FYI: Fludarabine and Chlorambucil are chemotherapy drugs commonly used to treat CLL (the type of leukemia Reuben has).
A week after her father was diagnosed with leukemia,
Helen had her hair cut to chin length and officially quiet cheering. She still
sat with Lydia and the art students at lunch, but she barely spoke to anyone.
Summer and Keith continued to draw through most of lunch, only looking up to
check the clock. From time to time, Lydia offered fresh dirt on the other girls
in the squad, but Helen would only nibble at her sandwich.
“You
wouldn’t believe what Kristen did with her hair,” Lydia recounted one day. “She
has these chunky red and platinum highlights. It looks like someone spilled
paint on her hair.”
“Really,”
Helen said blankly.
“I
can’t believe her mom paid a hundred bucks for it,” Lydia continued, laughing.
Helen
said nothing.
“Hey,
what’s wrong with you?” Lydia asked. “You look like shit.”
Helen’s
chin dropped to her chest. She threw out her half-eaten sandwich and apple in
her lunch bag and left the table. With that, she slipped off to the staircase
that went up to the library. Lydia looked over her shoulder and frowned.
“Trouble
in paradise,” Summer scoffed.
“At
first I thought it was PMS,” Lydia confided, “but she’s been like this for a
month.”
“You
haven’t been much help,” Sam remarked.
“What’s
that supposed to mean? I still sit with her.”
“She’s
miserable. The last thing she needs is her friend telling her she looks bad.”
“But
she does! Her eyes are all blue and puffy and her hair’s a mess and she doesn’t
even wear mascara anymore. She’s not taking care of herself. And she won’t tell
me why.”
Sam
threw his backpack on over one shoulder. “I’m going to the library.”
When
he reached the foot of the stairs, Sam saw Helen slide out the front entrance
with her hand in her front jeans pocket. He tiptoed up to the front doors and
peeked outside. Helen sat on the front
steps, her knees curled up to her chest, with her phone in one hand and
a tissue in the other. She dabbed at her eyes and then started shouting, one
hand waving. Then, she was suddenly quiet. She had hung up. Sam stepped out and
sat next to her on the steps.
“Hey,”
he said.
“Hey.”
Sam
turned his head just enough to see her face. While Lydia was right — she looked
very different without her long hair and makeup — he didn’t think she looked
bad. Not physically, anyway. Her hair was frizzier without whatever stuff she
usually put in it, and the redness around her cheeks was more apparent, but Sam
thought she looked more authentic without the red lipstick and big shiny
earrings. It allowed him to notice the way her mouth wrinkled at one side when
she was tense, and the specks of gold in her eyes. The way she forced herself
to smile in the hallway to compensate for the puffiness under her eyes and her
furrowed brow. Whatever was bothering her had to be pretty horrible, Sam
thought, for her to be so painfully tense. Her mouth twitched again.
“Why
did you follow me?” she asked. Her voice cracked.
“You
looked upset.”
Helen
scoffed. “It’s not… there’s not much I can do about it.”
Sam
tilted his head. “We should go back in.”
“Why?”
“Principal
Klein is on the corner. She’s putting out her cigarette.”
Sam
got up from the steps and offered Helen his hand. She stayed in place, merely
glancing towards Principal Klein. Her eyes were half closed.
“It
doesn’t really matter if I get detention,” Helen intoned. “I already have a
record.”
“Come
on.” He grabbed her hand. “You’re better than this.”
Helen
tried to slap his arm, but he shifted to the side just enough that she missed.
They made it back inside before the first bell without Principal Klein
noticing.
“I have to go to Art,” he told her,
letting go of her hand. “Helen?”
Just
as he called her name, she began striding down the hall in the opposite
direction.
***
At
the end of the school day, Helen got into her car, drove into the lot behind
the diner, in the space near the dumpster, and parked. Before she got out to
get her father, she turned up the volume on the radio and repeated to herself
her new mantra. “Don’t cry.”
