Short Stories - Chapter 2: Chapter 2

Every day, Ethan felt excited all over again to go see Mikey at the hospital. True, Mikey wasn't always there; sometimes he was home with his family, and Ethan found the chance of seeing him sort of like a gamble. He was ecstatic when he saw Mikey sitting in the playroom, and disappointed when he didn't.
Whenever Mikey was there, the two boys got closer. Ethan would bring something new each time, whether it was a book or a toy or a story or a game—Mikey turned out to be really good at scrabble.
Days turned into weeks. They were best friends. Mikey's parents loved Ethan, and he saw them a lot more after they found an apartment to rent, then a lot less again after they found jobs. Ethan's mom had met Mikey a few times, and she thought he was adorable. On the days that she didn't have work, the two boys missed each other's company like they never imagined they would. On the days that she did work, Ethan found him cancelling plans with friends to go with her to the hospital, and Mikey welcomed him with his timid smile every time. Everything was, to put it as simply as possible, awesome.
After a few weeks, things started changing.
Mikey would disappear more often for check ups. Sometimes he'd get what he called "medicine," but Ethan was pretty sure it wasn't normal medicine, because normal medicine didn't take two hours to take.
He was even more tired. They spent only half of their time in the playroom, half in his hospital room because he was bordering on sleep or feeling too sick to get up.
Ethan got used to seeing him with bandage wrapped around his elbow—Ethan remembered having something similar one time when he got his blood drawn, and it made him wonder just how often Mikey got his blood drawn.
Mikey would rub his temples whenever he thought Ethan wasn't looking. "Do you have a headache?" "No, I'm fine."
And Mikey would get this pained look on his face sometimes. He'd clutch his stomach and try to ignore what he was feeling, but eventually he would shoot up, say "I have to go to the bathroom," and dash out of the playroom. He would come back sometimes five, sometimes thirty minutes later, chewing gum and smelling of toothpaste. "Is everything okay?" "Yeah, I'm fine."
One day, when Mikey dashed out, Ethan followed him. Mikey did go to the bathroom, but he was far from fine. The stall door was open just a crack, and through it Ethan could hear vomiting.
"Mikey?" He called softly. The noise stopped abruptly.
"Ethan! Why are you—" But Mikey was cut off as his body took over once again. Ethan pushed open the door and, though he'd been expecting what he saw, it still squeezed painfully at his heart. Mikey, bent over the toilet, coughing and choking and hurling.
"I'll go get help," was Ethan's first instinct.
"No, it's okay," Mikey coughed. He stood up as if he were about to leave, before hunching over again and heaving.
Ethan was torn between getting someone and staying to make sure Mikey was okay. He decided to look for help, because a professional would know what to do better than he would.
So he ran from the bathroom to the nursing station where he quickly spotted Luisa, Mikey's nurse. "Luisa!" He called.
The nurse—a nice Hispanic lady in her thirties—looked up at the sound of her name and said, "Hey, Ethan. What's wrong?"
"Can you come to the bathroom? Mikey's not okay."
Her face creased in concern and she stood quickly, hurrying from the station to join Ethan. His mother, who'd just left a patient's room, started to say, "Ethan? What are you doing here?" But they were already gone.
They found Mikey in the bathroom, but he was at the sink, wiping at his face with a paper towel. He looked over his shoulder when they entered. "It's okay, Luisa," he said. "It's just the chemo."
Chemo. Ethan had never heard that before.
But Luisa nodded in understanding, and she didn't look as worried as before. As if this was normal. "How about we get you back to your room and check you out, okay?"
All Mikey did was nod. He was looking everywhere but at Ethan, and his face was red with embarrassment. "I'll be there in a few minutes," he said to Luisa, and she seemed to get the message, because she nodded and retreated from the bathroom, but not before leaning down to Ethan's ear and whispering "make sure he comes soon."
When she left, neither boy said anything for a long moment. They just kept staring—Ethan at Mikey, Mikey at the wall, the floor, and the ceiling.
Until, "Did the Bad Guy make that happen?"
Mikey shook his head. "The medicine."
"Your medicine makes you sick?"
"It's awful."
