Cipher

Chapter 18: Present

When Cipher returned to school a few days later, he was relieved that Matt didn't have anything to say to him in Biology. Cindy, on the other hand, had a lot to say.

"Cipher!" she exclaimed as soon as she saw him walk through the door. "I was so worried!" she noticed he was moving stiffly as he sat down beside her. "Nobody would tell us what happened. You were just gone!"

"I apologize if I caused you any worry." he winced internally at the slightly rough sound of his own voice. Even after a couple days of recovery, he still felt wrong.

Cindy's eyes widened a bit. "What? No! You don't have to apologize! I'm just happy to see you're okay." She paused before glancing at him. "You are okay, right?"

"I have returned to school," Cipher said, as if that answered the question.

"Oh, okay..." The bell rang and class went on as usual, but Cindy worried. She may not know what had happened, either way, she knew whatever it was, it wasn't good.

Cipher had always been fairly quiet in class, but this was different. Cindy could see the stiff way he held himself like his skin was too tight, hear the rough edge in his voice like something had damaged it. She found herself glancing over at him more often than usual throughout the class. She knew that he would probably never tell her what happened, but she hoped that he talked to someone, maybe Isaac or even Joslyn, as much as she hated to admit it. She knew she was just a lab partner. Cipher was polite to everybody, but only spent time with a few people.

***

The day Cipher came back to school again, Joslyn finally felt like she could breathe again. Even though she had talked to him, some irrational part of her still feared that he would never leave the hospital.

Probably because Jason never did.

With Jason, they didn't know anything was wrong until he collapsed.

It was like a puppet with its strings suddenly cut and he fell, barely avoiding hitting his head on the concrete. His arm wasn't so lucky, a gash traced nearly from wrist to elbow. He tried to play it off as clumsiness, even though everyone knew he was anything but a clutz. It only got scarier as the cut wouldn't stop bleeding.

The rest of the day was spent in the emergency room as doctors asked endless questions about his medical history and ordered labs trying to figure out what was going on. Why was he slow to stop bleeding? And why had he collapsed in the first place?

The results were bad. His complete blood count revealed that not only was his platelet count low, but so were his red and white blood cells. Red blood cell transfusions brought some color back into his skin and platelets helped with clotting, though neither solved the larger problem: why did he need transfusions in the first place?

"It could be caused by several things." they explained, admitting him to the hospital so they could run more and more tests over the coming days until they figured it out.

"Don't worry about the hematologist/oncologist, it doesn't mean you have cancer, they specialize in blood problems." The thought hadn't even crossed their minds.

But that's what it was, it was cancer.

Acute Myeloid Leukemia to be exact. And none of them, not Jason or Joslyn or their parents were ready for such a world shattering revelation.

Everything moved fast, so fast it was hard to think straight. Start induction chemo immediately, no leaving his area of the hospital, no contact with anyone who's sick, in-patient, only one person can stay the night with him.

At first it seemed to Joss that there was no way her big brother could be brought down so easily. This would just be a minor setback in his life and they would all go back to their normal once he was better.

But leukemia isn't a sprint race, it's a marathon. The first several months after Jason's diagnosis she held tightly to that belief that everything would go back to normal, because it had to, didn't it? Her hope started fraying when he started getting sick.

Half-way through her senior year, Jason got sick and he didn't get better. The light at the end of the tunnel was fading into the darkness that surrounded them, and all the fundraisers and well wishers started to feel forced and fake. And it hurt, even though she knew it wasn't true, it felt like they were just rubbing her nose in the fact that she was about to lose her brother.

She could never pinpoint exactly why, but she wasn't surprised when someone came to get her from class and informed her that her brother was gone. She had only gone to school that day because he had insisted. He told her she was skipping too much school for his sake, that she still had to think about her future, but she never regretted the time she spent with him. Even when she was told that she had missed too much school and would have to repeat the semester. If anything, she wished she could have dropped school entirely; their parents would hear none of that.

The day after she lost him she got her third star. It had started out as a joke, she threatened Jason that she'd get a face tattoo if he didn't get better. There was a lot of eye-rolling and "no you wouldn't"s. He should have known she would follow through, she was the stubborn one and refused to be proved wrong. The next time she visited she had one tiny star at her temple. The second came when he relapsed, the last when he died. The whole story told in a tiny constellation next to her eye.