Chapter 5

“Because don’t they look exactly like they should?”

I was agnostic about flowers until I heard that reasoning. Now, daffodils are my favorite too.

Finally, Friday arrived. She was already on our spot on the hill. My stomach was filled with butterflies. It felt like a first date.

I spotted her mother in the car in the parking lot. She must have brought Autumn here. She rolled down her window.

“Hi, Ms. Campbell,” I greeted.

“Hey, Joey! How are you?”

“That’s good. Hey, it’s a bit chilly out. Make sure Autumn stays bundled up for me.”

I nodded. “Sure thing.”

Then she pointed a warning finger. “And no frat parties.”

I laughed. “Yes, ma’am. No frat parties.”

“Please call me if anything happens, ok? Autumn has a habit of leaving me in the dark.”

“Ok, I promise I will.”

“That’s what I like to hear. Well, I got a hot date with Netflix I need to get to. So, enjoy the stars. I’ll be back to pick her up in a couple hours.”

She turned her car on and drove off.

Autumn waved me over. I went to her.

As before, she had lovingly set everything up. The telescope was already pointed in the direction of Jupiter. She sat cross-legged on a large picnic blanket. An unexcited look on her face. The problem was that a large stretch of clouds hung where our gas giant and its moons were supposed to be.

“No bueno,” Autumn said. “Looks like we might not get a shot of Jupiter tonight.”

“But we can wait and see, right?”

Autumn nodded. “Yep, we’ll wait. It might come out. Meanwhile, want to look at the moon? It’s in waxing gibbous, so the shadows in the crater and the mountains will be pretty cool to see.”

She turned the telescope to the east, where the moon hung just above the snow-dusted, gentle peaks of the San Gabriel mountains, and she slid a dark screen over the front of her telescope.

“A neutral density filter to reduce the moon’s brightness a bit,” she explained. She gingerly aimed her telescope as she peered through the viewfinder.

She offered me a view.

I craned my neck to look through it, feeling all warm and fuzzy being in such close proximity to Autumn. The warmth coming off her skin, the sound of her breathing, her lemon drop scent. It took an inordinate amount of effort to focus on the task at hand — somehow, the surreal experience of looking at the grey craters and a sparse, stark plain of grey dust was nothing compared to the sensation of being close to her.

“Wow, it’s amazing,” I breathed. “But what am I looking at?”

“That’s the sea of tranquility!”

“Oh, that sounds familiar.”

“That’s where Apollo 11 landed.”

“Oh really? That’s so cool!”

“Yeah! Hard to believe people were actually right there, bouncing around and stuff.”

“Would you ever be an astronaut?”

Right after I finished the question, my heart stopped. My eyes went wide.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I blurted.

“To suggest that –“

“I’d love to be an astronaut, but I don’t think they’d accept cancer survivors into the astronaut program. Who knows, though? Things might change in the future. Until then, I’m more than happy to hang out right here on spaceship Earth and look at the stars through a telescope.”

“What about you? Would you ever want to go to space?”

“No, of course not.”

She gave me a frown as if my answer had hurt her feelings.

I shrugged. “I just don’t like the idea of being strapped into a rocket with thousands of pounds of chemical propellant and being blasted into space. I’m fine staying on spaceship Earth. There’s a much smaller risk that it’ll blow up.”

“Maybe. Maybe not, the way things are going these days.”

“Well, if the shit hits the fan, then I might consider it. Maybe I could live on Mars.”

“That would be so damn cool! I’d totally live on Mars!” Autumn exclaimed.

“And we can grow potatoes like in The Martian,” I said.

“Yeah! Although hopefully more than just potatoes.”

“And I’d rather not use my own poop as fertilizer. That’s disgusting.”

“That probably can’t be helped. You do what you gotta do,” Autumn replied.

“You wouldn’t have any qualms about eating potatoes covered in your own poop?”

Autumn’s face crinkled in disgust as she pondered that thought, but she answered, “I’d scrub the potatoes really hard and peel the skin.”

