All the Answers (21 page)

“Well, that's good.” Ava looked out the window for a few seconds. Almost all the leaves had blown off the trees. She turned back to Sophie. “How come you were mad at
me
?”

“I'm not mad at you!” Sophie's eyes went all big. “I was going
to sit with you on the bus this morning, but you were already sitting with somebody.”

“You
were
mad. Right?” Ava looked at Sophie and raised her eyebrows.

“I was really mad at your pencil. And it's weird to be mad at a pencil so I guess I kind of took it out on you.” Sophie sighed. “You know how I am. Whether I'm happy or upset or whatever, sometimes I get so hyped up I don't even know what I'm thinking anymore and then I do things like decide to open crazy shopping businesses or ask out other people's boyfriends or run away from my best friend. And usually,
you're
the person I talk to about everything. You're the one who settles me down.”

“Really?” Ava had never thought of herself as the stable one.

“Really. But this time, you were all wrapped up in it with the pencil and everything, so …” Sophie shrugged. “I'm really sorry.”

“It's okay,” Ava said.
Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong
, she thought. She was feeling strong today. And she was glad to have Sophie back. She was going to need a friend. But she didn't tell Sophie about the pencil's latest news. Not yet. She wanted to go home and see how bad it was and then—then she'd figure out what to do next.

Ava's dad was supposed to pick her up after the field trip, but his pickup truck wasn't in the school parking lot when the bus got back, so Ava went inside to wait. She got her books from her
locker and headed for the bench by the front door, but Sophie called to her. “Hey, where's your saxophone?”

Jazz tryouts.

Jazz tryouts were today.

“It's in my band locker. But I can't go to tryouts,” Ava said. “I have to go home. My dad's picking me up.”

Sophie peered out the school's glass doors to the parking lot. “I don't see his truck. I'm going down for my tryout now. Call your dad and tell him you're coming, too.”

Ava shook her head. “I really can't.” But calling was a good idea. Maybe Dad forgot with everything going on. He had to have talked to Mom by now. “I'll call you later.” Ava headed for the office.

“Hello, Ava!” Mrs. Zuckerman smiled over the counter.

“Hi, Mrs. Zuckerman. May I please use the phone to call my dad for a ride?”

“No need,” she said. “He called not five minutes ago and left a message that he's busy this afternoon, but he'll pick you up at four. After jazz tryouts.”

“How does he know about jazz tryouts?” Ava blurted.

“Parents have a secret sixth sense.” Mrs. Zuckerman wiggled her eyebrows. “Also, because Miss Romero came by the office to call your house when you didn't show up for the auditions right away. She'd already spoken to your dad when I told her the field trip bus was running late. She said she'd wait for you in the band room, so everything's good.”

No. Everything wasn't. But Ava knew that she wasn't going
to get out of tryouts now. “Thanks,” she told Mrs. Zuckerman and headed for the band room.

“There you are! We were getting ready to send out a search party.” Miss Romero motioned Ava toward the instrument lockers. “Get yourself tuned up, and you can play next.” She turned back to talk Sophie through a tough section on her drum solo.

Ava took out her saxophone and put a reed in her mouth while she put the pieces together. Her scraped-up hands stung every time she touched something, and her arms were sore from hanging on so tight all day. She was tired, so tired of worrying. She just wanted to get home and hear the news and cry. But Dad wasn't coming for another half hour, and she knew from the adventure course that doing something was better than doing nothing. So she'd play.

“Which song did you decide to do?” Miss Romero asked Ava as Sophie waved and headed down the hall to her locker.

Ava waved back and shuffled through her sheet music. She'd accidentally brought Grandpa's Johnny Hodges song along with the jazz tryout pieces. “I practiced two of them.” She sat down in front of the music stand. “I tried the
Titanic
one and—” She stopped herself from saying “the one you like better” because Miss Romero wasn't supposed to know that. “And this one.” She held up the Thelonious Monk music.

Miss Romero nodded. “Give them both a shot, if you'd like. I'll listen and take some notes and we'll talk after, okay?”

Ava nodded, turned to the first page of that “Straight, No Chaser” song, and started to play. She knew how it was supposed to go—
Ba-da-ba-do-BA, ba-da-ba-da-ba-do-BA, ba-da-ba-do-BA, ba-da-ba-do-BA-WAH
—but she couldn't make the notes feel quick and sassy. Ava's version sounded stumbly and garbled. She felt bad for putting Miss Romero through all three pages, but she forced herself to the end.

