Page 5 of Past the Broken Bridges

“Sawyer?” I hear, snapping my eyes up to where Katherine is standing by the open door.

Releasing the hair and dropping my hands into my lap, I sit straighter. “Sorry, what?”

“I said good luck with everything,” she repeats with the same warm smile that’s made me feel at home since the day I walked into the treatment center for yet another round of chemo. “And as much as I adore you, I hope I never see you again.”

I laugh. “Back at you, Kitty Kat.”

She waves us off and walks out.

I barely have time to climb off the table when Mom asks, “What were you thinking about?”

I hate that she knows I was lost in my head, but I don’t want to dwell on any of it anymore. It doesn’t matter. After five years of off-again, on-again remission and treatments, I’m done.

Done-done.

It was hard enough going from being on the rise of popularity at fifteen to a social pariah nobody wanted to talk to. Like my cancer was contagious—likeI was. Switching to homeschooling wasn’t what I wanted to do, but it was the only way I could keep my sanity during a period of time that was already difficult to navigate.

I don’t want to keep hiding, and I don’t want to keep letting the cancer win.

I turn to my mother, who’s extending my winter coat out to me. “I was thinking that we should get chicken nuggets,” I say. “I promise I’ll save some for Bentley this time even though he’s a total dweeb.”

The woman who’s been through hell and back with me stands with suspicious eyes as I shove my arms into the sleeves of my coat. I’m sure she knows that isn’t what I zoned outthinking about, but she doesn’t pressure me into the truth. “Do you mean that this time, or are you going to tell your brother that you got him nuggets and then feed them to Maggie in front of him?”

I giggle, walking out the door with a newfound sense of freedom, knowing it’s time to move on to bigger and better things. “I can’t do the same thing twice or he’ll expect it. Duh.”

Mom sighs.

I grin. “He deserved it after eating the last Pop-Tart that he knew I was saving.”

“You two are something else,” she mutters.

“But you love us.”

She kisses my temple. “More than life, baby girl. More than life.”

I look back at the clock in the lobby when we get my final set of paperwork from the clerk.

Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock.

My skin buzzes with anticipation, excited to see the sun. To feel it on my too-pale skin that Mom makes me slather in layers of sunscreen in the summer and lotion in the winter.

And at the end of the day, I share my chicken nuggets with my little brother, watch his favorite dorky movie about rings and hobbits, and endure his gross habit of dipping his popcorn in pickle juice.

Because I know our time together is limited.

* * *

Swiping at the foggy mirror until a blurry image of my face appears, I readjust the soft coral towel around my torso to make sure it’s covering all the essentials.

When I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at sixteen, treatment was brutal. The only good news was that the type of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma I had tended to respond well to chemotherapy.Usually.

The first treatment was six months. After the first two infusions, the hair on my scalp felt so tight that it was too uncomfortable to keep. I’d asked Mom to cut it, but she’d been too emotional. So I went into Dad’s closet, found his old hair clippers, and took as much as I could off myself until she came into the bathroom and gasped at the mess of hair on the floor.

“Baby, what did you do?”

I pass her the clippers and whisper, “Please?”

It was hard for both of us, but she held back her tears and helped me finish until there was nothing left but skin. And when we looked at the floor and saw the scattered pieces of what made us look so much like each other, we both cried until our blue eyes were rimmed with red.

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