Localized.
I’d repeated the word to Pops the whole way home from Monday’s scans, until he asked if I wanted him to write it down. Dr. Giacherio had said it like good news, because it was. The cancer was in my leg and nowhere else.
Which was how I ended up in pre-op at seven-thirty Tuesday morning, catching about every third word the anesthesiologist said. He crouched beside my bed in a blue surgical cap and explained how he’d keep me asleep during the procedure. When he asked whether I had any questions, I looked at Dad. I had about eight hundred, but none of them seemed like the kind he could answer.
My gown gaped in the back, my clothes were sealed in a bag marked Patient Belongings, and my crutches leaned against the wall beneath the clock. At least the yellow hospital socks were warm.
Dad sat beside me with the signed consent form on his knee. His glasses came off and went back on twice before the anesthesiologist finished talking.
Maekynzie had arrived at six instead of getting ready for school, armed with gummy bears, face masks, and a phone charger long enough to reach across a gymnasium. Now she bounced one foot beneath the visitor chair, looking between me and the port diagram the surgeon had left on the tray table.
“Do you get to choose which side?” she asked.
“Not like picking an ear piercing,” I said. “They decide where it goes.”
“Right.” She folded the edge of the diagram back down. “That makes sense.”
She looked at the diagram again, then put it beside her bag. I wanted her there. I just didn’t know how to talk to her yet without thinking about the screenshot.
The anesthesiologist finished explaining what would happen, and Dad asked one more question. I tried to pay attention, but my eyes kept going back to his signature at the bottom of the form, the ink darker where he’d pressed too hard.
I knew why I needed the port. Dr. Giacherio had explained it, and Renata, one of the oncology nurses, had gone over it again. I was tired of understanding things I didn’t want to happen.
Maekynzie nudged the bag of gummy bears toward me before remembering I wasn’t supposed to eat before anesthesia.
“Right. Sorry.” She pulled them back, her cheeks flushing.
“Later,” I said. “Leave some for me.” She tucked them away and started untangling the phone charger instead.
She worked the cord through a knot that seemed to get tighter every time she pulled. She’d left her phone in her bag since she got here, even when it buzzed.
Dad noticed me watching her and reached for my hand. “You ready, Fiorellina?”
“No,” I said, looking down at our hands.
He squeezed mine and stayed beside the bed until the nurse came to take me through. I kept hold of his hand while she checked my wristband one more time.
When I woke up, a warm blanket covered me, and beneath the dressing below my right collarbone, a hard little bump ached like somebody had pressed a coin into me and left it there. I looked down at the bandage, then away, not quite ready to see what was underneath.
Dad rested a hand on my arm while I looked at the ceiling. I stayed that way until he asked whether I wanted some water.
By early afternoon, I was in room 614 on the oncology floor, wearing my leggings and Pops’ hoodie, unzipped to avoid the dressing. The waistband was twisted, but I didn’t feel like fixing it. Pops had packed my reindeer socks, and I’d put them on without arguing.
The nurses helped me settle into a recliner by the window, keeping my left leg supported. Outside, a car circled the gray parking lot while Renata checked the dressing and the tubing connected to my newly placed port.
Renata wore purple scrubs and smelled like hand sanitizer and cinnamon gum. She told me about her cat while she worked, explaining what she was checking before she touched anything.
“Everything looks good,” she said. “We’ll start with fluids and medicine to help prevent nausea. I’ll be checking on you, and I want you to tell me if anything feels wrong.”
I nodded while she adjusted the pump. The plan had been explained more than once, but seeing the equipment beside my chair made it feel different from hearing Dr. Giacherio talk about it in an office.
The first medication bags went up, one after another. I couldn’t stop staring at the deep, see-through red one.
“That’s doxorubicin,” Renata said. “Fair warning, it can turn your pee red for a day or so. Don’t panic. Just tell me.”
“Can you write the name down?” Maekynzie asked. “I’m not going to remember that.”
Renata pointed it out on the treatment sheet and reminded me I could ask questions whenever I needed to. Dad leaned over to read the name for himself.
The pump hummed, Dad moved his chair closer, and Maekynzie held her phone without looking at it. The red medication crept through the tubing, and I tried not to think about what it was doing once it reached me.
A little later, Renata asked if I wanted to meet another patient. I said yes before I could decide whether I meant it. When she returned with Lylah, the bracelets arrived first, jangling as she lifted a hand to wave.
She pushed a strand of her wavy lilac wig away from her face. Her hoodie was highlighter yellow, with a sunflower tattoo showing above one cuff, and pink fuzzy socks poked out beneath gray pajama pants. When she looked up, her violet eyes caught the light beneath a thick line of eyeliner.
