Even with Mina, who wasn’t under the spell, I could let go. She’d already left me, after all. I didn’t owe her anything.
On Monday, I went with Mina to her annual checkup at the hospital. I got in the car out of habit, because I always went with Mina to her appointments, but as soon as we were on the road, I remembered: I didn’t have to do this.
I could tell as we drove down the familiar streets that Mina thought I’d decided to come with her because I wanted to give her my support, like I used to. She didn’t say anything, but she looked at me out of the corner of her eye at stoplights and right-hand turns. She thought I was the same Katelyn who’d come with her to so many appointments in the past. The young, stupid Katelyn who did whatever she asked, who only cared about cheering her up, who didn’t have any other friends or interests.
Just because I hadn’t poked myself full of holes and shaved my head like she did didn’t mean I hadn’t changed, too. I was a different girl now.
After we pulled into the familiar lot and parked in our usual space next to a misshapen hedge, Mina got out and looked at me expectantly. “Ready?”
I leaned against my open car door. “You go,” I said. “I’ll meet you back here in an hour.”
If I’d been the old Katelyn, the look on Mina’s face would’ve ripped out my heart. Surprise, confusion, disappointment, hurt. Things had been tense between us all summer, but nothing I’d done had come close to causing this look.
I didn’t care. I didn’t have to care.
“Why are you being like this, Katelyn?” she asked, her voice small.
I closed the car door and stared at her. “Really?”
“I barely see you all summer, you’re always with your friends, and then when I do see you, you make a point of saying something terrible.”
“I’m sorry that me having friends is so inconvenient for you.”
She rubbed her shaved head, and I tried to imagine her hair sticking up in every direction in frustrated spikes. I didn’t even know what Mina’s hair would look like now. “Whatever, I’m late. Do what you want.”
She walked toward the oncology wing. I waited for her to disappear past the double doors, not looking back, before I made my way around the building to the ER.
Lots of people who’ve gone through stuff I’ve gone through hate hospitals because they associate them with death and loss and hopelessness. But I think even if Mina had died, which we thought was inevitable for three years, I still would’ve liked the hospital.
Sure, there’s suffering everywhere. But it’s also where people go to get well. I loved hearing pages and getting glimpses of freshly stocked linen closets. I loved the special clipboards and the beds with a thousand different levers. I loved the mean nurses too busy to talk to you and the nice ones even when you could tell they were checked out and faking it.
And I loved the doctors. The doctors! They came into a room and owned it. Everyone looked to them for answers, and unless they were brand new or things were particularly clueless, they knew the answers. Even when things were hopeless, they were the ones to let us know. They issued proclamations: prescriptions, diagnoses. They wore better clothes than everyone else, and they shook your hand and theirs was dry from so much washing. I loved them. I’d watch what they did, check the charts when they left, try to get Mina to laugh by imitating them.
One time I came into her room after school, took a look at her chart, said something, Mina laughed—and then ten minutes later a real doctor came in, looked at the chart, and said exactly the same thing. Mina’s eyes got huge in her thin, dark face.
“You’re going to be a doctor,” she said.
“Whatever.”
“No, seriously, Katelyn. You’ve got to.”
I didn’t believe her. I wasn’t that good in school, and doctors had to go to school forever. Besides, the whole reason I liked doctors was because they were so unlike me. I could never walk into a room and own it like a doctor.
Mina let it drop and never brought it up again, which proved my point: wasn’t going to happen.
But I remembered enough about my years imitating doctors and keeping Mina company that I knew how to blend in. While Mina was at her appointment, I passed the time trying to diagnose everyone in the ER waiting room. A couple flus, a kid with a high fever, a middle-aged man with the worst sunburn I’d ever seen. A woman holding a dish towel around her hand got taken back almost immediately. The rest of us sat around.
When I got bored I walked confidently through the swinging doors to the patient rooms. I knew my way around, and I knew that people didn’t ask where you were going if you looked like you had a destination. I’d been invisible in these hallways hundreds of times.