K. Bromberg - Slow Burn

And as silly as it seems, that reinforces my decision.

But how do I tell Rylee all of this? I know what she’ll say. She’ll tell me I’m crazy. That I need to stay positive, that my mom beat this beast. That I’m only hurting both of us by shutting Becks out when I need more people in my corner than ever before. She’ll add insult to injury and try to use peer pressure to make me open the doors and let the world in when all I want to do is shut everyone out and hide in the dark for a while.

So I lie to my best friend. Buy some time. Derail her tirade of stubbornness.

“For now. Please?” I open my eyes again and meet her confused look. “I just need some time to accept all of this, deal with this before I can bring someone else—lots of someone elses—into this situation. I don’t want the assessing looks of pity, the constant phone calls where people talk in circles because they’re too chickenshit just to come out and ask my prognosis, or the unexpected knocks on the doors with another foil-covered Pyrex dish as if a frickin’ casserole will cure me.”

Rylee nods, and yet I know she still doesn’t get it. But it’s not her decision to understand. And frankly I’m sick of having to explain myself. My schizophrenic emotions return with a vengeance. Grief giving way to anger, anger turning into disbelief, disbelief somersaulting into a feeling of welcome isolation.

I can’t keep track of them anymore, and I really don’t care to.

I shove up off the ground, needing to move, to embrace the rage I have but still can’t feel. I try to calm myself and focus on what I can feel: the tightness in my chest because I need to cry but can’t seem to urge the tears to come.

I want to tell her that my body’s already broken but just know she’ll arch her eyebrows and give me that “you’ve gotta give me something better than that, Montgomery” look she has mastered to perfection over the near decade we’ve been friends.

“Remember that goulash crap the neighbor across the street brought after Lex’s …” Her words trail off before she says funeral but the memory of that awful food has the corners of my mouth tilting up in a smile.

“The stuff that looked like dog food?” I turn to look at her.

“It smelled like it too.” Her nose crinkles up, and I don’t know what it is, but the laughter bubbles up. The first sounds of it fall from my mouth and hit my ears, sounding so strange against the tumult in my head.

But I can’t stop it.

I can hear the hysteria, can hear the anxiety weaving there, and yet I still laugh loud and deep, the breeze carrying it away and into the distance.

When I look up, Rylee is laughing too, but hers is physically contradicted with tears sliding down her cheeks as her eyes hold steadfast on mine.

Thoughts flicker as I laugh. Fear festers up, and I shove it away momentarily because I need this moment—the sky, the breeze, my best friend. Something to hold on to, to pull back up when I need it on the dark days that I know will be coming. The ones that will try to steal my soul and blind my light.

But this moment gives me the clarity that I’m gonna fight like hell.

I’m gonna fight like a girl: lipstick on, hair done, and attitude in place.

Because shit, I’ve got hearts to break still and heels to wear.

Hearts and heels.

Hearts and heels.

Damn. I’m scared. Petrified.

Trying so hard to keep my grip on reality.

So fearful of the unknown.

Chapter 26

Emotionless, I stare at myself in the mirror. I take in my swollen eyes and the dark circles beneath them, noting the disbelief still in their hollow reflection. I can still hear my mother’s shriek from earlier when I told her, as well as see the stunned look on my dad’s face, followed by his gritted jaw and sudden departure so he could go break down in his bedroom over not being able to protect the only woman left in his life still untouched by the monster that has decimated his family.

I shake off those painful recollections and begin tugging my clothes off, suddenly desperate to take a shower and scrub every single part of today from my body. My mom’s perfume lingers on my skin. The perfume that shouldn’t be there because I shouldn’t have seen her today.

So I welcome the scalding water as I scrub and cleanse, even though I know I can’t wash this away. I tell myself I need to call Rylee later and apologize for being rude and brash rather than appreciative and gracious for all that she’s done for me. I know she understands why, but it still doesn’t make it right.

I climb from the shower and grab a towel, which I twist around my hair and on my head. I grab a second, so emotionally drained I’m not thinking straight, and start to dry off and cross into my bedroom to grab my robe on my bed. As I near it, I look up and catch sight of my naked body in the mirror hanging on the wall beside my dresser.

I freeze. Then I walk toward it, completely lost in my thoughts and drowning in the fear from earlier today. I can’t take my eyes off my breasts in the reflection.

They’re pert and full with pink nipples. I stare at them and wonder how something that looks so harmless can hold so much power over me? I wonder how something that can bring pleasure, can nourish a baby, can also steal my life so easily.

Then I begin to wonder what I’ll look like when they are gone. Will I look like a patchwork quilt of scars? Will they be able to salvage my nipples so that I don’t have to have fake ones tattooed on so that I can pretend to look normal? What will be physically left of this major feature that expresses my gender, my sexuality?

I won’t even have my hair to help with that … so I’ll be a bald, flat-chested person with only makeup on my soon-to-be-bloated face to denote that I’m a female.

The thought staggers me. Suffocates both my thoughts and my breathing.

I like to think that I’m not a vain person, but everybody is in a sense. Is this God’s way of punishing me for always being pretty? For never going through that gawky stage as a teenager when every other girl was gangly and awkward and I was svelte and desired by the boys? The things I have always taken for granted, always been so comfortable with are going to be taken from me, and while I never thought I’d really care, all of a sudden I’m terrified of what I’m going to look like and how people will perceive me.

The tears that I’ve kept hostage all day finally erupt into a maelstrom of sobs. I drop the towel as I bring my hands to my boobs and cup them, feeling the weight, the smoothness of the skin, their roundness. I’ve had them my whole life, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever thought to memorize everything about them. Such a weird thought.

I tell myself through the exploding grief that when I get through this, I’ll have them reconstructed. That while I think my natural breasts are pretty close to perfect now, when I’m sixty, they’d be saggy and flat, so I’m lucky because the new boobs I’ll get will remain perky and full well into my nursing home days. Rationalization at its finest.

And then I start to laugh through the tears as I recall a Shel Silverstein poem I read to Maddie the other night. One about how a little boy shaved his head because he hated his wavy hair only to find out his hair was straight and it was his head that was wavy.

I don’t know why the thought is so funny to me now, but I can’t stop laughing as I look at the mirror and wonder what I’ll find beneath my hair. Tears fall as fast as the laughter from my lips until the sound dies but I continue to cry.

I stare again through my tear-blurred vision, my hair wet and stringy—my towel having fallen from my head during my laughter-sob fest—and my body still pink from the scalding water of the shower. This is the same body I’ve looked at for the last twenty-eight years, and yet I know that in the coming weeks it will no longer seem like or look like mine.