Michael’s older sister, Jillian, picked us up and we all went to Pet Planet. I got a new tank and an aquarium light for Frog and some accessories for her new aquatic universe. Jillian got a guppy in a plastic bag, and Michael got one of those Siamese fighting fish for himself. “Pow, pow,” he said, old-school evil-fighter-style, punching me when we stood waiting at the register. “Pow.”
When Jillian pulled up in front of my house, I hopped out. She held up her fish to the light. “Thank you,” she said, leaning over the passenger seat. “For making little Oscar possible!”
Michael got out and unlocked the trunk, bent down and took out Frog’s new world. “It’s heavy.”
“I got it!” I tried to take the awkwardly large box from him.
“No, Liz,” he said. “Chill, okay? If I take it into your house, I don’t get your firstborn.”
I felt everything relax. Shoulders, thigh muscles, stomach, heart. “Thanks.”
I followed Michael L up the stone steps and unlocked the door. He set the box down in the hallway and placed his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He might as well have been holding them up to show me he was unarmed.
He cleared his throat. “We can just be friends, you know.”
I nodded. “Okay.” I really wanted to be friends with Michael again.
“Let’s just go back to before everything.”
“We can’t really,” I said. “But I totally get what you mean.”
“Lizzie?” my mother yelled down from the top of the stairs.
“Hey, Mom.” I sighed. I unzipped my jacket. “I’d invite you in, but your sis is outside.”
“Well, she has her new guppy to keep her company.”
I laughed. It’s a funny word. “Thanks,” I said.
“Sure.” Michael cuffed me on the chin. He totally did this! Like I was his little sister. It felt awesome. Then he put his arm around me in this I’m-about-to-mess-up-your-hair kind of way.
I looked down at the Moroccan rug and laughed again. It turns out Michael Lerner really was a prince.
“A’ight. See you later!” he said, and then he was out the door, and I watched him go back down the steps and make his way to his family Volvo. I knew I might regret sending him away, but that was how it was for me now.
My mother was halfway down the stairs. “How was the movie?” she asked me.
“Fun, Mom.”
“See?” she said, hands on her hips. “Told you so.”
I made sure Frog’s new tank was the right temperature, with all the perfect amounts of UVA and UVB light. I added my purchases to the scenery: little rocks and fake and real ferns, a piece of driftwood for her to bask on or hide beneath.
I sat on my bed and watched her. Actually, I sat in my bedroom for a long time that night. I listened to Birdy, but she felt so soft and sweet, too good and young and pretty. I had this thought: What if all of us Birdy fans—all us girls, really, who wanted to be good and young and pretty, too—were sitting here in our rooms, looking at our turtles or our hamsters or our parrots, whatever live thing we had here, separately listening to this thing that connects us all? But we couldn’t find each other. We were alone in our rooms, invisible in the world.
In the hospital I wasn’t alone. Those nurses checked on me all night long. I had a roommate. She might have pretty much only slept and watched television, and we might have been divided by that disgusting curtain, but we were connected too. And our room was connected by Connor and Verlaine, an unbroken line. In a way, me there in my bedroom, my parents downstairs, my sister off at Tim’s studying for the SATs yet again, I was more alone than ever.
Maybe that’s why I got so happy seeing Stella B at Petiquette on Tuesdays. Every week I looked forward to seeing her.
The first time I really talked to her was the next week. All the sessions began in a circle, our dogs at our feet, underneath the glare and hum of the fluorescent light. That night it was me, and Stella B and gray Samantha, and then a bunch of older ladies and their little King Charles spaniels and Havaneses and then two guys, one with a beagle, the other with a Rottweiler. Looking around the room, I could see the truth: dogs really do resemble their people. If I was going to resemble a dog, I was lucky to look like Mabel.
There was some monitored dog socializing, and then we were off to train. What were we doing? I think we were still at sit and stay then.
“Look at you. Heeling,” Stella said, eyeing Mabel.
I hadn’t heard her approach us. I straightened. How did she know? “Well, I’ve been sick,” I said. It just came out.
“Oh! Okay.”
I then saw that Mabel was in fact heeling. I laughed, but I could feel heat rising to my face.
“Flawless,” Esther said, her split ends silhouetted in the evening light. “Heeling is extremely difficult for dogs. True heeling, that is.”
I looked at Mabel and she was looking at me, part of the heeling process.
