The Word Nobody Wants to Hear

I missed the bus. My mother found me on the bathroom floor with a wad of tissue jammed against my face, and one look at her told me this wasn't ending with a note excusing me from first period.

Dr. Whitlock's office by ten. He kept tapping his pen against the clipboard before he talked, twice, like he was winding himself up to say something he didn't want to say.

Then he said it.

Leukemia.

After that it was just words. Bone marrow. Blast cells. A treatment plan stapled to a sheet of percentages, numbers that were probably supposed to sound hopeful and instead just sat there in my lap doing nothing. My mother grabbed my hand on the table hard enough that it hurt, and I let her.

I didn't cry. I kept waiting for it to happen and it never did, so I counted ceiling tiles instead, because at least that gave me somewhere to put my eyes that wasn't my own name written on a chart.

"The subtype we're dealing with is aggressive," he said, once round two of testing backed up round one. "We'll start treatment right away and fight for the best outcome we can get. But I want to be honest with you about the odds, because you deserve that."

My mother made a small, broken sound next to me.

"Worst case." My voice came out steadier than I felt, which surprised me almost as much as it surprised him. "Just give me the worst case."

He gave me the look adults give you when they're deciding if you can actually handle the next sentence. I guess I passed.

"Without a strong response to treatment, we could be looking at months. Six. Maybe fewer."

Six months. I turned that number over and over, waiting for it to cut through the fog in my head, and it just wouldn't. None of it felt real. Not the beige walls. Not the light humming over my head like it needed replacing. Not a seventeen-year-old sitting in a room getting handed a sentence like that during the first week of senior year.

My mother had already moved on to second opinions, specialists three states over. I let the words wash past me. None of that mattered yet. What mattered was Gray, probably still waiting on a text back about first period, with zero idea what he was about to lose.

I'd watched him carry his mom's casket when he was fifteen. Renata Locke, same disease, two years ago, and I remembered all of it from my bedroom window. The hospice van parked in the driveway. The way he just stopped smiling for the better part of a year. I knew, better than anyone else on the planet, exactly what this would do to him if I let him keep loving me and then made him watch me go the same way his mother went.

I wasn't going to do that to him.

"I don't want anyone knowing," I said, cutting off my mother mid-spiral. "Not Gray. Not Dana. Nobody."

"Josie, you can't hide something like this from the people who love you."

"Watch me." I grabbed my bag, needing out of that room more than I needed anything else in the world right then. "If Gray finds out I'm dying the same way his mom died, that's not going to make either of us stronger. It's going to wreck him. I won't be the reason that happens."

Her face crumpled, but she nodded anyway, the way she always eventually nods when I plant my feet like this. "Fine. We'll keep the treatment schedule quiet. But this gets harder to hide, sweetheart. You know that."

I knew it. I just didn't have anything better.

The whole drive home, I rehearsed a life made of lies I hadn't told yet. Chemo scheduled early, before the house woke up. A wig, and hands steady enough to put it on without shaking. A stack of excuses ready to go the second Gray asked why I looked tired, why I kept canceling, why I flinched when he hugged me too hard around the ribs.

My phone buzzed as we pulled into the driveway.

GRAY: where were you today?? Coach let us out early for the pep assembly, meet me at my locker

GRAY: also I have something to tell the whole school tomorrow and you're going to want to be there for it

GRAY: it's about us. I'm done keeping this a secret

I stared at that screen for way too long. Under all the fear, some small, stupid piece of me was still glad. He wanted to claim me in front of everyone. He still wanted what we'd built all summer, badly enough to make it real.

I typed back okay.

I hadn't figured out how to build a life around a lie big enough to hold six months. One night left to figure it out, and I spent every minute of it awake.