Invincible (7 page)

“The vultures are out there again,” I say. Caleb gets up and looks out the window at the news vans below. I can't actually get over to the window; I only know they're there because I saw it on TV.

“What is it this time?” he says.

“Three-year-old kid got shot in a drive-by.”

Caleb crosses himself and mutters a prayer under his breath. We could talk about how sad it is, but what's the use? This whole building is full of sad.

Stella looks up from her phone. “Evie, you just got your painkillers, right?”

“You were right here when Moskowitz gave them to me, like, ten minutes ago.”

“And your next dose is in, what, four hours? I mean, three hours and fifty minutes?”

“Yeah. So?”

“Caleb,” she says. “It's time.”

“Really?” He looks scared.

“Time for what?” I say.

“Are you sure?” Caleb says.

“Of course I'm sure, Caleb. What a stupid question. You know I'm always sure. Now come on. We only have three hours and forty-nine minutes.”

He doesn't move. He looks paralyzed. I think for a moment he's under one of his brain tumor spells, but then he says, “I don't know, Stella. I don't think it's a good idea.”

“Remember,” Stella says gently, seriously. “It's for Evie. We're doing this for Evie.”

He nods. He says, “Okay.”

Stella slides off my bed, shuffles to the door, and looks both ways. “Clear,” she says, and disappears out the door.

“What's going on?” I say. Caleb just shrugs and smiles his sweet smile.

Stella returns with a wheelchair. “Uh-oh,” I say, knowing who it's intended for.

“Uh-oh is right,” Stella says. “Now how do we get you in this thing?”

“First you have to tell me what's going on. Where are you taking me?”

“Nope, don't have to tell you. That's part of the deal.”

“What deal?”

“The deal you made when you became my friend. Friendship with me comes with the agreement that I am allowed and expected to blow your mind on a regular basis, no questions asked. Don't you remember signing that contract?”

“Come on, you guys,” Caleb whines. “Hurry up.” Whatever rule-breaking is about to ensue must be killing him.

“You heard the man,” Stella says. “Hurry up.”

I don't know what to say. This could end up being the very best or very worst thing that could happen to me. I look into her bright black eyes: “Seriously, Evie,” and for a moment all her hard edges soften. “What have we got to lose?” She smiles, and for a second I see the young girl in her, and maybe even a little bit of fear.

“Okay,” I say. What have I got to lose?

I instruct Caleb and Stella on how to handle my leg and various attachments. Stella is so gentle as she pulls the IV for the bag of fluids out of my port. “For the next few hours, you can drink water like a normal person, can't you?” she says.

As Caleb hoists me into the chair, my pajama pants snag and pull all the way down, giving them a full view of
everything
. Stella breaks down laughing and Caleb nearly drops me. “I'm sorry that had to be your first experience with a vagina,” I say, pulling up my pajamas, and that makes Stella laugh even harder.

“I'm going to pee my pants!” she cries.

“I'm going to pee my catheter,” I say, and even Caleb has to laugh at that, even though he's finding it impossible to look me in the eyes. Only with them am I ever this funny.

“Oh no, I'm crying,” Stella says. “Is my makeup smearing?”

“We have to hurry,” Caleb says, as if being all business will cure his embarrassment.

“Yes,” Stella agrees, collecting herself. “Phase two: Operation Spring-a-Leak.” That makes us crack up again, but Caleb's already on the move toward the door.

“I'm going to do this,” he says, more to himself than to us.

“It's just like acting,” Stella says. “You love acting. Think of this as your Broadway debut. Pretend you're Brad Pitt playing a ninja.”

He takes a deep breath and walks out the door. “Jill,” we hear him call in the direction of the nurses' station down the hall. “Can I talk to you?”

“Are you ready?” Stella asks me.

“I have no idea.”

She smiles. “Good answer.”

