With This Heart(35)

Jason leaned forward so he could see me past Beck. “What’s a lap dance among friends , right?” His tone held a note of annoyance. Did he think I lied to him before? Beck and I were friends and we weren’t dating, so it’s not my fault that at a party I didn’t feel like recounting our complicated-as-hell status to a random surfing instructor.

I couldn’t look at Jason or Beck throughout the remainder of the game. Beck and I just sat there in silence until everyone started clearing out. I grabbed my phone out of my purse and motioned that I would walk ahead so I could make a call. I prayed Caroline answered.





[page]CHAPTER THIRTEEN





“ Oh my God, finally!” I felt the flutters of relief wash through my nervous belly when Caroline answered on the fourth ring. It was late for her, but when all you do is sleep, days don’t seem to be divided quite the same as they used to be.

“ Hey, Abs,” she answered with a voice that sounded like it was being grated. None of her usual cheeriness was present either.

“ Hey, did I catch you at a bad time? I could call back?” Maybe she was just tired.

She cleared her throat and I could hear the bed rustling like she was trying to sit up a bit further. “No. It’s okay, just feeling extra crappy.”

Usually she sugarcoated her illness. She would talk about being in the hospital like it was an extended stay in a hotel and nothing more.

“ Is that why you haven’t been answering my calls? I don’t care if all we talk about is how shitty you feel. I miss you.”

There was a long silence and I stared down at the sand. In the moonlight, it almost looked like snow. Warm, grainy snow.

“ Abby, I want you to be happy and I’ve just needed some time to process everything.”

My heart dropped.

“ Process what?” I shouted into the phone with no regard for anyone around me. I didn’t care what they thought.

“ Abby…They gave me a new timeline.”

A timeline. They gave her an expiration date. As if anyone could predict the f*cking future. A timeline was statistics and nothing more. It didn’t account for externalities. The fact that Caroline was the best goddamned human being I’d ever known and that she deserved longer than whatever timeline they decided to give her.

“ How long?” I stopped walking and let my knees fall forward into sand. My butt fell back onto my heels. Snowy sand stuck to my legs, exfoliating my pale skin.

“ Eight months.”

Eight months of life is what Caroline had to plan for. What I had to plan for. I felt an overwhelming need to scream building within me, building in my stomach and winding up my trachea and throat, pressing into my lungs. Then, when it reached my mouth, I counted to ten. This wasn’t my illness. This wasn’t about me. Caroline needed me to be strong. She needed the best f*cking eight months of her life.

“ Can I come pick you up and take you on the rest of the road trip with us?” I asked, praying she would say yes.

“ I don’t know when I’ll be out of the hospital, but what if when you get back we go on one. Just you and me.” That sounded like heaven. I instantly thought of all the fun places we could stay together. We could go to Hollywood and walk the star mile and find every celebrity we’d ever pined over.

“ Sounds perfect.”

“ Any updates for me?” she asked, and for the first time that night, I heard hope in her voice. She really was living vicariously through me.

I shifted around to see who was still around. The party had cleared out pretty quickly, but Beck was still on the beach a few yards away. He was sitting on his butt in the sand with his arms bent around his knees. His face was angled toward the ocean. The moonlight hit each of his sharp features. He was probably making sure I didn’t get kidnapped, but I appreciated the privacy he gave me.

I told Caroline everything about the bonfire, the kissing, and the sandbar confessions from the other day . She eagerly listened to every detail. When I admitted that she was the devil sitting on my shoulder at each moment, she cheered into the phone.

“ You’re damn right I am. I’ve never been prouder,” she admitted, and I could hear the smile in her voice.


“ You would have loved the surfing instructor. He was straight off Laguna Beach .”

“ Meh. He doesn’t sound as hot as Mr. Lap Dance.”

I burst out laughing. “I should call him that from now on.”

Once our laughter died down, the crashing waves settled in and I just sat there on the phone with her, wondering what she was looking at in her hospital room.

“ Once we hang up, I’ll take a picture of the ocean and text it to you.”

“ Thanks. I’ll put it as my background,” she answered wistfully.

“ I love you, Caroline.”

“ I love you, too, Abs.”

…



“ That’s a lot of pills,” Beck mentioned as we drove out of Corpus. We’d left just after breakfast and I’d forgotten to take my medicine beforehand. My medicine bag sounded much more ominous when there was no music playing in the car, so I switched the stereo on low before I started rattling through each pill bottle.

“ They’re for my sex change operation,” I quipped, not really wanting to get into the details of them.