Five Feet Apart(8)

Good one. Ms. Goody Two Shoes has some spunk.

“And clearly the teacher’s pet, too.”

“Six feet at all times! You both know the rules!” I realize I’m too close and take a step back as Barb reaches us, coming into the space and the tension between us. She turns to look at me, her eyes narrowing. “What do you think you’re doing up here?”

“Uh,” I say, pointing at the viewing window. “Looking at babies?”

She’s clearly not amused. “Get back to your room. Where is your face mask?” I reach up to touch my maskless face. “Stella, thank you for keeping your mask on.”

“She didn’t five seconds ago,” I mutter. Stella glares at me over Barb’s head, and I give her back a big smile.

Stella.

Her name is Stella.

I can see Barb’s about to really ream me out, so I decide to make my exit. I’ve had more than enough lecturing for the moment.

“Lighten up, Stella,” I say, sauntering to the door. “It’s just life. It’ll be over before we know it.”

I head out through the doors, across the bridge, and down C Wing. Instead of going back the long way, I hop on a much shakier, nonglass elevator, which I discovered two days ago. It spits me out right by the nurses’ station on my floor, where Julie is reading over some paperwork.

“Hey, Julie,” I say, leaning on the counter and picking up a pencil.

She glances up at me, giving me a quick look, before her eyes swing back down to the papers in her hands. “Just what were you up to?”

“Eh, roaming the hospital. Pissing off Barb,” I say, shrugging and twirling the pencil around and around in my fingertips. “She’s such a hard-ass.”

“Will, she’s not a hard-ass, she’s just, you know . . .”

I give her a look. “A hard-ass.”

She leans against the nurses’ station, putting a hand on her super-pregnant belly. “Firm. The rules matter. Especially to Barb. She doesn’t take chances.”

I glance over to see the doors at the end of the hallway swing wide open again as Barb and the goody-goody herself step out.

Barb’s eyes narrow at me and I shrug innocently. “What? I’m talking to Julie.”

She huffs, and the two of them walk off down the hallway toward Stella’s room. Stella fixes her face mask, looking back at me, her eyes meeting mine for a fraction of a second.

I sigh, watching her go.

“She hates me.”

“Which one?” Julie asks, following my gaze down the hallway.

The door to Stella’s room closes behind the both of them, and I look back at Julie.

She gives me a look that I’ve seen about a million times since I got here. Her blue eyes fill with a mix between Are you crazy? and something very close to care.

Mostly Are you crazy? though.

“Don’t even think about it, Will.”

I glance down at the file sitting in front of her, the name jumping out at me from the upper left-hand corner.

Stella Grant.

“Okay,” I say like it’s no big deal. “Night.”

I stroll back to 315, coughing when I get there, the mucus thick in my lungs and throat, my chest aching from my excursion. If I had known I was going to be running a half marathon all around the hospital, I might’ve bothered to bring my portable oxygen.

Eh, who am I kidding?

I check my watch to make sure it’s been an hour before pushing open the door. I flick on the light, noticing a folded note from Hope and Jason on the bleach-white standard-issue hospital sheets.

How romantic of them.

I try not to be disappointed they’re already gone. My mom pulled me out of school and switched me to homeschooling with a side of international hospital tourism when I got diagnosed with B. cepacia eight months ago. As if my life span wasn’t already going to be ridiculously short, B. cepacia will cut off another huge chunk of it by making my shitty lung function deplete even faster than it already has. And they don’t give you new lungs when you have an antibiotic-resistant bacteria running rampant inside of you.

But “incurable” is only a suggestion to my mother, and she’s determined to find the needle-in-a-haystack treatment. Even if it means cutting me off from everyone.

At least this hospital is half an hour away from Hope and Jason, so they can come visit me on a regular basis and fill me in on everything I’m missing at school. Since I got B. cepacia, I feel like they’re the only ones in my life who don’t treat me like a lab rat. They’ve always been that way; maybe that’s why they’re so perfect for each other.

I unfold the note to see a heart and, in Hope’s neat cursive, “See you soon! Two weeks till your Big 18! Hope and Jason.” And that makes me smile.

“Big 18.” Two more weeks until I’m in charge. I’ll be off this latest clinical drug trial and out of this hospital and can do something with my life, instead of letting my mom waste it.

No more hospitals. No more being stuck inside whitewashed buildings all over the world as doctors try drug after drug, treatment after treatment, none of them working.

If I’m going to die, I’d like to actually live first.

And then I’ll die.

I squint at the heart, thinking about that fateful last day. Somewhere poetic. A beach, maybe. Or a rowboat somewhere in Mississippi. Just no walls. I could sketch the landscape, draw a final cartoon of me giving the middle finger to the universe, then bite the big one.