Carved in Her Bones

Then-Rhian 33

After I gave Joey part of my liver, I became acutely aware that I wasn't whole anymore. It wasn't anything obvious—just this quiet feeling that something essential was missing. It was like part of me existed outside of myself now, living on in Joey, keeping him going while I adjusted to being... less.

Bronagh and Aoife came to spend a weekend with me after the surgery, but everything felt off. They had their own lives, filled with school and hockey and all the normal things I used to share with them. My life, meanwhile, had expanded in strange directions but left them behind. Their world was full of team practices and school gossip; mine was full of hospital visits, Joey, Blue, and the rest of the Onco Gang.

We tried to catch up, and I wanted to tell them everything, but it was like speaking different languages. They'd talk about away games, I'd talk about Blue's latest joke about cancer. They'd laugh about some teacher, and I'd try to explain the weird humor Joey and I had found in hospital food. We were all still friends, but there was this distance now, a new awkwardness that no one seemed to know how to bridge.

When I got back home, Dad and I pretty much fell back into our quiet, unspoken routine. He was always buried in work or organizing things for Mom and Joey, or managing my concert schedule. Joey, on the other hand, started sending me these bizarre late-night texts after the liver transplant. Things like, "Your liver feels very you," or "I think your liver's missing you." At first, it was funny—the kind of strange humor only Joey could pull off. But after a while, it became repetitive.

Joey had gotten close to Blue, a girl from the hospital. Blue had blue hair, ironically, and she was popular with the other kids who called themselves "the Onco Gang" or sometimes "The Dying Club," a title that sounded harsh but didn't seem to offend any of them. Blue was very much the ring leader, rallying them all with her dark humor. She had resigned herself to life without an after-cancer, despite still being in treatment. I didn't get it at first—how she could be so blasé about everything, as though the future didn't matter at all.

Still, Blue and I formed a strange but easy friendship. She had this way of being twistedly funny, especially with Joey, who followed her around like a lost puppy, clearly smitten. He constantly offered her his yellow jellies from lunch because he knew she liked them, and once I even made her some homemade yellow jelly. But Blue took one bite and scrunched her nose. "It's the lack of chemicals," she said with a grin. "Gotta have the cancer-causing ones for flavor."

One afternoon, while Joey was in surgery, I asked her if she liked him back. She shrugged in that way of hers, all detached.
"I like him... the way I like anyone," she said. "But he likes you more," I replied. "Yeah, maybe because he's around all this dying—it amplifies things in people's heads." "But Joey's not dying, Blue." "Well, I am, Rhian. That adds some urgency, I think."

Joey and Blue's friendship, while close, was always one-sided in this way. Joey adored her in a way she found hard to reciprocate.

One Sunday,  about a month after i sat for my GCSEs in June. Eralier than Bronagh and Aoife because Mrs Kim had told my parents i was ready and her work was done.Joey asked me to bring him his guitar after I'd finally gotten my driver's license.

He said he was inspired and need it . It was Mom's car, which she rarely needed, and I was excited to bring him something he loved. Joey never quite connected with the piano like I had, which was endlessly disappointing to Mom. Mr. Haug, our piano teacher, once described Joey as someone who "couldn't paint inside the lines," saying that classically training him in piano would be "like teaching a snail to run—a slow and aggravating exercise."

Joey himself always joked that I was so good at classical piano because I "had no courage to be disliked. and i always had to be agreeable." He quit the piano at twelve, leaving Mom disappointed, Mr. Haug exasperated, and our Grandma Howells downright scandalized. That year, he experimented with drums and the accordion, which Mom promptly labeled "useless instruments."