in the Netherlands-maybe Anna's mom and the Dutch Tulip Man end up moving there and trying to start a new life. But it had been ten years since An Imperial Affliction came out, and Van Houten hadn't published so much as a blog post. I couldn't wait forever.