This story has a happy ending. (An R5 Fanfiction)

Chapter 1

The bay window looking out into a man-made forest of palm trees and green, green grass isn't enough to take Melonie's mind off of the fact that she's lying in a hospital bed again. The mattress (if you can even call it that) is too soft in some places and too hard in others so there's no way to get comfortable. After ten years Melonie sometimes feels like she should be used to it, but there's just no getting used to a hospital bed.

                California sunshine is what woke Melonie up from her nap. She had to get up extra early this morning so the doctors could run tests on the few organs she has left that she was actually born with. Apparently those have to be in good working order before she can be considered for a third liver. Not, like, to put a third liver into her body so she'll be some sort of weird creature that has three livers. Her first liver was eaten up by some cancer cells so she got a new one from a boy who died in a car accident a few years ago. Now this one is getting eaten up by some new cancer cells so Melonie has to hope she can get another. Not that she's hoping for another poor kid to die so that she can have his or her liver. She would never hope for something like that.

                When Melonie rolls over to face the interior of her room she realizes she's not alone. The roommate that she'd shared this room with up until last week died in surgery. She was supposed to be getting a new heart but she didn't survive long enough for them to even start taking her heart out. They gave the heart she would have gotten to another Sick Kid and he's up and walking around now, which is the silver lining to the whole roommate dying thing.

                "So, what are you in for?" Melonie asks the lump of a human lying in the bed next to her. Based on the fact that there aren't any IV's or other machines attached to it Melonie is guessing the doctors put a person with a non-life-threatening illness with her so that she wouldn't have to watch another roommate die.

                The lump jumps like it was startled and turns to face Melonie and her jaw drops in surprise. There have been boys sharing her room before but none of them ever looked like this. He's like a super model straight out of a teen magazine. The kind of guy normal girls' her age would have posters of on their bedroom walls. "What?" he asks. He wipes his eyes. Melonie hadn't realized he was asleep.

"I asked what you're in for," she repeats much quieter and with less enthusiasm. She knows she's staring but she can't help it. He's that good looking.

"Oh," he says. He removes the blanket from his leg to reveal a black knee brace. "Hockey injury. Hit my head pretty good too. What about you?"

Melonie only has a split second to think but she somehow concocts a lie close enough to the truth that she doesn't feel bad for telling it. "Bad case of the flu."

She's never lied about her disease before. Usually she embraces the cancer, shouts it from the rooftop. Makes a joke about it. But she isn't usually talking to the hottest guy in the universe. For some reason she doesn't want the new guy to know how sick she is. When people find out she has cancer, they tend to get scared or look at her like she's just a dead (wo)man walking, which she kind of is but she doesn't like it when other people look at her like that.

The disease started out as the flu which is why her answer isn't exactly a lie. Well, her parents thought it was the flu. She was an active six year old, the star player on her soccer team, best friend to many first graders, smartest kid in her class (which doesn't mean so much in elementary school but her parents were proud), and all around Normal Kid. Then she got sick. She was always tired and didn't want to play soccer or go to school because she always felt like she was going to "fall asleep," which was the six year old Melonie's way of saying she constantly felt like she was going to faint. Her parents kept her in bed for a week and when the symptoms didn't go away they took her to the hospital assuming it was just a bad case of the flu. It turned out to be a bad case of liver cancer.