12. FIELD

FIELD

“ R ae,” Ryan’s fingers wrapped around my wrist as I climbed the steps to my house. Today was fun but tiring, and all of my muscles were aching. I knew he was a ticking time bomb of questions just from how he looked at me from the bottom of the stairs.

“Thank you for today. I don’t think I’ve had this much fun on my birthday ever,” I said, leaning into his touch.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” He asked again. He had asked twice while we were finishing bowling and on the walk home. “I’d hate for you to be sick and leave you. You need like soup or something, I can go-”

“Ryan,” I said to him, my voice pulling his attention back. His eyes are so big and hopeful that it nearly breaks my heart. Suddenly, the world doesn’t feel so big again, it’s back to just us, and I feel safe enough for a split second to say something stupid. “Soup won’t fix this.”

“Soup can fix anything,” he said, not quite catching on to the severe tone of my voice.

“No…” I said. I turned to look at him and almost lied, telling him it was just a headache or something that didn’t feel so daunting in my mind. His brows scrunched together in confusion, waiting for more and clearly concerned.

“Last year, I was gone for a while,” I mumbled, unable to find my voice.

Ryan closed the space between us. “You’re making me nervous, Starlight,” he said.

“Will you sit, please.” I pleaded with him when he froze, watching me.

“I remember, not you exactly,” he said with a sad voice and lowered to the steps beside me, “but everyone talking about the mayor's daughter just being gone.”

“I was diagnosed with leukemia, Ryan.” I said to him, “I went away because I had to spend five days in a hospital for radiation…” I trailed off, trying not to cry. Everything surrounding that year felt like someone settling weights on my chest, piling and piling until I couldn’t bear it any longer. “I was a mess, dizzy, sick all the time.”

“Dizzy like today?” Ryan sat forward, his jaw tight like he was assembling the messed up puzzle of my life with half the pieces missing.

“I’m in remission, it—” I tried to explain to him without causing more panic but that was pointless as he had already gone over the edge.

“So the cancer is gone?” His voice was brimming with hope, and it broke my heart as his fingers tangled with mine and rested them on his lap. I wanted to tell him yes, that it was gone, that I was cured, but I couldn’t lie to him. Not after how honest he had been all day, not with how scared he looked now.

“No, well, sort of…” I said quietly, “There’s no cure for it, just treatment and prayers.” I scowled at the last bit. I could see him processing the information slower than I would have wished, but he wasn’t flipping out. It was a decent start. He was now part of the Lorraine might be dying club . If only it counted toward community service hours, it might help him get into college.

The part I hated the most about when my parents found out was the look on their faces. Never once had I seen compassion or fear from them, but in that moment, it was all they showed. It was like feeling sorry would make it all better.

“That must have been terrifying,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s life, Ryan,” I said quietly. “Bad things happen to good people.”

“Nothing bad should ever happen to you.” Ryan shook his head, arguing a simple fact of life like he could change the saying. He was quiet for a long time, probably unsure of what to say to me, and understandably so. The girl he supposedly loved had just told him she was diagnosed with a cancer that could rear its ugly head whenever it felt like it.

“The radiation did its job, and when I got the chance to come home, I wanted to go right back to school, but my parents argued over it for a long time, so I spent some time here, alone until I was strong enough to go back to school but by then…”

“Everyone had told just about every nasty rumor they could think of, " he finished for me with a subtle nod. “You did all of that by yourself?” His comment caught me off guard. I had expected more piling about the leukemia or the treatment, but he was asking about me.

“My parents were around,” I said.

“Like they were today?” He countered, and he was right. Even in the city, Dad was always in meetings, and Mom would show up for a few minutes every morning to bring me fresh flowers, homework, and clean pajamas. But it had been mostly spent alone.

“There was this nice nurse, Kelly. She had this laugh that got high-pitched when I made a really funny joke,” I said to him, but Ryan didn’t laugh. He barely smiled. “I’m alright now. We do tests to check every six months, and today was the first time I’d gotten dizzy. I'm sure it was just because I hadn’t eaten in a while. My appetite is still a little wonky from everything.” I said, aware of my rambling but nervous that he would get scared or leave.

He was only seventeen, after all. My parents had handled all the news worse.

“I thought cancer was supposed to make all your hair fall out?” He reached forward and brushed his fingers over a strand of my hair.

“It’s a wig,” I said to him. “I have a few. They were presents from my mom to make me feel more normal .”

