2 AM

Stetson was already in the hallway when I opened my door.

Basketball shorts, old soccer tournament shirt, hair flat on one side. His phone was in his hand but he wasn’t looking at it. He was looking at me. The hallway was dark, the only light coming from the thin line under Dad and Pops’ door at the end of the hall, which meant someone was already awake in there, which meant I hadn’t been as quiet as I thought.

“How long?” he asked.

“I don’t know. A while.”

He looked at my left leg. I was shifting my weight without meaning to and he caught it the way he always caught things, before he’d fully processed what he was seeing. “How bad?”

“Bad enough.”

He turned and knocked on Dad and Pops’ door, two knocks, and pushed it open.

The ER at 2am was a different world. Fluorescent and cold, moving at two speeds at once, urgent in some places and completely stalled in others. The waiting area was full of people wearing the same expression, that glaze that sets in when you’ve been there long enough to stop expecting anything soon. I’d been in ERs before, a sprained ankle sophomore year, Stetson’s broken wrist in eighth grade, but those had felt like interruptions. This felt like the building knew something I didn’t.

They took me back faster than I expected. The triage nurse checked my temperature, looked at my leg, made a note, and we were through the door in under twenty minutes. Dad told me later that was significant.

The exam bay had a curtain instead of a door, a paper sheet on the bed that crinkled every time I moved, and a TV mounted high on the wall that nobody turned on. Pops stood at the foot of the bed with his arms crossed, not impatiently, just needing something to do with his hands. Dad sat in the plastic chair beside the bed and held mine, which he hadn’t done since I was maybe ten, and I let him, which I also hadn’t done since then.

Dr. Danielson was younger than I expected, moving through the room with the efficiency of someone who didn’t waste motion. He asked questions in a calm specific order: when did the pain start, where exactly, has it changed, any recent illness, any fever. I answered all of them. I mentioned Dr. Kerr’s appointment that morning, the inconclusive bloodwork she’d ordered, the fact that she’d told us to watch it over the weekend and come back Monday if the fever spiked. It had spiked.

He pressed gently on my thigh, just above the knee. When he found the spot I couldn’t keep it off my face. He noticed but didn’t say anything about it.

“We’re going to start you on fluids and bring the fever down,” he said. “And I want a CBC and an X-ray of the leg.”

“What are you looking for?” Dad asked.

Dr. Danielson paused, just briefly. “A few things. Let’s see what the images show first.”

The IV went in on the second try, back of my left hand, and the cold saline moved up my arm in a way I focused on so I didn’t have to focus on anything else. The ceiling was plain and white and gave me nothing. I stared at it anyway while the nurse secured the line.

The bay had its own particular quiet. Not peaceful, just contained. The curtain moved every time someone passed in the hallway outside. I could hear everything through it: wheels on linoleum, a muffled cough, the low careful register of voices that only exists in hospitals. I counted the curtain rings. Twelve. It was easier than thinking.

At some point Pops moved to the chair on my other side and put his hand over mine on the bed rail. Just resting it there. He didn’t say anything. That was his version of saying everything.

The X-ray took ten minutes. Lie still, don’t breathe, breathe, the machine moving over my leg with a sound like a decision being made. Back in the bay, crinkly paper, my dads on either side.

We waited. Nobody mentions the waiting when they talk about ERs, but that’s most of it. The fluids dripped. The fever reducer started working, that specific feeling of skin that’s been running too hot beginning to loosen. Dad still held my hand. Stetson was in the waiting room and I kept thinking about that, my brother in a plastic chair under the fluorescent lights at three in the morning, and I kept making myself stop because it wasn’t useful.

Dr. Danielson came back with a tablet.

I looked at Dad’s face first. That was always my first move, before anything else, because his expression would tell me what I was about to hear before the doctor opened his mouth. Dad’s face was cautious. Too cautious. The kind of cautious that was just another word for scared.

“The CBC shows some elevated LDH,” Dr. Danielson said. “That’s a protein that can indicate several things, so I want to be clear that it’s not diagnostic on its own.” He turned the tablet toward us. The X-ray was gray and white and black, my femur pale against the darker tissue, and there was a shape on it that didn’t belong. “There’s a mass here, about two inches wide, on the left femur. There are several possibilities for what this could be. A benign tumor. A localized infection. Explanations that aren’t serious.”

He was careful. Very careful.

Not careful enough.

“But,” Dad said.

“But given the combination of findings, the fever, the elevated LDH, the location and appearance of the mass, I’ve contacted Children’s Hospital Colorado.” Dr. Danielson set the tablet down. “I’ve made a referral to their seventh floor. The Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders.”

The Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders.

I said it to myself twice, the way you repeat something to make sure you heard it right. The words formed and reformed and stayed exactly the same.

Pops made a sound. Low, barely there, the kind that comes out when you’re working hard to stay quiet. I’d never heard him make it before. I didn’t look at him because I knew if I did I wouldn’t be able to keep it together.

