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CHAPTER 1
Boone
Studying the gridof yellow and red pegs, I focus on a decidedly barren area. Leveling a confident smirk across the top of my game board I say, “D-6.”
I whistle—my missile firing from my destroyer to sail over to Aiden’s side, where he should take over the sound effects and give me a definitive explosion.
Instead, he grins. “That’s a miss.”
“What the hell?” I mutter, plugging the D-6 hole with a yellow peg. I glance up at him suspiciously. “You do have all your ships on the board, right?”
Aiden rolls his eyes, something only an eleven-year-old can do with utter perfection. “Don’t try to put this on me just because you suck at this game.”
“Whatever,” I say with a wave of my hand. “Make your move, dude.”
“J-2.” I don’t have to look at his face to know he knows it’s a hit. I can hear it in his smug tone.
Aiden emits the whistling sound of his missile and arcs his hand up and over the board, mimicking its theoretical flight path. I scowl as I make a less-than-effusive bombing noise. “Direct hit,” I grouse.
Pumping his fist, Aiden exclaims, “Yes!”
“You must be psychic or something.”
“I just have good deductive reasoning,” he replies with a shrug and then glances at the clock. “For example, a nurse should be rolling in anytime now to hang a new bag.”
And as if Aiden knew she was standing right outside his hospital room door, said nurse walks in. A cheery, middle-aged woman with burgundy-tinted hair that she wears cut super short glances at the board, then to me, then to Aiden. “How bad are you kicking his butt today?”
“Bad,” Aiden says.
“I think he’s a cheater, Lori.” Yes, I know her name is Lori, just as I know she’s been a nurse for twenty-two years and she’s married with three adopted children.
Hang out in the children’s hospital enough, you get to know people, and Lori is one of the regular pediatric oncology nurses.
“Not my sweet Aiden,” she croons as she works to change out a bag of some IV medication. He’s on a lot of different ones.
Aiden has acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
More specifically, secondary refractory leukemia.
I’ve learned some stuff about this kid and his incredibly long journey battling this disease. Diagnosed at five, he underwent induction therapy for a month, which was a combination of chemotherapy drugs designed to kill as many of the leukemia cells as possible in the blood and bone marrow. After that he had consolidation therapy, which was higher doses of drugs over a few months designed to kill remaining cells that couldn’t be seen on tests. After that, over two years of maintenance chemotherapy to kill anything that survived the first two phases and to keep it from coming back.
By age eight, he was deemed cancer-free and living his best life.
At age eleven, it returned. I first met Aiden at the beginning of March when he entered the hospital for another round of chemotherapy to attempt to put him back in remission. Unfortunately, he didn’t respond to treatment the way he had before and it was determined his best chance was an allogeneic bone marrow transplant.
That was completed three weeks ago and I haven’t been able to see him until this week as he was at an increased risk of infection, thus his visitors were limited. Even today, I still have to wear a gown, gloves and mask to sit in the room with him and that’s because in addition to killing the cancer, the chemotherapy kills his red and white blood cells. He needs those—particularly the white—to fight infections. It makes his situation very precarious since he’s highly susceptible to many types of complications, which means he’s going to be in the hospital a while. This isn’t a treatment you can recover from at home.
Now it’s a waiting game to see if his bone marrow recovers, his blood cells reform and the leukemia has been eradicated.
“Your dad not here yet?” Lori asks Aiden.
I glance at my watch. Steven Hoffman is usually here during the days with his son and I’ve met him a few times. Nice guy who’s quite jovial, despite the sad nature of what his boy is going through. He’s always quick with jokes and never fails to make his son laugh.
Aiden glances at the clock and frowns. “I don’t know where he is. He’s usually here by now.”
“I don’t have any major plans today,” I say, studying my battleship grid for my next move. “I’ll hang until he gets here.”
I peek up at Aiden and see the relief on his face. He’s still mostly bald from the intensive round of chemo he got before the transplant but I notice a light coat of peach-like fuzz starting to come in. For some reason, that signifies hope to me even though I’m not sure it means much.
