Chapter 3

“Autumn. Why don’t we take a break? You don’t look good. How about some water?”

I had a Nalgene water bottle with me. I unscrewed the cap and handed it to her. She shot me a weak smile and took a long sip from it, then replied,

“I’m fine. It’s nothing. Really.”

“Um. Ok,” I replied uncertainly. “Still, let’s take a break. Let me know if I need to take you to the medical center.”

She nodded. “Sure. But really, I’m fine.”

She went to the top of the hill and plopped down on the grass. I plopped down beside her and handed her the Nalgene again. She took a sip.

“Thanks, Joey,” she said.

“No worries,” I replied.

And we sat there and gazed out on the campus in silence together. The breeze rustled the Eucalyptus leaves, and the crickets sang peacefully. It was a moment I would have thoroughly cherished if I didn’t have a pit in my stomach from seeing Autumn’s sudden bout of nausea.

On Monday, Autumn wasn’t in class.

The lecture that day was about galaxies, and the professor talked about Andromeda. He mentioned Andromeda being on a collision course with the Milky Way. I smiled, thinking of what Autumn said about stars from different galaxies forming couples. I couldn’t really pay attention to most of the rest of the lecture. My mind was buzzing with worry about why Autumn was missing. I shot her a text but received no reply.

When the class was over, I headed straight for her dorm room to see if she was at least only playing hooky, though after what I witnessed Saturday night, I suspected something might be wrong with her.

I knocked on her door. It swung open, and another girl I didn’t recognize stood before me.

“Hi, I’m looking for Autumn.”

She raised her eyebrow like she was confused. Like she had never heard of the name before.

“Autumn doesn’t live here.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I must have misread the directory.”

The girl smiled. “No, you read it correctly. This is her room. I’m her roommate. Well, supposed to be. She hasn’t been living here.”

“Are you a friend of Autumn’s?”

“Uh-huh,” I replied. “Sort of. We’re working on a project for a class together.”

In a hushed and gentle voice, as if we were chatting at a wake, she said,

“Autumn has cancer. She’s living with her mom while she’s going through chemotherapy.”

I breathed in and held it and clutched my chest as if to clutch onto my heart before it fell to the ground and shattered into pieces. Too late. My heart just exploded.

“I’m sorry,” the girl said. “If she’s not in class, she might be at the clinic. Westwood Pediatric Orthopedics Center.”

“Thanks,” I said and left without saying anything more. I was in shock. A lump formed in my throat. It all made sense now. The bout of nausea. The floppy beanie which she wore not only as a fashion statement but to cover her hair loss from chemo. Her skipping out on our meeting on Friday night, which I felt so much self-pity for, and now felt foolish for what I did. I felt like an idiot for not seeing it. Then I felt angry. Not only at myself but also at Autumn for not telling me about any of this. For pretending like she was just a normal college student. Don’t I deserve a heads-up?

I ran back to my dorm room and lay in my bed in a daze, thinking about Autumn. Seeing her smiling face so vividly in my mind. So cheerful and her eyes bright as when she talked about Andromeda and Jupiter and the Galilean moons. I felt sick to my stomach. I thought of lying there all day to devolve into a heaping pile of depression. But then I thought about what Autumn must be going through now, and my head pounded with frustration, not knowing anything more about what was going on with her. What sort of cancer did she have? How bad was it? Why on earth was she in classes when she had cancer!?

I was frustrated at myself for not knowing any of this information and frustrated at Autumn for not telling me. I stared at my phone at the lonely line of text I sent her asking her if she was planning on coming to class that morning. I stared at it as if staring hard enough would will a response from her. Then it occurred to me. Couldn’t I just drop by to visit her at the clinic? They allow visitors, don’t they? She’d be happy to see me, wouldn’t she?

I did a quick google search for Westwood Pediatric Orthopedics Center and saw that it was just a half-hour walk from campus. Deciding that the worst that could happen is that they turn me away at the front desk and having a real itch to see how Autumn was doing, I went.