“But if you’re on Mars, and you don’t have a potato peeler. Or a potato scrubber. You don’t even have enough water to clean them. You just gotta toss the potatoes into the microwave and munch on them. Poopy skin and all,” I said.

“Oof,” she replied. “I guess if I have to…”

“Of course, you have to.”

“But you have to eat them with me,” she said.

“Your poop potatoes? Ugh, then maybe I won’t go to Mars,” I answered.

“Oh, come on. Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to live a miserable life filled with poop potatoes.”

“But it’s the end of the world! It’s your only chance of survival.”

“Then I guess I’ll go out in peace.”

“Why would you do that if you can come hang out with me on Mars?” She asked.

“And spend the rest of my life eating your shitty poop potatoes?”

“Our shitty poop potatoes. No way I’m the only one making fertilizer up there. Everybody’s gotta pull their weight.”

“You’re doing a good job selling the experience.”

“But wouldn’t hanging out with me be worth eating poop potatoes?”

“Hmm, I dunno. It’d be just the two of us?”

“I don’t know if you’d stand hanging out with only me on Mars.”

“I don’t mind hanging out with only you on Earth.”

Her answer made me blush. She blushed too, then quickly turned her attention to the telescope, pressing her eye against the eyepiece and fidgeting with the focus ring. Her breathing grew shorter. Goosebumps grew on her forearms. To see that lit my heart with joy.

“Ah ha! There it is. Check it out!” She said.

She moved aside so that I could take a look. I peered into the eyepiece and saw, center frame, a perfectly rust-red sphere.

In my excitement, I bumped the eyepiece, and Mars went blurry on me.

“Oh, crap. I think I lost the focus.”

“No, worries, it happens all the time. Just fiddle with the focus ring until you get it back.”

I tried finding the focus ring, moving my fingers up and down the eyepiece to feel for it, but I was struggling to find it. Autumn saw this.

“Here,” she said and reached over. Her hand went atop mine. The palm of her hand touched the top of mine. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up on end. My heart melted like an ice cube in a heat wave. An involuntary sigh ushered from my mouth. I winced, realizing she might have interpreted that sigh as a reaction to the touch of her hand to mine, which it was.

I caught her eye. I caught a small smile curl on her soft lips. My eyes stayed fixed on hers. Her hand stayed atop mine. Pressed her palm harder against the top of my hand. Keeping it there, making no effort to refocus the telescope.

Our eyes remained with each other for a long moment, with silence between us. Silence in the world around us, save for the rustling of the dry eucalyptus in the breeze, the singing crickets, and the low constant noise of the traffic on the nearby Interstate that sounded like the waves of a distant ocean, all making the silence seem that much more intimate.

I thought of what her mother said about making sure she stayed bundled up, and I couldn’t help but think that I didn’t want her bundled up at all.

She was so close. Her lips were so close to mine. Something in my gut told me to make them closer.

She swallowed nervously. She bit her lower lip. I was still a rookie when it came to kisses, but even I could see that she wanted to let that kiss happen. But when I moved in, her eyes grew wide. She blinked rapidly, leaned away from me, and shook her head as if to shake off rain.

“Oh no,” she murmured.

Perhaps the worst possible combination of two words you could hear from the person you’re trying to kiss for the first time. I cupped my hand to my mouth in horror as my heart plunged right into my gut. I had totally misread all the signs. Or maybe I had imagined them.

I shut my eyes and squeaked, “I’m so sorry, Autumn!”

I peeked. She still had that swimming, dazed look.

“It’s ok,” she muttered in a flat voice. “It’s ok. Just unexpected.”

I inhaled deeply, and as I exhaled, I replied, “Yeah. Totally. I just… yeah. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

She looked away. Her hands turned nervously into each other. She glanced at me quickly, then looked away again. There was a lost look in her eyes as if she pitied me.

A long moment of awkward stillness passed. The crickets did all the talking for us. I forced a nervous chuckle, just so there was a sound to break the stillness.

One of my biggest fears is rejection. So much so that I actively avoided situations that could open me up to it. This was true in many aspects of my life, but especially true when it came to romance. I rarely ever opened myself up to the chance of romance because the chance of rejection and the humiliation and pain that followed was a stronger motive force. Tonight, for whatever reason, I had a momentary lapse in judgment, and I was now paying for it.

