Dessert First (15 page)

“Just—make Beep well, okay?”

So: No pressure. I gave her a scared nod.

• • •

The next morning, at the Blood Centers of the Pacific donation site in San Francisco on Bush Street, a block from Dad's office, I sat in a brown, one-armrest lounging couch for the three-hour “harvest,” while the regular blood donors came and went, because my donation took six times as long. A Filipina nurse named Norlissa in a white medical jacket supervised, and the apheresis machine clicked and whirred, separating what it was pulling out of my blood for saving Beep from the stuff it sent back. The only creepy parts were (1) the blood they put back into me came back in cold, so I could feel this long chilly line s-l-o-w-l-y moving up my left arm then through my chest toward my heart. I put my right hand on where it was coming back from the left side, and felt the cold advancing. Eww. And, of course (2) there was no guarantee my stem cells, parked in Beep, wouldn't kill him.

They gave me this little tape-wrapped gauze about the size of the cardboard center of a toilet paper roll, which I was supposed to roll around every five seconds in the hand of the arm they were taking the blood out of. While I twirled and squeezed it, I sent little messages to my stem cells.
Make Beep well. Don't get rejected. Make healthy blood cells, in your new home. Don't kill my brother, guys. Be good for him. Kick leukemia's ass. Save my brother. Please.

• • •

Beep was so zonked from the chemo, he didn't even remember getting my transplant. When the docs put the drip in, he was way too out of it to remind the little cells of what to do, and those cells didn't have any actual brains in their tiny selves. So I was worried they might already have forgotten my advice from a few hours before.

Beep played nearly dead for a couple of days, then slowly started getting better.

The weeks while Beep and my bone marrow were still deciding how much to fight with each other, I had trouble sleeping. Way across the country in his hospital room, Hunter was so wired on prednisone that sleep wasn't a regular option for him. Instead, we spent hours in the darkness, shooting messages back and forth. He said I helped distract him from his situation, and I needed something to take my mind off the growing ache of worry for Beep. One night in late November, we exchanged complaints about school.

H:
Was supposed to escape high school for good in June, but even if I get well fast they'll make me repeat at least a semester, cuz I missed so much.

K: (*
Shudder
*)
Since I haven't done any of the assignments, they might make me repeat a whole grade. The student equivalent of being regurgitated. They'll feed me the same b.s. homework over again, to make me hurl. A whole year of making street pizza and eating lunch to match my shoes.

H:
LOL
.
But don't get me started—I know lots more words for barfing than you
.

K:
Dream on, shiny head. I'm a cancer sib. I entertain my cancer kid brother with names for the big spit. I've forgotten more ways to say yak than you know.

H:
Wanna bet?

K:
Sure. My bone marrow against your heart. (With chemo, your liver and kidneys, probably not so good.) I should warn, though—it's not clear yet if my bone marrow is so great either
.

H:
No prob. Last girl I gave my heart to threw it back, bruised. And any bone marrow is better than mine. You're on: Hurling, horking, heaving. Hacking up a hairball.

Hmmn. Upping the degree of difficulty by starting with the same letter? Easy.

K:
Barfing. Booting. Blowing gravy. Big spit. Bouncing breakfast. Burping biscuits. Barking chow
.

H:
Spitting up
.
Spaghetti speech. Stomach acid shoe shine.

That was a new one to me.

K:
Tossing cookies. Talking to Ralph on the round white phone. Throwing up. Tossing a street pizza. Tonsil-tickle tossup. Technicolor yawn.

After half a dozen more messages back and forth, Hunter conceded.

H:
Wow. You win.

The poor guy never had a chance. He'd never heard of the power burp, let alone anti-gravity gargling. I dazzled him with my synonym skills.

H:
Where do you want the heart delivered?

K:
I'll get back to you on that
.
Take good care of it in the meantime, so when I claim it, it's cancer free.

H:
I'll do my best.

That's when Hunter started calling himself my “possibly DBF,” for possibly Dying BoyFriend. I had this weird pang, because I thought about Evan, but I played along anyway. Hunter was 3000 miles away, and a senior, and would either bounce back to the healthy world and leave me behind or be dead in a few months. Also leaving me behind. I figured it was like, when you're a girl getting a haircut, why not play-flirt with the totally gay late-20s guy hairdresser? You both know it won't go anywhere, but it's fun, maybe good practice for later in life, and basically harmless.

I wish.

• • •

That week, Drowningirl disappeared on me. Or, technically, disappeared on her online friend Cipher, but I was the one who felt bad about it. There were two last heartbreaking poems and a final message.

D:
Too much gravity here
.
I'm too crushed to type anymore. Going to use all my energy pretending to cope. I'm turning over a new leaf, and will only email when I have something cheerful to type. If ever. Love and good-bye. Thank you. Be well.

