Dessert First (28 page)

I left a note for Mom, holding the pen in two fingers like half a set of chopsticks, then shot her and Dad thumb-typed text messages:
Hurt my hand at school. Having it checked out. I'll text later.

I got on my bike to go to BART, which would take me to San Francisco, except I couldn't grip the handlebars with my right hand. So I had to hold on with my thumb and first finger, like an old lady pinching a teacup handle. Going over the speed bump on Fairmount, my hand slipped and I bumped the black and purple part. My vision went dark, and I pulled over, as I almost passed out from pain. Ouch.

After the BART and Muni ride, by the time I got to UCSF, it was almost 7
P.M.
Turned out, I didn't actually know how to check into a hospital as a patient. My massive hospital experience was with Beep already admitted, or sprinting to the front of the line at the emergency room over at Children's Oakland, pushing him in his wheelchair, while we tried to stop a clotless-cancer-kid nosebleed.

Seven
P.M.
was the change of shift for the PICU nurses, so I figured I'd wander up, ambush one I knew coming off shift, and get help to sort it out. Nurses help people for a living.

My right hand was a throbbing mess. The black and purple had spread down the palm almost to my wrist, and my little and ring fingers were hugely swollen.

The first person I saw coming off shift was Chestopher, my (and Beep's) favorite. Score.

“Hey.” I waved urgently with my left hand, from the waiting room outside the nurses' station.

“Hi.” Chestopher gave me a big smile, like it was totally normal to get visits from dead people's relatives at work. “Kat.” I hadn't seen him in months, but he remembered my name. He still had gorgeous long eyelashes. “How are you?”

“Bad.” I sniffled. Then, like a complete moron, I tried to wipe the tears with my smashed right hand, which hurt, so I cried harder. Then I started blubbering. “I beat up a girl, and it was scary, and I'm mad at everybody and I MISS BEEP.” Practically howling.

He got me tissues, which of course they have in the PICU waiting room. “What happened?”

“I got in a fight with a girl at school and hurt my hand, and now it has this huge bruise.” I showed it to him. “It's not—” I swallowed and my voice came out quavery, “—leukemia, right?”

He touched it gently, and I yelped. “Did this happen today?

I nodded.

“Ever have problems before with excessive bruising?”

I thought back. My hand throbbed. “No.”

“Bloody noses? Tiredness? Joint pain? Swelling?”

I shook my head each time.

“Can you move your fingers? Make a fist?”

I tried. They barely bent on the little finger side, and it hurt too much. “No.”

“I have some good news, and some bad news.”

“Which is?” Throb.

“I'm pretty sure it's not leukemia.”

“Okay.” Throb. That was a relief, but I had this weird mixed feeling. If it was leukemia, life would somehow make sense.

“But you need to get this looked at by a doc. You might have broken your hand.”

• • •

Even though I wasn't an official patient yet, Chestopher went to get ice. “Keep it elevated.” He put his own hand on the top of his head to demonstrate. So I put my hand up, in demented teapot pose, until he got back with the plastic bag of ice.

He handed it to me. “Where are your mom and dad?”

Uh oh. “Still in the East Bay.” Assuming Dad was home from work.

“Do they know you're here?”

“Sort of.” I looked behind him at some poster about diabetes, which had gotten interesting.

“Sort of?”

I was worried about how to get home and exactly how things would go after that. Maybe, since I might have a broken hand, they'd let me stay at the hospital overnight. I could use a night off from my life. “I couldn't get through, so I left them a message I was getting my hand checked out.”

“Maybe we'd better try them again.”

“Or we
could
figure out exactly what's wrong first, so they'll have totally accurate news and won't worry unnecessarily.”

“They're probably already worried.” Conversations with grownups always skitter off in the wrong direction.

They discourage loud cell phone conversations in the PICU, even out at the nurses' station. I went outside to call, where there was better reception anyway. Great. First, my favorite boy in the universe shared his deepest family secret, and thought I called him a liar. Then I beat up a terrorized girl, elbowed my favorite teacher in the nuts, and broke my hand. Might as well finish the great day as a runaway, calling the world's most freaked-out Mom. Chestopher came along for moral support.

