Five Feet Apart(27)

She hears me, though, and looks up, her eyes sleepy.

“You work too hard,” I say when she sees me.

She smiles and opens her arms like she used to when I was younger and having a rough day at the hospital.

I climb onto her lap, like a child, and wrap my arms around her neck, smelling the familiar, safe, vanilla scent of her perfume. Resting my head on her shoulder, I close my eyes and pretend.





CHAPTER 10


WILL


“Cevaflomalin time!” Julie sings, swinging my door open the next morning, a bag of the medicine in her hand.

I nod. I already got the notification from Stella’s app and moved from the desk over to my bed, where the IV rack is, waiting for her arrival.

I watch as Julie hangs the bag, taking the IV line and turning toward me. Her eyes travel to the drawing I did of Stella in the yoga room, hanging next to the lung drawing Stella had put up above my desk, the corner of her lip turning up as she looks at it.

“I like seeing you like this,” she says, her eyes meeting mine.

“Like how?” I ask, pulling down the neck of my shirt.

She inserts the IV line into a port on my chest. “Hopeful.”

I think about Stella, my eyes traveling to the IV bag of Cevaflomalin. I reach out to touch it gently, feeling the weight of the bag in my palm. The trial is so new. Still too new to know how this will turn out.

It’s the first time I’ve even let myself think about it . . . which might be dangerous. Or even stupid.

I don’t know. Getting my hopes up when a hospital is involved doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.

“What if this doesn’t work?” I ask.

I don’t feel any different. Not yet, at least.

I watch the IV bag, the steady drip, drip, drip of the medicine working its way into my body. I look back at Julie, the both of us silent for a moment.

“But what if it does?” she asks, touching my shoulder. I watch her leave.

But what if it does.

*

After the IV drip, I carefully slide on a pair of bright-blue gloves, making sure to keep my B. cepacia germs far away from anything Stella will touch.

I take one more look at my drawing from the yoga room earlier, carefully evaluating it as I pull it down off the wall.

It’s a cartoon but it’s definitely Stella. She’s in a white doctor’s coat, a stethoscope slung around her neck, her small cartoon hands resting angrily on her hips. Squinting at the drawing, I realize it’s missing something.

Aha.

I grab red, orange, and yellow pencils and draw fire coming out of her mouth. Way more realistic. Laughing to myself, I take a manila envelope that I stole from the nurses’ station, slide the drawing inside, and scrawl on the outside: “Inside, you’ll find my heart and soul. Be kind.”

I walk down the hall to her room, picturing her opening the envelope, expecting something profound and deep. I look both ways before slipping it under the door, and lean against the wall, listening.

I hear her soft footsteps on the other side of the door, the sound of her snapping gloves on, then bending over to grab the envelope. There’s silence. More silence. And finally—a laugh! A real, genuine, warm laugh.

Victory! I walk back down the hallway, whistling, sliding onto my bed and grabbing my phone as FaceTime pings, a call coming in from Stella just like I hoped.

I answer it, her face appearing, her pink lips turning up at the corners. “A dragon lady? So sexist!”

“Hey, you’re lucky you said no nudes!”

She laughs again, looking at the drawing and then back at me. “Why cartoons?”

“They’re subversive, you know? They can look light and fun on the outside, but they have punch.” I could talk about this all day. If there’s anything I’m passionate about, this would be it. I hold up a book that’s on my nightstand that has some of the best of the New York Times political cartoons. “Politics, religion, society. I think a well-drawn cartoon can say more than words ever could, you know? It could change minds.”

She looks at me, surprised, not saying anything.

I shrug, realizing how hard I just nerded out. “I mean, I’m just a wannabe cartoonist. What do I know.”

I point at the drawing behind her, a beautiful picture of lungs, flowers pouring out of the inside, a backdrop of stars behind them. “Now that is art.” I pull my laptop closer to me, realizing what it means. “Healthy lungs! That’s brilliant. Who did it?”

She looks back at it, pausing. “My older sister. Abby.”

“That’s some talent. I’d love to take a look at her other work!”

A strange look comes onto her face, and her voice turns cold. “Look. We’re not friends. We’re not sharing our stories. This is just about doing our treatments, okay?”

The call ends abruptly, my own confused face swinging into view. What the hell was that? I jump up, angry, and throw open the door to my room. Storming down the hallway, I make a beeline for her door, ready to give her a piece of my mind. She can kiss my—

“Hey! Will!” a voice says behind me.

I swing around, surprised to see Hope and Jason walking toward me. I was texting Jason like an hour ago, and I still totally forgot they were coming today, like they always do on Fridays. Jason holds up a bag of food, grinning at me as the smell of fries from my favorite diner a block away from our school wafts down the hallway, trying to reel me in.