I sat there, stunned. I was worried about her, but also feeling abandoned. How could she do that? I was mostly there for her, but if things got worse for me, I figured she'd be there for me, a helpful expert on how to keep slogging through misery. And even if she was trying to protect me from her bumming me out more, didn't she know that it helped me to be needed somewhere? I'd never told her how much our connection meant.

C:
Don't go
.
I need to hear from you. I'm very alone where I am. Don't disappear on me. Please. I don't write poems like you, but I'm living one of yours. I feel like you're writing about me, too. Don't leave me alone with all this. It's too much. Please email me back. Love, and
not
good-bye. 1-800-273-TALK. Or write. Real soon.

But I didn't hear from her.

Along with all the other things trying to kill Beep, after the transplant there was one more:

Me.

My borrowed bone marrow cells attacked Beep. Like I always go after everyone with sarcasm. Except no one has to gobble bowls full of colorful meds to keep my sarcasm from killing them.

Bone marrow, borrowed or otherwise, doesn't just chill, hanging out in the middle of your bones. It's one big twenty-four-hour-a-day factory, cranking out every kind of blood cell, including the infection-fighting ones, which are supposed to wander around attacking everything that's not you, as part of your immune system.

You can see how this might be a problem. Kat-style white blood cells, made by Kat's borrowed stem cell marrow in its new Beep home, are cruising down a Beep artery on their way to work one morning when Beep starts playing some first-person shooter videogame, like
Call of Duty
Roman Numeral Zillion Eight.

When the new Kat white cells realize he's enjoying that, they go “Holy crap, this
can't
be me, because I'm made out of Kat-stuff” and start attacking everything around as one giant foreign something-or-other that's not them.

It's called graft-versus-host disease, or GVHD, and it's like one of Beep's violent videogames: Everything attacks everything else. Except there's no restart, if you die.

GVHD can be mild, where you're a little sick from your whole body wanting to throw itself up. Or it can be bad. Gangrene, death, organ failure, or even death. Also, death.

To keep it down, they gave Beep buckets of pills to make his immune system tardy, on vacation, or almost completely absent, like human feelings of kindness, say, from the Tracies. Or me, say, from school, in early December.

Almost everybody was careful to describe Beep's GVHD as “mild,” at least around me, but I was never sure how much they were lying. Beep was really sick, and I kept remembering how the
Johns Hopkins Patients' Guide to Leukemia
described even heart failure as “mild.” The hospital people were probably trying to make me feel good about what I did, playing down how much my borrowed bone marrow was chomping on Beep.

Only Rachel wasn't so careful. Beep's transplant going bad had put everyone on edge, so Rachel and I got even more snarky with each other. A huge surprise, because even I hadn't thought that was possible.

She came back from the grocery store one afternoon, after deliberately not getting the eggs, milk, and meat on the list. I'd even written bacon bits and salami down, so she could leave two things out and claim moral superiority while getting the rest.

“Are you
trying
to starve me?” I asked. “Some of us prefer to eat chickens than to survive on what they eat.”

“I got seitan instead of ham.” Her expression was seriously annoyed. “And Tofurky bacon.”

Vegetables are fine. If Mrs. Miller counts, I even have one as a teacher. But as far as I'm concerned, they have their own thing going and should stick to it, not pretend to be bacon. “As much as Brian nibbles on you, I thought you'd develop some sympathy for us carnivores.”

“Shut up. Now.”

“Put actual bacon in my mouth, and I'll stop talking long enough to chew.”

“Why don't you stop talking, period? All you do is spew hateful things,” she said. “It was bad enough when you were participating in killing animals. Now you've moved on to people.”

“What?”

“I'm as sick of you as Beep is, and you're killing him.”

I stared at her, mouth open, speechless. Stricken. My breath caught in my chest. I stormed upstairs to my room and slammed the door so hard, books fell over on my bookshelf.

• • •

Rachel knocked at my door a few minutes later.

“Go away.” Sometimes, when you get a deep cut, it takes a bit for the pain to catch up with the injury. I'd been lying on my bed, thinking about how horrible it was that, across the Bay, my blood cells were attacking Beep. They gave me a whole pamphlet of risk factors, but they left out the most important: What if it didn't work and my cells killed Beep instead? How could I deal with that?

Rachel opened the door and came in anyway.

“Such great listening skills.” I stood up. I didn't want her settling in for a lengthy let's-make-Kat-feel-even-worse session.

“I went too far,” Rachel said quietly.

“What? With Brian? Didn't realize you had a limit.”

“I came by to apologize.” Her face reddened and she stopped.

As opposed to actually apologizing, I guessed. “I know I'm killing Beep. Okay? I can't get the homework done, but I'm not
stupid
.” I looked down, at Rachel's red toenails in her cute, stupid sandals. “I'm not perfect, like you. I'm screwing everything up, including Beep's blood supply. I get it.”