I get my pill organizer out of the cabinet and a tub of yogurt out of the fridge. I have to move around Lennon to get to the spoons, and there’s something nice about that too. He anticipates my movements, and we move around each other like people who’ve known each other a lot longer than we have.
“Want some toast?” he offers as he pops a couple of slices of bread into the toaster.
“Sure. Thanks.”
I stand with my back to the counter and lean my head forward slightly. I take one tablet at a time and alternate between taking one big sip and two small sips of water with each one. When I’ve downed five or six, I eat a spoonful of yogurt.
The entire time, he watches me without saying a word.
I have a hard time reading his emotions. There are a lot of them, and none of them is what I expect to see. Usually, people are curious when they see me taking my meds. They have questions or concerns. He looks uncomfortable, like he doesn’t know where to look but can’t look away.
Shit. Maybe he has a thing about sick people?
17
Lennon
Mymindisracing.I’ve been watching Connor take tablet after tablet with no idea what to do with my face. Eventually, it occurs to me that normal people, people who don’t know every little thing about someone else’s life, would ask why he’s taking so many meds.
“What’s all that for?” I ask.
“I had congenital heart failure.” He says it like he’s talking about the weather. His expression is calm. There are no lines on his face. No worry or pain in his eyes. “I collapsed during a football game in my second year of college, and that’s how we found out I was sick. Treatments worked for a while, and then they didn’t. It got pretty hairy. I had to drop out for a year.” There’s a hitch in his voice. Very, very slight, but it’s there. “But I got a new heart, so I’m all good now.”
For a long time now, I’ve hated the numbness. The absence of everything good has been so stark that it’s made me wonder if it wouldn’t be better to feel pain if that’s the price I have to payto be happy. Now, I’m grateful for it because as he talks, I feel nothing. I move my eyebrows up and down and try to coordinate my mouth into expressions that match what I’m doing with my brows.
“So you got a transplant, huh?” I hear myself say. “Gnarly.”
My use of the wordgnarlymakes him laugh, which is kind of funny because Havi used to love it when I said it too. He bought me a T-shirt for my birthday one year that had a big iron-on print of the word over the chest. Every time I wore it, he’d spend the entire day saying “Gnarly, bro,” every time I said or did anything.
“Itwasgnarly,” Connor says, taking the piss out of me and doing the worst impression of a skater boy I’ve ever heard. “It was gnarly as fuck, man.”
He laughs like it’s easy. Like the world is a good place and life is worth living. When he does it, his eyes crease at the corners and his lips pull back so far that three or four curved lines form on either side of his mouth. His cheeks go pink and a splotch of color forms at the base of his throat.
I can’t take my eyes off him.
I’ve watched him and watched him from the shadows. I’ve watched him for so long, yet the more I get to know him, the less I know about him.
“So,” I say, waving in his general direction, “is that, like, why you’re like this—all Zen master and shit? ’Cause you almost died?”
He stops laughing gradually and looks at me. His eyes are still shining. Blue-green and peaceful.
“No,” he says quietly. “I’m like this because I lived.”
It’s a subtle difference, but it’s not lost on me. It’s almost the truth, but not quite. Maybe it’s his version of the truth, but the real truth, the universal truth, is that he isn’t like this because he nearly died or even because he lived. He’s like this because this iswho he is: someone who chooses to focus on good things instead of bad.
“But yeah,” he continues, “it was a…” His voice trails off, and changes, softer and more husky now. “Groundbreaking…mind-altering…life-changing experience. It changed me in ways I’m still discovering and coming to grips with.”
My eyes wander and land on the photograph of him on the shelf. The one of him in his football gear. “Do you miss him?” I ask, gesturing to the picture with a tilt of my head. “The guy you were before?”
He turns, following my gaze, and looks at the photograph for a while. “That guy had it pretty good,” he says. “Not gonna lie, he really did. He had guys and girls all over him.”
Guys and girls? Guysandgirls?
What the fuck?
“Thought you were gay,” I say before I have time to stop myself.
“I didn’t say I was gay…” He smiles neutrally, almost impersonally, for a second, and then it changes. It goes from friendly and polite to something laced with unmistakable desire. “I said you were good-looking.”