“I think I might have given you the wrong impression. Sorry,” Autumn said.

“It’s not your fault. I just have a supreme talent for making an awkward situation even more awkward.”

Autumn snickered. “That makes the two of us. Someone should separate us before we break something important.”

“You’re probably right,” I said, trying my best to not let the hurt come out in the tone of my voice.

“So… you’re into girls,” she said.

It was a true statement. But one that added to the hurt because of the embarrassed way in which those words were spoken. A statement that made me realize that, in my blind desire, I completely forgot to consider that she might not be on the same wavelength (sexually, that is). Another shock of embarrassment to the core. How brain-dead could I be?

“Oh God,” I moaned and covered my face with my hands.

Autumn put a consoling hand on my shoulder. Then she gave me a tight squeeze. A hug of support, as between two good buddies. While we hugged, her port-a-cath dug into my chest. A stark reminder of her tough circumstances. Strangely, perhaps morbidly, it softened the blow of rejection, as it made me consider that however painful my humiliation was, it had nothing to do with the pain Autumn had to endure.

The clouds parted. Jupiter appeared just in time to distract us from that painfully awkward interaction.

Autumn trained her telescope onto it, removed the eyepiece, and attached her camera. This time I snapped the pictures while Autumn patiently instructed me. All the while, that numbness of surreality that comes with the swift extinguishing of hope simmered through my body.

Later that night, I plopped into bed, still in a state of stupefaction. I lay there as rigid as a cemetery angel. I could do nothing more, as my mind was expending all my energy to spin like a powerful tornado, all the thoughts twirling in my head like flying debris. There goes a tree. A shed. Now a fridge. Look! A cow mooing frantically as it careens around in circles high above the ground.

How could I have been so brash? How could I be so stupid!? And why, oh why, did I have to complicate things when things were so damn complicated already? Why do I always have to be so cringe?

I smothered myself with my pillow and groaned into it to try to drown out the tornado of thoughts.

At least she didn’t go running off. At least she was kind enough to give me the dignity of sticking around and finishing our assignment for the night.

Shortly into my lonely stewing in self-pity, my phone vibrated with a message. I glanced at it. It was Autumn. She sent the photos we took earlier, along with a line of text:

I’ve figured out all the moons 😊 and I think we have enough data here to calculate their orbits too

I shot her a thumbs-up emoji and replied with nothing more. I simply set the phone down and returned to my mental self-flagellation. But about a half-hour later, another text came from her.

hey, about earlier. I still feel bad about sending you the wrong signals. I hope you understand. I think you’re awesome, and I want us to be friends. Is that cool?

I didn’t give my response much thought. Almost instinctively, I wrote back,

Don’t feel bad. More than cool with being friends 😊

The smiley face emoji was an extra touch to show her I was being sincere, but really, it was merely a mask for the sadness of knowing that the ship of a possible something more had just set sail, and I wasn’t on it. Even if that ship did have cancer.

Remember to look at the stars, not down at your feet. – Stephen Hawking

Those were the words written on the markerboard on the door to her infusion room.

Maureen explained to me that the staff took turns coming up with an astronomy-related quote to put on the door on Autumn’s infusion days. It occurred to me that they must write custom quotes for every pediatric cancer patient that walks into their ward. How tough it must be for them to keep up the motivation to do that when there’s so much sadness around. But how meaningful such a gesture must be for the patients.

Three weeks had passed since the last chemo treatment, so she was at last at the final round of neo-adjuvant chemo (neo-adjuvant, I learned, was a fancy way of saying pre-surgery). It would be her last before they image the tumor again, then hopefully proceed with resection surgery the week after.

“It’s not as bad as the Doxorubicin, but they have to keep me prisoner in the hospital for five days as a precaution.”

Isosfamide infusion required a five-day inpatient stay as it had a tendency to cause something called hemorrhagic cystitis, an inflammation of the bladder that can result in serious infection, requiring her to be constantly monitored.