บททั้งหมดของ Fighting For Normal: บทที่ 11 - บทที่ 18

The chairs in Dr. Giacherio’s consult room were soft and low, and somebody had pushed them too close together.When I sat down, I sank, and my left leg, still bandaged from the biopsy, sank with me at an angle that sent a hot line up the bone. The room was warm and stale and smelled faintly like lemon disinfectant, and the overhead light buzzed, steady and thin, like it was trying not to listen.Dad sat on my right in a button-down he’d clearly grabbed off the floor, the sleeves rolled unevenly, one to the elbow, one bunched at his wrist. He had his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped so tight the tendons stood out on the backs of them. Pops sat on my left in his fleece vest, zipped halfway, and his emergency sneakers. His foot was tapping on the carpet, fast and light, like he was trying to run somewhere without standing up.Stetson stood by the wall. He wouldn’t sit. His hoodie was half zipped, his hair was sticking up in every direction from running his hands through it, and

I didn’t hear a single word the anesthesiologist said.He was very nice about it. He crouched next to my pre-op bed in a blue paper hat with tiny cartoon tacos on it and explained everything slowly, with his hands, about the port and the little catheter and the vein and how it would sit right under my skin below my collarbone. I nodded at all of it. I said, “Yes. That makes sense. Thank you.”Nothing went in.It was seven-thirty on Tuesday morning, October fourteenth, four days after the sleepover. The curtain around my bed was a scratchy blue fabric that smelled faintly like bleach. I was in a hospital gown with ties that didn’t line up, too loose at the neck and cold where the gap fell open against my back, and a pair of grippy yellow socks. My leggings and the gray zip-up hoodie I’d stolen from Pops’ closet last winter, the one that said U.S. NAVY in cracked white letters across the back, were folded in a plastic bag under the bed with a sticker that said PATIENT BELONGINGS. My cru

I closed the drawer.It didn’t make a sound. That was the worst part. It slid shut on its runners the way it always did, quiet and smooth, and the Band-Aids and the alcohol wipes and the box of masks disappeared, and nothing in the bathroom looked any different.I stood there in my bare feet with the thermometer in my hand.My Colorado State tee had slid off one shoulder, the neckline stretched out from a year of being slept in. My pajama shorts felt too thin for October. My scalp felt tight again, and my skin was hot everywhere, and I wanted somebody to tell me the thermometer was broken. I wanted somebody to tell me what to do.You see a hundred point four, you come get us. You knock.I’d promised. I’d said the words out loud in the kitchen with Bernard sneezing at the fridge.Bernard got up from the bathroom doorway and walked a few steps down the hall. Then he stopped and looked back at me, like he was waiting to see if I’d follow.The hallway carpet was rough under my feet. Every

Noelle came at 5:58 with her backpack still over one shoulder.I’d been in room 614 since nine that morning. The hallway on the way in had been colder than I remembered, and quieter, and the lemon disinfectant smell was sharper than it had been in October. The same IV poles lined the wall outside the supply closet. The same nurses walked by with the same badge reels clipped to their scrubs. I knew the routine now. I hated that I knew it.My counts had needed an extra week to come back after the fever, so the second cycle was late, and the red bag had gone up at eleven, and I’d been watching it drip into my chest all afternoon with nobody in the visitor chair.It was supposed to be Maekynzie’s day. She’d claimed it in purple Sharpie on the corkboard in my room, with a heart next to it and a crown.At eight that morning, an hour before I was due, my phone had buzzed.Maekynzie: omg sloane i’m so so sorry. something came up w my mom. i can’t today. i’ll make it up to u i promise 💜💜💜I