Mikey had that same miserable look on his face that he'd had the first day Ethan found him crying in the corner. Ethan didn't know what to say. Words were hard at nine. So he stepped forward and hugged his friend instead, and when Mikey hugged him back, Ethan could hear him crying against his shoulder.
Two days later was July twelfth, Mikey's ninth birthday. Ethan brought him a little stuffed eagle and a book about marine animals, and Mikey just about tackled him in a hug.
After that, Ethan realized that he really liked hugging Mikey, so he started doing it more often. Every time he came in the mornings and left at nights. Whenever Mikey got really sad, or really happy. It was weird, because Ethan never hugged his friends from school. Mikey wasn't like his friends from school, though. His friends were pretty cool. Mikey was pretty amazing.
It was a week later that Mikey started wearing The Hat. It was a grey beanie, under which Ethan could just see the ends of his hair. Ethan didn't think anything of it at first, until he realized that Mikey wore it every day, and wouldn't take it off.
They were sitting in the visitor seat of the hospital, cross-legged across from each other with a stack of UNO cards between them, when Ethan's curiosity got the better of him.
"Why do you always wear that hat?"
Mikey's eyes rounded, and he seemed pretty startled by the question. "What?"
"That hat," Ethan said. "You never take it off. Why?"
Mikey swallowed. "I—"
"Don't lie."
Something like dread crossed Mikey's face. But he didn't put up any argument. He didn't say anything at all. He just pulled the beanie off of his head, and Ethan tried not to gasp.
His brown hair, which had been so thick before, was thin and peppered with missing patches. Mikey ran a hand through it, and his fingers came out with strands clumped between them.
He brushed the hair off of his fingers into the trash bin, and Ethan noticed for the first time that the bin had even more hair already inside of it. "Mikey . . ." He breathed.
Mikey quickly pulled the hat back onto his head. "Gross, I know."
Ethan shook his head. "Is that the Bad Guy, or the medicine?"
"The medicine," was Mikey's answer. Ethan frowned.
"I really don't like your medicine," he said. He remembered the word he'd been hearing more and more lately. "Chemo."
"I don't like it either," Mikey said. "But I think it's the only way to beat the Bad Guy."
"I think I can come up with a better way," Ethan said, bringing a lighter tone. "What if we . . . get a dragon? And the Bad Guy will have to fight it, and obviously he'll lose because nobody can beat a dragon."
Mikey laughed, a bit of light coming back to his eyes. "Where are we gonna get a dragon?"
Ethan shrugged. "Wherever Hagrid got his," he said, because he knew Mikey loved Harry Potter. "Or we can go to Hawaii. The Bad Guy will follow us, because he's lame like that, and then we'll trick him into falling into a volcano."
"Can we take him to Mauna Loa?"
"Sure," Ethan said with a grin. Did he know what Mauna Loa was? Not at all. But he was used to Mikey enough by now to guess that it was probably some famous volcano who's history he knew by heart.
"Or," Mikey prompted, "we could tell him we're going to Hawaii but actually go to Antarctica. We'll dress warm and join a penguin colony, and he'll freeze to death in his swimsuit and get eaten by polar bears."
"That's dark, Michael Smith," Ethan laughed. "I like it."
They went on like that for hours, coming up with ridiculous, impossible, often hilarious plans to take out the Bad Guy.
Weeks turned into months. The new school year started, and after a week of not seeing Mikey, Ethan realized he couldn't handle it and asked his dad, who always picked him up from school since his lunch break coincided with the end of the school day, to take him to the hospital instead of home. All he had to do was promise to finish his homework.
Mikey missed school. He had a tutor that came to the hospital, but that wasn't the same as going to his school back home and seeing his favorite teachers. Ethan made up for it, though. Ethan made up for almost everything.
Almost. But then there were the ups and downs. The days when Mikey was on top of the world, because it seemed like the treatment was finally working and the Bad Guy was going away, followed by the worst days ever when the doctors brought in the bad news that it hadn't disappeared.
He remembered a conversation his parents had had with the doctor when they thought he was sleeping. Treating the Bad Guy—the doctor called it leukemia—happened in three steps: induction therapy, consolidation therapy, and maintenance therapy.