“This is Lylah,” Renata said. “She’s in the room next door.”
Lylah stopped just inside the doorway. “Hi. Renata says you might want company. If I’m too much, kick me out.”
I studied Lylah’s socks. “Are those flamingos?”
“Llamas. Supposedly.” She lifted one foot to give me a better look.
Whatever the animals were supposed to be, they had long necks and tiny embroidered sunglasses. I moved my phone off the empty side of the tray table and nodded toward the visitor chair.
“Come in.”
Maekynzie offered Lylah the chair, and she tucked her feet underneath it like she’d come over to watch a movie.
“I’m in 612,” she said. “And before you ask, yes, this is my everyday level of subtlety.”
She glanced at my feet, where one reindeer sock stuck out from beneath the blanket.
“Reindeer in October. Bold. I respect it.”
“Pops packed them,” I said, pulling my foot back.
“Keep them. The other ones fall down.” She eyed the bags hanging beside me, then looked back at my face. “So. What are you in for?”
I looked at the medication moving through the tubing. “Ewing sarcoma. My femur.”
Lylah nodded without pretending she knew exactly what that meant for me. She told me she had leukemia and was being treated again after it came back. She’d first gotten sick at sixteen and finished treatment at eighteen. Now she was twenty, back in the room next to mine.
“I’m sorry,” I said, because every other possible response disappeared from my brain.
“Yeah. It sucks.” She glanced at Dad, then back at me. “I’d say it nicer, but there isn’t a nicer version.”
“You don’t need one,” Dad said. I hid a smile in my blanket.
By the time Lylah started complaining about hospital gelatin, I’d stopped watching the pump. She had strong opinions about the green kind, which she claimed was neither lime nor any other substance found in nature. Maekynzie argued that orange was worse, and Lylah demanded to know how anyone could be wrong about something so important.
Dad, who’d been quiet since we arrived, made the mistake of admitting he liked both.
“Both?” Lylah looked at him. “You’re the first person I’ve met who actually likes the green one.”
Dad shrugged. “More for me, then.”
“You can have mine.” She leaned back and looked at me. “I keep asking them not to bring it.”
My phone had buzzed throughout the afternoon, including right after the final bell at Sierra Vista Central. When it lit up again, Lylah glanced toward the screen but made no move to touch it.
“Who keeps texting?”
“Chandler.” I unlocked my phone and scrolled through the messages he’d sent.
Chandler: How’s the port?
Chandler: Mr. Grzywacz saved your packet. It’s approximately four hundred pages. You’re welcome.
Chandler: Tinsley took notes for you. I asked if I could copy them and she said I could develop a work ethic.
I snorted, which tugged at the sore place beneath my collarbone. Maekynzie looked over, and I showed her the screen before explaining to Lylah that Chandler had appointed himself my unofficial school correspondent.
“His reports aren’t exactly reliable,” I told her, opening a picture he’d sent from our lunch table.
Emory sat on my stool, holding a slice of pizza and looking like he’d been forced into a hostage video. Chandler had captioned it with one word.
Chandler: Unacceptable.
Maekynzie laughed at the picture, and Lylah whistled when I admitted Chandler had sent eleven messages.
“Eleven,” she said. “And hostage photos. Noted.”
“Chandler uses periods in texts,” I added. “Full punctuation. Like he’s filing a police report.”
Lylah pressed a hand to her chest. “That is the most scandalous thing I’ve heard all week.”
Dad looked up from his phone. I waited until he went back to it before answering Chandler’s question about the port.
At four-thirty, even with the medicine, the nausea hit.
Heat rushed up my neck. A metallic taste flooded my mouth, like I’d been sucking on a key, and my stomach twisted hard enough that I folded forward, fingers gripping the recliner.
I’d told myself I was going to handle this without making a scene. My eyes filled anyway.
“Do you need the nurse?” Maekynzie asked. She stood so quickly her chair scraped the floor, and I nodded with my hand over my mouth.
“Maekynzie, can you get Renata?” Dad asked, already reaching for the basin beside my chair.
Maekynzie went to the door while Dad held the basin for me. I got sick, and he steadied my shoulder with a hand that wasn’t quite steady itself.
Renata came in almost immediately, checked on me, and talked me through what she could give me to help. I concentrated on her voice and the cool edge of the basin, wishing I could be anywhere else.
Lylah stayed near the window, out of the nurses’ way. When I could finally breathe without feeling sick again, she looked over at me.
“Want a wet washcloth?” she asked.
“Please.”
