Page 119 of The False Flat

I looked back, stopped.

“Where’s Grant?” I asked.

No answer.

Several seconds passed.

William and Beau came up beside us.

No Grant.

A chill tightened my skin “Where’s Grant?” I asked, louder this time.

“He told us to go on,” William said. “I listened because you remember what happened the last time I didn’t.”

Grant had given us all a lecture about not treating him like he was an invalid.

My heart pounded in my chest. My legs pedaled back. Sweat trickled down my neck.

I saw Gaia first, mangled in a heap on the gravel shoulder. And then I saw him, lying in the grass a yard away from the road.

Still.

A scream curled in the back of my throat. I threw my bicycle and ran.

CHAPTER 48

LIFE REALIZATION #22: IT’S ALWAYS SOMETHING

The cold, white tiles.

The muffled voices.

The smell of rubbing alcohol and floor cleaner and dinner trays.

The slight squeak of a passing bed, someone else going for imaging.

The laughter that didn’t belong.

The silent sobs coming from the person crouched against the wall because she just couldn’t stand up anymore: me.

Grant hadn’t been killed by the white Honda that had ripped his bicycle out from under him, but while he was getting his fourteen stitches, I tried to find life inside this hospital, our life. Because this accident was one more thing, and I felt like I was dying inside. How could we live within the confines of this diagnosis, chemo and radiation interrupting what little life we had left?

I went into the bathroom, where an onslaught of anxiety left no room for the food inside my stomach. When I was done, but still sunken inside, I stepped back into the hall.

A young girl wearing a beanie was being pushed past me in a wheelchair. Her gown fell off one bony shoulder, and before her mom could pull it back up again, I saw the bandage on her upper-right chest. It was a port. I knew because Grant had one in the exact same place. A little implanted reservoir, just under the skin, that connected to a vein so a chemo patient wouldn’t have to continually get stuck by needles. The nurses could “access the port” instead.

I started to turn back into the bathroom, hit by another wave of nausea, but the pale girl looked up at me with her watery blue eyes and smiled. Then she went back to talking to her mother, a casual discussion about a dance next month.

They were living, laughing. They were here at this hospital, merging outside life with hospital life, but they weren’t making a distinction. They were just living wherever they were. I wanted to follow them, to observe. I wanted to take notes, make a spreadsheet. I wanted to know how to do it when everything fell apart.

Later, when I carried thoughts of that mother and daughter into Grant’s room on the fourth floor, where he’d been transferred so they could watch him for the night, he was crying. I’d never seen him cry over his illness, and it scared me.

I ran to his bed.

But he wasn’t crying over his injuries or illness. He was crying because he’d lost his best friend. Gaia was gone, totaled. In the middle of Grant telling me about his plan to put her in storage because he couldn’t bear the thought of scrapping her, there was a knock on the door.

Dr. Killjoy, Grant’s oncologist, breezed in, smelling of hand sanitizer and leather, and told Grant he shouldn’t ride anymore.