Seventh Floor

Monsieur Montreuil was at the board conjugating verbs when the PA crackled on.

The static came first, that half-second that made the whole room glance up on instinct. Then my name.

Everyone else heard it the same way they heard any announcement. Sloane Deshazo, please come to the main office. Bring your things. An interruption. Something to wonder about for thirty seconds before the next thing happened.

The appointment was at one. I’d been watching the clock since first period.

I reached for my bag. Monsieur Montreuil caught my eye and held a look that was carefully, specifically neutral, the kind teachers wore when they’d been told something and asked to sit on it. I pushed my chair back, legs scraping against the floor, and felt the room’s attention swing toward me the way it always did when someone got called out mid-class.

Tahni was three rows over. She didn’t turn all the way around, but I felt her tracking me from the side anyway, that peripheral awareness she always had, cataloging everything without appearing to watch. I wondered what she’d make of it. Whether she’d connect it to anything. Probably not yet.

Emory was two seats behind me. I didn’t look at him on the way out, but I caught just enough of his face to know he’d already picked up on something. Not facts. Just Emory reading a room the way he always did, that instinct running under all the jokes, and right now it was pointed at me. I couldn’t deal with that right now.

The hallway had that quiet that only happened during class, borrowed and temporary. I walked through it and didn’t look back.

Dad was in the main office, talking quietly to the attendance secretary. He paused when I pushed through the door, held the look a beat too long before his face rearranged into something easier. I’d been watching him do that since Sunday.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. Not yes. The closest thing I had.

Children’s Hospital Colorado was thirty-eight minutes from school. I took the back seat, Pops up front, some indie rock station on low that nobody changed and nobody really listened to, and watched the suburbs give way to the highway and then Aurora, glass and brick and the mountains sitting behind everything, massive and completely indifferent. I’d driven past the exit for this hospital a hundred times. It had just been a sign.

The seventh floor didn’t look like what I’d been picturing since Sunday. Something that announced itself, I think, something that looked like where serious things happened. Instead it was regular-width hallways, a nurses’ station with a whiteboard, a waiting area in blues and greens, the colors of whatever research said felt least like fear. There were kids in some of the chairs. Some of them looked fine. I kept my eyes on the whiteboard.

Dr. Giacherio was petite, dark hair pulled back, reading glasses resting on her forehead. She had the manner of someone who had done this many times and knew exactly how, without softening it into something false or sharpening it into something cruel. She shook my hand first, before Dad or Pops, and asked how I’d slept.

“Fine,” I said.

She nodded like she’d heard that before. “Let’s talk about what we’re seeing.”

She pulled up the X-ray on the wall. The same one from Sunday, my femur with the shape on it that didn’t belong. CBC results beside it. She walked through everything at a pace calibrated to how much a room could absorb at once.

“The LDH elevation is significant,” she said. “Combined with the imaging, the location and margins of the mass, and the symptom timeline.” A pause, not the careful kind Dr. Danielson had used but a different one, the pause of someone choosing accuracy over comfort. “All signs at this point strongly suggest malignancy. I want to be clear about that, while also being clear that we don’t have a confirmed diagnosis yet. That’s what the workup is for.”

Malignancy.

The word sat in the room. Dad’s hand found mine under the table. I kept my eyes on Dr. Giacherio because if I looked at either of my dads right now I was going to lose the thread.

“What does the workup involve?” Pops asked. Completely level. Military bearing on the worst Tuesday of his life.

She listed it in order: biopsy of the mass, repeat LDH, MRI of the leg, PET scan, CT scan. Five things, each with its own appointment, its own waiting room, its own version of sitting still while someone looked for the shape of what was happening inside you. The biopsy would likely be later in the week. The rest would follow.

“We’ll move as quickly as we can,” she said. “I know what the waiting feels like.”

Plain, without making a production of it. It landed differently because of that.

Dad asked about family history. She asked about bone tumors or sarcomas. He explained about the surrogate, the limited medical history. She made a note, said it probably wouldn’t matter, the type of tumor they were looking at didn’t tend to run in families.

She looked at me. “Any questions?”

I had a thousand, all of them knotted up in each other, none of them ready to come out yet. Then one came loose.

“I have a volleyball game Friday,” I said. “Am I still okay to play?”

Something shifted in the room. Small, but I felt it, the particular weight of a question that already has an answer nobody wants to give.

Dr. Giacherio didn’t hesitate. “Not until we have biopsy results and a clearer picture of what we’re dealing with. I know that’s not what you want to hear. But we need to understand the mass before we can talk about physical activity.”

“Okay,” I said.

It wasn’t okay. It was the first concrete thing this had taken, the first piece of my actual life already gone, and it sat in my chest with a weight I wasn’t going to examine right now in this room with my dads on either side of me.

“Write down the others when they come,” she said, a little softer. “Bring the list next time.”

Walking back out through the seventh-floor hallway, past the nurses’ station, past a kid my age sitting with his mom in one of the chairs, I kept my eyes forward and thought: I walked in here forty minutes ago and my life is not the same as it was. I don’t know how to do that and still keep moving. But I am. Moving.

Dad held the elevator.

I stepped in.