Induction therapy was supposed to kill bad cells in the blood and bone marrow to bring about remission—periods of time when the patient doesn't have symptoms. The other two steps were meant to make sure that any remaining bad cells were killed.
Induction therapy was supposed to last a month. Mikey had been stuck in that phase since June, and now it was October.
Something was wrong with his cancer. It wasn't normal. If it was normal, they wouldn't have flown all the way from Illinois. His parents wouldn't have left their jobs and homes.
Mikey was pretty sure he was going to die.
And he didn't want Ethan to treat him like someone who was going to die. So he tried so, so hard to hide those days from Ethan. And it worked for a while.
But then months became a year. Ethan was ten now—Mikey's family had gotten him a brand new baseball bat for his birthday—and more observant than ever. So he noticed. He noticed that everything was worse now—especially the exhaustion and the nausea. He noticed that Mikey's hair was completely gone—from his head, his arms, his eyebrows and eyelashes. He noticed that Mikey's skin was way, way paler now, and that he'd lost so much weight Ethan felt like he could break him if he hugged too hard. He noticed that Mikey stayed at the hospital more and more, until he was there everyday, as if he lived there. Sometimes, when he started laughing, he was cut off by a violent fit of coughs. Sometimes Ethan went home and cried, because he thought Mikey was dying.
He noticed that Mikey would go through swings, sometimes super happy, sometimes super sad, until those swings stopped entirely and he seemed to just have this hopelessness to him, like a constantly hovering cloud. But any time he brought that up, he upset Mikey, and he hated upsetting Mikey, so he stopped bringing it up.
That wasn't to say that Mikey was no fun anymore. He was still the best, and Ethan never once felt like being his friend was tedious. He was Ethan's little Birdie, and that wouldn't change. Things were never weird with him. Sometimes different, but never weird.
Things were weird with Ethan's parents, though. When Ethan asked his mom if he could put Mikey's parents phone numbers into her phone, she dismissed him by saying that wasn't necessary. When he asked his dad, he told him that they had limited call time and text messages, and couldn't afford to waste it. Which made Ethan wonder about all the times he'd heard his mom talking on the phone with her friends for hours about nothing important.
Not to mention, they never let Ethan go over to Mikey's apartment to see him. They always found some excuse—some obscure thing that Ethan needed to do. They never even got Mikey's address.
With his parents being weird and his sister being his sister—moody and bossy like your average teenage girl—Ethan started turning more and more to Mikey for someone to talk to. It became obvious then that Mikey didn't just need Ethan. Ethan was pretty sure he couldn't live without Mikey, either.
They began to grow up together. At eleven, they were whispering curse words to each other when Mikey's parents weren't around, making inappropriate jokes that they didn't even fully understand yet, and making fun of each other's cracking voices.
The age eleven was also when they started to spend pretty much all of their time in Mikey's hospital room, because it was too hard for him to get up and about. Sometimes he made it to the visitor seat and they would talk there, but other times he couldn't even get out of bed. On those days, Ethan would climb into the hospital bed beside him—the two of them easily fit, especially now that Mikey had grown so thin—and they would talk, or play some game, or Mikey would help Ethan with his homework.
At twelve, Ethan got into the habit of putting and arm around Mikey whenever they did this, because he was starting to learn that contact comforted Mikey. And maybe Ethan kind of liked the contact, too.
That was also the age when Ethan started talking more about girls. Leila from first period, Jenny from fifth, Anne Marie from the softball team. He would tell Mikey how lovely their eyes were, or how much he liked hearing their voices, or how cute they looked in their outfits.
Mikey never really talked about girls. Ethan eventually stopped, too, when he was on the cusp of thirteen, mostly because—and this startled him a little—he wasn't thinking about girls anymore. Instead, he was thinking about Mikey. He had the loveliest eyes—bluer than anything Ethan had seen before. There was no voice Ethan liked hearing more than his. And he always looked cute, even in his hospital gown. He didn't need hair to be pretty.
Ethan didn't really know how to feel about these new thoughts at first. A part of him was freaked out, because he'd never seen another boy like that before. But another part of him sort of just shrugged and decided to see where it went, because nothing ever felt wrong with Mikey. Plus, he was pretty sure Mikey felt it, too.
