But you know how those rich boys think. They got entitlement issues. Like everything in the world’s supposed to come easy. You want a cappuccino?”
“Sure. Are you saying I should play hard to get?”
LaShonda frothed milk. She raised her voice to be heard over the screech of the steamer. “I don’t know. Seems like boyfriends always turn out to be more trouble than they’re worth.”
“Who said anything about a boyfriend? I’d just like to go on a real date. Somewhere nice, like Al’s by the Creek. Not hooking up at the mall or parking at the beach.”
LaShonda set two foamy mugs on the table and slid into a seat across from Sloan.
“He called me so I’d have his number.”
“Don’t you dare call him. Make him work for it.”
“I wasn’t drooling all over myself if that’s what you’re thinking. I was cool.”
“I’m just saying don’t make it too easy. Guys like him are used to getting what they want, when they want it.”
“True.”
“I can’t believe you’d go out with him anyway. I thought you hated those fake people on Lafayette Isle.” She sipped coffee. “You know, come to think of it, ain’t his dad that developer dude, always finding some island to mow down or some swamp to drain so he can throw up mansions?”
“I don’t know. You sound like my dad. Can’t you be at least a little happy for me? He’s hot.”
“Yeah, he’s hot all right. Just be careful or you’ll end up burned.”
CHAPTER 7
Side Effects
Adults were secretive. Her parents and the doctors and nurses whispered in the hall outside her door. While that might have worked with some kids, Ainslie’s hearing was sharp, and she strained to make out their conversations. Sometimes she would lie in bed and pick certain sounds out of the hospital noise, slippers soft in the hall, the call button at the nurses’ station, a cry from down the corridor. And she could smell better, too, which usually wasn’t a good thing in a hospital—alcohol and urine and that too sweet hand lotion all the nurses seemed to like. Ainslie could even smell the brownish antiseptic still lingering on her skin from the surgery.
And the pain. If she lay perfectly still it was like nothing was wrong with her, but if she twisted left or right her back hurt. So she stayed still, the pain medication swimming in her mind. All the details of the humming hospital, the smells and sounds, made Ainslie wish for the calm of waves and the scent of tea olive that drifted through her bedroom window at home. But the hospital windows were shut tight, and even though she was in Charleston at the Children’s Hospital at the Medical University of South Carolina, she could have been anywhere in the world. Sometimes she imagined she was in India where sleepy-eyed camels pulled carts below her window, or she imagined she was in the Arctic where polar bears prowled outside and Eskimo children slept in other hospital beds.
When she was first diagnosed, Ainslie hadn’t tried to understand what was happening to her. She’d just done what was asked, submitted to whatever tests. But then they removed one of her kidneys and the things they did to her hurt more. She was tired and cranky from the meds and all she wanted to do was run away, to rip the tubes out of her arm and run out of the hospital into fresh air and sunshine. Instead, she got a parade of kids in pajamas dragging IV poles past her door. Sometimes they would look in and see Ainslie, and they would wave or smile. Other times they just stared like they didn’t really see her there, and then they would just walk on down the hall.
The longer Ainslie stayed in the hospital the more things began to hurt. They took blood and started IVs, and each time a nurse stuck a needle into the top of her hand or the tender part inside her elbow, Ainslie imagined she was being burned, that a tiny flame was shooting into her arm. Of course, they put numbing cream where they stuck in the needles, but that didn’t really help much. The doctors had promised her something called a port, some thing they put inside your chest, just under your skin. They said they could stick the needles in the port and it wouldn’t hurt so much, but she wasn’t sure that she wanted some creepy thing inside of her. This was when she started to tune in to adult conversations instead of watching cartoons.
Once she tuned in to what was being said, things started to make sense and they started to scare her. She’d learned about chemotherapy. Everybody knew chemotherapy was medicine to kill cancer, but she found out that chemotherapy killed good cells along with bad ones and that was what caused you to be grossed out and to vomit. She’d been scared when she’d overheard the hall-lurking adults talking about the possible weird things that chemo could cause to happen to your body later. They called these side effects.
Ainslie wanted to know what these side effects were, but she didn’t ask her mother. The hospital staff had made a book where they kept all her medical information. They called this the roadmap, and it had all her medicines and all the reactions she could expect, but her mother never wanted her to look at the roadmap book. She told Ainslie not to worry, that the doctors would take care of everything. Ainslie suspected that her mother never told her the whole truth. And her father wasn’t an option. He didn’t know much of anything about medical stuff.
When her mother wasn’t looking, Sloan helped Ainslie decipher the roadmap book. Sloan brought her laptop and they got online. It didn’t take long before they found a link and had document after document off the Internet about Wilms’ tumor cancer. The deal was usually that a kidney got removed, the kid got radiated, sometimes they got chemo, other times not. Most kids survived and were never bothered with it again.
“Piece of cake,” Sloan said. “You’re tough.”
She also said that they probably shouldn’t read a bunch of the stories of other sick kids, that it might be too depressing. Ainslie had agreed. All the research was enough for her to think about without being sad over some other kid with worse luck.
They were in bed together, looking up her chemo cocktail on the Internet. They had both become good at medical lingo.
“I can’t find this drug anywhere. I wonder why.”
“Go ask Miss Vivian. She’s my favorite nurse.”
At the nurses’ station Sloan asked for Miss Vivian and a few minutes later the woman arrived in Ainslie’s room. Vivian flipped through her own reference materials and then said, “It must be new.”
“Is it experimental?” Sloan asked.
“Honey, I didn’t say experimental. I said new.” Vivian flipped her book closed with a frustrated sigh. “I don’t have much info here on that, but I’ll see what I can find out. Sure you want to know all this? It can be scary.”
“It won’t scare me,” Ainslie said.
“We won’t tell anybody you helped us,” Sloan said. “Especially not our mother. She thinks she needs to shield us from all of this.”
“Sure, I understand,” Vivian said. “A lot of parents feel that way.”
Ainslie nodded. “It’s okay. I want to know.”
But that hadn’t been the case when Vivian brought them a printout the next day.
“You didn’t get this from me,” she had said. “I could get fired for this.” Sloan promised to destroy the paper as soon as they were finished.
“What does it say?” Ainslie asked.
“Just a bunch of doctor stuff I can’t understand. A few side effects you know about. Nausea, hair loss, blah, blah, blah.”
She stopped her finger on a line. She reread the passage, then moved on quickly.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“Nothing, I said.”