She pushes me to the door and we listen to Caleb explain to Nurse Jill that he is severely constipated and hasn't pooped in five days and can he please have a laxative? It takes all of our self-control to keep from bursting out laughing. We pop our heads out the door and Caleb gives a thumbs-up when Jill disappears into the nurses' office, then Stella pushes me down the hall in the other direction toward the elevators. She hits the down button and we wait there for what seems like forever, and I realize this is the most alive I've felt in a long time. That unfamiliar buzz in my blood is adrenaline. I didn't know my body could even make adrenaline anymore.

The elevator arrives right as Jill comes back out of the nurses' office with Caleb's laxative, and we get in just in time.

We're both breathing hard, me from excitement, but Stella seems genuinely out of breath.

“What's up?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says, but her face is pale and she's leaning on the side of the elevator. I've seen her sick before, but somehow she always managed to maintain an aura of fierceness, even when she was puking, even when she was stumbling around, tired and weak. But that reliable fierceness has suddenly faded, and now Stella just seems sick.

“No, really,” I say. “You don't look good. We should go back.”

“No!” she says with all her strength. “We're not going back. Not yet. You need this.”

“Okay,” I say. I know not to argue with Stella.

The elevator opens and she pushes me out. Luckily, the front desk doesn't face the elevators and everyone's preoccupied with the frenzy of reporters and news cameras, so we're free to sneak through the side door without anyone noticing. When we get outside, the night is crisp and clear. Stella seems energized by the fresh air, her weariness gone as quickly as it came. She pushes me around the side of the building, down Fifty-Second Street, and under the freeway and BART tracks. She waves in the direction of a big blue van idling across the street, and it makes a U-turn and pulls up right in front of us.

The guy who gets out of the driver's seat is thin and well-dressed in a sweater-vest and bow tie, with a wide smile that immediately puts me at ease. “This is Cole.” Stella beams.

“I feel a little underdressed,” I say. I am wearing a ratty old T-shirt and pajama pants with sledding penguins on them.

“You look great,” Cole says with a surprisingly girlish voice. He's so convincing as a boy, I almost forgot he's not quite one, at least not physically.

“Cancer chic,” Stella says.

They roll me up a makeshift ramp into the back of the van. “This is Vincent,” Cole says.

“The van?” I say.

“Yeah,” Cole says. “As in van Gogh.”

“Get it?” Stella says. “Van.
Go
.” They laugh at the bad joke together and I ache for Will, for these silly things shared by people in love.

The inside of the van is cozy with a futon mattress, a beanbag chair and assorted cushions on an orange shag carpet. Stella pushes them aside to make room for my chair, then covers me with a blanket that smells faintly of mildew.

“Put your brakes on, Scooter,” Stella says. “We're going for a ride.”

“Is that a disco ball?” I say, noticing a sparkling orb hanging from the ceiling.

“It most definitely is a disco ball,” Stella answers.

“You never know when you're going to need to dance,” Cole says.

“How am I supposed to keep from falling over?”

“Watch this,” Stella says. She pulls a giant clump of tangled bungee cords out of a plastic bag, hands half of them to Cole, and they start attaching my chair to door handles, metal hooks, anything they can find that's solid. Pretty soon I'm sitting in the middle of an intricate web that looks like it was spun by a deranged spider. Stella gives my chair a test push and it barely budges.

“Wow,” I say.

“A feat of engineering,” Stella agrees.

“You feel safe?” Cole says.

“As safe as I'm going to.”

“Then let's get the hell out of here,” Stella says. She slams the back doors closed and they get in their seats in the front.

“Wait a minute,” I say. “Why am I facing the back? I can't see anything.”

“Exactly,” Stella says. I can hear the evil grin in her voice.

“Where are we going?”

“That's a surprise, obviously,” she says. “Duh.”

“Did you really just say ‘duh'?” She doesn't answer. I feel the car pulling out of the parking lot into the street. “You're basically kidnapping me, you know.”

“Technically, I think Cole's kidnapping both of us,” Stella says.

“Sorry for kidnapping you,” Cole says. “Are you okay back there?”

“Yeah. It's kind of bouncy.”

“Are you going to puke?” Stella says.

“Probably not. Considering the fact that I'm supposed to die in a few weeks, I feel surprisingly good.”

“La-la-la-la!” Cole sing-screams loudly.