Because at thirteen, they got touchier. Cuddling a little more, touching each other's hands whenever they could. Nothing had ever excited Ethan more.
Okay, that was a lie. There was one thing that made him more excited than anything else in the world.
Mikey was getting better.
He was obviously still sick. And some days, it was still really, really bad.
But it didn't seem like he was dying anymore. Ethan noticed that he was gaining weight, at least enough to look less gaunt and sickly. Some of the color was returning to his skin. He smiled more, and laughed without coughing, and didn't have as much trouble getting around.
Now that he was getting better, seeing him at the hospital became a gamble all over again. Ethan still went every day, whether it was during school or summer, but he didn't always find Mikey there. Ethan had begged his parents time and time again to get him a phone—that way he could find out which days Mikey would be home, and besides, all the other thirteen year olds had phones—but they refused every time. It's too expensive, they said. Ethan called bullshit; his family wasn't rich, but they weren't short on money, either. His sister had gotten her first phone when she was twelve.
It wasn't all bad, though. Because when Ethan arrived on the third floor of the hospital to find Mikey's room empty, he simply went to the playroom and did something he never did when he was younger—he played with the kids in there. He realized how messed up that it was that the hospital had one person stationed in the playroom, and that the person just went on their phone and looked up every now and then to make sure the kids were all safe and didn't try to run away.
Those kids needed someone to lift their spirits. So Ethan became that person. Most of them were quiet and moody and shy, but Ethan was old enough now to know that kids would still be kids when given the chance. And now that he understood what it meant to help people, he found satisfaction in bringing smiles to those quiet, moody, shy faces.
He made more friends in those kids. None of them were like Mikey, of course, and many of them were only in the hospital for a day or a week, but they were his friends nonetheless.
Being friends with Mikey had kind of forced Ethan to grow up really fast. Turns out, he really liked being a big brother.
"Hey, Birdie?" Ethan said one day when he and Mikey were sat against each other on the latter's bed—not because Mikey couldn't get up, because he could, but because staying in bed gave them an excuse to be closer, though neither of them would admit it out loud.
"Hm?" Mikey hummed. His head was on Ethan's shoulder, and when he looked up from his newest book—The Origin of Species, which Ethan had gotten him for his birthday a week before—the Yankees cap on his head narrowly avoided hitting Ethan's cheek.
"I think you're my person," Ethan said, and he caught Mikey choke a bit. "I don't mean it like that," he said quickly, even though he was pretty sure he did. "I just mean that I don't think I'll ever get along with anyone else like this, you know? Like, I tell you everything. You're my best friend. You know that. And whenever you're happy, I'm, like, crazy happy. And watching you get better makes me wanna start break dancing." Mikey scoffed at that, because they both knew very well that Ethan couldn't dance to save his life. "And I'm kinda realizing now that I don't actually know where I'm going with this, but I just felt like I had to say it."
Ethan must have been tomato red, but Mikey's smile made up for the embarrassment. "I didn't know you were such a sap," he teased.
"Oh, screw you," Ethan laughed, pushing Mikey away by the shoulder.
"Just kidding," Mikey said, doing that cute little giggle of his and wrapping Ethan up in a hug. "I love you too, by the way."
Poor Ethan could literally feel his face burning.
Something weird happened that night.
Ethan climbed out of bed at an ungodly hour, having woken up from a strange dream with his body sending him major I'm not going back to sleep until you put food in me messages. So he went downstairs, planning on doing a bit of late-night pantry raiding.
He stopped, however, at the sound of his parents' voices coming from the kitchen—or more importantly, the sound of his name being said.
". . . scared that he might be turning into something that he isn't." It was his dad's voice.
"I know," his mom said. "I'm scared, too."
"I really think we should stop taking him to the hospital," his dad said, and if Ethan had been holding something, he would've dropped it.  "We're only feeding this . . . whatever the hell you'd call it."
Ethan heard his mom sigh. "What good will that do?" She asked. "That's his best friend—one way or another, we're just going to make him hate us if we do that. Believe me, I agree with you, but think—the kid is getting better. Which means he'll be out of the hospital soon enough and his family will move back to Illinois, and Ethan will have to get over it. Maybe we just have to wait and try our best to nudge him in the right direction."
