When I was little, I thought it would be like that all the time, that Joe and Nick would come with me wherever I went. Just because. Without my having to ask them. It kills me now that I’ll be gone and they’ll be doing stuff we should be doing together. Or at least they’ll be talking about it together after the fact. You know from the way Holden doesn’t talk about his brother Allie that he misses not having him to talk with. It should be the three of us Landon boys sharing inside jokes and ribbing Joe about his lectures on how the real world is and getting pumped with Nick, that pure high of his about being alive.
When Grandma called us gypsies, I could see myself saying it to a string of my own kids, my team, once Joe and Nick were off doing their own thing. It would be a way to make the everyday junk seem like an adventure. I can hear Mack Petriano dissing me: “Mary Poppins, welcome home.” It isn’t that, honestly. I’m not that much of a wuss. Especially lately, I get it that no one can really understand what another person feels. But it’s the idea that chores or school or life don’t have to drag you down if you stick together. That’s what clicks with me. Or did. Too late to lose sleep over it now.
Even though Dad stole Grandma’s saying and twists it around in his lectures about communication as the solution to world peace by emphasizing the listen and not the gypsies, I don’t argue with him. The truth is the middle kid never gets much airtime. When Joe’s here, he controls every conversation. I guess you’d expect that. As the oldest it’s easy to get sucked up into Mom and Dad’s trial and error, Parenting 101. Joe’s the first at everything and he has to break all the barriers for Nick and me. So he probably thinks he’s earned the right to talk first.
Lucky Nick cruises right through things. Just because someone tells him he can’t do something, he doesn’t let that faze him. He waits until they aren’t paying attention and then does exactly what he wants to do. He and Phoebe Caulfield.
So, in a way, The Disease levels the playing field. Now they have to listen to me.
Holden’s working on the same thing. Trying to get someone to take him seriously. For totally different reasons, of course. And I’m not sure he knows that’s why he acts the way he does or even if he isn’t wondering what’s the point of it all. But he and I think a lot alike. We’re practically the same age. And even though, like me, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s going to do next, there’s one huge difference. He has his whole life ahead of him to figure it out.
It’s hard not to hate him for that. And Nick and Joe. They get to live. Maybe go around the world, sleep with a few girls before they find the right one, invent a new kind of car, run a business, or whatever. They have time to fix mistakes they made when they didn’t know better.
I’m stuck with whatever I’ve done so far and maybe ten or twelve months more. It’s like my name, the highest limbo pole ever. Sometimes I think I shouldn’t even waste time sleeping. There’s not enough time to do all the things I planned on doing before I got sick.
Twenty-five, thirty years ago when my parents were teenagers, buying plastic 45s and hoping someone brought weed to the sleepover, only little kids had leukemia. You’ve seen those bald heads on posters. Everyone has. Cute, smiley kids with no hair. But never the same kid from year to year. There’s a reason for that.
By the time leukemia found me, the hospitals were full of cancer patients, all ages. A teenager with leukemia was nothing special. AML, or acute myeloid leukemia, my mother forever corrects me as if the official name makes it easier to accept I’m going to be dead in a year.
Hard to figure when formality’s not her strong suit, but she insists on that precise medical term with other people, too. In some weird way it’s a kind of protection. No son of hers could be laid low by something as mundane as cancer.
CHAPTER THREE
I’m writing this the summer after the new millennium has come and gone. What a fizzle. Y2K was the biggest flop ever. And no one, me especially, has any great hope for the rest of the century. I mean, the Croatians are killing the Serbians, the Russians nuked everyone at Chernobyl but still refuse to admit they were at fault, and Saddam Hussein continues to shoot people and bury them in roadside ditches because he doesn’t like the way they tie their sarongs or whatever you call that headgear people in desert countries wear to avoid sun poisoning.
The only good thing about Y2K was that everyone had to stop and think about the future. Their ideal future. The ones who thought the world would end, the ones who thought they’d lose all their money because the banks would freeze and the stock market would fail, the ones who thought the terrorists would take over: they were all forced to look at their lives from a different perspective. We must have written about it in every class last fall. So whenever anyone asks how I feel about The Disease, I say, “It’s like Y2K, only personal.”
To tell you the truth, my life is simple compared with Holden’s. Compared with the whole effing rest of the world’s. Which a grown-up would tell you is good, but I know better. And so does HC. Grown-ups hate complications, even though that’s what makes any of it interesting.
So, leukemia, here’s the real story. You feel lousy most of the time. You turn into a total dud. Least that’s what Nick claims because I won’t run soccer drills with him like I used to last summer. No use explaining to him it’s more to do with having grown out of playing games like that than being sick. Plus I sleep more.
Sleeping helps because you forget. Trouble is, you wake up with no more energy than when you got in bed. And you don’t forget for long. You get real skinny and weak. Mack says I’m starting to look like Mick Jagger. You have to drop out of every public activity because you’re too tired. Or other people’s parents act like you have cooties. Or you’re just sick of answering their questions. And when they pat your shoulder, you’re sick of trying to smile instead of sinking your teeth into their hands.
The doctors sit around and shake their heads like they don’t really have a clue what works and what doesn’t. Then they say what they say to every other cancer patient: he needs chemo, she needs radiation. As if everyone’s supposed to know exactly what that means. And hop right to it, like it’s cotton candy or a free rollercoaster ride.
It feels like you’re living in some sci-fi movie, Star Wars AWOL at the Mayo Clinic. Continuous four-syllable words roll off their tongues, words you’ve never heard before. All that flash and burn technology, the next thing you know you start feeling hopeful. Someday, someday soon, they’ll be able to slide you through a metal tunnel and regenerate your old body with a new one, pure and whole, like a fucking starfish.
That’s the myth they want you to believe. And it’s tempting.
Let me tell you how it really works. First they tell you you’re sick. Duh. You’re supremely aware of that fact from the way you feel. Then they run you through every machine in the hospital. Sometimes more than one hospital. They take samples from all kinds of weird places with superlong needles and photograph every single part of your body, and they share the pictures with every doctor and nurse in a hundred-mile radius. Privacy, hah. Privacy means nothing to those know-it-alls. After that? They send you home and you still feel lousy.