In the parking garage, before we reached the Suburban, Dad stopped. Just stood there between a minivan and a pickup truck in the specific nowhere of a hospital parking structure. He put his hand over his mouth.

I stood next to him. There was nothing to say that would be the right thing. After a moment he lowered his hand, straightened, and became the person who was going to handle this. I watched him make that choice in real time, like watching someone pick something heavy back up after putting it down for just a second. The light in the garage caught the ash blonde of his hair, and I noticed how tired he looked, and I made myself look away.

Pops put a hand on his shoulder. Dad covered it with his own. They stayed like that while I looked at the concrete and let them have it.

We got in the Suburban.

I was on the sofa with Bernard across my lap when my phone lit up at 3:15, which meant school had just let out.

come get coffee with me.

Chandler. Not are you okay. Not what happened. Just come get coffee with me, like it was any other Tuesday.

I’m in sweats, I typed back.

I know. Come anyway.

I looked at the TV. I looked at Bernard. Bernard lifted his head and gave me the expression of a dog who had been a weighted blanket for two solid hours and had developed opinions about it ending.

“Sorry,” I told him.

I found my slides by the door.

Chandler was already in the Jeep when I came out, window down, elbow propped on the door, looking exactly like himself. Which sounds like nothing but was the right thing, somehow. I got in. The Jeep smelled like ocean mist and mint and that particular car smell that becomes invisible when it belongs to someone you’ve known your whole life. He pulled out of the driveway without saying anything.

Java Junction was twelve minutes away, a single-story brick building at the corner of Granite and the older part of downtown, faded yellow smiley face on the side wall, there since before either of us had licenses. Chandler parallel parked on the first try without making anything of it.

He ordered for both of us without asking. His usual, and something he apparently decided on for me: honey lavender cold brew. He handed it over without explanation, already turning for the door.

“What is this?”

“Try it.”

“Chandler.”

“Just try it.” He pushed the door open with his shoulder. “If you hate it I’ll get you something else.”

Outside under the green awning, string lights already on against the early evening, we pushed two metal tables together. The street was doing its Tuesday thing, steady and unremarkable. A slight breeze. The kind of evening that had no idea.

Chandler had both elbows on the table, looking at something down the block. Not performing casual. Actually relaxed, taking up exactly the space he always did.

I took a sip. Honey and lavender, something floral and cold and a little unexpected, sweet without being too much. I took another sip.

“Well?” he said, not looking at me.

“It’s good,” I said.

The corner of his mouth moved. He looked back at the street.

My shoulders came down a little. I hadn’t noticed they’d been up.

“Nice outfit,” he said.

I glanced down. Emberwolves down the side, faded from a hundred washes, bleach stain near the hem I’d stopped noticing. “You said come anyway.”

“I did.” He glanced at me once, brief. “You look fine, Sloane.”

The way he said it landed somewhere between a compliment and something that didn’t have a clean name, and I looked at my cup.

He knew about the ER. He knew about today. He didn’t know what today had said. He was sitting across from me in the early evening not asking, and that was its own kind of thing.

I took another sip and let him not ask.

He drank half his cup in two pulls.

“You’re going to get a headache,” I said.

“I’m fine.” He set the cup down, something almost amused at the edge of his face. “Have your coffee, Sloane.”

I looked at the string lights. The evening was taking its time. A couple walked by with a dog that stopped to investigate the table leg before being pulled away. Somewhere down the block someone had music going.

I thought about Dr. Giacherio’s voice. All signs strongly suggest. The shape on the X-ray. My dads in the parking garage. The volleyball question, and the answer, and the way I’d said okay when it wasn’t.

The back of my throat tightened. I pressed my lips together and looked at the string lights and breathed through my nose, slow, the way I’d been doing all day every time I felt the edge coming.

“You don’t have to tell me anything tonight,” Chandler said. Still looking at the street. Like he’d felt it from across the table without turning his head.

I nodded once. Kept my eyes on the lights until they stopped blurring.

“I know,” I said, when I could.

“Okay.”

He finished his coffee. I looked at the string lights and drank the rest of mine.

My phone was on the kitchen counter when I got home, right where I’d left it. I grabbed it on the way to the fridge.

Evan. The unknown number I still hadn’t saved as anything, because naming it felt like a decision I hadn’t made yet.

heard you have a game friday. you any good?

I stood there with the fridge door open and read it twice.

It was such a textbook move. Confident without being obvious, the kind of opener that already had an answer built into it. No game Friday, Dr. Giacherio had made sure of that, but he didn’t know that. He was texting from a week that still existed the way it was supposed to, a version where the worst thing that had happened to me was the PA announcement pulling me out of French and whatever story Tahni was building around it. He didn’t know about the appointment or the word that had sat in the room afterward or my dads in the parking garage. No reason for him to.

You any good. Like he already knew the answer and was giving me the chance to confirm it. Under any other circumstances I might have typed something back just to see what he did with it.

I typed: yeah, outside hitter, come find out.

I deleted it.

I closed the fridge. Put the phone face down on the counter and went to find Bernard.

This was the second time in three days I hadn’t written back. He had no idea why. The explanation wasn’t ready, because I hadn’t found the words for it myself yet, and even if I had, it wasn’t the kind of thing that fit in a text. So I let the silence sit there and went to find the dog.