She checked with Renata before bringing one over.
Maekynzie stood by the door with both hands over her mouth. Her mascara had smudged, and she kept looking from me to the basin and away again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I need a minute.”
Her voice had gone thin. She kept staring at the basin even though Renata had already moved it out of sight.
“Go,” I managed. I was still holding the washcloth against my mouth, and I couldn’t make myself say anything else.
Maekynzie slipped into the hall, and I kept looking at the doorway until Renata finished checking me. Lylah offered me a tissue, then sat down again without trying to fill the silence.
“First days are rough,” she said.
I watched the doorway, waiting to hear Maekynzie come back. Lylah stayed in the chair, turning a bracelet around her wrist while Renata asked if the medicine was helping.
On Wednesday, Stetson came in behind Pops with both hands shoved into the pocket of his hoodie. His gaze traveled from my port dressing to the basin on the tray table, and he stopped just inside the room.
“You look…” he began.
“Like garbage?” I supplied.
“I was going to say fine.” He dragged a chair closer without meeting my eyes.
When I raised my eyebrows, he sighed and finally looked at me.
“You look tired. Really tired.”
“You can say that.” I moved my hand so he could put his phone on the tray table. “I have a mirror.”
Lylah was perched on the edge of the visitor chair with a bottle of black nail polish, having decided my nails looked “too innocent for an oncology floor.” She’d asked the nurse whether it was okay to paint them, and now she was carefully working on my left hand while I rested it on a folded towel.
She looked between Stetson and me, taking in the matching stubborn set of our mouths.
“Twin?” she asked.
I nodded, and she wanted to know which one of us was the troublemaker. Stetson and I pointed at each other so quickly that our accusations collided.
“He is,” I said, right over his “She is.”
Lylah laughed and pointed at Stetson with the polish brush. “She got there first.” He shook his head, smiling at the blanket.
He stayed for two hours, perched at the very end of my bed and saying less than usual. Before he left, he squeezed the toe of my reindeer sock through the blanket, the way he used to when we were little and wanted me to know he was going.
That night, while Dad slept in the chair with his glasses on, Lylah appeared at my door. A nurse had cleared a brief visit before quiet hours, and Lylah settled beside me without waking him.
“Can’t settle down,” she whispered. “The steroids have me wide awake.”
The hallway light stretched across the floor in a long yellow stripe. Lylah followed it with her eyes before speaking again.
“I was supposed to start nursing school this fall. Riverdale College of Nursing. I got in.”
She tipped her head toward the nurses’ station, where Renata’s laugh carried faintly down the hall.
“I was going to be the one with the cinnamon gum. I already bought the backpack. It’s still in my closet with the tags on.”
She turned a bracelet around her wrist. I didn’t ask whether she still planned to go. Instead, I asked whether she’d picked out the backpack herself.
“Obviously,” she whispered, pulling out her phone. “It’s purple. With flowers. Very professional.”
She showed me a picture of it, then swiped to another photo. This one wasn’t from a hospital. Lylah stood outside a coffee shop with three other girls, her real hair dark and windblown, one arm hooked around a friend’s neck. Somebody had drawn a crooked crown on the paper cup in her hand.
“That’s Nessa,” she said, tapping the girl beside her. “We worked the opening shift together. She used to put my name on the cups as Your Majesty until the manager caught her. She still sends me pictures of every customer who orders a drink with more than six instructions.”
In the picture, Lylah was laughing with her eyes shut. I barely recognized her without the wig.
“Did you like working there?” I asked.
“I liked having money. I liked knowing everybody’s order. I did not like cleaning the blender after somebody requested extra peanut butter.”
She tucked the phone away, still smiling at something I couldn’t see.
“Nessa’s keeping my apron. Apparently I’m the only person willing to work six in the morning.”
I hoped she’d need that apron again. I didn’t say it out loud, though, because Lylah had already moved on to telling me about a customer who’d ordered a drink with so many modifications that the label wrapped around the cup.
I laughed, then told her about the time Stetson tried to make iced coffee at home and forgot to put a glass under the machine. For a few minutes we traded stories about people who had absolutely no business operating kitchen equipment.
After a while, Lylah asked what I’d done before all this. She didn’t say before you got sick, but the words were there anyway.
“Outside hitter,” I said. “Volleyball. Since sixth grade.”
“Any good?”
She asked it with the same curiosity she’d shown about the reindeer sock. I thought about the Castle Ridge match, the line wide open, the line judge flinching.
“Yeah. I was really good.”
“Are,” Lylah said, almost under her breath.
I looked up, and she turned the silver charm on her bracelet between two fingers.
