Jackie just stared at the front of the class, her eyes searching for some clue to the answer to the question, searching for some way out.
“Jackie!” Mrs. Markowitz yelled, grabbing Jackie by the shoulder and shaking it with more force than such a diminutive person should have been able to muster.
“JACKIE!”
Jackie opened her eyes and saw her sister. Megan was gently shaking Jackie’s shoulder and whispering her name, trying to wake her from a dream.
It took a minute for Jackie’s head to clear and to remember where she was and what was going on.
“Huh? What time is it?”
“It’s like two in the morning,” Megan whispered, “but listen!”
Jackie went still and listened. She heard laughing. No, crying. No, something else. “What is that?”
“I think it must be Dad. I’m scared.”
“C’mon,” Jackie said, taking her sister by the hand. They slunk out of the bedroom into the pitch-black hallway. They edged along the wall, moving closer to the sound until they were outside their father’s study. As soon as they got there, Jackie recognized the noise for what it was. Her parents were making love.
Jackie wasn’t sure how she knew, since she had never even kissed a boy, but there was no mistaking it. She looked at Megan and saw that her sister had figured it out, too.
“Gross!” Megan said.
“Sssh,” Jackie told her, and led them both back to Jackie’s room. They crawled back into bed together, and in a matter of moments Megan had fallen back asleep. Jackie lay awake for a while longer and smiled for the first time in that long, miserable day. If her parents were still able to make love, maybe her father’s illness wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Maybe everything would be okay.
***
Glio—the name by which the high-grade glioblastoma tumor now thought of itself—didn’t know what was happening, but it was lighting up Jared’s brain like a football stadium at night.Glio really, really, really liked it. He stopped to watch.
It was the first time Glio thought of itself in the masculine. “I am he,” it said, or he said, to no one in particular. Or would have said had he been able to form words or even make sounds.
The show ended in one ginormous explosion of color and light, then faded like the evening sky on the most perfect night. Glio sat in wonder for a moment before returning to the work at hand, picking off his host’s memories one by one—the sheriff’s badge Jared got for his third birthday, a big dog biting him on the cheek when he was six, running away from his family at an amusement park when he was ten because his cousin was teasing him about his fear of roller coasters. Buoyed by the light show, Glio’s hunger intensified. It was a feast to end all feasts.
The pièce de résistance was Jared’s first real kiss. He was thirteen years old, on vacation with his parents at some long-forgotten resort in the Berkshires. The girl’s lips were covered in a fruity gloss that surprised Glio, just as it had surprised Jared. He expected them to be moist with saliva, not sticky with raspberry. He could feel the gloss adhere to his own lips, or Glio’s idea of lips, holding him in place, making the kiss last. The girl’s name was lost to Jared in the ebb of time, but Glio found it. Gail.
He could see her face: a wide mouth, eyes so rich in color they were almost lavender, and a button nose. Glio had no way of knowing that the memory had been enhanced by Jared’s brain. But it didn’t matter. It was like manna from heaven.
After the kiss was over, the memory consumed, Glio drifted off into the hypothalamus and, like his host, fell asleep.
***
Hazel Huck’s shoulders sagged as she stared at her computer screen.
“A million dollars,” she said aloud to her empty bedroom.
From the very beginning, Hazel’s plan had been to raise money to purchase Jared on eBay and then return him to his family, to allow him to die with dignity, comfort, and cash. She had succeeded in getting pledges totaling $15,000 from her online gaming friends. She had called in every favor—sold every piece of handcrafted virtual jewelry, hired her level sixty-five druid out for future quests, and sold every ingot of gold in her war chest for pennies on the dollar. It was a remarkable feat for a seventeen-year-old girl.
And then it went viral.
All of a sudden, Warcraft characters Hazel had never met were wearing “Save Jared” T-shirts over their chain mail and leather armor. There were player vs. player melees in which the losing party would agree to donate X dollars to the cause.