Page 29 of So Long, Honey
“Please.” The sound of his voice broke through my nerves and landed true. I inhaled slowly, filling my lungs with a long, shaky breath before I tugged the wig from my scalp. A few barrettes and pins popped as I did.
Ryan leaned close, and before I could gauge his reaction to the pixie short hair, his fingers were brushing through the choppy dark strands. His eyes searched over it, tugging me closer as his touch tickled around and raked through the nape of my neck.
“It’s adorable,” he huffed and cupped my face in both hands, “in a you were dying kind of way.”
“Ryan!” I scoffed, but a smile spread on my lips. “You think so?”
“I don’t know why you hide it?” He said plainly and let me go.
“Because after it was gone, it was hard to look in the mirror and find the girl I was. It was like she had died, and whoever had come home from the hospital was some chemo-monster. If I couldn’t look at myself and the kids at school had spread the narrative of a teenage pregnancy. I didn’t want more eyes on me. I couldn’t handle it.”
“Was it scary?” He asked me, his body so still I could barely tell he was breathing.
“At times,” I said, “you never know what to expect when the doctors visit.”
“Promise me something?” He asked, bringing my hand up to his lips and kissing my knuckles gently.
“What?” I asked, doing my best to ignore the warmth that flooded me.
“I can’t change the past. I can’t go back and be there for you, but promise me that you'll tell me if you feel sick or scared. You’ll let me help?” he asked, his eyes painfully green.
“Nothing bad is going to happen, Ryan,” I said to him, scooting closer on the step.
“Convincing me of that will be harder than you think,” he said. “Just promise me you’ll talk to me. You won’t do it alone this time?”
He was serious. Extremely serious.
“Alright,” I said, just to quell the intense feelings stirring around behind his eyes.
“And stop wearing these stupid wigs around me. I want to feel your real hair when I touch you, " he whispered, and it made my chest warm.
“On one condition.” My lips pressed into a thin, serious line. He wasn’t getting everything he wanted that easily. He had to work for something.
Ryan scoffed, “What?”
“You finish your papersandyou let me help you apply to colleges,” I said.
“I’m not getting into college, Rae, not the old-fashioned way.” Ryan shook his head in disbelief.
“How about you worry about me, and I’ll worry about you?” I said, leaning in closer and pressing my head against his. “Deal?”
He grumbled something under his breath but nodded against my forehead. “Deal.”
Ryan didn’t seem like the type to drop an issue so intense and move on. From the look in his eyes, I could tell it wouldn’t be as simple as telling him the truth and promising to follow through on our deal.
He was going to go through the stages.
Everyone did.
First, he would treat me like I was more fragile than the birthday present he had purchased for me. Then he would research, call people, and read books he never would have thought to open. All to find a solution. Then the denial would come, the idea that cancer doesn’t exist if we don’t let it. That it's simply a mind game.
The last stage before acceptance would be anger.
He would get pissed off. He would ask me a million questions. Wonder why I’m not more upset about the unfairness of it all. It was only natural for him to go through all of that my parentshad, I had, and random people at the hospital had when they saw a sixteen-year-old girl sitting in the radiation chair.
It was inevitable.
“Let’s start with the immediate problem: you have a game you need to play in. And you’ve got very little time left to make that happen because you’ve been distracted.”