Ryan stared at the strand between his fingers, “it feels so real,” he whispered.

“It should. They were a lot of money. I get told once a week.” I said. “My hair is coming back, but…”

“Show me,” he blurted, but it was soft and whispery in the warm air.

“I don’t—” I chewed on my lip. I barely ever left my room without them on. When Mom had first given me one, I had been angry, pissed off that she was trying to cover up the sickness, but over time, they had become a safety blanket for me. I couldn’t imagine how the kids would look at me at school if they had seen my patchy growth months ago.

“Rae, I’m not going to find you less beautiful without some hair,” he smiled at me with encouragement in his eyes.

He said that now…

“Please.” The sound of his voice broke through my nerves and landed true. I inhaled slowly, filling my lungs with a long, shaky breath before I tugged the wig from my scalp. A few barrettes and pins popped as I did.

Ryan leaned close, and before I could gauge his reaction to the pixie short hair, his fingers were brushing through the choppy dark strands. His eyes searched over it, tugging me closer as his touch tickled around and raked through the nape of my neck.

“It’s adorable,” he huffed and cupped my face in both hands, “in a you were dying kind of way.”

“Ryan!” I scoffed, but a smile spread on my lips. “You think so?”

“I don’t know why you hide it?” He said plainly and let me go.

“Because after it was gone, it was hard to look in the mirror and find the girl I was. It was like she had died, and whoever had come home from the hospital was some chemo-monster. If I couldn’t look at myself and the kids at school had spread the narrative of a teenage pregnancy. I didn’t want more eyes on me. I couldn’t handle it.”

“Was it scary?” He asked me, his body so still I could barely tell he was breathing.

“At times,” I said, “you never know what to expect when the doctors visit.”

“Promise me something?” He asked, bringing my hand up to his lips and kissing my knuckles gently.

“What?” I asked, doing my best to ignore the warmth that flooded me.

“I can’t change the past. I can’t go back and be there for you, but promise me that you'll tell me if you feel sick or scared. You’ll let me help?” he asked, his eyes painfully green.

“Nothing bad is going to happen, Ryan,” I said to him, scooting closer on the step.

“Convincing me of that will be harder than you think,” he said. “Just promise me you’ll talk to me. You won’t do it alone this time?”

He was serious. Extremely serious.

“Alright,” I said, just to quell the intense feelings stirring around behind his eyes.

“And stop wearing these stupid wigs around me. I want to feel your real hair when I touch you, " he whispered, and it made my chest warm.

“On one condition.” My lips pressed into a thin, serious line. He wasn’t getting everything he wanted that easily. He had to work for something.

Ryan scoffed, “What?”

“You finish your papers and you let me help you apply to colleges,” I said.

“I’m not getting into college, Rae, not the old-fashioned way.” Ryan shook his head in disbelief.

“How about you worry about me, and I’ll worry about you?” I said, leaning in closer and pressing my head against his. “Deal?”

He grumbled something under his breath but nodded against my forehead. “Deal.”

Ryan didn’t seem like the type to drop an issue so intense and move on. From the look in his eyes, I could tell it wouldn’t be as simple as telling him the truth and promising to follow through on our deal.

He was going to go through the stages.

Everyone did.

First, he would treat me like I was more fragile than the birthday present he had purchased for me. Then he would research, call people, and read books he never would have thought to open. All to find a solution. Then the denial would come, the idea that cancer doesn’t exist if we don’t let it. That it's simply a mind game.

The last stage before acceptance would be anger.

He would get pissed off. He would ask me a million questions. Wonder why I’m not more upset about the unfairness of it all. It was only natural for him to go through all of that my parents had, I had, and random people at the hospital had when they saw a sixteen-year-old girl sitting in the radiation chair.

It was inevitable.

“Let’s start with the immediate problem: you have a game you need to play in. And you’ve got very little time left to make that happen because you’ve been distracted.”

“Usually, I would argue with you, but today I’m happy to let you win because there’s only two things I need in this world, your love and to win that game.” Ryan huffed gently with our foreheads still pressed together, his breath warm on my cheeks.

“That was cheesy,” I laughed and scrunched my nose up.

“My backpack is in your bushes around the back,” he said with a chuckle before kissing my forehead and pushing off the steps to retrieve it.

I watched him walk away with a thousand thoughts swirling in his mind, his fingers tapping against his thigh as his eyes searched the sky for answers. The stars wouldn’t help him, though. They never helped me.