Meg saw things differently. And as I had come to learn over the last several weeks of shouting and crying and pleading and futile attempts at reasoning, her opinion was the only one that mattered. “I’m having the baby,” she declared.
My mom didn’t say anything. Neither did her sister Mabel. Neither did I. I was still so, so mad.
“I feel good,” she said. “Better than I have in a long time. All I have to do is hold out another seven or so months, and then I’ll go right back on treatment. I promise.”
“But, Megan,” her mother said, “you know how quickly things can change. Seven months is a very long time when it comes to cancer.”
“I don’t care.”
Her mother shook her head and glared at me. Me, the asshole who knocked up her sick daughter. Believe me, anything she was thinking, I was thinking ten times worse.
“Everything is going to be fine,” Meg said. “You just have to trust me.”
Well, it wasn’t fine. Not even close.
But there was so much good stuff in our relationship too. So much. I loved her. I miss her. And her journal helps me remember. Everything is so out of control lately. I’m so tired, and it’s really hard to just think. Sometimes I worry I’m going to forget her. Forget the time we had together, as if it was some strange, wonderful/horrible dream. I can’t do that. I need to tell Hope all about Meg when she gets old enough. I can’t control the fact that Hope’s going to grow up without a mom, like I grew up without a dad, which really fucking sucks, but I can give her what I never had—as many details as possible.
When I read the journal, Meg’s words latch onto my tired brain, and the memories from those specific moments come flooding back. Not the big things, the mistakes. Believe me, I don’t need a journal to remind me of that. The journal helps with the small things—the things I’d forget without Meg’s notes, the things I need to tell Hope someday.
I wish I had more journals, more reminders.
Meg left this journal at my house sometime at the end of sophomore year, after she told me about the cancer but before we found out she was pregnant. I kept it without telling her. There’s writing in it up to the very last page, which is probably why she never missed it—she was ready to start a fresh one anyway. I couldn’t have known at the time that it would become my most valued possession in the entire freaking world.
I open it up.
May 20.
Ryden Brooks spoke to me in Honors English today.
I can’t do this again. The crush is absolutely, positively not coming back. I am going to carry out the rest of my high school days the same way I have for the past few months—in a rational, sane, Ryden-free mental state. Yup.
Reasons why I love this part:
1) I never knew Meg had a crush on me before we started going out. She never told me that, even after everything. So I know something I never would have known.
2) I love the “yup” at the end. Like she’s agreeing with herself. It’s really cute.
3) She wrote this entry the day we met. She goes on to document exactly what we said to each other. Which means our crazy conversation in Mr. Wheeler’s class meant something to her too.
I keep reading, and it’s like a play button has been pressed in my mind.
“There’s gum on that chair.” Those were the first words she ever said to me.
I froze, my ass hovering above the seat, and looked over to find myself staring into the darkest pair of eyes I’d ever seen.
I zoomed out from the eyes a little and found they were attached to a girl. Her hair was just as dark as her eyes, but her skin was pale. Really pale. Like, Styrofoam-marshmallow-Casper-the-Friendly-Ghost pale.
She was gorgeous.
And she was smiling at me.
Wait, scratch that. She was laughing at me.
“What?” I asked, starting to feel kind of angry. I wasn’t used to getting this kind of reaction from anyone—especially not girls.
“Nothing.” She grinned. “You just look kind of…confused.”
“Huh?”
She nodded in the direction of my still-frozen-in-midair butt.
Oh. Right.
I guess I did look a little mental, squatting over the chair and ogling this girl like she was a topless supermodel, when all she’d been trying to do was save me from sitting in a wad of Bubble Yum.
I straightened up. “Sorry. And, uh, thanks.”
“No problem.”
I switched my chair with the chair from an empty desk nearby and tore a page out of my notebook to alert any future unsuspecting asses who wouldn’t be lucky enough to have a pair of mysterious, dark eyes looking out for them.
Don’t sit. I wrote. Gum. I was about to tear it out of the book and put it on the chair when a little giggle stopped me. She was laughing at me again. What was with this girl?
I sighed. “What now?”
“What are you, a caveman?” she asked. “Don’t sit. Sit bad. Gum bad.”
She was putting on a kind of gruff voice, her eyebrows pulled together, her shoulders hunched. She was totally making fun of me. I should’ve been pissed. Normally I would have been pissed. But it was funny. She was funny.
“What’s your name?” I blurted out like an idiot.