“The referral isn’t a diagnosis,” Dr. Danielson said, still even, still careful. “It means the right people need to look at this. They’ll contact you within twenty-four hours to set up a consultation.”

“What do we do tonight?” Dad asked. His voice was steady. I could tell what that steadiness cost him.

“Finish the fluids, bring the fever down, and go home. Rest, no heavy activity, come back immediately if the pain gets significantly worse.” He looked at me then, not at Dad or Pops, just me. “You’ve been dealing with this for a while.”

Not a question.

“A few weeks,” I said.

He nodded like he’d already known. “Try to get some sleep tonight.”

He left. The curtain closed. The bay went quiet except for the IV drip and the low background noise of the hospital, and none of it had anything to do with us.

Dad stood and walked toward the window. There was no window. He walked to the wall and stopped there a moment, his back to us. His shoulders moved once, just once. Then he turned around wearing his courtroom face, and I understood he was using every tool he had.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

Pops went to him and put a hand on the back of his neck. They stood there for a moment, foreheads nearly touching. I looked at the ceiling and kept my breathing even.

The waiting room was cold and fluorescent and loud the way empty spaces echo. I came through the door between Dad and Pops, the faint chemical smell of IV tape still on my hand, and found Stetson before anything else.

He was in the far corner, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. He looked up when we came in and his face did something it quickly covered, but I saw it. Whatever he’d been sitting with for the last hour and a half, alone under these lights, was there for just a second before he put it away.

Jake had his hand on Stetson’s shoulder.

Chandler was standing nearby.

Nobody had called them. Dad’s phone had been in his pocket the whole time, and Pops’ too, and neither of them had stepped out. Which meant Stetson had called them. My brother had sat in this waiting room alone for twenty minutes before deciding he couldn’t do it anymore and picked up his phone.

I held that for a second and then put it somewhere I couldn’t look at directly.

Jake crossed to us and hugged Dad, then Pops, then pulled me into his side without saying anything first. His arm was solid around my shoulders. I leaned into him for just a second before I straightened up.

“You okay?” His voice was aimed at the top of my head.

“Define okay.”

He made a sound that was almost a laugh and let me go.

Chandler hadn’t moved from where he was standing. Dark sweatpants, a hoodie that looked like it had been grabbed off the floor, his faux hawk completely gone, hair flat. He was watching me with those cerulean eyes, steady and direct, and there was nothing casual about it. Not the way he looked at a room. The way he looked when something mattered and he was done pretending it didn’t.

He didn’t say anything. Neither did I. I held his gaze for a moment and then looked away, because the alternative was falling apart in a fluorescent-lit waiting room at four in the morning, and I wasn’t doing that.

Dad was already talking to Jake in a low voice, laying out facts and findings the way he did when he needed to organize something. Pops had moved to Stetson, hand on his shoulder. Stetson was listening with his jaw set, the way it got when he was holding something he didn’t know how to hold.

I sat down because my leg was aching and the adrenaline was gone and the chair was there. Cold plastic against the back of my joggers. The fluorescent lights hummed. Chandler sat down beside me, close enough that his knee was an inch from mine, forearm resting on his thigh. He didn’t say anything about the doctor or the results or any of it. He just sat there, present and quiet, and I was aware of him the way you’re aware of the only solid thing in a room when everything else has gone uncertain.

Outside the waiting room windows the parking lot was empty, orange-lit, completely ordinary. The world out there had no idea.

The seventh floor. The shape on the X-ray. Stetson picking up his phone.

Neither did I. Not really. Not yet.

Chandler’s Jeep was still in the driveway when we got home at five. He’d driven separately, stayed until Dad told him to go get some sleep, and left without arguing. He knew everything. He’d been in that waiting room since three.

I was still lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, when my phone lit up later that morning.

Unknown number.

you ever just wake up and instantly wish you hadn’t?

I stared at the screen. The shape from the X-ray was the first thing I saw every time I closed my eyes. I’d gotten maybe an hour of sleep, if that.

Three minutes passed. Another message.

also. so he’s really not your boyfriend?

I set the phone face down on the mattress.

Evan. Had to be. He was texting from a Friday morning that still existed the way it was supposed to, a version of the week where the worst thing that happened was Tahni claiming him in the cafeteria and a hallway question that landed without a clean answer. He didn’t know about the ER, the referral, the shape on the X-ray that sat in the image like it had always been there, just waiting. No reason for him to.

The second text sat there under the first one. So he’s really not your boyfriend. The same edge he’d had in the hallway, that ease, like he already knew the answer and just wanted to watch me give it. Under any other circumstances I might have typed something back just to see what he did with it.

I picked up the phone. Set it back down.

The explanation for why I wasn’t answering wasn’t ready yet, because I hadn’t found the words for any of it myself. Down the hall I could already hear Dad on a call, low and measured, moving pieces into place. The house was doing its quiet version of falling apart, which looked exactly like everyone staying very calm and very busy.

Two different worlds in the same phone. I put it face down and closed my eyes and let the ceiling be the ceiling.