He nods, so I suppose I’ve summed up his question adequately.
“...Sure.”
“Nice. My sister got implants in college. She hates them now. I think she’ll get them removed within the next year.”
I briefly consider sinking the tines of my fork into his dull hazel eyes. In the textbook of things not to say to a breast cancer survivor, complaining about voluntary breast surgery is in the first chapter.
This is not the day for the Be Yourself (Again) List. Steve is a lost cause, and I didn’t go through a year of treatment to waste time on lost causes.
I stand abruptly, grabbing my purse and my shawl. I’ll camp out in the bathroom until the dance floor opens. “I’ve got to…go to…the bathroom.”
“Can you get me a whiskey coke at the bar while you’re up?” Steve asks. I stare at him in disbelief. “Thanks.” He smiles.
I imagine burying Steve in a crevice between the rocks that line our Monterey home and having a torrid affair with the lead investigator so that he helps me cover up the evidence. I step around Steve, but he stops me with a hand to my wrist.
“You are so brave,” he says spiritually, trying to meet my eye.
Kill me.
chapter
two
Tragedy isan icky slime that sticks. It’s the first thing anyone sees when they look at you, even if they try to ask innocuous questions that only hint at it. It insulates, creating a barrier between you and the world. By the time you figure out how to get rid of it, clean off the muck, what’s underneath it has gone rancid. Bitter. And who wants to be around someone like that?
Tim told me to be nice to the girl with cancer because she doesn’t have a lot of friends.That was the exactoppositeof a Be Yourself (Again) moment. I need to tuck the bitterness away, fold it into something smaller, less hazardous for people close to me.
I plaster a pleasant expression on my face, and smooth down my hair as I cross the empty dance floor to the bathroom. The band is playing Nat King Cole and I try to sync my hips casually to the music. I am happy. I am healthy. I am effervescent.
“Hey, Ruby,” someone says. Clara, face like a cat and long, pin-straight hair the color of cornsilk, struts toward me. She is, from what I can tell on Instagram, currently occupying Penelope’s best friend spot.
“Hey,” I say breathily as she wraps me in a Prada-scented hug.
“Love your hair. Slaying the short look.”
“Oh, I’m, uh, growing it out.”
Clara watches me with an expression of polite apathy.
I should continue the small talk, find something inane to comment on. “This wedding is gorgeous.”
“I know right?” Clara looks around. “I’m so impressed they pulled it off. Fanciest shotgun wedding I’ve ever seen.”
I blink, slow. “Shotgun wedding?”
Clara covers her mouth, giggling. “Oops! I thought everyone knew. Izumi’s like four months pregnant. She’s barely showing, though, I can totally see why you’d never know.”
It’s like a scab being picked open, warm blood trickling out with a pain both dull and sharp. Anxiety tugs in my gut, a whisper that snakes through my insides, telling me that I’m only here because they feel bad for me. That I’ll never escape being that one satellite friend who went through something horrible.
I have to close my eyes. I’m at Izumi’s wedding, present and healthy, but I’ve learned the hard way that reality is easily warped. One day you could be laying on the couch with your boyfriend, half-seriously looking at two bedroom lofts in West Loop, and the next your nurse anesthetist is wheeling you into the operating room, a full staff of surgeons and nurses waiting with scalpels and needles and drugs to cut the cancer from your body.
All it takes is one itsy bitsy cancerous cell to make a break for it in my bloodstream, and all of this could come crumbling down. The cancer could take root in my bones or my lungs or my brain. They say you have years, not decades, when you get diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. Can you imagine trading fifty years for five because of one pesky, errant, mutant cell? What kind of justice is that?
I gulp down as much air as I can, considering my throat is closing.
“It’s crazy, Craig and I are, like,sofar from having kids,” Clara rattles on, oblivious to my impending meltdown. “We have so much we want to accomplish career-wise.”
“I have to—” I point toward the hallway. “Sorry. Bathroom. Got to—yeah.” I pinball my way out of the reception hall. “So good to see you!” I call back to Clara before I take off at a power walk toward the only private space on this floor: a single stall, all-gender bathroom that all genders will need to do without for a few minutes. There is a category five hurricane gathering in my amygdala.
