“So we’re good?” she asks, hopeful.
“You mean it? Just friends? Nothing else? You’re okay with that?”
She nods.
“Then we’re good.”
“Woohoo!” She does a cartwheel, right there in the parking lot.
? ? ?
During my break, I eat chocolate pudding and open to the next entry in Meg’s journal. I didn’t read any yesterday because I was pretty sure I couldn’t handle it after everything.
January 19.
I have a feeling Hope will be born soon. I know I’m not due for a couple more months, but I don’t think she’s going to wait that long. Theoretically, the longer she stays inside me, the healthier she’ll be. But does that count for a pregnancy like this one too? Where the baby is trapped inside a rotting body? What if I’m poisoning her? I know I’m going to die, but what if I die before she can get out safely? What if she dies too and all of this will have been for nothing?
My heart is in my throat.
Meg knew she was going to die? She never once told me that. The only thing she ever said was that she hoped Hope would be okay—when it came to herself, her confidence never wavered.
Everything is going to be fine. That was her go-to line. She was so sure.
But now it seems she wasn’t. She wasn’t sure at all. And I never would have known that if Mabel hadn’t given me this journal.
What changed for Meg between that day in August when she sat us all down and said she was keeping the baby and January 19, the day she wrote this entry? When did it change?
And what the hell else was she lying to me about?
Chapter 12
Fuck the read-the-journal-slowly plan. I need to find out what else is in here. I sit on my bedroom floor and read as quickly as I can while still paying attention to what the words actually say. Jesus. There’s a lot more about how Meg hadn’t been feeling well and how she didn’t think she had much time left. She even went to her doctor by herself one day without her parents or me or anyone knowing to get checked out. She took a fucking cab—a weak, sick, pregnant, seventeen-year-old girl taking a cab to a secret doctor’s appointment so she could find out how long she had to live. Goddammit, Meg. Why didn’t you tell me?
The doctor told her there was no real way to know for sure, but it looked to him like she didn’t have much time left. Weeks. The cancer was everywhere. Her organs were going to fail. He wanted to do an emergency C-section, get the baby out of her, give her body a final chance to bounce back. A Hail Mary pass, he called it.
She said no. It was too soon for the baby to be born. She’d accepted her fate; she just needed to hold out as long as she could—for the baby.
I throw the book against the wall and pace the room.
Why the hell would she do this? Why wouldn’t she give herself every possible chance?
It wasn’t a pro-life thing—Meg was always going on about women’s rights and equal pay and gender inequalities and “the old, white jackasses in Washington who think having a penis gives them the right to govern vaginas.” She was pro-choice. And she certainly made her choice, didn’t she?
I pick the book off the floor and flip to the next entry, searching through her scribble for some kind of meaning, some hint, some answer.
By the time I reach the end of the journal, one word has jumped out at me more than any of the thousands of others, the very last word on the very last line: legacy.
Hope’s been kicking a lot lately. It hurts when it happens, like I’m being beaten up from the inside out. But it’s okay. Actually, it’s the only thing that’s okay lately. I can’t look at my parents or Mabel, because all I see is anguish. They know I’m dying. They know it and they hate me for it. And Ryden…Ryden’s still in denial. It’s even harder to be around him. With him, I have to pretend. He still has hope, and I’m not going to take that away from him. It hurts to smile, but I will not stop. I will not take away his hope. I love him too much. And it makes me want to cry.
But then Hope kicks and I feel better, because she’s okay, she’s healthy. My little legacy.
That’s it. There’s nothing else in the book. Except the checklist.
Legacy.
Is that why Meg insisted on keeping the baby? Because she wanted something to leave behind? She could have written a book or donated her college fund to a charity or planted a goddamn tree. No, she had to do the one thing that guaranteed she would even need to leave something behind in the first place, the one thing that would ensure her thirty percent chance of survival plummeted down to a big fat zero.
I sink to my floor, the journal clutched in my hands.
Somewhere deep in my brain, sirens are going off, warning signals. Of what, I have no clue. But I go back to the beginning and start to reread.