جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 20

Emory had found a stick somewhere between the parking area and the guardrail and was using it to point at things.“That’s the Springs,” he announced, gesturing at a smudge of grid on the horizon. “Probably. Or Pueblo. One of them.” Another gesture at something that could have been clouds. “And that -”“Emory,” Stetson said, “if you point that stick at me one more time I’m throwing it off the overlook.”“The stick is educational.”“The stick is a hazard.”I was sitting on the hood of Chandler’s Jeep with my legs stretched out in front of me and a jacket that was doing about sixty percent of the work required of it. The overlook was a flat pull-off on the south side of the ridge, twenty minutes outside town, the kind of place that existed in every Colorado zip code: a patch of gravel, a guardrail, and a view that made the guardrail feel almost insulting. You could see the whole valley from up here. On a clear day you could see the mountains stacked behind each other like something staged

The anti-nausea meds hit harder this cycle.Hanna had warned me, third round sometimes did this, the body recalibrating in ways that made the recalibration worse before it made it better. She’d said it lightly. It was landing less lightly now.The recliner was fully back. Tinsley had brought a blanket from home, cream knit, the kind that smelled like someone else’s laundry in a way that was almost the same as comfort. She’d draped it over my lap without asking and gone back to her book. She’d also brought a water bottle she put on my small table without comment, a pack of crackers I hadn’t asked for, and earbuds she offered once and put away when I didn’t take them. That was very Tinsley.The room was the room. Teal recliners, fluorescent light, the mounted screen running a nature documentary nobody was watching. Hanna’s cart in the corner. The particular smell of Infusion Room C that I’d stopped noticing three cycles ago.Lylah was two chairs down.She’d been there when we arrived, a

The hair came out in the brush.Not all of it, not a dramatic fistful, just more than yesterday, more than the day before, the kind of more that had been building for weeks without a name. I knew it was coming. Hanna had told me in the specific careful way she told me things, factual and forward-facing, third cycle sometimes accelerates the timeline, and I’d nodded and gone home and not thought about it.I was thinking about it now.The brush was on the counter. I’d set it down carefully, the way you set something down when you need both hands free and don’t trust yourself with a single one. The bathroom light was making everything look slightly more true than I wanted it to. I pressed both palms flat on the cold edge of the sink. The tile under my feet was cold through my socks. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time without making it into anything.Then I opened the cabinet under the sink, got out the box of hair ties I’d been buying in bulk since September, and put my hair

Noelle showed up with two boba teas, which meant she’d thought about it before she left her house. I took mine without comment and didn’t say what it meant that she’d thought of it.Lylah was already there. She looked up when we came through the door, did her small nod, went back to reading. Her arm, when she turned the page, was noticeably thinner than last cycle. Not dramatic. Just different in a way that stayed.Noelle sat down and put her earbuds in and that was the whole transaction. She’d learned early that the infusion room had its own rhythms and I didn’t need to perform anything in them.The nausea this cycle was different. Lower, more persistent, the kind that sat under everything and made the room feel slightly farther away than it was. I kept my eyes mostly closed and let the room do what it was going to do.Hanna came through on her rotation, checked my line, ran the questions. Then she moved to Lylah.Noelle’s earbuds were in. She was looking at her phone. But the one ne

Coach Mathieson asked me to stay after fourth period on Tuesday, which was how he always did it, the ask framed casually enough that you could pretend it was about something else until it wasn’t. I’d known since September that this conversation was coming. I just hadn’t known exactly which Tuesday.The hallway cleared out around us. He had his clipboard, which he always had, and he looked at me the way he looked at everything he’d already decided: direct and without apology.“I’m pulling you from active roster,” he said. “Effective today. You’ll stay on the team. Practice when you can. But I can’t put you in rotation right now and you know why.”I did know why. I’d known why since the first week of October when my serve had dropped six inches and my footwork had started compensating in ways I’d been hoping nobody noticed. Coach noticed everything. That was the whole thing about Coach.“Okay,” I said.He looked at me for a moment. Not the clipboard. Me. “You’re still their outside hitt