Ethan couldn't listen anymore. He felt sick to his stomach, for more than one reason. He felt angrier than he ever had that his parents had even considered trying to separate him from Mikey—and for what reason? The most nauseating thought, though, was the one his mom had brought up. Mikey was hopefully going to be totally cancer free soon. Would he go back home when his time at the hospital was over?
Maybe Ethan's mom was wrong. Mikey and his family had been here for four years. His parents had an apartment and jobs in this city. They could stay. They had to stay.
Ethan didn't say a word to either of his parents the next morning. Partly because he was pissed at them, and partly because he was too wrapped up in thought.
He practically ran through the hospital to Mikey's room that day, which he was sure his mom would yell at him for later, but he didn't care. He didn't care at all.
"Jesus," Mikey breathed as Ethan jumped onto the visitor seat. "Slow down, tiger."
"Are you leaving?" Ethan blurted. Mikey blinked in confusion. "Like, when you're better. Are you moving back to Illinois?"
Mikey's grin slipped from his face, and suddenly he was staring at his hands. "All of our family is there. I . . . it's been hard for my parents here. They owned a shop back home. And it took years to get that place to a point where they could, you know, profit from it. And it got really hard to maintain when we came here, so it's been closed for a while. It's hard to start from scratch and . . ."
"And you have to move back so they can make a good living again," Ethan finished for him. Now he, too, was looking down.
"I don't know when that'll be, though," Mikey said, trying to push some enthusiasm into his tone. "I'm still here, right? What else matters?"
Ethan nodded, swallowing. "Yeah, 'course. And I'm really glad your getting better. So whenever the time comes, I'll just—" Ethan's voice broke and he felt something swell in his throat, snuffing out any sound. He turned his eyes to the ceiling and blinked back the stinging he felt behind them.
"Ethan . . ." Mikey climbed out of his bed and came to sit beside him, taking his hand. "Please don't cry. You know I'm gonna start bawling if you do."
Ethan let out a breathy laugh. "I'm sorry," he sniffed, wiping under his eyes. Maybe it wasn't normal for a thirteen year old boy to cry over his friend, but nothing had ever been normal with Mikey. "I just . . . I don't want you to go."
"I don't want to go either," Mikey said, his voice hoarse.
Big news. No, giant news. Massive news.
It was gone. The cancer.
For real this time. At least, that was as much as Ethan understood.
There was just one thing, because even Mikey's abnormalities were abnormal. But the doctors had figured out a way to remove that one thing. And Mikey would be okay.
"Well, probably okay," Mikey explained, glancing anxiously at the wall beside his bed. "There's a chance . . ."
"A chance . . ?" Ethan prompted, hating the suspense.
"The surgery could go wrong," Mikey said quietly. "It could kill me."
Ethan felt his heart stop. "And you're seriously gonna do it?"
Mikey cleared his throat. "It's a small chance," he said. "And if I don't do it, I'll die anyways."
"I thought the Bad Guy was gone?"
"For now. But if I don't do the surgery, he might come back, or something else will go wrong. If you couldn't tell by now, my body kind of hates me. It'll find some way to fuck me over."
Ethan chewed his lip anxiously. "When are you gonna do it?"
"The doctors said as soon as possible. So . . . tomorrow."
Something constricted in Ethan's gut, painful enough to make him wince. "And after the surgery?"
"If it goes well—"
"Which it will," Ethan said. No way was Mikey going to die now, after all the fighting he'd done.
Mikey smiled. "I stay for however long they need make sure everything is okay. Then I should be able to finish my treatment in . . ."
"In Illinois." Ethan tried not to sound the way he felt.
"Yeah."
"And we . . ."
"Keep in touch," Mikey cut him off. "One way or another. After the surgery, we'll come up with some kind of plan that even your parents can't fuck with."
Despite himself, Ethan grinned. "I'm thinking dragons," he said.
Mikey laughed. "And volcanoes."
Feeling his heart swell with something, Ethan added, "And Antarctica."
