Vapor

Chapter Two

  Luke drove horrifyingly. Whether stopping or starting, everything happened with a tremendous JOLT. I  flew against the seat belt of his Toyota SUV each time he braked, and my neck snapped backwards each time he hit the gas. I might have been nervous -- what with sitting in the car of a strange boy on the way to his house , keenly aware that my crao lungs complicate efforts to fend off unwanted advances - but his driving was so astonishingly poor that I could think of nothing else.

  We'd gone perhaps a mile in jagged silence before Luke said, " I failed the driving test three times."

  "You don't say."

  He laughed nodding. "Wel, I can't feel pressure in old Prosty, and I can't get hang of driving left-footed. My doctors say most amputees can drive woth no problem. But....yeah. Not me. Anyway, I got in for my fourth driving test, and it goes about like this is going." A half mile in front of us, a light turned red. Luke slammed on the breaks, tossing me into the triangular embrace of the seat belt. "Sorry." I swear to God I am  trying to be gentle. Right, so anyway, at the end of the test, I totally thought I'd failed again , but the instructor was lke, " your driving is unpleasant, but it isn't technically unsafe."

  "I'm not sure I agree," I said. " I suspected Cancer perk." Cancer perks are the little things cancer kids get that regular kids dont: basketballs sighed by sports heroes, free passes on late homework, unearned driver's licences, etc.

  "Yeah," he said. The light turned green. I braced myself. Luke slammed the gas.

  "You know they've got hand controls for people who can't use their legs," I pointed out.

  "Yeah," he said. " maybe someday. "He sighed in a way that made me wonder whether he was confident about the existence of someday. I knew osteosarcoma was highly curable, but still.

  There are a number of ways to establish somone's approximate survival expectations without actually asking.

  I used the classic: "So, are you in school?" Generally, your parents pull you out of school at some point if they expect you to bite it.

  "Yeah," he said. "I'm at Norwest Christan. A year behind though: I'm a sophomore. You?"

  I considered lying. No one likes a corpse, after all. But in the end I told the truth. "No, my parents withdrew me three years ago."

  "Three years?" He asked, astonished.

  I told Luke the board outline of my miracle. Diagnosed with stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirtreen (I didn't tell him that the diagnose came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You're a woman. Now die.) It was, we were told, incurable.

  I had a surgery called radical neck dissection , which is about as pleasent as it sounds. Then radiation. Then they tried some chemo for my lung tumors. The rumors shrank, then grew. By then, I was fourteen. My lungs started to fill up with water. I was looking pretty dead -- my hands and feet balloned; my skin cracked; my lips were perpetually blue. They've got this drug that makes you not feel so completely terrified about the fact that you can't breathe, and I had a lot of it flowing into me through a PICC line, and more than a dozen other drugs besides. But even so, there's a certain unpleasantness to drowning, particularly when it occurs over the course of several months. I finally ended up in the ICU with pneumonia, and my mom knelt by the side of my bed and said, "Are you ready, sweetie?" And I told her I was ready, and my dad just kept telling me he loved me in this voice that was not breaking so much as already broken, and I kept telling him that I loved him, too, and everyone was holding hands, and I couldn't catch my breath, and my lungs were acting desperate, gasping, pulling me out of the bed trying to find a position that could get them air, and I was embarrassed by their desperation, disgusted that they wouldn't just let go , and I remember my mom telling me it was ok, that I was okay, that I would be okay, and my father was trying so hard not to sob that when he did, which was regularly, it was an earthquake. And I remember wanting not to be awake.

  Everyone figured I was finished, but my Cancer doctor Anna managed to get some of the fluid out of my lungs, and shortly thereafter the antibiotics they'd given me for the pneumonia kicked in.

  I woke up and soon got into one of those experimental trials that are famous in the republic of Cancervania for not working. The drug was Phalanxifor, this molecule designed to attach itself to cancer cells and slow their growth. It didn't work in about 70% of people. But it worked in me. The tumors shrank.

  And they stayed shrunk. Huzzah, Phalanxifor! In the past eighteen months, my mets have hardly grown, leaving me with lungs that suck at being lungs but could, conceivably, struggle along indefinitely with the assistance of drizzled oxygen and daily Phalanxifor.

  Admittedly, my Cancer Miracle had only resulted in a bit of purchased time. (I did not yet know the size of the bit.) But when telling Luke Hemmings, I painted the rosiest possible picture, embellishing the miraculousness of the miracle.

  "So now you gotta go back to school" he said.

  "I actually can't" I explained, "because I already got my GED. So I'm taking classes at MCC" Which was our community college.

  "A college girl" he said, nodding. "That explains the aura of sophistication." He smirked at me. I showed his upper arm playfully. I could feel the muscle right beneath the skin, all tense and amazing.