“Okay, not bad,” Miss Romero lied.

“It was awful.”

“Well, it's a tough song,” she said, “and I can tell you made a go of the dynamics, which is great. But why don't you try the
Titanic
song, too, so you get to show a different style, okay?”

Ava sighed. It was only a quarter to four. She switched the music and started playing, but all she could think about was Leonardo DiCaprio with icicles hanging off his eyebrows and somehow that made her think of her mom and chemotherapy, even though chemotherapy had nothing to do with icicles. Ava stopped in the middle of a measure and put her saxophone down.

“Is it okay if I play something else?”

Miss Romero frowned. “Like what? We did have set choices for the tryouts, so I'm not sure I can—”

“It doesn't matter if I get to try out or not. It's fine if I can't do jazz band. I just—I need to play something else right now. Please?”

Ava blinked fast to keep her tears inside. It mostly worked.

Miss Romero's face softened, and she nodded. “Sure. Go for it.”

Ava pulled the Johnny Hodges song from the bottom of the pile. She didn't look up at Miss Romero's face to see what she
thought of it. It didn't matter. Ava needed to play this one for herself. She needed to play like Johnny. When she'd been alone in her room it made her feel better. Not all the way better but a little looser, like she wasn't about to explode from the inside out. She needed it to make her feel that way now.

She played the song from start to finish, without looking away from the music. She played for Johnny Hodges and for Grandpa and for Mom. But mostly, she played for herself. She let the notes carry her, let her fingers ride the keys, let herself be lifted up by her own breath blowing through the horn.

She tried as hard as she could to forget she was Ava, to forget she was a tired, scared girl with scraped palms and bandaged knees and a mom with cancer. She tried to be someone else—someone who played and didn't worry, not about a thing. All the way to the last
Bah-waaahhhhh …

Then she put her saxophone down. She was only Ava again. But not tied up quite so tightly inside. And that helped.

“Ava, that was … that was amazing!” Miss Romero took a deep breath as if she could draw in whatever was left of those notes, hanging in the air. “Just beautiful.”

“Thanks.”

And then someone started clapping.

Two someones, Ava saw, when she turned around.

Her parents were standing in the doorway.

“How was your doctor's appointment?” Ava asked as soon as they got in the car to go home.

Mom didn't answer right away. She looked across the front seat at Dad. He nodded at her, just a little.

“It was fine,” Mom said. Then she turned in her seat to face Ava. “But they did see something that concerned them, so I had to go to a different office to have an ultrasound. That's why we're late. I also have to go back for a biopsy. Do you know what that is?”

“Kind of.” Ava knew exactly what it was. She'd read all about breast cancer on that website. After something showed up on a mammogram, doctors did a biopsy, where they take a sample of tissue to check and see if it's cancer. Ava wished she could just fast forward all this; she already
knew
. “It's to find out if you have cancer.”

Her mom hesitated, then nodded. “The doctor says it may not be. And if it is, they've caught it early. Very early and that's good. I don't want you to worry.”

“When's the biopsy?”

“Tomorrow morning,” Mom said. “They had a cancellation, so it's right away.” She hesitated again. “I'd like to wait until after that to talk with Marcus and Emma, okay? They didn't even know I had this appointment today, and I don't want to worry them if it's nothing.”

Ava forced herself to say okay, even though she knew it wasn't nothing.

“Good,” Mom said and nodded quickly, changing gears. She complimented Ava again on her song in the band room, then asked about the adventure course and applauded when Ava told her she'd finished.

“Just like Christopher Robin told Winnie the Pooh,” Mom said, “you're braver than you believe …”

For once, her mom got the quote right. “And stronger than you seem,” Ava joined in, “and smarter than you think.” She smiled, but her eyes welled up, and she had to turn toward the window. It was going to be a long couple of days. Her mom would need to remember those words, too.

The pencil wasn't wrong.

The pencil was right.

Mom's biopsy the next day not only confirmed she had cancer but agreed with the pencil on the exact kind—stage 1B breast cancer.

Just the word “cancer” made Ava's whole body feel like mush, but Mom dished out the news along with gravy for the mashed potatoes at dinner, as if she were talking about what book she wanted to read next instead of what kind of cancer treatment she was going to get.

“The doctor says they can do a lumpectomy—where they only remove the actual lump—so I'll be meeting with the surgeon in two weeks and most likely having surgery next month,” she said. “After that, I'll probably need to have radiation and chemotherapy to make sure it doesn't come back.”