Invincible
Authors: Reed,Amy
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HarperCollins Publishers
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UNCORRECTED E-PROOFâNOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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UNCORRECTED E-PROOFâNOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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For Elouise and Brian, who make me whole
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HarperCollins Publishers
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UNCORRECTED E-PROOFâNOT FOR SALE
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“LET'S GO TO THE CAFETERIA,” STELLA SAYS. SHE IS RESTLESS. She is always restless.
Unlike everyone else in here, she is not in pajamas. Every day, without fail, she puts on her black skinny jeans, big black boots, a thick coat of red lipstick, and her signature black fedora with the peacock feather sticking out the side. Even though all we ever do is sit in each other's rooms. Even though we're not allowed to leave hospital grounds. Even though the only people she talks to voluntarily are me and Caleb and Dan, the Child Life Specialist, and none of us could care less what she looks like.
“Are you hungry?” Caleb asks. His pajamas have soccer balls on them. Mine are pink with white hearts. The left leg is cut off to make room for my white plaster cast, decorated with Sick Kid autographs.
“No, I'm not hungry.” Stella groans. “I just need to get out of here. Aren't you guys going crazy? How can you not be going crazy?” She's like a caged animal. Pretty soon, she's going to start gnawing on the metal bars of my bed. She was like this even in Outpatient, even when she knew she was going to get to leave in a few hours.
“My parents are going to be here any minute,” I say. “I should stay.”
“Have you asked them yet about adopting me?”
“But you have parents, Stella,” Caleb says. He has a hard time with sarcasm. Stella has diagnosed him with mild Asperger's in addition to the brain cancer we already know about.
“I'm going to get legally emancipated,” she says. “Just as soon as we get this whole cancer thing figured out. I'm only still their daughter because I'm using them for their health insurance. God, Evie, I am so sick of your room.”
We've been spending a lot of time in my room. And by “my room,” I mean this particular room during this particular stay, which is going on two weeks now, my longest yet. There have been countless identical rooms over the past year, some in this part of the cancer floor, some in the super-duper sterile prison part of the floor when my white blood cell count was zero. It's a little hard for me to get around right now because I just got surgery and my leg is in a cast, so I can't just hop out of bed whenever I feel like it. Not that many kids on the cancer floor do much hopping.
I may seem lucky for getting one of the few single rooms, but everyone here knows they're reserved for the hopeless cases so some other poor kid doesn't have to deal with a dead roommate. This one is pretty much the same as every other room I've had, so many by now that I've lost count,
but half as big. I wasn't even here a night before Mom put up the same sad decorations as my last long stay, to make it “feel more like home.” No number of family photos or teddy bears or bouquets of flowers will ever make this feel like home. All they do is confirm that I'm going to be here for too long.
“We could go to the teen lounge,” Caleb says. “We could play a game.”
“The teen lounge doesn't have any windows,” Stella says.
“Turn the TV to the Discovery Channel,” I say. “It'll be just like looking out the window, except you'll be in Africa or underwater or something.”
“Or it'll be some reality show about Amish prostitutes or morbidly obese dwarves who talk in tongues.”
“That's TLC,” I say. “The morbidly obese dwarves.”
“You two are no help. Plus Dan might be lurking in the teen lounge and he'll just try to get me to talk about my feelings.”
“It's good to talk about your feelings,” Caleb says. “Dan says it'll make you sicker if you keep things bottled up inside.”
“When have you known me to keep things bottled up inside?”
“Good point.”
“You guys don't have to stay here,” I say. “You can go do something without me. I'm fine by myself.”
“Oh, Evie,” Stella says. “Don't go acting all heroic. We're not going to leave you in here all by yourself.”
“Really, it's okay.”
“Can you stop thinking about everyone else for once and just admit that you can't live without me?”
“I want to watch the football game,” Caleb says, grabbing my remote and turning on the TV.
“I hate you,” Stella says, but she doesn't move. There aren't a whole lot of other options for us as far as activities go. Watching football in a cramped hospital room may not be everybody's idea of a good time, but it could be worse. It could always be worse.
I first met Stella eight months ago, when I was going in for my third round of chemo. It was her first and she wasn't happy about it, which I could tell because she was climbing the eight-foot-tall stuffed giraffe outside the outpatient oncology center while her mother and a security guard were trying to talk her down. Her mom was actually more like trying to scream her down in Mandarin, but neither approach was working.
She held on to that poor giraffe's head, screaming bloody murder until her mom finally managed to pull her down, and as she fell to the floor she made one last dramatic proclamation, calling everyone “heartless bloody dickholes.” Parents covered their kids' ears; her mom swiped her on the side of her face with the back of her hand, and I decided Stella was both the most
beautiful and bravest person I had ever seen in my life. She was showing all the fear and fury I felt but could never let out. She wasn't pretending to be anything she wasn't.
I walked up to her as she sat under the giraffe, sobbing. I sat down next to her and said, “Hi, I'm Evie.” Her makeup was smeared but that somehow made her even more glamorous. “Are you getting chemo?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Me too. It's not that bad.”
“I'm going to lose my hair,” she whimpered. “I can't lose my hair.” She had beautiful hair. It was long and straight and perfect. She had thick bangs that came all the way down to her eyes. It was rock-star hair.
“You could get a wig,” I said. My hair had already started thinning. Everyone assured me I was still beautiful, as if that was the most important thing for me to worry about.
“Wigs are for old ladies.”
“What about a hat?”
She thought about that for a minute. “A hat could work,” she said. “I could totally rock a hat.”
We walked into the clinic together, our mothers following close behind.
My mom tried valiantly to befriend Stella's mom, but Mrs. Hsu was cold and suspicious right away. She still is, even after all this time. Families get to know each other well when their kids are in and out of the hospital all the time, when they're sitting together for hours on end in the injection clinic. They hug; they bake each other things and buy each other Christmas presents; they cry for each other's children. But not Stella's parents. They are always off to the side, silent, miserable, judging, and alone.