Five Feet Apart(17)
I roll my eyes. “He is not cute.”
“?‘He’!” The two of them squeal in delight, and I can sense the waterfall of questions that’s about to pour over me.
“I gotta go! Talk to you tomorrow!” I say while they protest, and hang up. The moment on the roof is still a little too fresh and weird to talk about. The page for the Cabo beach party swings back into view. I hover over “Not Going” but I can’t bring myself to click on it just yet, so instead I just close the page and pull up Visual Studio.
I open the project I’ve been working on and begin to sort through the lines and lines of code, already feeling my muscles loosen as I do. I find an error in line 27, where I put a c instead of an x for a variable, and a missing equal sign in line 182, but aside from that, the app finally looks ready to go for beta. I almost can’t believe it. I’ll celebrate with a pudding cup later.
I try to move on to completing the dosage table for diabetes in my spreadsheet of the most prevalent chronic conditions, sorting through varying ages and weights and medications. But I soon find myself staring at the blank columns, my fingertips tapping away at the edge of my laptop instead, my mind a million miles away.
Focus.
I reach over to grab my pocket notebook, crossing off number 14 and trying to get the feeling of calm that usually comes from finishing to-do list items, but it doesn’t come. I freeze as my pencil hovers over number 15, looking from the blank columns and rows on my spreadsheet back down to “Complete dosage table for diabetes.”
Unfinished. Ugh.
I chuck the notebook onto my bed, restlessness and unease filling my stomach. Standing up, I walk over to the window, my hand pushing back the blinds.
My eyes travel to the roof, to the spot where Will was standing earlier. I know he was his usual self when I got up there, but I didn’t imagine the coughing, and teetering. Or the fear.
Mr. “Death Comes for Us All” didn’t want to die.
Restless, I walk over to my med cart, hoping that moving on to “Before-bed meds” on my to-do list will help calm me down. My fingers tap away on the metal of the cart as I look at the sea of bottles, and then out the window again at the roof, and then back at the bottles.
Is he even doing his treatments?
Barb can probably force him to take most of his meds, but she can’t be there for every single dose. She can strap him into his AffloVest, but she can’t ensure he keeps it on for the full half hour.
He’s probably not doing all his treatments.
I try to go over the meds in order of when I take them, shuffling them around on the cart, the names all blurring together. Instead of feeling calm, I feel more and more frustration, the anger climbing up the sides of my head.
I struggle with the cap on a mucus thinner, pressing down on it with all my strength and trying to twist it off.
I don’t want him to die.
The thought climbs on top of the mountain of frustration and plants a flag, clear and loud and so surprising to me that I don’t even understand it. I just see him walking back to the edge of that roof. And even though he’s the actual worst . . .
I don’t want him to die.
I twist the lid sharply and it comes flying off, pills showering down onto my med cart. Angrily, I slam the bottle down, the pills jumping again with the force of my hand. “Dammit!”
CHAPTER 6
WILL
I open the door to my room, surprised to see Stella backing up against the wall on the other side of the hallway. After the stunt I pulled yesterday, I thought she’d steer clear of me for at LEAST a week. She’s wearing about four face masks and two pairs of gloves, her fingers wrapping tightly around the plastic handrail on the wall. As she moves, I catch the scent of lavender.
It smells nice. It’s probably my nose craving anything that isn’t bleach.
I grin. “Are you my proctologist?”
She gives me what I think is an icy look from what I can see of her face, leaning to peer past me into my room. I glance behind me to see what she’s looking at. The art books, the AffloVest hanging on the edge of the bed from when I shrugged it off as soon as Barb left, my open sketchbook on the table. That’s about it.
“I knew it,” she says finally, like she confirmed the answer to some great Sherlock Holmes mystery. She holds out her double-gloved hand. “Let me see your regimen.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
We stare each other down, her brown eyes shooting daggers through me while I try to give her an equally intimidating glare. But I’m bored as shit so my curiosity gets the better of me. I roll my eyes and turn to go rip apart my room looking for a sheet of paper that’s probably already in a landfill somewhere.
I push aside some magazines and check under the bed. I riffle through a couple of my sketchbook pages, and even look under my pillow for show, but it’s nowhere to be found.
I straighten up and shake my head at her. “Can’t find it. Sorry. See ya later.”
She doesn’t budge, though, and crosses her arms in defiance, refusing to leave.
So I keep looking, my eyes scanning the room while Stella taps her foot in the hallway impatiently. It’s useless. That thing is—wait.
I notice my pocket-size sketchbook lying on my dresser, the regimen crammed into the back of it, neatly folded and just barely sticking out past the small pages of the book.