“You said was.”
“You’ve only been here two days,” she said. “You don’t have to make it past tense already.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to play again.”
“I know.” She looked down at her bracelet. “I still say I work at the coffee shop. I haven’t been there in weeks.”
I studied the shape of my left leg beneath the blanket. I didn’t know whether I believed her, but I wanted to.
She was quiet long enough that I thought she might be drifting off. Then she held up her left hand and spread her fingers in the stripe of hallway light. Nothing on them but chipped polish.
“Logan proposed the day I rang the bell,” she whispered. “The end-of-treatment bell. I was eighteen.”
“What happened?”
“It came back.” She let her hand drop. “He made it three weeks.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. Lylah tucked her hand back under the blanket. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s my sad story. I get to tell it badly.”
Lylah let me think about it, then asked what color she should paint my nails next.
By Thursday, everything hurt. I sat in bed in Pops’ hoodie, too tired to sit up straight. My head felt too heavy for my neck, my chest ached beneath the dressing whenever I moved my right arm, and my leg throbbed under the blanket.
I wanted to go home, but even getting dressed sounded exhausting. The last chemotherapy dose had finished Wednesday, and Thursday morning had been fluids, monitoring, and blood work. By noon, Dad was reviewing discharge instructions down the hall. I’d been told more than once that if I developed a fever or couldn’t keep fluids down at home, we needed to call the oncology team.
Maekynzie had texted twice since Tuesday. The first was another apology. The second asked whether she could drop off clean clothes or anything I needed, no pictures, no visitors unless I said yes.
I hadn’t answered yet. Her long phone charger was still plugged in beside the visitor chair, the cord looped around one leg. I put it in my bag before checking the forty-one messages Chandler had sent since Tuesday.
My phone buzzed again while Dad was down the hall with the discharge nurse. This time Chandler was calling, and I answered before I could think of a reason not to.
“Forty-two,” I said, settling the phone against my ear. “Do you ever put your phone down?”
“You counted?”
His voice came through with the faint noise of other people behind him. A chair scraped the floor before he asked, “How’s the port?”
“Sore. And I’m pretty sure somebody replaced my bones with wet sand.” I shifted carefully against the pillows, trying to find a position that didn’t hurt. “But they’re letting me go home.”
“Good.”
He paused, and a door closed on his end of the call before he spoke again.
“For the record, I think you’re really pretty too.”
My fingers tightened around the phone. After my biopsy, still foggy from anesthesia, I’d told Chandler he was really pretty. Twice. He’d been decent enough not to mention it at the lake or during the sleepover.
“I was under the influence of excellent medication,” I said. “My judgment was impaired.”
“Of course.”
“And you waited until I’m trapped in a hospital bed to bring this up?” I asked, sinking lower against the pillows.
“You’re less likely to throw something at me from there.”
I looked at the folded discharge papers on the bedside table, suddenly very interested in the hospital logo printed across the top.
“I wasn’t wrong, though,” I said, before I could talk myself out of it.
He was quiet for a second. “Good.”
Someone called Chandler’s name in the background. He promised to text after school. When we hung up, I left the phone in my lap and watched the screen until it went dark.
Lylah came in at one wearing yellow fuzzy socks and an orange sweatsuit. She asked whether I was up for company before settling into the visitor chair and pulling a folded piece of notebook paper from her pocket.
It was creased into a fat square, with tiny sunflowers doodled in one corner.
“Going-home present,” she said, holding it out and waiting while I took it.
I unfolded the paper carefully. Across the top, in turquoise gel pen and enormous loopy handwriting, she’d written a title and underlined it twice:
Normal Things Sick Girls Don’t Get to Do
Beneath it was a numbered list. The first item read:
1. Dye your hair a color your parents hate. (Wigs count.)
Before I could read the next one, my phone buzzed on the blanket, still open to Chandler’s thread. Lylah glanced toward it, then deliberately looked away.
My heart did something stupid anyway.
“I made it for you,” she explained when I looked up. “You can do whichever ones you want. Or none. But I reserve the right to ask.”
She tapped the corner of the paper, where one of the little sunflowers had six petals and the other had closer to fourteen. I folded the paper and tucked it into Pops’ hoodie pocket.
I smoothed the pocket over it, checking that it would fit without bending the corners again. Lylah stood, her bracelets jingling as she pulled down the hem of her sweatshirt. At the doorway, she glanced back toward my phone.
“And number seven,” she said, “might have something to do with Chandler.”
I reached for the paper again. She grinned at me from the doorway, then went back to her room while I unfolded it in my lap.