Chapter: Number SevenI read it three times. It stayed one word.Bernard lifted his head off the end of my bed. He’d been watching me not sleep for an hour, and now he watched me throw back the comforter.I typed coming, deleted it, and got up instead.Pops’ Navy hoodie was on the back of my desk chair, where Chandler’s beanie used to sit. I zipped it to my chin over my pajamas, shoved my feet into my Uggs, and stood with my hand on the doorknob, listening to the house. The furnace ticking. Nothing else.Bernard was already at the door, tail going.“Quiet,” I whispered.He took it as a suggestion.The hall was dark. I passed the loft, my Algebra II worksheets still spread across the table where I’d abandoned them Tuesday morning, and Stetson’s door at the end, shut, no light underneath. My dads’ door was dark too. The last time I’d stood in this hallway at night, there had been a line of light under that door, and I had walked to it and knocked.Tonight there was nothing to walk to.I took the stairs the w
Last Updated: 2026-10-07
Chapter: Don't WaitNoelle came at 5:58 with her backpack still over one shoulder.I’d been in room 614 since nine that morning. The hallway on the way in had been colder than I remembered, and quieter, and the lemon disinfectant smell was sharper than it had been in October. The same IV poles lined the wall outside the supply closet. The same nurses walked by with the same badge reels clipped to their scrubs. I knew the routine now. I hated that I knew it.My counts had needed an extra week to come back after the fever, so the second cycle was late, and the red bag had gone up at eleven, and I’d been watching it drip into my chest all afternoon with nobody in the visitor chair.It was supposed to be Maekynzie’s day. She’d claimed it in purple Sharpie on the corkboard in my room, with a heart next to it and a crown.At eight that morning, an hour before I was due, my phone had buzzed.Maekynzie: omg sloane i’m so so sorry. something came up w my mom. i can’t today. i’ll make it up to u i promise 💜💜💜I
Last Updated: 2026-10-07
Chapter: DibsOn Wednesday, my hair came out in the shower.A handful. I ran my fingers through it the way I’d done every morning of my life, with shampoo foaming between them, and when I pulled my hand away, my fingers were wrapped in it. Long, wet, dark gold with water, tangled around my knuckles like seaweed.I stood there under the spray and looked at it.Then I did it again, because I needed to know. Another handful. It didn’t hurt. That was the strangest part. It just let go, like it had been waiting for permission.Water pooled around my feet, warm and then cooling, while I stood very still and held my own hair in both hands.I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I picked every strand off my fingers and dropped them in the trash can by the sink, one handful at a time, and then I turned off the water and stood dripping on the bath mat until I started shivering.When I brushed it out, the brush came away thick. I cleaned it. I brushed again. It came away thick again.I stopped brushing.When I came o
Last Updated: 2026-10-07
Chapter: AlmostI closed the drawer.It didn’t make a sound. That was the worst part. It slid shut on its runners the way it always did, quiet and smooth, and the Band-Aids and the alcohol wipes and the box of masks disappeared, and nothing in the bathroom looked any different.I stood there in my bare feet with the thermometer in my hand.My Colorado State tee had slid off one shoulder, the neckline stretched out from a year of being slept in. My pajama shorts felt too thin for October. My scalp felt tight again, and my skin was hot everywhere, and I wanted somebody to tell me the thermometer was broken. I wanted somebody to tell me what to do.You see a hundred point four, you come get us. You knock.I’d promised. I’d said the words out loud in the kitchen with Bernard sneezing at the fridge.Bernard got up from the bathroom doorway and walked a few steps down the hall. Then he stopped and looked back at me, like he was waiting to see if I’d follow.The hallway carpet was rough under my feet. Every
Last Updated: 2026-10-07
Chapter: Short PlanI came home from my first chemo cycle wrapped in Pops’ fleece blanket, the ugly plaid one he kept in the back seat of the Silverado for emergencies, and Bernard heard us before the front door was all the way open.He came around the corner from the kitchen at full speed, nails clicking and then skidding on the hardwood, his whole back half swinging. He hit the rug by the door and slid the last two feet. For one second, he was just Bernard, all fluff and tongue and joy.Then he stopped.He sniffed my knee. My hip. My hand. Then his nose went straight up the front of my sweatshirt to the spot below my right collarbone, where the port sat under a square of bandage, and he pushed his face against it and whined.“Easy, bud,” Dad said, reaching for his collar.Bernard didn’t even look at him. He sniffed the bandage again, harder, and the whine went up a note, the same sound he made when somebody was crying in another room.The house smelled like Pops’ stress candle. A cold draft came throug
Last Updated: 2026-10-07
Chapter: LilacI didn’t hear a single word the anesthesiologist said.He was very nice about it. He crouched next to my pre-op bed in a blue paper hat with tiny cartoon tacos on it and explained everything slowly, with his hands, about the port and the little catheter and the vein and how it would sit right under my skin below my collarbone. I nodded at all of it. I said, “Yes. That makes sense. Thank you.”Nothing went in.It was seven-thirty on Tuesday morning, October fourteenth, four days after the sleepover. The curtain around my bed was a scratchy blue fabric that smelled faintly like bleach. I was in a hospital gown with ties that didn’t line up, too loose at the neck and cold where the gap fell open against my back, and a pair of grippy yellow socks. My leggings and the gray zip-up hoodie I’d stolen from Pops’ closet last winter, the one that said U.S. NAVY in cracked white letters across the back, were folded in a plastic bag under the bed with a sticker that said PATIENT BELONGINGS. My cru
Last Updated: 2026-10-07
Fighting For Normal
She had her whole junior year mapped out. Volleyball. Late nights with her friends. Maybe telling her brother's best friend the thing she's been not-saying for two years. Then her left leg started hurting and a Tuesday trip to the ER rewrote everything.