"I'm scared," Mikey admitted. "Of the surgery. It could go wrong. And of leaving you and never seeing you again. Both of those are pretty much death."
"You wouldn't die if you never saw me again," Ethan said.
"It would sure feel like it."
Ethan squeezed Mikey's hand. "You took a jump off your tree," he told him. "And you crashed. Hell, you crashed a million times. But you're back up on that branch, ready to take another jump off. And if you're scared, you're only gonna fall again."
Mikey shook his head. "I've spent too much time falling."
"So don't be scared," Ethan said. "No more falling. And no more floating. Only flying from here on out."
Mikey repeated Ethan's words under his breath. Then he turned to look at his friend, and Ethan looked back, and it was kind of a mistake, because they were in Mikey's hospital bed sat at the same level, and there wasn't as much room as there used to be. His healthy weight gain, combined with both of their teenage growth spurts, left them filling the bed a lot more than they used to, and when they both turned to look at each other, the space between them was frighteningly small.
And on any other day, they would've turned red and looked away.
But today, they didn't look away. Today, Mikey scooted forward and pressed his lips against Ethan's.
It was so soft and so quick, Ethan barely had time to respond. His eyes were saucer-wide, and he felt all of the blood rush to his face at once. Mikey was blushing like mad, staring at his lap because he was terrified of Ethan's reaction. "I'm sorry," he whispered.
But then he felt Ethan's mouth again, this time against his cheek. "I'm not," Ethan said.
Mikey still didn't meet Ethan's eyes, but his mouth had curved into a small smile. The Mikey Thing.
Then Ethan was smiling, too, and he was pretty sure there was no force known to man that could make him stop smiling. He felt warm all over, and kind of blurry, as if he was in a dream. Dreams didn't feel this real, though. He would know; he'd dreamed of this before.
And Ethan knew from that very moment, at thirteen years of age, that he would never feel exactly that way again. At least, not with anyone but Mikey.
Ethan was up early the next morning. He rushed his mom through her routine more than he ever had before. He wanted to be with Mikey up until the moment his surgery began, and there again the moment it ended. He'd probably never said the phrase "Hurry up" more in his life.
Even when they were in the car driving, he urged her on. Faster! Faster!
It got to the point where he was practically yelling, leaning over the console as if she couldn't hear him well enough as it was. Of course, he didn't see the harm in what he was doing. He only saw Mikey.
But his mom, unable to focus with Ethan yapping like a Pomeranian in her ear, eventually turned to him and demanded that he stop. Ethan only argued, though, as any kid does when they aren't thinking right.
Until a flash of red caught the corner of his eye and he yelled, "Mom! The light!"
She snapped her head back towards the road and slammed on her breaks a second too late.
Another driver, crossing the intersection, crashed into the passenger side of the car.
Mikey waited for Ethan for hours, even asking the doctors to give him five extra minutes before his surgery began to see if his friend would arrive.
Then the surgery. There were a few scares, but it went well.
He waited again after the surgery. His parents were with him the entire time, ecstatic that everything had been a success. He was happy, too, of course. But not as happy as he could be.
The next day came, and there was no sign of Ethan.
Meanwhile, on a different floor of the hospital, two parents had their heads bent in quiet conversation.
"Don't you think it's wrong?" The father asked.
"Of course it's wrong," the mother said. "But it'll work."
"You know I don't like their relationship any more than you do," he said. "But he's our son; I'm too worried that he's not going to be okay to focus on that, and you should be, too. There's a line, May, and you're too close to crossing it. Who the hell cares about Mikey when our boy is—" his voice broke. "If he doesn't wake up . . ."
"He will wake up," said the mother, and her voice shook with the conviction of a woman who, despite wanting to do an awful thing, was also completely shattered by the misfortune that had struck her family. She loved her son. She had to have faith that he would wake up, or she might just fall into a coma herself. But she was also a woman with a plan. "And when he does, we need to make sure that he doesn't make the same mistake twice."
The day after the surgery, there was a knock on Mikey's hospital room door. At his mother's come in, the door swung open.
Mikey bolted upright at the sight of Ethan's mother, wincing at the pain it caused him. "Misses Bates!" He said. Then, forgetting his manners entirely and anxious for his best friend, he asked, "Where's Ethan?"