As
she whispered the words, she watched the back wall of the diner blur into a red
brick haze as her eyes watered. Before she blinked enough to clear her eyes,
she looked around the car. Everything was a mess of color and light, all
blended together. The people in the street, the clouds, the signs, none of them
were distinguishable from each other. Everything became distant, a faded
memory. Insignificant. She had to wipe her eyes and forget about it all. The
next time she recited her mantra, her eyes were still puffy, but dry.
She
went inside the diner and found her father at a table, rolling cutlery into
paper napkins. The waitress sitting next to him was rapidly sorting the forks,
knives and spoons into sets of three, then, with a twist of her wrist, wrapping
them up in a flash. He was laying out each napkin flat and placing the fork,
then the knife, then the spoon, with a slowness usually reserved for delicate
surgery. But his forehead was beading with sweat nonetheless. Pete left the
register and put a hand on his back, patting him gingerly, like an old dog.
“Don’t
worry about it, Reuben. I can do the rest.”
Helen
offered her father an arm to steady him as they walked to the car. She had to
wipe her hand on her jeans leg before she touched the steering wheel; her
father’s shirt was damp. For most of the car ride to Westwood, neither of them
said anything. He fell asleep as soon as she got on the highway, and didn’t
wake up until she got on the exit for Westwood and started slowing down. When
they sat in the waiting room for the outpatient oncology clinic, Helen found
herself looking at the other people. She noticed that she was easily the
youngest by at least twenty years. The woman sitting next to her — a stocky brunette
in her forties who wore a black knit jacket and pants set — jabbed her arm with a ballpoint pen.
Helen lowered the clipboard with a questionnaire about her father’s medications
and symptoms. She thought it was sad that she kept better track of how often he
had night sweats and nausea than he did.
“Are
you new here?” Ballpoint Lady asked pointedly.
Helen
flinched. “I guess.”
“I
can tell. Most people don’t even touch those forms.”
Helen
looked over at her dad, hoping to escape Ballpoint Lady by asking him to help
with the questionnaire, but he had picked up an issue of Weight Watchers, and was staring at a glossy picture of a
lemon-roasted chicken served with roasted potatoes and steamed asparagus. She
frowned. That was the kind of meal he used to love to cook, but his nausea made
it almost impossible for him to stand cooking. Most nights she didn’t have the
time to do anything more complicated than pasta with microwaved veggies.
“The
only thing they really need to know, honey, is how much you’re eating.”
Thinking
she was safe, Helen got up and grabbed a magazine from the coffee table in
front of them. She opened up to an article debating the merits of cloth versus
disposable diapers, and promptly tossed it back on the table.
“They
used to have Reader’s Digest here,”
Ballpoint Lady droned on, “but one of the doctors didn’t like how many articles
they have on antibiotic-resistant Staph infections. Thought it scared too many people. You can get it from gym
mats, you know.”
Helen
got up and picked up an old issue of Cosmopolitan, happy to find a magazine that was guaranteed not to have articles on
diapers or Staph infections. She
wondered if it had been left in an oncology waiting room as a joke. “Fifty hot
new hairstyles for the summer” and “low-fat spicy quesadillas” did not seem
like good articles for people in the throes of chemo. Seeing that her father
had fallen asleep, she flipped over to the article on how to pick up guys at
the beach. There were a surprising number of suggestions on how to angle your
torso and bend your legs in order to disguise a soft belly, small breasts, or
cellulite. Helen had never been to a real beach before, but the prospect of
walking on hot sand with her legs crossed and her torso contorted to push out
her chest sounded ridiculous. If she could see the ocean, she thought, she’d
throw off her sandals and run across the sand into the water, feeling the cool
waves wrap around her ankles. She could pick up guys at parties, if she were
that desperate. Not that she’d been invited to any parties recently.
“Oh,
I don’t read those dirty magazines,” Ballpoint Lady chimed in. “I do word
searches.”
Helen
turned the page to a photo shoot of almost-naked lifeguards, and placed it on
her armrest while she drew her study guide for algebra out of her backpack. She
turned to her neighbor and murmured very seriously, “I prefer to multitask.”
