terrible things - ashton irwin

thirty four

Ashton fell asleep almost immediately. This was fine with me, because I needed complete and total focus on my new assignment: piloting a speeding death-and-dismemberment trap across the country.

Because, FYI, car crashes kill way more kids then cancer does. Those crosses you see on the side of the highway, the little white ones hung with fading silk flowers? They're for people my age. ("People who were texting," my mum liked to remind me, because she never wanted to blame Budweiser for anything.)

I managed not to become a highway statistic in those early hours, but there were occasional...problems. For instance, I pulled into a Texaco for gas but didn't know how to operate the pump, and Ashton was sleeping so deeply I couldn't wake him. After I begged some nice old man to help me fill my tank, I got back on the highway going in the wrong direction. For thirty miles.

After I turned around, I tried playing the radio softly. It barely worked, so I turned it off and had only my thought to keep me company:

I never knew how damn big the United States is.

Where's the nearest Starbucks?

How come my mum hasn't found me yet?

The miles ticked by, monotonous but nerve-racking. Eventually, I just started talking out loud to keep myself company.

"Don't take this the wrong way," I said, though I knew Ashton was still in dreamland, "but I don't think I ever believed we'd make it this far. Like, wouldn't my mum call the cops when she woke up and found me gone? Obviously, I'm not saying I want to be caught. I want to keep going. But i guess I wonder if we've just been really lucky so far? Or is there a certain amount of...disinterest on my mum's part concerning the location of her remaining daughter?"

I took a sip of cold truck-stop coffee. It felt good to talk about it, even if, or especially because, Ashton wasn't listening.

"And then there's you," I said to Ashton's sleeping silhouette. "Where are your parents? Aren't they worried about you? Do they have any idea where you are?"

When I met Ashton on the cancer ward, he'd brushed off all talk of his family. No sad-eyed father sat with him while he got his chemo; no weeping mother held his hand while he was bombarded with radioactive particles.

He was, for all that the rest of us could see, 100 percent alone.

On the other hand, no one was more popular. Ashton could turn a Domino's delivery guy into his new BFF in five minutes Once I heard two of the nurses talking about how they wanted to adopt him. And of course he could've had his pick of girls, on or off the ward. He was magnetic.

Out of everyone, he'd chosen me. I was his family.

When we were discharged, Ashton followed me to Klamath Falls. 

"We need to stick together, Lav," he'd said. "Plus I have an uncle there. Says I can live in his basement."

I didn't question it, all I cared about was not saying good-bye.

I realised how much he'd left behind in the course of his life: his parents, his uncle, the doctors who wanted to treat him. It was as if he'd run from everyone but me.

"Am I enough, Ashton?" I heard myself ask. "Can I really be everything you need?"

He shifted in his sleep, stretching out his long legs. But he didn't wake up to answer that critical question.

"I wonder," I went on, "if it's possible to go so far that I'll stop being afraid of us not ever coming back." 

I chewed on my lip for a while, then drank some more bitter coffee. 

"I thought I'd figured out the risks. I thought I had everything planned out. But I hadn't counted on you getting sick."

I sneaked another glance at him. His eyelashes made a dark curve against his pale cheek, and his left hand twitched, moving in his dream.

There was another thing I hadn't counted on. And that was falling in love, as fast and irrevocably as you would fall of a cliff, and realising that loving someone might mean to simultaneously want to slug them and gold them and possibly have to watch them die...I hadn't counted on that.

I reached over and touched his cheek.

"I love you," I whispered. "Please stay with me."

In his sleep, Ashton turned and sighed.

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