Five Feet Apart(18)

My mom must have hidden it there so it didn’t end up in the garbage bin.

I grab it, heading back to the doorway, and hold out the paper to her. “Not that it’s any of your business . . .”

She snatches the paper from me before pressing back up against the far wall. I see her furiously looking at the neat columns and rows that I made into a pretty sick cartoon, imitating a level of Donkey Kong, while Mom and Dr. Hamid chatted. The ladders sit on top of my dosage information, rolling barrels bounce around my treatment names, the damsel in distress screams “HELP!” in the left-hand corner next to my name. Clever, right?

“What is—how could you—why?”

Clearly, she doesn’t think so.

“Is this what an aneurysm looks like? Should I call Julie?”

She shoves the paper back at me, her face like thunder.

“Hey,” I say, holding up my hands. “I get that you have some save-the-world hero complex going on, but leave me out of it.”

She shakes her head at me. “Will. These treatments aren’t optional. These meds aren’t optional.”

“Which is probably why they keep shoving them down my throat.” To be fair, though, anything can be optional if you’re creative enough.

Stella shakes her head, throwing up her hands and storming off down the hallway. “You’re making me crazy!”

Dr. Hamid’s words from earlier surprise me by playing through my head. Don’t get close enough to touch them. For their safety, and yours. I grab a face mask from an unopened box of them that Julie put by my door, pocket it, and jog after her.

I glance to the side to see a short, brown-haired boy with a sharp nose, and even sharper cheekbones, peering out of room 310, his eyebrows raised curiously at me as I follow Stella down the hall to the elevator. She reaches the elevator first, stepping inside and turning to face me as she hits the floor button. I move to step in after her but she holds up her hand.

“Six feet.”

Shit.

The doors slide shut and I tap my foot impatiently, pressing the up button over and over and over again as I watch the elevator climb steadily up to the fifth floor and then slowly back down to me. I glance nervously at the empty nurses’ station behind me before sliding quickly into the elevator and jamming the door-close button. I meet my own gaze in the blurry metal of the elevator, remembering the face mask in my pocket and slinging it on as I ride up to the fifth floor. This is stupid. Why am I even following Barb Jr.?

With a ding, the door slowly opens, and I power walk down the hall and across the bridge to the east entrance of the NICU, dodging a few doctors along the way. They’re all clearly on their way somewhere, so no one stops me. Gently pushing open the door, I watch Stella for a moment. I open my mouth to ask what the hell that was all about, but then I see that her expression is dark. Serious. I stop a safe distance away from her and follow her eyes to the baby, more tubes and wires than limbs.

I see the tiny chest, struggling to rise and fall, struggling to continue breathing. I feel my own heartbeat in my chest, my own weak lungs trying to fill with air from my mad dash through the hospital.

“She’s fighting for her life,” she finally says, meeting my eyes in the glass. “She doesn’t know what’s ahead of her or why she’s fighting. It’s just . . . instinct, Will. Her instinct is to fight. To live.”

Instinct.

I lost that instinct a long time ago. Maybe at my fiftieth hospital, in Berlin. Maybe about eight months ago when I contracted B. cepacia and they ripped my name off the transplant list. There are a lot of possibilities.

My jaw tightens. “Listen, you’ve got the wrong guy for that inspiring little speech—”

“Please.” She cuts me off, spinning around to face me with a surprising amount of desperation in her expression. “I need you to follow your regimen. Strictly and completely.”

“I don’t think I heard that right. Did you just say . . . please?” I say, trying to dodge the seriousness of this conversation. Her expression doesn’t change, though. I shake my head, stepping closer to her but not too close. Something’s up.

“Okay. What’s really going on here? I won’t laugh.”

She takes a deep breath, taking two steps back to my one step forward. “I have . . . control issues. I need to know that things are in order.”

“So? What does that have to do with me?”

“I know you’re not doing your treatments.” She leans against the glass, looking at me. “And it’s messing me up. Bad.”

I clear my throat, looking past her at the small, helpless baby on the other side of the glass. I feel a twinge of guilt, even though that makes no sense.

“Yeah, well, I’d love to help you out. But what you’re asking . . .” I shake my head, shrugging. “Eh, I don’t know how.”

“Bullshit, Will,” she says, stomping her foot. “All CFers know how to administer their own treatments. We’re practically doctors by the time we’re twelve.”

“Even us spoiled, privileged brats?” I challenge, ripping the face mask off. She isn’t amused by my comment, and her face is still frustrated, distressed. I don’t know what the real problem is, but it’s clearly eating away at her. This is more than control issues. Taking a deep breath, I stop screwing around. “You’re serious? I’m messing you up?”