Now the new thing is not what is wrong with me but the thing is to: Save the colon! So how will we know when we’ve saved it? Is a bill passed? Does a school stay open? Does an innocent man walk free?
There are, apparently, a million and one ways. Several types of new medications in many kinds of combinations. Massage. Herbs.
“What about a fecal transplant?” I hear my mother say to a doctor or a resident outside. Did I hear her correctly?
Save the Colon. It’s like a cheer at a football game, which, for the record, I’m also about to miss. I can picture the bleachers filled up with everyone, the weather turning. I can hear that stupid marching band. I used to feel bad for the kids in marching band, their tall hats always off-kilter, their heavy tubas and trombones marked with greasy fingerprints. But then, when I thought more about it, I was in awe of them. Can you imagine? Making that kind of music while walking? Marching? Well.
I wonder now if I’ll be out by homecoming, but part of me knows that even if I am, I won’t be there. At the game. I can’t imagine caring. I never cared, for the record, about football, though sitting on the bleachers up from the field, hanging out with my friends, that was something that was once fun. But king and queen? It was not even a concern. Other things I’m about to miss: all the parties the seniors weren’t going to let me and my friends into anyway. Preseason. Sitting at a desk with Wuthering Heights, raising my hand. The future. It’s happening without me.
I’m having these lovely thoughts when my mother comes in with her coffee.
“Okay, lover,” she says. “Up, up, up.”
I have secretly always loved it when my mother called me that. “But don’t you think it’s best for me to save my strength?” I try. Honestly, though. Shouldn’t my colon be resting too?
She sips her coffee. “When,” she asks, her mouth around the lip of the paper cup, “is best for your schedule?”
My mother. And her coffee. I don’t drink it, but still it taunts me.
“Later,” I say. “God, Mom, later.”
She sips.
My food goes in through an IV from the bag of TPN, a kind of milky, liquid food that’s supposed to provide nutrients. Even though I know I’m losing weight, I’m convinced it’s going to make me gain thirty pounds. If I get out of here, I won’t even get to leave skinny.
I take a breath, but it’s like I can’t catch it. I am so weak. I am so small. I am just about to give in to trying to get up when there’s another knock at the door, and I see the little snout again.
“Verlaine!” my mother says. “Come on in, you guys! You’re here early, Connor.”
I feel my face get hot with embarrassment, and I tilt my head and look at my mother with the biggest eyes I can muster, which she also chooses to ignore.
“Thanks!” Connor says.
I mean, the wrinkled oxford shirt, the perfect-fitting jeans. And the long, light eyelashes? The gray-blue eyes? Come on.
Verlaine’s dog mouth is smiling, and his big tail is wagging. It would be nice to pet him again, it’s true, but now I’ve got this whole, like, layer cake made of shame—the diagnosis layer and then the falling-on-my-face layer and then the layer that is me lying here practically naked—and I can’t deal at all. “We’re talking.” I nod to my mother, who I hope will have my back.
“Oh, sorry,” Connor says, pulling back on the red leash. I swear Verlaine stops smiling. “I’m just doing a quick hello before school. I like to check in and see who is up for a real visit later. But usually everyone’s around in the morning for checking in.”
You got that right, I think. That’s for sure. We’re all around.
“Also just checking in. After our talk and all.”
“Talk?” says my mother, and I feel my face get even hotter, and so I know it’s even more red.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I’m totally fine. Thank you.”
Why isn’t this boy out playing lacrosse or sailing, knee bent on the bow of a boat on the Chesapeake? That is where he belongs, not here in the land of darkness and doom. If he were in here, though, as a patient, I bet his mother would just sit by his bed, quietly holding his hand. There would always be fresh flowers on the side table and cold filtered water on the swingy table.
“Come on in!” my mother says. “Hi, sweetie,” she says to the dog, who wags his way over to her. “I was just going to get some coffee,” she says, and then she, like, hides her coffee! Mortifying. I touch my head, feel the dreadlocks forming on my scalp. No, dreads would be more fashion-forward, though totally wrong for me, deeply wrong. Wrong on so many levels. But I haven’t washed my hair since camp! I am a monster. Revision: I am a monster who has not bathed.
My mother is out the door before I can convince her not to go, using my extreme illness, my new superpower, for good.
Connor scrapes what I have come to think of as my mother’s chair over to the side of my bed.
Verlaine sits next to him.
Thelma stirs.
“Perhaps I should properly introduce myself,” he says.
I blush. Again. Can he see it on my sick, gray face? “Yes?” I say.
“I’m Connor.” He holds out his hand. “Connor Bryant.”
His hair sort of swishes to the side, as if it’s forever being blown in the wind. His lips are the slightest bit chapped.
“Lizzie Stoller,” I say, sort of sticking my hand out and letting him shake it.
“So,” says Connor. “Tell me everything.”
Maybe it’s because my mother isn’t here to watch me. Maybe it’s that I can’t eat this cake of shame anyway. Or that I’ve really got nothing left to lose here. Whatever the reason, I consider the question.
“Okay,” I say slowly. But what have I got to tell him?
“It doesn’t have to be a thing. It can be a feeling.”
I look at him, and I know my face says what the hell. “A feeling?”
“Yes.” He reaches down and pets Verlaine.
Who is this person? What is he doing in here, precisely? I wonder. But I don’t ask him. Who cares really? I am in a jar. I’m like a firefly in here, bumping up against the glass, frantic, the holes my father has punched into the metal cap the only way air gets in. My blinking light just might go out in here.
“I’m tired,” I say. But I don’t mean it like I need sleep, which I very much do. You cannot sleep in here at all.
He nods.
“Of being me. In here. I wish I could just be the kind of sick person who is sad and upset and shows it. Who’s, I don’t know, vulnerable.” I shrug.
He nods again.
“That’s annoying,” I tell him.
“Is this you being vulnerable?”
I have to laugh. “No. It’s all just coming out angry. That’s what I’m saying. I’m tired of that. It takes a lot of energy to be pissed off all the time.”
He nods.
“Okay, but it is annoying that you keep nodding! It’s like we’re in a movie and you’re the shrink.”
“Shrink I can do,” he says, pressing his fingertips together and forming a triangle with his hands. “See?”
“I do,” I say. I wonder about Connor.
“What else, Lizzie Stoller?” Verlaine has gone from sitting to lounging. He yawns.
“I’m boring Verlaine,” I say.
“Don’t do that,” Connor says. “You’re deflecting.”
I look hard at Connor. So beautiful and weird and in my room. It’s like he’s staring at me through this glass. I’m flying around like crazy and there he is, head tilted, peering in.
“I’m scared,” I say. It just comes out.
Connor stops smiling.
“I’m really scared.” It’s all I can say. I feel it all over. It’s in everything.
He stands up. He goes to the side of my bed. He touches my arm, and I get goose bumps. Goose bumps.
I go to pull my arm away. But I stop myself.
“I understand,” he says. Connor Bryant says.
I look into his eyes. They’re blue and gorgeous and clear, and he looks like he’s almost crying.
“Thank you,” I say. And for one brief and fleeting moment I am filled up with gratitude. Just filled up and over. Brimming.
And that’s when my mother cracks open the door. “Hello?” she says tentatively. “Guys?”
Connor nods. “We were just going,” he says, readying to leave.
I feel deflated again. Back to the misery.
And then my mother steps inside.