“Everything okay?” I ask.
“It’s Louise. She—” The words crack in Tori’s throat. “She didn’t tell me that things had gotten this bad.”
Dread pools in my stomach, my extremities weighing like lead. “What do you mean?”
“She’s—” A sob wracks Tori. “gone.”
A light goes out inside me.
chapter
thirty-two
You thoughtthis was a happy story, didn’t you? Where the good little cancer patient sits in her chemo chair, takes her medicine, eats her vegetables, and survives. Beats it. Well, cancer doesn’t work that way. It takes who it wants, when it wants. Death knocks on your door the second you get the diagnosis. Death is on everyone’s doorstep, of course, but you don’t become aware of it until something like this happens. And then it’s all you think about. The possibility of not being here anymore, of not accomplishing everything you want to accomplish, not going all the places you’re meant to go. Every moment you live becomes a reminder that it could all be taken away in the blink of an eye. At a certain point, cancer claims some of us. Becomes resistant to treatment. Spreads. Or something else gets to you first. Malnutrition, infection. A story about cancer is a story about mortality.
So, welcome to the party.
The world is gray.Color has been sucked out of it. Everything is slow and difficult, like moving through peanut butter. I have to remind myself to do the things that should come naturally. Putting one foot in front of the other. Breathing.
Louise is gone.
Louise is gone.
Gone.
One word—one syllable, even—and everything is different.
One day I won’t be here anymore, and that’s the way it is.I can still hear her scratchy voice.Gem? Good name. A paisley kaftan with a trailing cloud of Chanel No. 5 and ten times more chutzpah than I could ever hope to have. The memories make my legs tremble.
I can’t feel my own steps back up to the bridal suite. Josh is still downstairs with Tori, so I’m alone, hovering a few inches above the ground like a wraith.
Time glitches and suddenly, I’m standing in front of Penelope, her makeup artist brushing on eyeshadow.
“Yes?” she asks sharply.
“Louise is…” I trail off, my throat closing. “She, um.” Tears are trying to press their way out of my eyes, wet and heavy. “Passed away. This morning.” I hold my cheeks. “I’ll call the vendors?—”
“What?” Calliope croaks from my right.
“Why would you do that?” Penelope’s face is disturbingly calm.
“Because…” I can’t force out the words.Because someone really special just died and how are we supposed to go on living our lives normally?
Penelope groans. “This willnotruin my wedding day!”
The world stops, like shifting to park at fifty miles an hour. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. I’m sorry she’s gone, but that isn’t going to stop anything today. It’s not what Louise would have wanted.”
I have to laugh. “Not what Louise would have wanted? You don’t know the first thing about what she wanted.”
Penelope’s voice turns to ice. “This ismy special day.”
In the light of a sun Louise can no longer see, I realize that I don’t know this person. This isn’t the girl I became friends with. The person I sipped sangria with over our laptops, giggled with in the corners of clubs while we picked out boys to talk to, cheered on through two book deals. That person doesn’t exist. At least not anymore. I’ve been bending over backward, pinching myself again and again into a shape that would fit with someone who couldn’t even visit me during treatment without taking photographic evidence.
It’s a slippery slope, losing yourself. Like free-falling above the atmosphere, where there’s no air to tell you which way is Earth and which way is vast, empty space.
Penelope barrels on, oblivious to the fact that the earth is no longer stable beneath us. “This whole time she’s beenblackmailingme into spending time with her, and now when I finally get whatIdeserve out of it, she goes right ahead and finds a way?—”