I put in my earbuds as I made my way there. I picked a song at random. Don Mclean started singing his song, ‘Empty Chairs.’ A song I like to listen to because my dad played it a lot on the stereo when I was younger. It was way too sad a song to be listening to now, so I switched to something brighter. A song from a playlist of Studio Ghibli music that never failed to cheer me up when I was feeling down — the theme song from ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’.

I was fortunate to have gone through life without cancer having any real impact. My grandpa died of lung cancer when I was too young to remember him. My grandmother died of breast cancer before I was born. I could not come even close to understanding the sort of life-changing anguish that must come from finding out you or someone you love has cancer. How terrible Autumn must feel to have to go through such an ordeal. And how terrible her family must feel. I dearly hoped it was something treatable.

I stood in front of the clinic doors for what felt like an eternity before I could muster the courage to enter the building. There was a sort of sterility about the building that was oddly serene, like some minimalist’s idea of the gates to Heaven or something. The words ‘Westwood Pediatric Orthopedic Center’ were written above automatic doors in glinting bronze sans-serif font. The building’s glassy façade gleamed in the bright sunlight.

I walked through the doors. The lobby was quiet, bright, and lofty. Vanilla-colored and vanilla-scented. TV played an episode of one of those HGTV realty shows silently. A numbingly good-looking couple with wide smiles touring their dream house. But the house just might be above their budget. Will they go for it?

There were a lot of children and teenagers of all ages around, which makes sense as I was in a pediatric clinic. Some sitting in the waiting area, others wandering around the lobby, in the company of nurses and doctors and their parents. It was heart-wrenching to see that many of them were bald, meaning they were going through chemotherapy to treat whatever cancer they had. What an ordeal to have to go through. Especially so young.

Behind the reception desk, an elderly woman with curly hair and glasses attached to a drooping thin gold-chained leash spotted me and smiled.

“Good morning. Are you here to visit a patient?”

“May I ask who you are here for?”

“Autumn Campbell. Sure. She’s in one of the infusion rooms now. If you don’t mind, I just need some ID.”

I gave her my student badge and a quick smile. She glanced at the name on the badge as she held it raised to check to make sure I looked like the girl in the photograph. Then she opened a binder and rifled through the pages. She rifled back and forth between two pages, then shut her binder and glanced up at me with a skeptical look.

“I’m sorry, sweetie, you’re not on the list. Are you family? A friend?”

“I see. Well, I’m sure she would be happy to know you dropped by for a visit, but I’m afraid that since you’re not on the visitor’s list, we can’t let you see her.”

A woman who had been standing at a vending machine nearby, who had obviously overheard the conversation, came over and said, “Joey, hi!”

She gave me a tight hug. “I’m so glad you could make it.”

I was stunned. I had never seen this woman before, so all I could do was stand there and take her hug. I glanced wide-eyed at the receptionist, and she raised a skeptical eyebrow seeing my reaction.

The woman turned to the receptionist and said, “it’s fine, Heather, she’s with me.”

Heather smiled at the woman, let out a long sigh, and said, “alright. Your call.”

“Thank you,” the woman said, then turned back to me and motioned with her head for me to tag along and said, “come on, let’s go see Autumn.”

I gave the receptionist a sheepish grin as I fell in behind the woman I did not know.

As we walked down the long hallway and far from the reception, I whispered,

“Thanks. Um, sorry, I don’t think I know your name.”

The woman smiled at me. “I’m Maureen. I’m Autumn’s mother.”

“Ok. That makes sense.”

I could see it now. The freckles. The maple brown eyes.

“How did you know my name?” I asked.

Short of her being some sort of psychic, I was genuinely confused about that.

“Autumn told me she made a new friend in her astronomy class. I guessed it was you.”

At the end of the hall, we arrived at a door with a sign above it indicating that it was one of the infusion rooms. On the face of the door hung a marker board, and on the board was neatly handwritten with black marker: “When the night is dark, look to the stars.”