Mom was predictably unhinged when I told her about what happened and where I was. When I finished, Chestopher took my phone and gently talked Mom down off the roofline, promising he'd wait with me until they got here.

We went back to the PICU waiting room, my home away from home, for the forty minutes it took Mom and Dad to drive in from Albany. My hand throbbed worse, even with the ice, and was just as swollen.

So he wouldn't think I was a complete dork, I told Chestopher the reason I was worried about leukemia. Beep seemed to get better after my transplant, but then got worse again. “I thought maybe he got cancer the second time from me.”

“No, Kat,” Chestopher said. “We test cells before we give them to patients. You didn't have leukemia. Beep's cancer came back from his body, not yours.”

So I asked him about the other thing I'd worried about for months. “Beep got graft-versus-host. At the end.”

Chestopher nodded.

“So.” I cleared my throat. “It can be serious, you know?” I'd looked it up online. It can be fatal. “Did my bone marrow make Beep sicker?” Out of nowhere, I was crying again.

Chestopher put his arm around me, like I was a little kid. “No. Beep was lucky. You were a good match. Beep had a really, really mild case of graft-versus-host.”

“Everybody called it ‘mild,' but I don't know what that means.” I told Chestopher about the
Johns Hopkins Patients' Guide to Leukemia
. How it called even heart failure “mild.”

“Not like that. Beep's was about the mildest I've seen. Your transplant didn't make him sick, Kat. You just gave everybody more time to say good-bye.”

I thought about that for a while and cried some more. But I felt better, as if a huge weight lifted off me. I'd have to find something else to feel bad about. “It was scary, when I beat up that girl. I could have killed her.”

“Why'd you get in a fight?”

“She started it. Then, when I tried not to fight, she said I was a quitter—like my brother.”

“She called
Beep
a quitter?”

I nodded.

“She's lucky you didn't kill her.” Chestopher is some kind of nonviolent Buddhist, but he didn't sound bothered about my beating up the girl who called Beep a quitter.

“My hand
really
hurts,” I said after a silence. “Maybe this is it for my boxing career.”

He didn't laugh, but he did smile. “Retire as a prizefighter, undefeated?”

“Yeah. My prize is dealing with Mom when she gets here.”

• • •

When Mom and Dad arrived, it wasn't that bad. I guess when you've already lost one kid to leukemia and one of your other kids goes to the hospital with excessive bruising, it's a huge relief to find out she's just a thug—not, you know, dying. (Perspective. A good thing, but it doesn't come factory installed. When someone in your family gets cancer, it's the expensive upgrade.)

Chestopher took Mom aside while Dad was looking at my hand. Maybe telling her to go easy on me, because I was an even bigger moron than I seemed—thinking my bone marrow had killed Beep.

Of course, I was at the wrong part of the hospital, up at the pediatric intensive care unit, because instead I needed to go to an “emergency room,” which was different. Weird, because you'd have thought cancer equals emergency, but bruised hand from punching a girl equals take-a-number-dumbass ward. Plus, although UCSF was fine for a little thing like fatal cancer, it turned out our insurance didn't cover a “routine” emergency room visit there, and instead we had to go to the ER at Children's Hospital in Oakland, back over near where we lived. So we piled into our car, me with my ice bag.

“Kat,” Mom turned around to look at me in the back seat while Dad drove us back. “Your bone marrow didn't make Beep sick.” Ah. Favorite nurse to the rescue.

“I know. Chestopher explained.”

“Honey—” Mom started.

“Please. My hand hurts, and I feel like a total idiot. Can we talk about this some other time?” Say, when the sun burns out? Basically, about when I stop feeling like an idiot.

It turned out “emergency room” really was the take-a-number-dumbass ward, at least on a busy night when you don't sprint to the head of the line because you have a bleeding clotless cancer kid with you. Dad drove us to Children's Hospital in Oakland, where we sat in the ER waiting room for
five hours
while their docs took care of more urgent cases—car accidents, gunshots, and possibly even kids bored to the edge of death by having to repeat a grade because they didn't finish their make-up papers.