Sloane Deshazo, sixteen, has spent her whole life being easy to love. No drama, no needs, no complications. Ewing Sarcoma, stage 2, doesn't care about any of that. And neither, it turns out, does Chandler Pavelka, who keeps showing up without being asked, in yesterday's jeans and an inside-out hoodie, like staying is the most obvious thing in the world.
Sloane knows how to fight. She's learning, slower, how to let someone stay.
But remission isn't guaranteed, and some days the scariest thing isn't the diagnosis. It's wanting something this much.
Read
Chapter: OkayThe text took three drafts.Not because I didn’t know what I wanted to say. I’d known since the Suburban ride home, the phone in my bag and the city going past and Stetson’s shoulder warm against mine. I’d known it the way I knew things that had been true for a while before I let myself name them. The three drafts were about finding the version that didn’t make it bigger than it was.Monday afternoon. Cycle 9 started Wednesday. It had been snowing since morning, the slow February kind that stuck, and I was on my bed with Bernard across my feet, and I typed the third version and sent it before I could make a fourth.I think we should talk. Not over text if that’s okay.He called within two minutes. That was Evan, always prompt, always prepared. I sat up and Bernard relocated, indignant, and I answered.He was kind about it and so was I and neither of us performed anything, which was maybe the best version of how this could go. He said he’d sensed it. I said I had too, for a while. He s
Last Updated: 2026-04-10
Chapter: The GalaThe thing about a room full of people who understood was that you didn’t have to explain yourself. That was the whole thing. You could just be in it.The ballroom was on the fourteenth floor of a hotel in downtown Denver, formal and polished in the way of things that had been planned for a long time: round tables with white linens, centerpieces that were tasteful and not too tall, a silent auction along the east wall with items that had been donated by people who wanted to do something and didn’t know what else to do. The foundation had been running this gala for eleven years. It showed in the way the evening moved, unhurried and organized, like a machine that had learned its own rhythm.I was in a deep navy midi dress that Noelle had approved in a single look, structured through the bodice and soft everywhere else, and I’d worn the gold earrings from homecoming because they were the right weight and didn’t pull. Cycle 8 meant cumulative tired, not just today tired, the kind that live
Last Updated: 2026-04-10
Chapter: Things Lylah Told MeGrief didn’t compress the way I’d expected it to. I’d thought it would arrive all at once and then diminish, the way a fever did, breaking cleanly and leaving you on the other side. Instead it came in layers, some days thin and close to the surface, some days heavy in a way that had nothing to do with the treatment fatigue and everything to do with the silence that Wednesday had now.The funeral had been Tuesday. A church in Aurora I’d never been to, full of people who had known Lylah longer and better. Her older sister spoke. She had Lylah’s same direct way of looking at a room. Two little brothers in the front row who were too young to be sitting that still. I sat in the back with Noelle, her sapphire eyes red-rimmed the whole service, and didn’t cry until the drive home, which was when it was finally private enough.I went back to Happy Paws on Thursday. Not because I was ready. Because Cove needed the session and nobody else knew his training history the way I did.Cove was a three
Last Updated: 2026-04-10
Chapter: LylahJanuary had a specific quality that December didn’t. December was loud and full of things happening. January was what was left after. Cycle 7 VDC, first Wednesday back, and the hospital felt the same as it always did: the antiseptic smell, the low murmur of machines, Hanna’s rotation arriving at predictable intervals. Consistent. None of it caring what month it was.Lylah was already in her chair when we got there.She’d lost more weight since before the break. The lilac wig was gone, replaced by a soft grey beanie that sat low on her forehead, and her book was open in her lap but she wasn’t reading it. She was looking at the window. When I came in she turned and did the small nod she always did, and I did it back, and that was the whole transaction.Emory had come because I’d asked and he didn’t like hospitals and had said so directly and then come anyway, which was its own kind of thing. He’d been quiet in the car over and was sitting now in the chair beside mine with his jacket sti
Last Updated: 2026-04-10
Chapter: All Of ItWednesday morning there were more clumps on my pillow than the morning before. I lay there for a minute looking at them, then got up and video-called Chandler.He answered on the second ring, still in his room, faux hawk not yet done, and I didn’t say anything for a second and neither did he. He looked at my face on his screen and said, “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”He was there before I’d finished putting the clippers on the counter.I’d gotten the clippers from under the bathroom sink, the ones Dad used for his edges, and I’d set them on the counter and then stood there not touching them until I heard the front door. Chandler came upstairs. I was sitting on the bathroom floor with my back against the tub, the same position I’d been in the last time he’d found me here, which felt like something but I wasn’t going to name it.He looked at the clippers. Then at me.“You sure,” he said.“I’m losing it anyway.”He didn’t say anything else. He picked up the clippers, and I sat on the
Last Updated: 2026-04-10
Chapter: Chandler's WednesdayNoelle had the system down. Boba tea from the place on Colfax, both orders memorized. Brown sugar milk tea light ice for me and whatever seasonal thing she’d been rotating through since October. She knew which chair was mine and which outlet the IV machine needed. She’d figured out that the third chair from the window got a draft and steered me away from it without saying anything. Six weeks of Wednesdays and she had it mapped.I was deep into Cycle 6 when the door opened and it wasn’t Hanna.Chandler stood in the doorway in his hoodie, backpack over one shoulder, looking at the room the way he looked at most things, like he’d already decided. His eyes found me. He didn’t wave or make a face or do anything that required a response. He just came in.Noelle looked up from her phone. Then at me. Then back at Chandler. She lifted her chin in that way she had, the one that covered everything, and he nodded back, and that was the whole transaction.He pulled a chair from the wall and set it
Last Updated: 2026-04-10
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