Beautiful Lives

Chapter 24

Chapter 24 – Ocean Wide (The Afters)

Ending treatments turns out to be a lot easier than starting them. I finally agreed with my mom that going to school was a pointless waste of energy, and it didn't help that I hadn't spoken to Nate since our breakup. School seemed like a concrete jail that I didn't want to spend any time in if I didn't have to.

But of course, the end of the treatments meant that I was going to fade quickly. Everyone prepared me for it – we stocked up with a wheelchair, as I was starting to get too weak to walk, an oxygen tank to help me breath once my lungs started to fail, and about a million painkillers to make the whole thing easier.

I spent most of the days lying in my bed, and even though my friends would usually call me in the evening, I started to go stir crazy without them by my side every day.

Even with that, I started to feel more and more numb each day. The pain caused by the chemo treatments was starting to ease off, especially with the help of the medications, but I was still feeling drained – both emotionally and physically. I missed Nate, and I missed spending time with my friends. With each hour that passed, I actually started to miss school, and even the homework assignments stopped sounding so awful.

But there was no going back. After I'd made my decision, my family had abandoned their fights to support me as much as they could. My mom had taken a leave of absence from work, and after that night (to everyone's surprise) she'd offered my dad a bed in the guest room. At first, I was convinced that it wouldn't work out – I'd expected to wake up to fighting every morning – but so far, things seemed to be going as well as they could have gone.

The worst thing that I couldn't get out of my mind was my bucket list. With every breath, it became painfully clear that I wasn't going to finish it. Even if I had one decent day left in my body, there was no way I was going to make it to prom – no arrangements had been made, and I didn't have a date anymore. It hurt to think about it, so I tried as hard as I could to put it out of my head, and focus on the positive things.

* * *

Unfortunately, it was hard to stop thinking about when I knew exactly when and where the prom was taking place. The Monday morning before prom weekend, I found myself in tears, while scrolling through my Facebook feed on my phone, hungrily devouring every photo of a prom dress that I could find. It made me miss Nate and my friends more than I could even explain to myself, so I turned my phone off, and curled up in a ball to try and fall asleep again.

"Lexi?" my door creaked open, and my mom stuck her head in. "Do you want to come sit downstairs for a bit?"

"I'm okay," I said. "I'm kind of tired,"

"Well, come sleep down on the couch," she crossed the room and pulled the covers off of me. "Come on, you'll feel better,"

"Mom..." I whined, but she already had my wheelchair ready by my bedside, so I slid out of the warm sheets, and folded in on myself in the chair. She wheeled me to the stairs, where she bent to lift me into her arms. My mom is pretty tiny for her height, but she's always had hidden muscles, and I'd lost a lot of weight during the treatments, so she carried me downstairs like it was absolutely no problem at all. She deposited me onto the couch, and covered me with blankets. I shut my eyes again, and had almost fallen asleep when the doorbell rang.

It was one in the afternoon, so I knew it couldn't have been any of my friends. I tried to ignore it, but a few minutes later, my mom was shaking my shoulders, her whispers urgent.