Page 23 of Part of Forever
“Wow, your life is so exciting,” Lucy says.
I laugh. “Or incredibly dumb.” I take a breath, and another person enters the room. Right, this isgrouptherapy, I forgot. The boy sits at the edge of the semicircle and pulls out his phone, putting earbuds in his ears.
Lucy laughs, too. “Or maybe that.”
“So, the night before I’m supposed to go home, one of my friends, Shawn, calls. We’ve known each other forever since his dad and my dad lived in the same apartment in college and are still good friends. It’s so weird how most of my friends came from who my parents were friends with. Not the point of this story.” I take a deep breath and continue.
“Shawn starts telling me about this girl, Libby, that he’s desperately in love with”—I roll my eyes dramatically—“the same way he’s desperately in love with a new girl every month, so I didn’t really believe him when he told me that.”
Lucy nods, watching me intently, hanging onto every word.
“Anyway, he’s going on and on about how he loves her but how she’ll never notice him, even though they’re friends, but that she’ll never notice him likethat,like he wants her to. So I blurted out, ‘why don’t we fake date?’”
“You did not!?” Lucy gasps.
“I did, and for a few seconds I thought he might have hung up. But then he goes, ‘you would do that for me?’ And I said, ‘it’s notcompletely selfless, I need to get Tucker out of my head,’ because we were friends and I could tell him that.”
I let out another sigh. “But then, six months later, we were still fake dating, or fake whatever it was we were doing, since we never actually decided to be in a fake relationship. Our parents were thrilled. Mom encouraged it so much, and I didn’t want to let her down. We never kissed. We only held hands if we had to, like if Tucker and Libby were around and we needed to pretend. I have a no PDA at school rule, so that was easy. But the more I got to actually know him, the less I liked him. I don’t know if my friends even really believed it, but I saw the hurt every time Tucker really looked at me. I mean, on the surface he and I have been good friends like we’ve always been, but I knew I’d hurt him.”
“Why go through all that?” Lucy asks quietly. “Isn’t life already too short to ignore the things we actually want?”
Her words hit harder than they should and I don’t reply. I’m realizing that now and I’m afraid we have wasted so much time already.
“I mean, now you get to be with Tucker, so something changed?” Lucy asks.
“My big audition was a couple of weeks ago, before I found out about all this.” I gesture to my body. “But I haven’t told him yet. He’s a singer, I can’t remember if I said that, but last weekend he sang a song to me in public and Shawn dumped me—well, fake dumped me? And then I told Tucker, and that’s when we kissed. I want to be with him, to get a chance to be with him instead of running away from it.” There, I said the words out loud. I can tell Tucker now, right?
“You need to tell him about the cancer,” Lucy says.
I shake my head—this girl doesn’t know me; she doesn’t know my story, even if I’ve just shared a part of it. “I can’t, not yet.”
She gives my hand a gentle squeeze. “I get that,” she says softly. “And sorry if what I just said was too much… I get like that sometimes. All up in everyone’s business. Telling them what they should do.”
“It’s okay.”
“I mean, not really.” Lucy smiles at me as her nurse comes to check her IV that I only now realized she had. “Mom says it’s probably because I’m dying, but I’m always urging people to be honest and just live their lives, since life’s too short to do anything other than that.”
I wait for her words to sink in, but they don’t. Because sure, I’ve got cancer, but I’ve still got plenty of time. I’m not worried about dying. I still have the time to be with Tucker like I want to. I just wish I could have realized it sooner so we could have hadmoretime together. Like he said, senior year could have been our year.
“I get that,” I say. Or at least, I want to get it. I want to be brave and tell Tucker how I feel, I want to stop wasting time. But we’re going to have to say goodbye when I go to Paris, so will it be worth the heartbreak?
Lucy’s next smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes. It’s as if she’s pretending, too, as if she knows that I don’t believe her, that I don’t think that life is too short. Because it still feels like I have all the time in the world, so why not wait a little longer to tell him the truth about my cancer and my feelings?
We have to stop talking after that because three more people join us; one of them is the therapist, who starts to explain how group therapy works.
I listen the whole time.
It was nice talking to Lucy about everything, but I’m not quite ready to share everything with a roomful of strangers. Especially when all of my feelings are jumbled anyway.
Lucy hugs me before I leave. It’s a little awkward, since she’s still a stranger, but I give her a smile and turn to go find Dad. As I walk out of the hospital, my heart fills with an emotion I can’t quite name.
It’s not until we’re almost home that what I feel is relief—reliefthat I’m not alone in this, that I have a friend who knows what I’m going through, because as of now, Lucy is my newest friend. Or at least something close to it.
“What was that look?” Nathan asks as soon as the warning bells go off in my head, telling me I shouldn’t be friends with Lucy, that we both have cancer and this might not end well.
“What look?”
“Well, you were smiling one second, then the next you looked like someone died.”
