I giggle, my noise blending in with the pan flute. I do her the favor of not arguing with her about being near death. I could probably pick Layla up and throw her, and I’m not exactly the picture of health myself.
“So you know by”—Layla takes a deep breath, and closes her eyes—“feeling a little empty if you’re apart more than a day or two, like half your self wandered off without permission. By needing them closer even when they’re right inside you, by knowing the smell of their skin and being able to sort it out from your own, by sharing a glance and saying the world, by feeling like nobody will ever know you like they do, but being a little sad that there’s nothing more you can share. Because in the end it’s just you who has to be enough.”
She opens her eyes and smiles at me, slow and quiet, and I think she’s either read all the romance books in the world or there’s someone out there she needs to say something to before she dies. Either way, she’s put words to something I couldn’t, no matter how many lists I made. And maybe I need to add something to my last column of things I know, and that is that I messed up everything.
Heath didn’t want me by his side; he wanted whoever the girl with the highest GPA was, something to balance his own with. He wanted a girl who wanted the same things he did—to look like the best, the brightest, a clean, shining example of a good teen.
Isaac didn’t care about that. He wanted me, actually me, with the hard edges and all. He wanted it enough to scratch our names in rock next to pictures that had lasted a thousand years. And our names probably would too, for the people after us to read. And the people after them. Isaac and Sasha, next to each other. Forever. It looks like that’s the one bit of me that is going to be around for a while; all the supposedly good things I’ve tried to do are captured on a grade card for a girl who won’t make it to college, while a bad thing a boy did for me is going to say I existed beside him.
And I tried to erase it.
Layla is still watching me, waiting for an answer.
“Yeah,” I finally say. “I think I am in love.”
The words feel heavy, like a deep B flat. They’re powerful and all-encompassing, demanding my throat close up, threatening to make me cry. They matter more than a lot of things, I realize now. More than the bloodred As on my papers or a weighted GPA or Sasha Stone always being number one.
I smile again, thinking of Isaac with his middle finger up in the air, which leads to thoughts of his hands, and my mind wanders further. Future Sasha Stone and all her plans have been derailed, a train gone off the track as surely as if it tried to use the trestle bridge and collapsed into a burning heap of twisted metal at the bottom of the ravine. And if Sasha Stone doesn’t need to worry about being rewarded for anything, maybe Shanna Stone should have her way, in the little time we have left.
My breath catches in my constricted throat, a small sob emerging. Layla reaches over to squeeze my hand in the dim light, and I finally do relax, sliding down into meditation not to the sound of the sea breeze, but the quiet clicking of her mechanically pumping heart.
Will the LVAD hurt you?
Don’t k[no]w
Are you scared?
Not s(ur)e.
twenty-three
“Holy shit balls, dude.”
Brooke’s voice is loud in the cardiac center common room, like it could knock over furniture. Josephine looks up from her laptop, Nadine from a game of solitaire. Layla jumps, almost knocking over her bottle of nail polish. I’m on my feet in a second, highly aware that my friend from the outside is too alive, too vibrant for them. Already the room seems small with Brooke in it, her ponytail thick and healthy, her legs strong and sure underneath her.
“Hey.” I grab her by the elbow and steer her down the hall toward my room.
“I mean, your face,” Brooke keeps going. “Dog turds on a stick. I thought I was ready for it, but . . .”
“Thanks a lot,” I tell her.
“Can I touch your stitches?” she asks as I close my door behind her. “I’ll wash my hands first.”
“Sure,” I tell her. “As long as you brought it.”
Brooke flops onto my bed, her face suddenly serious. “Yeah, we’ve gotta talk about that.”
I cross my arms. “What? It didn’t work?”
Mom and Dad still have me on a no-phone diet, and they’re stricter than even the nurses with our individual nutrition plans. But Brooke’s old cell was the same model as mine, and she should’ve been able to power it up, call an activation line, punch in my number and passcode and voilà—my phone is restored to me without parental assistance or permission.
“It worked fine,” Brooke says, reaching into her pocket to pull it out.
“So what do we need to talk about?”
She switches it back and forth in her hands before answering me, her teeth clamping on her bottom lip. “I read your texts.”
I sit down on Amanda’s rolling chair, hard enough to send it back into the wall. “You did what?”
“I thought it might be smart, after everything that happened,” she says. “I didn’t know if there might be anything on here that would . . . upset you.”
“You didn’t pause to consider that maybe you reading my texts might be equally upsetting?”
“Sasha . . .” Brooke lets my name out in a sigh, like she’s giving something up. “I saw. When you went out the window. Lilly and I both, we . . . we saw you reading a text and then you—”
“And then I jumped out the window,” I interrupt. “I remember. I also remember that you called me a bitch.”
Brooke picks at the case on the phone, an older one of hers that she had made. Me, Brooke, and Lilly at band camp sophomore year, arms around one another, sweaty tank tops stuck to our skin in patches.
“I’m sorry about that,” she finally says. “But you know what? You kind of are a bitch, dude. But I don’t care, because you’re also smart and funny, and kind of a musical genius. So whatever. If you’re a little bit of a bitch too, then fine, I’ll take you that way. Because honestly the person you’re the biggest bitch to is yourself, Sasha Stone.
“You’ve always pushed yourself to your limits and never cut yourself any slack. I think you demand perfection out of yourself and everyone around you, and sometimes we fail you, and sometimes you fail yourself. And I think you hate that more than anything.”
We sit quietly together for a minute, the clock ticking off our breaths. Mine are coming in short bursts, analyzing the portrait of the person Brooke just painted for me. This is how I look to her. This is what a bitch is. Maybe being one isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Brooke powers on the phone, finally looking up at me.
“So you and Isaac Harver, huh?”
I feel a tick in my chest, the upbeat of a tempo change. “Did he text me?”
“Um, like a hundred times,” she says, thumbing through my messages.
“And you read them?” I feel a flush rising, embarrassment beating out anger.
“Yep,” Brooke says. “The newer ones aren’t all that interesting. But some of the old ones . . . I mean, wow. Who needs YouTube?”