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were too long, as if the second toe was a window into the soul or something. So when I pointed out a pair of sandals that would suit her skin tone, she was like, “Yeah, but . . .” the but being but they will expose my hideous second toes to the public, and I said, “Kaitlyn, you’re the only person I’ve ever known to have toe-specific dysmorphia,” and she said, “What is that?”
“You know, like when you look in the mirror and the thing you see is not the thing as it really is.”
“Oh. Oh,” she said. “Do you like these?” She held up a pair of cute but unspectacular Mary Janes, and I nodded, and she found her size
and tried them on, pacing up and down the aisle, watching her feet in the knee-high angled mirrors. Then she grabbed a pair of strappy
hooker shoes and said, “Is it even possible to walk in these? I mean, I would just die—” and then stopped short, looking at me as if to say I’m sorry, as if it were a crime to mention death to the dying. “You should try them on,” Kaitlyn continued, trying to paper over the awkwardness.
“I’d sooner die,” I assured her.
I ended up just picking out some flip-flops so that I could have something to buy, and then I sat down on one of the benches opposite a
bank of shoes and watched Kaitlyn snake her way through the aisles, shopping with the kind of intensity and focus that one usually associates with professional chess. I kind of wanted to take out Midnight Dawns and read for a while, but I knew that’d be rude, so I just watched
Kaitlyn. Occasionally she’d circle back to me clutching some closed-toe prey and say, “This?” and I would try to make an intelligent comment about the shoe, and then finally she bought three pairs and I bought my flip-flops and then as we exited she said, “A nthropologie?”
“I should head home actually,” I said. “I’m kinda tired.”
“Sure, of course,” she said. “I have to see you more often, darling.” She placed her hands on my shoulders, kissed me on both cheeks,
and marched off, her narrow hips swishing.
I didn’t go home, though. I’d told Mom to pick me up at six, and while I figured she was either in the mall or in the parking lot, I still
wanted the next two hours to myself.
I liked my mom, but her perpetual nearness sometimes made me feel weirdly nervous. A nd I liked Kaitlyn, too. I really did. But three
years removed from proper full-time schoolic exposure to my peers, I felt a certain unbridgeable distance between us. I think my school
friends wanted to help me through my cancer, but they eventually found out that they couldn’t. For one thing, there was no through.
So I excused myself on the grounds of pain and fatigue, as I often had over the years when seeing Kaitlyn or any of my other friends. In
truth, it always hurt. It always hurt not to breathe like a normal person, incessantly reminding your lungs to be lungs, forcing yourself to accept as unsolvable the clawing scraping inside-out ache of underoxygenation. So I wasn’t lying, exactly. I was just choosing among truths.
I found a bench surrounded by an Irish Gifts store, the Fountain Pen Emporium, and a baseball-cap outlet—a corner of the mall even
Kaitlyn would never shop, and started reading Midnight Dawns.
It featured a sentence-to-corpse ratio of nearly 1:1, and I tore through it without ever looking up. I liked Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem,
even though he didn’t have much in the way of a technical personality, but mostly I liked that his adventures kept happening. There were
always more bad guys to kill and more good guys to save. New wars started even before the old ones were won. I hadn’t read a real series
like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.
Twenty pages from the end of Midnight Dawns, things started to look pretty bleak for Mayhem when he was shot seventeen times while
attempting to rescue a (blond, A merican) hostage from the Enemy. But as a reader, I did not despair. The war effort would go on without
him. There could—and would—be sequels starring his cohorts: Specialist Ma
I was just about to the end when this little girl with barretted braids appeared in front of me and said, “What’s in your nose?”
A nd I said, “Um, it’s called a ca
disapprovingly, but I said, “No no, it’s okay,” because it totally was, and then Jackie asked, “Would they help me breathe, too?”
“I du
“I know, right?”
“I think I’m breathing better,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” I said, “I wish I could give you my ca
place.
“Thanks for letting me try it,” she said.
“No problem.”
“Jackie,” her mother said again, and this time I let her go.
I returned to the book, where Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem was regretting that he had but one life to give for his country, but I kept
thinking about that little kid, and how much I liked her.
The other thing about Kaitlyn, I guess, was that it could never again feel natural to talk to her. A ny attempts to feign normal social
interactions were just depressing because it was so glaringly obvious that everyone I spoke to for the rest of my life would feel awkward and self-conscious around me, except maybe kids like Jackie who just didn’t know any better.
A nyway, I really did like being alone. I liked being alone with poor Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem, who—oh, come on, he’s not going to
survive these seventeen bullet wounds, is he?
(Spoiler alert: He lives.)
CHAPTER FOUR
Iwent to bed a little early that night, changing into boy boxers and a T-shirt before crawling under the covers of my bed, which was queen size and pillow topped and one of my favorite places in the world. A nd then I started reading A n Imperial A ffliction for the millionth time.
A IA is about this girl named A
and they have a normal lower-middle- class life in a little central California town until A
But it’s not a cancer book, because cancer books suck. Like, in cancer books, the cancer person starts a charity that raises money to fight cancer, right? A nd this commitment to charity reminds the cancer person of the essential goodness of humanity and makes him/her feel loved and encouraged because s/he will leave a cancer-curing legacy. But in A IA , A
A lso, A
might be a con man and possibly not even Dutch, and then just as the possibly Dutch guy and her mom are about to get married and A
about to start this crazy new treatment regimen involving wheatgrass and low doses of arsenic, the book ends right in the middle of a