The
clinic nurse, Linda, started calling out, “Reuben F.”
Before
she woke her father up, Helen closed the magazine and tossed onto her empty
chair.
“I
don’t read these!” Ballpoint Lady chirped after Helen and her father. “They’re
filthy, filthy, filthy! A girl your age shouldn’t be reading this.”
“What’s
that woman talking about, sweet pea?” her father asked.
“Nothing.”
Just
before Linda brought Reuben into an exam room, Helen peeked over her shoulder.
Ballpoint Lady had picked up the magazine and opened it to the lifeguard
pictures when she decided no one was paying attention.
In
the exam room, Linda took Reuben’s vitals and put on a pair of gloves to take a
set of blood samples. It had only been a week since they had gone through this
ordeal. She tapped both of his arms multiple times, up and down the length of
each forearm, as though she were searching for a lost treasure. Eventually, she
swabbed the back of his left hand, which was still bruised from banging a table
at the diner and used one of those veins. After she bandaged his hand and
discarded the butterfly needle kit, she labeled the three vials of blood and
disappeared. It was another forty minutes before they saw a doctor, and Reuben
spent most of the time lying down on the exam table, asleep. Helen did her
journal assignment for Honors English.
Create
a character profile. Include a physical description (height, gender, hair
color), dominant personality traits, etc. and tell me how he/she would react in
a crisis.
My
character’s name is Audrey Madison, Helen
wrote. She is five foot two, but her small stature is compensated by
her bearing. She walks upright, her broad shoulders back. She keeps her hair
very short so that it doesn’t slow her down when she does what she loves most —
running and competitive swimming. In the water and on the track, she’s known
for her intensity and skill. Most of her teammates respect her, until a rival
accuses her of a vicious crime. At school, she maintains her proud stance,
always looking forward when she walks. Her peers think she is putting on an
artifice of innocence. This is ridiculous. She doesn’t want to prove her
innocence. She wants to demonstrate her strength. In a way, she believes that
acting strong will bolster her psyche. But in the privacy of her room, her eyes
betray her, flooding her view of the world. The muscles she has sculpted
through years of swimming, the endurance of her lungs, the power of her heart —
none of them can truly keep her from falling apart.
As Dr. Kutzner knocked on the door, Helen slammed her
English journal shut and shoved it in her backpack, lest it be mistaken for a
personal journal. She wondered, for a half-second, if Mr. Griffin would try to
read anything into her profile of Audrey Madison. But as Dr. Kutzner logged
into the computer in the room and started pulling up a series of lab results,
she decided that the matter of “Audrey” was not worth the worry.
“How
have you been feeling, Reuben?” he asked him.
Her
father yawned. “When I’m not at work, I usually just sleep.”
“He
still eats,” Helen added. “But the only thing that doesn’t bother his mouth is
ice cream. So I make milkshakes with Ensure.”
“You need to be having more protein and iron,” Dr.
Kutzner told Reuben, but Helen heard it as an instruction to her. Fewer
milkshakes, more meat and vegetables. But what?
“I
know,” Helen sighed. “But that’s all he eats!”
“I
need you both to try harder. Your father’s red cell and platelet counts are
low. If you let this continue, you could be looking at more bruising, internal
bleeding…”
“I
get it,” Helen hissed.
She
bit her lip. She had to try harder. Her
father barely had the energy to make a sandwich when he got home from work, so
she cooked. Every meal, every day, was now her job. And she needed to do
more.
“The
cancer cells don’t seem to have changed, though, so he’s going to have to stay
on both the Fludarabine and the Chlorambucil. Same dosage. Same time of day.”
“That’s
it?” Helen spat. “What about his platelets?”
“We’re
fresh out of A negative platelets.”
“I
could donate,” Helen offered. “How long does it take?”
“About
two hours. But if you do it as a regular donor, that would reduce the risk of
him having an immune reaction.”
“I
don’t know about this,” Reuben interjected. He turned to Helen. “You’re already
doing more than you have to.”
Helen
wrapped her hand over his, taking care not to put any pressure on it. “Who else
is gonna do it?”
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