Don't fall in love with me // DNF fanfiction

chapter one

Late in the winter of my nineteenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit
of my abundant free time to thinking about death.
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.) But my mom believed I required treatment, so she took me to see my Regular Doctor James, who agreed that I was veritably
swimming in a paralyzing and totally clinical depression. and that therefore my meds should be adjusted and also should attend a weekly Support Group.
This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.
The Support Group, of course, was depressing as hell. It met every Wednesday in the basement of a stone-walled
Episcopal church shaped like a cross. We all sat in a circle right in the middle of the cross, where the two boards would have met, where the heart of Jesus would have been.
I noticed this because Nick, the Support Group leader and only person over twenty in the room, talked about the heart of Jesus every freaking meeting, all about how we, as young cancer survivors, were sitting right in
Christ's very sacred heart and whatever.
So here's how it went in God's heart:
The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust,
and listened to Nick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story-how he had cancer in his
balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn't die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a master's degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped to those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.
AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!!
Then we introduced ourselves: Name. Age. Diagnosis. And how we're doing today.
So I started.
I'm Clay, but everyone is calling me by my nickname Dream, I'd say when they'd get to me. Nineteen. Thyroid originally but with an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs. And I'm doing okay.
I smiled.
Once we got around the circle, Nick always asked if anyone wanted to share. And then began the circle jerk of support: everyone talking about fighting and battling and
winning and shrinking and scanning.
To be fair to Nick, he let us talk about dying, too. But most of them weren't dying. Most would live into adulthood, as he had.
(Which meant there was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize
that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that's one in five... so you look around
and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards).

The only redeeming facet of Support Group was this kid named Thomas, a long-faced, skinny guy with straight blond hair swept over one eye.
And his eyes were the problem. He had some
Fantastically improbable eye cancer. One eye had been cue out when he was a kid, and now he wore the kind of thick glasses that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass
one) preternaturally huge, like his whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you. From what I could gather on the rare occasions when Isaac shared with
the group, a recurrence had placed his remaining eye in mortal peril.
Thomas and I communicated almost exclusively through sighs. Each time someone discussed anticancer diets or snorting ground-up shark fin or whatever, he'd glance over at me and sigh ever so slightly. I'd shake my head microscopically and exhale in response.
So Support Group blew, and after a few weeks, I grew to be rather kicking-and-screaming about the whole affair. In fact, on the Wednesday I made the acquaintance of
Augustus Waters, I tried my level best to get out of Support Group while sitting on the couch with my mom in the third
leg of a twelve-hour marathon of the previous season's America's Next Top Model, which admittedly I had already seen, but still.