“Cole doesn't like it when we talk about dying.”

“Oh, sorry.”

Sometimes I forget how uncomfortable normal people get when we joke about being sick. They don't understand that turning it into a joke is sometimes the only thing that makes it bearable.

“So,” Stella says. “I have a very important question for you. What kind of music do you like?”

“Music? I don't know. I never really thought about it. I guess I just listen to whatever's on the radio.”

“No,” she says. “No no no no no no no. That is unacceptable.”

“Definitely unacceptable,” Cole agrees. “If Stella didn't love you so much, I might have to kick you out of this van.”

“Yet it is exactly what I was afraid of,” Stella continues. “That's why I prepared a very important lesson for you. And it is centered around this mix CD. You can't see it because you're tied up and looking at the windowless back door of a kidnapping van, but I am at this moment holding up a mix CD that I carefully constructed for you. Because I care about you, Evie. I care about your musical salvation.”

“Okay,” I say.

“That's it? Okay? Say it with a little more enthusiasm.”

“Okay!” I shout.

“Louder!”

“Okay!!!”

“That's better. Now. I know you're familiar with angsty white boys singing about boy stuff and poppy girls with male producers showcasing their boobs instead of their brains. Right?”

“Sure.”

“Forget them,” she says with a snarl. “Listen to this. Girls in combat books and fishnets picking up guitars and making their own music. Music for
us
. Do you understand?”

“I think so?”

“No, I don't think you understand. Hence the need for examples. Hence the need for this mix. Are you ready?”

“Yes?”

“Without further ado, song number one from Stella's Impossibly Awesome Kick-Ass Girl Mix.” As she inserts the CD into the stereo, she adds, “You'll like this one. It's about cheerleaders and football and shit.”

Simple drums and a driving baseline start the song. A girl's thin voice starts singing about a pep rally, about teenage dreams, something about white privilege. Then the guitars come in and the song really starts rocking. Stella starts singing along in her beautiful, fierce voice—about going crazy, about living big despite it all. The music is so loud I can feel it in my bones. I can feel it in my poisoned marrow.

“Do you hear that?” Stella screams. “Do you hear that rage? She's so fucking strong. She's so fucking
angry
.” All I can see are the locked van doors in front of me, but I suddenly feel freer than I've felt in a really long time.

When the song's over, I realize I'm shaking. But not because I'm cold. Not because I'm sick.

“This song is, like, my anthem,” Stella says. “It's all about questioning authority. Not believing blindly just because someone with power tells you something's true. That's all high school is. Doing things blindly. Following the rules. Wearing their stupid uniforms and cheering at their stupid games, as if that's the shit that's really important.” Maybe I'm supposed to be offended. Maybe I'm supposed to be pissed at Stella for implying I'm one of the high school sheep for being a cheerleader. But I'm too grateful to be mad at her.

“I love it,” I say.

“I knew you would. I knew it. That singer was in a band with Carrie Brownstein. You know Carrie Brownstein? From
Portlandia
? Oh my god, I am so in love with her. Sorry, Cole, but she's my free ticket. We each get a free ticket, right? Like, the one person we're allowed to sleep with and we'll be forgiven?”

“Mine's my eighth-grade history teacher,” Cole says. “She had this really sexy lisp that I couldn't get enough of. I loved it when we covered the Civil Rights era because she had to say ‘Mississippi' all the time.”

“That's weird,” Stella says. “But whatever.” The next song she describes as a love song, but it's got none of the sentimental cheese you hear on the radio. It's about the hard parts of love, the ambiguities, the complicated stuff people don't usually sing about.

“These are real women playing real instruments making real music they wrote themselves,” Stella says. “They don't all have perfect voices; you can hear them straining sometimes, but that's what makes them
real
. That's what makes it beautiful.”

I can feel the car going up a hill. Stella gets quiet for the next few songs, speaking only to tell me who the artist is and a little history. As I listen to a gorgeous song that's nothing but an acoustic guitar, cello, and haunting voice, she says, “This one is from 1992. We weren't even
born
yet. Can you believe it? Everything cool has happened already.”