Sick Kids in Love: List 3

Sick Boy? This is so demeaning. Can’t I be Sick Man?

He’s doing some really ineffectual job of cleaning his room while I lie on his bed with my existential panic.

He’s doing some really ineffectual job of cleaning his room while I lie on his bed with my existential panic.

He grumbles and clambers onto the bed next to me.

I mean, am I dying, or am I leaving the city? Or is the city about to be ravaged by some Godzilla-type monster? It’s kind of an important distinction.

I mean, am I dying, or am I leaving the city? Or is the city about to be ravaged by some Godzilla-type monster? It’s kind of an important distinction.

That’s a pretty morbid question. Plus, I think I’ve told you before. My mom held me while I died, we watched TV, blah blah.

So if it was my last night in New York, I would go back to The New York Earth Room—that’s what it’s called. I want to see if I’ve learned anything, if it’s really this meditative place like people say it is...

But this is a nice suit, tailored, with a jacket lapel that shines in my crappy kitchen lighting.

Ashley’s stunning in light pink, Maura’s wearing red and has a streak in her hair to match because she does not abide by seasonal rules, and Siobhan has a black halter-dress that makes the rest of us look like middle schoolers by comparison.

Ashley’s stunning in light pink, Maura’s wearing red and has a streak in her hair to match because she does not abide by seasonal rules, and Siobhan has a black halter-dress that makes the rest of us look like middle schoolers by comparison.

Ashley and Luna are busy fawning over Sasha in his suit.

I try to imagine dancing with Sasha the way the girls who are dancing with boys are dancing—or the way Luna and Siobhan are dancing—and it just feels awkward. It would be the most intimate thing we’d ever done, and it would be in a room full of people who have never seen him before, and we’d be pretending to be open and sexy people instead of neurotic and uncomfortable people...

I go out with the rest of the girls and screech with them and join our writhing little group. Maura holds my hands and spins me around. I don’t remember the last time I danced with all of them like this.

After four songs, my hips are screaming and I’m feeling bad about leaving Sasha for so long. The girls make moaning noises at me as I go, but I extricate myself anyway and limp on over to him.

I want to go hug everyone at your school who made you happen. I love your friends. I...I am all in, here, that’s what I’m saying. There’s not a caveat. There’s not an exception. There’s...I love everything about you.

It’s one of those moments that seems predetermined, like that clock that’s been inside me and maybe inside both of us since Thanksgiving at the very latest, tick-tick-ticking away, is finally sounding the alarm.

“My parents would probably leave us alone if we asked them really nicely and I promised I’d clean everything up.”
“So would my dad,” I say, though I can’t imagine all those people in our tiny, pristine little house.

He looks down at his waffle and does this sheepish grin that makes me want to die right on the checkered floor.

“I can do it,” Luna says. “I’m not going to foist the whole party off on you just because it’s your house. Oh, see if you can get decorations, though? Something, like...twinkly.”

It’s not like an intimate sleepover. Fifty people are going to be there.

“I thought you liked Sasha.” I know I’m being manipulative. But I can’t miss this party.

“I have to make sure no one pukes in my brothers’ room or pees on the credenza,” he says.

Some guy jostles past me on the way to get his drink.

Literally five minutes ago she was crying about how she was jealous of me for having a boyfriend, and now because he’s horizontal for a minute, all of a sudden I’m, what, a noble hospice worker?

But since I don’t make the enzyme, my old cells just stick around, clogging everything up, taking up space, rattling around in my lungs or making my spleen the size of nine spleens or sitting around my bone marrow, keeping me from making red blood cells.

It’s pink and blue and a little misshapen, like lumpy cotton candy.

“Yes,” I say, and I put my phone on speaker and listen to the quiet rasp of his voice as I fall asleep.

“Why wouldn’t I like something you like?” he says nonchalantly, turning a page in the yearbook.

I reply back, refuting every single one of his points, and he responds almost instantly, defending his just as hard.

Sasha, on the other hand, gets a fever of a hundred and three and lungs so congested they almost stop working.

He hops up and pulls up my clothes hamper for an extra chair and sits down next to me at the desk.

“Okay, so there’s kind of a practice round first, after you get past the opening exposition part.”

We finally get to the part where I start killing ghosts or zombies or...revenants, I guess, whatever these things are, and I’m terrible at it because I’m terrible at video games.

He’s wearing this red sweater that makes his skin look yellow and delicate and beautiful, and he chews on his thumbnail while he searches for the right brand of shortening.