23
Abigail
Two Months Later
Spencer:Hey, Priss. I miss your face so fuckin’ much that I don’t even care about the no cussing rule. I wanna video chat with you tonight, okay? I wanna watch you get yourself off again. Then cuss for me, because nothing turns me on as much as that time you said shit.
My face burns as a bubbled laugh bursts from my chest and I hurriedly try to hide my phone from the girl lying in her bed beside me.
Her eyes are tired, her mouth is full to the brim with painful sores. Marcie’s recovery seems to be going backwards far more often than we’d like. Her chemotherapy routine has been extended, her body is growing thinner, her skin more and more translucent.
We, she and I, have this unshakable belief that everything is going to be okay. Because I’ve already walked this road, I’ve shown her it can be done, and though neither of us are under the illusion that it’s an easy journey, we also know there’s no alternative. So she dutifully follows, and never complains about what she has to do to win.
Marcie’s working on her defense. She’s doing her best. But every now and again, she’s forced into the forest and gets lost in the thickness, unable to find her way out again without a little extra help.
She lays on her side like a small child. Balled up so her knees touch her chest and her arms wrap around them, but her eyes flip to mine. She had chemo just yesterday, and everyone knows the day after sucks, so she chooses to ball up and hold the fort while the worst of it passes. The spew bucket sits on her bedside table. Her adult diaper goes ignored by us both. I’ve been sitting on the end of her bed, reading a book out loud for hours, but then Spencer’s text came in, and when I laughed, I got the first real reaction from her all day.
She doesn’t begrudge my visits, nor does she wish I didn’t come. But today, the day after chemotherapy, she hoards what little strength she has, and doesn’t bother with the small talk or pleasantries that most who don’t know this world abide by.
She doesn’t have to laugh when the book is funny, or swoon when the hero is sweet. She doesn’t have to get up to use the bathroom if she has a diaper on, and when she vomits, I pass her a glass of water and continue reading as though she doesn’t feel the fire from the inside out.
But my bubbling laugh gets her attention, and when I furiously blush and try to hide my phone, she grins. It’s painful and slow, but she grins.
“What does it say?”
I shake my head in fast, jerky movements. “Nope. Can’t tell you.”
“Please?” With a deep, pain-filled groan, she turns in her bed and slowly works her way up so she can look at me straight on. “Tell me?”
“Marcie…” Laughing, though it’s mostly forced, I pat her knee and shake my head a second time. “I really can’t tell you. It’s super inappropriate. You’re seventeen.”
“I’m nearly eighteen,” she argues with a croaky, quiet voice. “I think I’ve earned some kind of maturity badge, right? No other seventeen-year-old has to do this shit.” She weakly waves a hand toward the machines that drip fluids into her body around the clock. She’s still expected to eat and drink on her own, but she can’t keep up with the water, and the eating is essentially nonexistent at this point. “I get points for this, right? Help a girl out, and tell me what he said.”
“How do you know it was a man?”
“Not just any man,” she croaks. “But your man. Because women don’t blush the way you did unless it’s for a man. Tell me.”
“Marcie.” My face flames anew. “I can’t tell you. It doesn’t feel proper.”
“So show me.” She reaches out and takes my phone with surprising speed.
Laying back with a grunt, she reads until her eyes pop wide and fire burns in her cheeks.
“Well alright.” She clears her throat. “He sounds cool.”
I burst out in embarrassed laughter and snatch my phone back. “I can’t believe I just let you do that. Your mother is going to kill me.”
“No she won’t.” She brings a hand up and cups her warm cheek. “Holy cheese on a cracker, he turned me on.”
“Marcie!”
“What? He did. Mitch never says anything like that. At least, not when I’m around, so my infatuation is waning. Then your big, bad soldier says things like that, and I’m ready to jump ship to your dude. Do you think he’d date an almost eighteen-year-old?”
“No!”
Her lips pull up into a sweet grin. “What if it’s like a Make-A-Wish thing? I’m dying, Abby.” She gives a fake cough that starts as a laugh, but ends with a pained groan. “He wouldn’t say no to that, right?”
“You’re not dying!” I pick up the paperback book I was reading and start again. “But he wasn’t at the–”