Ethan's mom offered a tight-lipped smile. "That's what I came to talk to you about," she said. Then she nodded towards Mikey's mother and father, sat in the visitor seat. "Lauren, Paul, how are you?"
The two of them smiled in greeting, but their eyes were wary. They didn't like that woman, and for good reason. "We're very excited that the procedure went so well," Paul said stiffly.
Ethan's mom hummed. "Yes, that's very exciting. I'm happy for you, Michael."
"Thank you, ma'am."
She feigned a troubled look. "Yes well, I hate to tell you that I don't bring such good news. But Ethan . . . well, Mikey, he won't be coming here anymore."
Mikey's eyes shot wide. "What? Why?"
"He doesn't want to see you again," she lied smoothly. "Keep in mind, I'm just the messenger, but he . . . he said that he can't believe what you did, and that he hates you for it. I tried to reason with him, of course, but he's made up his mind. I'm really sorry, Michael. I know that's not what you want to hear so soon after a big surgery, but I thought it would be better to tell you now than keep you waiting in the dark."
Mikey was absolutely silent. He stared, disbelieving and terrified and heartbroken, at the woman who had so easily just spoken the worst words he'd ever heard. Words worse than you have cancer.
"Now hold on," said Mikey's dad, standing up. "Mikey and Ethan were closer than I've ever seen two kids be. With all due respect, May, I don't know if I beli—"
"Dad," Mikey interrupted softly. "It's okay. I. . .I know what I did."
Which was ironic, because May didn't have the first clue "what he'd done."
A couple of days ago, in that very hospital bed. A kiss. Ethan had changed his mind. Mikey had ruined everything.
"Are you sure we can't talk with him?" His mom asked, her heart breaking at the expression on her son's face.
"I respect what my son wants," Ethan's mom said, and something had shifted in her voice. The sympathy was gone. "You need to respect it, too."
And then she left. They never heard from her or her family again.
Mikey broke down.
He cried for hours, and there was no way his parents could console him. They tried everything.
The next day, too. And they day after that. Each day, Mikey waited, hoping that Ethan would show up and say he wasn't upset anymore, wishing they'd gotten his address so Mikey could try and apologize. Each day, Mikey cried and cried and cried, because he'd lost his everything in what felt like just twenty-four hours, and it was his own damn fault.
All-the-while, Ethan was two floors away in a room just like Mikey's, unconscious and covered in bandages.
It was three weeks before Mikey left. Three weeks of despair and hopelessness and feeling like nothing was worth anything. Mikey knew he would never see Ethan again, and he'd been right—it felt like dying.
His family packed up the apartment. They left their jobs. They climbed into his dad's car and left for Illinois.
He cried the entire car ride back, not sleeping for a second, even when they stopped at a hotel for one night. His house didn't feel like his home. His home was back in California, hating him. And after ruining the best thing he'd ever had, he couldn't help but hate himself, too.
It was another two weeks before Ethan woke up. His parents rejoiced, bringing him a cake and flowers and a balloon. Even his sister seemed, for the first time ever, happy to see him.
But his first question was, "Where's Mikey? Did I miss his surgery? He didn't leave yet, did he?"
The answer: there were complications during the surgery. He didn't make it.
Ethan burst into tears right away. He cried to the point of screaming and breathlessness and choking, cursing out the world and cancer and himself for not being there.
A part of him couldn't believe it. That Mikey was gone. That the last memory of him would forever be a kiss in his hospital bed.
But a bigger part of him believed it all too much, and it destroyed him. He was a zombie on his feet, inconsolable for months, crying at the sight of everything that reminded him of Mikey—birds, horoscopes, books, scrabble.
They were two heartbroken boys, up late each night because they couldn't sleep through their tears, unable to think about anything but each other, blaming themselves for losses built on lies.
There are certain things that you don't get over in weeks, or months, or a year. Things that you eventually come to think you've forgotten, until some reminder has you blinking back tears again when you're fifteen, sixteen, maybe even seventeen. Things that you preserve the only way you can; photo albums, souvenirs of better times—a stuffed eagle. A baseball bat. A book of horoscopes.