Stella’s pit bull was pretty close to her side, and I watched her arrange her leash in a way that would get her at her hip, on the left side. She did it with such ease.
I’m telling you: she trained with ease, but Stella looked crazy. Her hair, so black it was practically blue, those black-lined eyes, which were bright blue, a faded wife beater with a huge men’s short-sleeve striped polyester vintage button-down over it, and so on and so on. She was giggling.
“What are you going to do with her?” Stella said when we’d all sat back in our circle, our dogs subdued by our feet.
I placed my hand firmly yet gently on Mabel’s back, and she sighed.
“If you guys get the certificate?”
“‘If’?” I said. “Please, sister. Does it look like there’s going to be an ‘if’ here?”
“True. Okay. When.”
“Children’s hospital?”
“So were you that kind of sick? Or like flu sick?”
“That kind of sick.” I looked down at Mabel.
“That’s shitty,” she said.
I nodded. I didn’t laugh at the second pun she didn’t know she was making.
“I understand you might want to help little kids now,” she said.
I pictured Mabel smiling at a bald five-year-old. I pictured him smiling back, cured of sorrow and maybe even cured of cancer.
“But man, that sounds fucking depressing.”
I don’t know why. Maybe because she was a stranger or because she was a girl or because she was truthful or because she had a velvety gray pit named Samantha, but that night, after training, when she waited with me for my mother to finish up with Greta, I told her everything about the hospital.
It didn’t take that long. There was something calm about her that made me want to talk.
“You said it’s going to be removed?” she asked. “The bag?”
“Supposedly by summer,” I told her. We were on a bench outside Petiquette, and the night was dark and super starry.
“Are you glad?”
“Of course I’m glad,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be? This thing is no fun. At. All. And it keeps me from things.”
“From what things?”
“I don’t know. Being close to people.” Is that what had kept me from Michael L? Maybe a little.
“I would think it would filter the bad people out.”
I thought about that. I thought not just of the people who might actually see it, but the ones like Dee and Lydia, who really weren’t there anymore. I could filter them out.
“I see your point.”
Of course I thought of Connor. He was, then, in everything I thought. And I also thought how much I liked Stella’s point of view. You think you’ve heard everything about being sick or getting better, all of it. But then, it turns out, you haven’t because Stella tells you something new.
“I don’t know.” She fingered her bike chain bracelet. It was rusted.
“Did you buy that?” I pointed to the bracelet.
“Buy? God no. My friend made it for me,” she said. “It’s ridiculous. I don’t know. Anyway. I think if it were me, I might just keep it. I mean, I’m sure it’s a total pain and uncomfortable and surreal to have and life changing, but now you’ve got another surgery, and if you remove it, it’s like the whole thing is over.”
“That’s what I’m going for. Overness.” Inadvertently I brought my hand to my stomach.
“I’m all for war wounds,” Stella said. “I wouldn’t want them taken from me.”
“Well,” I said. “You have no idea.”
“I don’t,” she said. “I’ve got no fucking idea, but I think scars make the body more interesting.”
“Scars, maybe,” I said. “This is not a scar. I could deal with the scars. I could.” I will.
“See this?” She pointed to the corner of her eye. A fine line slashed diagonally across her brow. “I fell when I was a kid.”
“That’s not really the same thing.” Seriously? That she equated my experience with falling down might have ended it with Stella B, which would have been a shame, because I could tell I really liked her.
“But I didn’t tell you that I was being chased. It was really bad. Chased by a neighbor. Who caught me. If I hadn’t fallen and gotten blood everywhere and had to go to the hospital, which gave me this scar, it would have been a very, very bad thing.”
I was silent.
“Let’s just say this reminds me of a lot of things. Mostly about being lucky.”
“I’ve been lucky,” I said. “But I think I can remember that part without this.”
“Can you?”
I could.
That’s when my mother came prancing out with a crazed Greta straining at her leash, trying to get to us. “Wait, why am I doing this again?” she asked me. “Wasn’t this your and Daddy’s idea?”
“Hi, there,” Stella said, standing. “I’m Stella.”
“Hi,” my mom said.
“Daphne,” I said, nodding my head toward her.
“Hi, Daphne,” said Stella.
My mother looked stunned. Finally! Then she turned to me, and trying to get hold of Greta, she flashed us both a massive grin.