Someone who clearly knew Autumn likely left that message there for her as a word of encouragement. It was a sweet gesture but one that twisted my gut into several knots.

Maureen put her hand on the door handle.

“Ready to see her?” she asked before opening the door. Her solemn gentleness with her tone gave this occasion a ceremonial levity. One that I wasn’t prepared for. It all felt so surreal. I had only met Autumn three weeks ago. And in that short time, we had barely hung out. I was filled with so much doubt that I even belonged here. I felt like a fish out of water. But knowing that Autumn had told her mom about me, at least enough that her mom knew my name, and the kind, familiar way her mom looked at me now, with a smile that crinkled the edges of her eyes, I decided, yes, I was ready to see Autumn, and furthermore, I wanted to see her.

Maureen opened the door.

“Autumn,” she sang. “You have a visitor.”

I crept in shyly and came out from behind Maureen, my hands clasped tightly to my front.

Autumn was sunk into a big plush patinaed leather armchair sunk with a book splayed open on her lap. She had on a medical isolation gown. To her right was a hanger on which hung a pouch filled with a ruby-red liquid connected to a box full of buttons. An IV drip tube made its way to a port at the top of Autumn’s chest.

She flinched when she saw me. Fear like a deer in the headlights sort of fear came to her eyes, and her hand jolted instinctively for her beanie, which was sitting on the arm of her chair. She went to slip it on, but she quickly realized that the jig was up. I had already seen her bald head.

“Joey!” she breathed, exasperated. I waved and smiled shyly.

Autumn shot her mom a quick glare, then gave me an embarrassed look.

“Well, sheriff, you caught me,” she said.

“I sure did, didn’t I?”

Maureen grabbed a chair from the corner of the room and placed it in front of Autumn.

“Take a seat, Joey. I’m going back to the waiting room for a snack,” Maureen said. “Want something from the vending machine?”

I shook my head as I quietly sat.

“Be back soon,” she said and left.

The door had one of those hydraulic track arms, so it came to a slow shut. When it finally did, Autumn asked,

“Did my mom put you up to this?”

“Did she make you come visit me?”

I shook my head. “No. Of course not. You didn’t show up to class, and you didn’t answer your text. So, I went to your dorm room and found out from your roommate that you have friggin’ cancer.”

I stared at the book in her lap to avoid her eyes. She had shut it so I could see the cover. ‘Contact’ by Carl Sagan. Dozens of little colored tabs jutted out from between the pages, placed on the pages with such care that all together, they looked like a little staircase. I wondered what quotes she marked.

“Sorry for not answering, but as you can see, I’m a bit preoccupied.”

She didn’t look too busy to me. Sure, she was getting the chemical injected right into her chest. Otherwise, she was just sitting there, reading her book. Hardly preoccupied, by any stretch of the imagination.

“You should have told me you had cancer,” I replied softly.

“Guess I should have. Just couldn’t figure out a good time to, and…”

She paused. Sighed. Her hands came together tightly, and so did her knees.

“And I didn’t want to scare you away.”

“I don’t scare easy.”

“That wasn’t my impression after our first meeting,” she replied with a smirk.

“Ok. That’s fair. Still. I wish you’d –“

Before I could ask what that was, she explained, like she had explained it a million times,

“It’s a type of cancer in the bone or around the bone. A type of sarcoma, obviously. In my case, in my tibia.”

She tapped her shin just below the knee to indicate where the tumor had formed.

“Not the best choice of cancer to get. It’s extremely rare, and if it metastasizes, the prognosis isn’t great.”

“Has it metastasized?”

“Fortunately, no. Not yet.”

“How long have you had it for?”

“I found out about it about four months ago.”

She spoke matter-of-factly. As if she were discussing something scientifically fascinating, she had read in a book rather than something that was dramatically and inexorably life-altering.

I shuddered. My throat turned tight. Four months ago. That meant she would have found out about her cancer right before matriculating. Starting college was already very stressful. Finding out you have cancer at the same time, I could not comprehend what that must be like. And to choose to go to college anyway. It was beyond me.