Vapor

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  I went to support group for the same reason that I'd once Allowed nurses with a mere eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically named chemicals: I wanted to make my parents happy. There is inly one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.

  Mom pulled into the circular driveway behind the church at 4:56. I pretended to fiddle with my oxygen tank for a second just to kill time.

  "Do u want me to carry it in for you?"
  " no, its fine," i said. Thr cylindrical green tank only weighted a few pounds, and I had this little steel cart to wheel it around behind me. It delivered two liters of oxygen to me each minute through a cannula, a transparent tube that split just beneath my neck, wrapped behind my ears, and then reunited in my nostrils. The contraption was necessary because my lungs sucked at being lungs.

  "I love you," She said as I got out.
  " You too, Mom. See you at six."
  "Make friends!" She said through the rolled - down window as I walked away.

  I didn't want to take the elevator because taking the elevator is a last days kind of activity at support group, so I took the stairs. I grabbed a cookie and poured some lemonade into a Dixie cup and then turned around. (Whats your favourite cookie flavour?)

  A boy staring at me.

  I was quite sure I'd never seen him before. Long and leanly mascular, he dwarfed the molded plastic elementary school chair he was sitting in. Dirty blonde hair, and lip ring decorating his bottom lip. He looked my age, maybe a year older, and he sat with his tailbone against the edge of the chair, his posture aggressively poor, one hand half in a pocket of dark jeans.

  I looked away, suddenly conscious of my myriad insufficiencies. I was wearing old jeans, which had once been tight but now sagged in weird places, and a yellow T-shirt advertising a band I didn't even like anymore. Also my hair: I had short hair, and I Hadn't even bothered to, like, brush it.  I had chimpunk cheeks, a side effect of treatment. I looked like a normally proportioned person with a ballon for a head. This was not even to mention the cankle situation. And yet- I cut a glance at him, and his ocean blue eyes were still on me.

  It occurred to me why they call it eye contact.

  I walked into the circle and sat down next to Calum, two seats away from the boy. I glanced again. He was still watching me.

  Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward smile and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy...well.

  I pulled out my phone and clicked it so it would display the time: 4:59. The circle filled in with the unlucky twelve -to-eighteens, and then Troy started us out with the serenity prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. The guy was still staring at me. I felt rather blushy.

  Finally, I Decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the starting business, after all. So I looked at him over as Troy acknowledged for the thousandth time his ball-lessness etc., And soon it was a staring contest. After a while the boy smiled, and then finally his blue eyes glanced away. When he looked back at me, I flicked my eyebrows up to say, I win.

  He shrugged. Troy continued and then finally it was time for thr introductions." Calum, perhaps you'd like to go first today. I know you're facing a challenging time."

  "Yeah," Calum said. "Im Calum. Im seventeen. And it's looking like I have to get surgery in a couple of weeks, after which I'll be blind. Not to complain or anything because I know a lot of us have it worse, but yeah, I mean , being blind does sort of suck. My girlfriend helps, though. And friends like Luke. " He nodded towards the boy , who had a name. "So, yeah," Calum continued. He was looking at his hands, which he'd folded into each other like the top of a tepee. "There's nothing you can do about it."

  "We're here for you, Calum," Troy said. "Let Calum hear it, guys." And then we all, in a monotone, said, "we're here for you, Calum."

  Michael was next. He was also seventeen. He had leukemia. He'd always had leukemia. He was okay. ( or so he said. He'd taken the elevator.)

  Sierra was sixteen, and prettu enough to be the object of the hot boy's eye. She was a regular -- in a long remission from appendiceal cancer, which I had not previously known existed. She said -- as she had every other time I'd attended support group -- that she felt strong , which felt like bragging to me as the oxygen - drizzling nubs tickled my nostrils.

  There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his turn came. His voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. "my name is Luke Hemmings," he said. " I'm seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I'm just here today at Calum's request."

  "And how are you feeling?" Asked Troy

  "Oh, Im grand." Luke Hemmings smiled with a corner of his mouth. "Im on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend."

  When it was my turn, I said, "My name is Elena. Im sixteen. Thyroid with mets in my lungs. I'm okay."

  The hour proceeded apace: fights were recounted, battles won amid wars sure to be lost; hope was clung to; families were both celebrated and denounced; it was agreed that friends just didn't get it; tears were shed; comfort proffered. Neither Luke or I spoke again until Troy said, "Luke, perhaps you'd like to share your fears with the group."

  "My fears?"

  "Yes."

  "I fear oblivion," he said without a moment's pause. "I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark."

  "Too soon," Calum said, cracking a smile.

  "Was that insensitive?" Luke asked. "I can be pretty blind to other people's feelings."

  Calum was laughing, but Troy raised a chastening finger and said, "Luke, please. Let's return to you and your struggles. You said you fear oblivion?"

  "I did," Luke answered.

  Troy seemed lost. "Would, uh, would anyone like to speak to that?"

  I hadn't been in proper school in three years. My parents were two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed. I was a fairly shy person -- not the hand-raising type.

  And yet, just this once, I decided to speak. I half raised my hand and Troy, his delight evident, immediately said, "Elena!" I was, im sure he assumed, opening up. Becoming part of the group.

  I looked over at Luke Hemmings, who looked back at me. You could almost see through his eyes they were so blue. "there will come a time," I said, " when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will ne no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this " -- I gestured encompassingly -- "will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else Does."

  I'd learned this from my aforementioned third best friend, Peter Van Houten, the reclusive author of An Imperial Affliction, the book that was as close a thing as I had to a Bible. Peter Van Houten was the only person I'd ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what its like to be dying, and ( b) not have died.

  After I finished, there was quite long period of silence as I watched a smile spread all the way across Luke's face -- not the little crooked smile of the boy trying to be sexy while he stated at me, but his real smile, too big for his face. " Goddamn," Luke saud quietly. " Aren't you something else."