All Chapters of Fighting For Normal: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

26 Chapters

Prologue: Before

The thing about Jake’s backyard was that it had a specific gravity. Once you were in it, you didn’t leave. You just migrated toward the grill or the cooler or the string lights and settled there and let the evening happen around you, and at some point you looked up and two hours had passed and you weren’t surprised.Dad and Pops had arrived with food. Jake already had everything going. That was the division of labor that had existed since before I was born and nobody had ever questioned it, because it worked.Sixteen years of this. Sixteen September fourteenths in Jake’s backyard, give or take the one we did at our house because Jake’s porch was being redone and the one we did at a park when we were all seven and everyone agreed it was a mistake and we never did it again.Stetson was holding court near the cooler, which was his natural habitat at any gathering. He was tall in the way that had happened fast, still slightly surprised by it, doing something with his hands while he talked

After

“Sloane.”The way Dad said it was the tell. Not the sharp version, not the one that meant I was late or had left something in the driveway. The careful one. The one he used when he already had a read on the situation and was giving me the first move.I took a bite of egg.“I’ve had a slight fever. Two days, nothing serious. I was going to say something if it hadn’t cleared up by this morning.”He didn’t answer right away. The range hood was off, which meant he’d been up long enough to not need the noise anymore. His case file was open beside the stove, coffee still steaming next to it. Bernard was sprawled across the floor between the island and the range, occupying more tile than seemed geometrically possible, thumping his tail without bothering to lift his head.The kitchen smelled like coffee and something herby from the eggs, which meant Dad had actually looked at the spice shelf instead of defaulting to salt. The pendant lights were on over the island, warm and low. Outside the wi

Probably Nothing

Chandler had looked at my tray twice already.He hadn’t said anything yet, which meant he was being patient, which meant he was about to stop being patient. I kept my eyes on the table and tried to look like someone who was planning to eat and not someone who had been staring at the same sweet potato fry for four minutes.The cafeteria was doing its usual Thursday thing, loud in that specific way where sound bounces off the ceiling and comes back amplified. Our table was in the outer ring near the drink machines, same spot we’d claimed freshman year and never revisited as a decision. Far enough from the center to breathe, close enough to see everything. Noelle was in the middle of a story, hands going, fully committed. Maekynzie had her chin in her hand, lip gloss immaculate, tracking every word. Emory was eating chips straight from the bag, chestnut eyes crinkling every time Noelle landed something good. Tinsley had her elbows on the table and her bottle-green eyes somewhere else, whi

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

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, catalog

Double Feature

Pops said yes to the truck without asking why.Which meant Noelle got the passenger seat and Chandler and I were in the back, which was fine. That was just how it sorted. It had nothing to do with anything.The drive-in was twenty minutes outside town, past the point where the streetlights gave up and the sky opened the way it only did when you got far enough from everything. Emory drove himself and Maekynzie and Tinsley in his mom’s Subaru and somehow beat us there, which he credited to superior navigation and which Maekynzie credited to two yellow lights.The lot was already half-full when we pulled in, cars and trucks nosed up to the low speaker poles, lawn chairs and blankets arranged in beds and on hoods. It smelled like popcorn and cut grass and gasoline and that outdoor-night smell that didn’t have a name but meant summer was still trying. Two kids in front of us were arguing about which spot had the best angle on the screen. An older couple had a full folding table set up besid

The Week Before the Name

The biopsy was Monday.Seventh floor, procedure room two doors from Dr. Giacherio’s office, forty minutes including the time it took to numb the area and the time it took me to adjust to the fact that I could feel pressure even without pain. Dad sat against the wall with his phone face down on his knee, looking at the space above my head with the expression of someone who had decided that not looking directly at what was happening was the right call.I was also not looking directly at what was happening.The worst part wasn’t the needle. The worst part was after, sitting in the waiting room with my leg wrapped and a folder of post-procedure instructions and a follow-up appointment already scheduled. Dad read the instructions twice. I looked at a framed mountain range print on the wall and thought about whoever had chosen that specific image for this specific room. Someone had gone through a catalog and chosen mountains.“You okay?” Dad asked.“Yeah.”He folded the instruction sheet. “W

Light and Sound

The PET scan required fasting from midnight. Pops had offered to skip breakfast.I told him not to.He cracked the egg shells with more force than necessary. The skillet hissed. The coffee pot gurgled. I sat at the counter with my hands around a glass of water and watched him cook and neither of us said anything about why I wasn’t eating.The PET tech tightened the strap across my waist and told me to hold still.I held still.The tracer injection had been twenty minutes ago, cold going in, and now my whole body felt slightly removed from itself, like someone had turned the volume down on my nerve endings without touching the dial. There was a metallic taste at the back of my throat that the tech had told me was normal. It didn’t taste normal. It tasted like the inside of a machine.The table slid forward. The ring of the scanner circled me and I stared at the black curve above and let my mind go blank, which was the closest I could get to peace in a room like this. My left leg ached f

The Diagnosis

We’d been in Dr. Giacherio’s office ten minutes before I realized I’d been staring at the same framed print on the wall since we sat down. Mountains, same as the other waiting room. Someone on this floor had a type.Dad on my left, Pops on my right, Stetson beside him. Dr. Giacherio across the desk with the folder open in front of her, reading glasses on, that same calm unhurried manner. She’d asked how I was sleeping. I’d said fine. This time she didn’t push back on it.She opened the folder.“The biopsy results confirmed what the imaging suggested,” she said. “The tumor is malignant. Specifically, you have Ewing sarcoma, stage two.”Ewing Sarcoma.Not the kind of freeze where you hold your breath or brace yourself. The kind where everything just stops for a moment, and you exist in the word before you can process anything else. Ewing sarcoma. It had a name. It had been a shape on an X-ray and a result pending for two weeks, and now it had a name that was specific and real and mine.D

Emergency Sleepover

The pizza arrived at seven and the room was already loud.Noelle had claimed my bed, which she always did, and was currently using my pillow to argue a point she’d been making for the last ten minutes about something that had happened in Emory’s Environmental Science class on Friday. Emory was on the floor with his back against the bed frame disputing every single detail with the energy of someone who had been waiting all week to dispute it, sandy hair towel-dried and called done the way it always was. Maekynzie was cross-legged by the window doing something with her hair that required both hands and a specific kind of concentration she apparently couldn’t apply to the conversation at the same time, chocolate curls pulled through her fingers in sections, which hadn’t stopped her from having opinions about it. Tinsley was near the door with a throw blanket pulled around her shoulders, contributing exactly one comment per five minutes, each one somehow landing harder than everything else

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