Here's an ultimate torture: At the end of the day you did the stupidest things in your whole life, sit for hours on a cheap plastic chair in a crowded waiting room full of coughing strangers and a blaring TV on the wall, with a clueless Dad and a Mom with an anxiety disorder who keeps babbling “Was the other girl permanently injured? Hank, can they sue us? Do you think you'll get
expelled
?”

Then, with the embarrassment setting way past please-make-me-die-
now
, dictate, out loud, apologies for your Dad to write out on a legal pad. Because, of course, your useless writing hand hurts too much and your apology notes are due tomorrow.

Surprisingly, Dad was reasonably cool about that. We went outside for twenty minutes, so I didn't have to stumble through the whole thing in front of thirty tubercular patient-wannabes.

When I finally got x-rayed, after midnight, the film showed a jagged broken bone below the little finger, and a smaller break in the bone below the ring finger. The Doc, a tired-looking young guy who needed a shave, said it was a “boxer's fracture,” usually caused by punching something hard with a closed fist, turning the nice straight hand bones into splinters. Mine was apparently more messed up than most.

“I might have punched a few times, after it broke,” I said.

“How'd you manage that?”

“I'm—” I shrugged. “I'm—enthusiastic.”

They gave me Vicodin for the pain and put me in a splint and cast, which covered everything except my fingertips, and told me to keep the broken hand “elevated” above my heart, which was easy: After my blowup with Evan, my heart was sunken or missing completely.

When you want to overhear your parents (instead of standard mode, ignoring them when their lips are moving) pretend to fall asleep in the back seat of the car. Flop over, relax your face, and open your mouth into a big vacant O, like a dead goldfish. That's what I did on the drive home.

The dead goldfish face was key. It made me look like a kid, instead of a teenager who cared how she looked. It triggered parent suspicion-reducing awww-memories of when I was too little to back talk, and mouth-open drooling was normal.

“Kat?” Mom said, from the front.

I kept silently dead gold-fishing.

“Kat, honey? Are you asleep?”

The Vicodin made me loopy, but not loopy enough to answer back. The one skill I did get from skipping homework was how to fake the easy tests.

“She's out,” Mom pronounced.

“No kidding,” Dad said, driving. “With Vicodin on board.”

“This is awful. She's
beating girls up
.” Mom's tone said that was probably the worst thing, ever.

“At least she's acting out,” Dad said. “Not pretending nothing is wrong.”

“She's flunking out.” Mom used her absolute doom voice.

“Kat's smart.” Dad let out a long noisy breath, the background soundtrack for talking to Mom about problems. “She'll be okay. If she has to repeat a grade, it won't be the end of the world.”

More like the end of the universe, if you ask me.

He went on. “It's Rachel I worry about.”

“Me too,” Mom said. “It's really scary that she calls herself ‘drowning girl' online. Like she's dying.”

“I thought you said she closed that Facebook account.”

“She still uses it as her email.”

Wait.
What?
I could barely keep dead-goldfishing, as my relaxed-O open mouth turned into a shocked-O. Rachel was Drowningirl? Drowningirl was Rachel? I opened my eyes into slits, to make sure this wasn't some nightmare hallucination caused by prescription painkillers. No such luck. We were stopped at a red light on Shattuck, alone on the otherwise empty dark street. Mom and Dad were, in fact, in the front seat talking about Rachel's online identity.

When we got home, I pretended to wake up, groggy. It was easy. I had the confused, disoriented, sleep-stupid stumbling bit nailed, without even trying.

Half an hour later, upstairs in my bedroom, I had more trouble imitating sleep. My hand ached, even through the Vicodin. I almost wished they'd given me Versed instead, like Beep used to take: Sure, it makes you hiccup, but the side effect is memory loss—at least it might make me forget what I'd heard.

Rachel was Drowningirl. Drowningirl was Rachel. My sister, who'd been the absolute, ultimate bitch to me, was also my secret friend, the only person whose life was twice as miserable as mine. The girl I had more compassion for than anyone.