lips parted, and here’s what she said: “I love you too, Ryden Brooks.”
Those words, coming from Meg’s mouth, felt so fucking good, I can’t even tell you. I felt indestructible. We toppled over on the blanket and made out for, like, ever.
“I wish we could stay here forever,” I whispered against her mouth.
“Me too,” she whispered back. “It’s perfect here.” But then she pulled away. “Wait, I still have to tell you something.”
“Anything.”
She sat up and pulled me with her. “I haven’t told you this yet because I didn’t want to freak you out, and things have been going so well with us and we’ve been having so much fun that I didn’t want to ruin it. But I went to the doctor today—”
“Doctor?” I repeated. “What’s wrong, are you still sick?”
She hesitated. “Yeah, I am. Um…” She peeked at me through her jet-black eyelashes. “I…well…I have cancer.”
What?
I didn’t know if I said the word out loud or not, but suddenly all the warm, happy, floaty feelings from the I love yous were gone, gone, gone.
“It’s melanoma.” Meg picked at a pilly part of the blanket. “Or it started that way. There was this tiny mole on the back of my leg that I didn’t notice had changed. And I started feeling really bad all the time, so about four months ago, I finally went to get checked out, and it turned out that the melanoma had metastasized to my liver, gallbladder, and kidneys.”
I was listening, soaking up every single word, trying to understand, but it all felt like a dream. Like I was watching some very special episode of a primetime drama during February sweeps, and the writers had thrown this curveball for one of the main characters, but don’t worry, you know she’ll be cancer free by the end of the season, because, after all, she’s the show’s star.
“The treatments make things tricky. It makes me feel really gross, and it’s why my skin is so pale and why I couldn’t go to the dance—I have to stick to low-key activities.”
Her skin. The skin I thought was so pretty was actually cancer skin.
“I went in for a week of chemotherapy in April, so I was out of school for a couple of weeks. I don’t know if you noticed.” I shook my head, and she shrugged. “They do it in rounds, giving your body time to recover a bit before they go back and do it again, so I’m on break now. I still get sick from it sometimes though, as you’ve seen.”
So that’s what that was. She didn’t have the flu. She was sick because of fucking chemotherapy.
“But I have to go back in soon. So, um…I thought I should tell you.”
I didn’t know what to say or do or feel. The best I could come up with—God, I’m such an idiot—was, “But you still have your hair.”
That made her smile at least. “Yeah, I was lucky. I didn’t lose my hair in the first round. It got a little thinner, which is why I stopped blow-drying it. I figured I might as well be good to it, stop trying to wrangle it into something it’s not, and maybe I’d get to keep it longer. But my doctor told me yesterday that they’re upping the dose the next time around…so I’m probably going to lose it then.”
“But…” I mumbled. “I love your hair.”
Meg looked sad. “Me too.”
I knew I needed to say something else, something better. So I forced my brain to clear itself and said, “Will you be okay?”
“I think so. The doctor said the first round of chemo was somewhat successful, and the masses have started to show indications of shrinking. But there’s still a long way to go.” She looked me straight in the eye. “The survival rates for this kind of thing aren’t great. You should know that, but…I just have this feeling everything will be fine.”
Everything will be fine. Yes! Good! Okay then! I grabbed her hands, suddenly needing to touch her, to remind myself that she was still here, that even though she had this disease, it didn’t mean she was going to die. “Promise?”
“Promise.” She gave a little smile. “Do you want to take back what you said earlier?”
I blinked. “That I love you?” I shook my head. “Why would you even think that?”
“Okay, good. Because I have something else I need to tell you.”
“Oh God, now what?” I asked before I could stop myself.