Five Feet Apart(19)

She doesn’t respond, and we stand there, staring at each other in silence, something bordering on understanding passing between us. Finally, I take a step back and put on the face mask again as a peace offering, before leaning against the wall. “Okay. All right,” I say, eyeing her. “So, if I agree to this, what’s in it for me?”

Her eyes narrow and she pulls her heather-gray hoodie closer to her. I watch her, the way her hair falls over her shoulders, the way her eyes show every little thing she’s feeling.

“I want to draw you,” I say before I can stop myself.

“What?” she says, shaking her head adamantly. “No.”

“Why not?” I ask. “You’re beautiful.”

Shit. That slipped out. She stares at me, surprised and, unless I’m imagining it, just a little pleased. “Thank you, but no way.”

I shrug and start walking toward the door. “Guess we don’t have a deal.”

“You can’t practice a little discipline? Stick to your regimen? Even to save your own life?”

I stop short, looking back at her. She doesn’t get it. “Nothing’s gonna save my life, Stella. Or yours.” I keep going down the hallway, calling over my shoulder, “Everyone in this world is breathing borrowed air.”

I push the door open and am about to leave when her voice rings out from behind me.

“Ugh, fine!”

I spin around, shocked, the door clicking shut.

“But no nudes,” she adds. She’s taken her face mask off and I can see her lips twitching into a smile. The first one she’s given me. She’s making a joke.

Stella Grant is making a joke.

I laugh, shaking my head. “Ah, I should’ve known you’d find a way to suck all the fun out of it.”

“No posing for hours on end,” she says, looking back at the preemie, her face suddenly serious. “And your regimen. We do it my way.”

“Deal,” I say, knowing that whatever she means by her way is going to be a gigantic pain in the ass. “I’d say let’s shake on it, but . . .”

“Funny,” she says, looking at me and then nodding toward the door. “The first thing you have to do is get a med cart in your room.”

I salute. “On it. Med cart in my room.”

I push open the door, giving her a big smile that lasts me all the way back to the elevator. Pulling out my phone, I send a quick text to Jason: Get this, dude: a truce with that girl I told you about.

He’s been getting a real kick out of the stories I’ve been telling him about her. He cried from laughing over the door alarm incident yesterday.

My phone buzzes with his reply as the elevator slows to a stop on the third floor: Must be your good looks. Clearly not because of your charming personality.

Pocketing my phone, I peer around the corner to check that the nurses’ station is still empty before sliding off the elevator. I jump when a loud crash reverberates out from an open door.

“Ow. Shit,” a voice says from inside.

I peek in to see the dark-haired dude from earlier wearing a pair of flannel pajama pants and a Food Network T-shirt. He’s sitting on the floor next to an overturned skateboard, rubbing his elbow, clearly post-wipeout.

“Oh, hey,” he says, standing up and picking up the skateboard. “You just missed the show.”

“You doing stunts in here?”

He shrugs. “No safer place to break a leg. Besides, Barb just went off shift.”

Valid point. “Can’t argue with logic.” I laugh, raising my hand to do a small wave. “I’m Will.”

“Poe,” he says, grinning back at me.

We grab chairs out of our rooms and sit in our respective doorways. It’s nice to talk to someone around here who’s not mad at me all the time.

“So what brings you to Saint Grace’s? Haven’t seen you here before. Stell and I pretty much know everyone who comes through.”

Stell. So they’re close?

I lean my chair back, letting it rest against the doorframe, and try to drop the B. cepacia bomb as casually as I can. “Experimental trial for B. cepacia.”

I usually avoid telling CFers because they make it a point to avoid me like the plague.

His eyes widen, but he doesn’t move any farther away. He just rolls the skateboard back and forth under his feet. “B. cepacia? That is rough. How long ago did you contract it?”

“About eight months ago,” I say. I remember waking up one morning having more trouble breathing than usual, and then I couldn’t stop coughing. My mom, being obsessed with every breath I’ve taken my whole life, took me straight to the hospital to run some tests. I can still hear her heels clicking loudly behind the gurney, her ordering the people around as if she were the chief of surgery.

I thought she was obsessive before the results came back. She always overreacted to every loud cough or gasp of breath, keeping me out of school or forcing me to cancel plans to go to doctor’s appointments or to the hospital for no reason.

I remember doing a mandatory chorus performance back in third grade and coughing right in the middle of our shitty rendition of “This Little Light of Mine.” She literally stopped the concert midsong and dragged me offstage to go get a checkup.

But I didn’t know how good I had it. Things are so much worse now than they were then. Hospital after hospital, experimental trial after experimental trial. Every week it’s another attempt to fix the problem, cure the incurable. A minute without an IV or not talking about a next step is a minute wasted.