“Listen to you, Sasha Stone,” he says, as I wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark. “A punk haircut and bribing people with drugs. What’s next?”
“This,” I say, and press myself up against him. He kisses back, his hands wandering under my shirt for a second before he pulls away. My body knows what to do because it’s done it before, but I’ve never been fully present in these moments with him. My skin wants to leap off my skeleton, wrap itself around him.
“Is this a good idea?” he asks again.
“I told you, I took care of the nurse. She’s on shift for the rest of—”
“No,” he cuts me off. “I mean this. You and me doing . . . this.” He tightens his hands on my body like he’s not sure what he wants the answer to be.
“Yeah, it’s fine,” I say, leaning in again.
“I won’t hurt you or anything, right?” he asks, pulling back.
“No, it’s okay,” I tell him, and then I’m on the bed and he’s with me.
We’ve never done it in a bed, and it’s different. All my hazy memories from Shanna are desperate, wind in our faces and dirt on our backs. But here and now Isaac is different with me, like maybe he knows it’s actually me, not her. He’s cautious and sweet, gentle in a way that changes how I respond. It’s not the crazy, grasping, defiant competition like it is for Shanna. It’s soft and kind and we lie together afterward, something new as well. I curl against him, the prickles of my shorn scalp probably tickling his chest, but he doesn’t ask me to move.
“This is nice,” he says, one hand toying with the hair I have left.
“Yeah,” I have to agree, even though part of me doesn’t want to. I feel like every time before this was for Shanna. But what I just did . . . that was for me. And I liked it. Sasha Stone liked having sex with Isaac Harver. It feels like graffiti in my mind, something I can’t unsee.
“So what’s the surgery tomorrow?”
“It’s called an LVAD,” I tell him. “Basically it’s like a pump in my heart they put in to keep me going until a transplant becomes available.”
“How long does that take?”
I shrug, my naked shoulder moving against his chest. “Depends. You’ve got to have the same blood type as the donor, and be roughly the same age and weight. Plus the heart can’t be far away, because it can’t have stopped working within the last four hours. So you have to hope that someone near your age, weight, and with your blood type within a certain mile radius dies, and agreed to be an organ donor when they got their driver’s license. Even if they did, their family still has to approve and agree.”
“That’s fucked-up.”
“Yep,” I agree. “I have a pager that will go off if a heart becomes available for me, and I get rushed to the hospital for the transplant. I’m supposed to wear it at all times.”
Isaac’s brow furrows. “At all times?” He lifts our blanket to peer underneath.
“I think it’s in the pile of clothes on the floor,” I tell him.
“I guess you better go get it then,” he says, rolling over to pin me to the bed.
“You get it,” I tell him.
Neither of us gets it.
I walk Isaac to the back door afterward, where there’s a bit of lingering and kissing despite the cold rain starting to fall. I say something about him riding all the way back home in the weather but he shrugs it off, tells me it’s worth it and disappears into the dark like the antihero I have to remind myself he is. There’s a light coming from under Layla’s door, so I keep my promise, knocking before slipping into her room.
“Hey.” She looks up from her book, eyes heavy with the sleep she’s denying herself as she waits up for me.
“Hey,” I say back, trying to keep my tone light as I take the chair by her bed.
Layla looks awful. I didn’t know black people could go pale, but she definitely isn’t her normal skin tone, and her fingers are trembling in a way I don’t like as she sets aside her bodice-ripper paperback.
“So, dish,” she says, but I shake my head.
“You sure? You . . . sorry, but you look rough.”
“Says the girl with half her face sewn back on,” she shoots back.
“Which should carry even more weight,” I say.
“Meh.” She waves aside my concern. “I stayed up too late last night. Had to see if the heroine got her hero. Same story tonight, just in real life.”
“If you’re sure . . .”
“Yep, but first things first. Did you take care of the dirty laundry?”
“Literally and figuratively,” I nod.
“Okay.” She leans back in her bed, eyes closed. “Tell me your love story. What’s his name? How did you meet?”
I start slow, telling her about how my sister fell for him first, but I might be following suit. Her eyes get big and I know she assumes that’s why my twin threw me out a window, and I let her think it. I talk about Heath and our antiseptic relationship, how nothing he ever did touched me—and I mean that in all the ways.
Layla smiles at that. “So this Isaac, he your first?”
“Yeah,” I say, laying claim to it. “You ever?”
She smirks. “I wish. Mom’s been helicoptering me since I was in fifth grade. Even if there was a boy interested in having sex with a flat-chested girl who might die right in the middle, he’d also have to be okay with my mom standing right there with a defibrillator.”
I snort—there’s no other word for it—and Layla laughs along with me, though it leaves her short of breath.
“There’s somebody though, right?” I ask, and Layla shrugs, her stick-thin shoulders poking against the blanket as she does.
“Maybe there’s a boy,” she says. “Maybe I met him at a camp for kids like me, the kind where you don’t go for long hikes or do trust falls, because we were all fragile things. Maybe we write each other letters instead of texting, so that we’ve each got something that the other actually touched, in case it’s the last one that’ll come. Maybe he got his heart, and it’s a fine, strong one. Maybe he’s waiting on me so that we can meet again someday, the same people we were before, but now with more time ahead of us than what’s behind. Maybe that’s why I haven’t decided to die just yet. Maybe that’s my love story.”
“Yeah,” I say, thinking about my life, two stark columns of good and bad, yes and no. “Yeah, maybe.”
twenty-five
I could die today.
Technically I could die any day, for no reason at all, so it seems like the chances will be much higher when my veins are full of chemicals, my senses unresponsive, and my torso splayed open like the frog I dissected in seventh grade.