Chapter 4

The question about her prognosis burned in my mind, but I didn’t ask. I figured it would be inappropriate to ask. I know I wouldn’t want to be reminded.

“It’s a real bummer,” she added. “But it’s not all doom and gloom. They’re doing a clinical trial on me.”

“I get to be a lab rat! They’re trying out a new protocol, which, I’m still a bit hazy on the technical details, but it means they’re testing a new kind of therapy. In any case, it’s kind of cool that I get to contribute to medical science.”

“I’d rather not have cancer.”

“Yeah, me neither, but if life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. I’ll be damned if I don’t make some lemonade before I go. And besides, I think I still have a pretty good shot at beating it.”

“I’m counting on you to beat it,” I said. “I need you for the astronomy project.”

She gave me her trademark Muttley snicker. It cheered me up.

“So, how much chemotherapy do you have to do?”

“Seventeen rounds over the course of a year.”

“Oh God, that sounds like a lot.”

“Yup. It is. And it’s no fun. Especially the red one.” She pointed to the red liquid in the pouch.

“It’s called Doxorubicin. Or the ‘Red Devil.’ It packs a punch. But hey, good news, I got one more pre-surgery session, then surgery, then it’s all downhill from there. A bit more chemo, some radiotherapy, and I’ll be done before summer.”

I shot her a smile. Despite the deep shadows beneath her eyes, her brown eyes flickered warmly. It was hopeful. A little flame flickering up from ashes.

“I really do hope you beat it.”

“I know I’ll beat it.”

“That’s what I like to hear.”

Autumn nodded, then her face softened into coyness. “I’m sorry, by the way.”

“That I didn’t tell you.”

“I know it’s a shitty thing to put on you. I know you weren’t hoping for a cancer-stricken lab partner.”

“Are you kidding me? That’s exactly what I was looking for in a lab partner.”

She grinned. Her starry freckles bunched up. But then her face turned down, and she turned her eyes to her book. She batted the cover of the book nervously.

“But if you prefer not to be partners with me for the lab, I totally understand.”

“Why would you say that? Of course, I’ll still be your partner,” I said.

“Don’t feel sorry for me, either. I don’t like it when people pity me.”

I hesitated to respond. Was it pity I felt? Yes. Assuredly yes. But there was more there than pity. I told her the truth.

“You know what? I do feel sorry for you. I’m sad for you. How can I not? But also, you are awesome at astronomy, so I feel lucky to have you. And I think you’re super cool, and I think we get along very well.”

She kept her eyes fixed on the cover of her book, tracing the outline of the letter ‘C’ in ‘Contact’ with her finger. She smirked.

“Thanks. I appreciate it,” she said.

“How long are you going to be here?” I asked.

“Are you getting lecture notes from the professor?”

“No. He probably doesn’t know about it. I mean, he should, but if you know anything about Professor Adams, then you’d know he’s a bit of a space cadet.”

I laughed. “Yeah, totally. Look, I took notes, and I’m free for a little while, so why don’t I walk you through today’s lecture?”

“Um, sure. I’d like that.”

I scooted my chair over to the side of hers, whipped out my notebook, and opened it up to today’s lecture. The door cracked open. Her mother poked her head in and smiled. Seeing that her daughter was in good hands and maybe because she was in dire need of a stretch and a bit more time away from the infusion room, she told us she’d just be out for a walk and left us alone.

With her phone, Autumn snapped photos of each of my note pages while I talked through what we learned today. I quickly realized I didn’t need to. She already had a better grasp of the material than what we covered in class. For instance, when I explained how galaxies formed through the gradual collection of gas and dust that collapsed under their own gravity, she would further elaborate with:

“Yeah, Actually, the gas and dust would first form into clumps of protogalaxies, then proximate protogalaxies will form dense regions called protoclusters. And in the protoclusters, protogalactic nuclei will form, which are dense cores that attract more and more dust and gas and dark matter, and the bigger the nuclei get, the more they attract until eventually, you get a full-blown galaxy!”

She moved her hands around to mimic the spinning shape of a galaxy.

“Oh… I don’t remember him saying anything about protogalactic nuclei, but that makes sense.”

I madly scribbled down ‘protogalactic nuclei’ in my notebook.

“It’s in the textbook. Anyways, what else did he cover today?” she asked eagerly.

We spent a good half-hour reviewing the lecture (where I learned a lot of new things). Her excitement for the subject matter was contagious. I wanted to spend more time with her, just to hear her talk about stars and galaxies, but if I stayed any longer, I’d miss my microbiology class, so I had to leave. We organized another night to take more photos of Jupiter, then I left.

I found her mother standing outside the clinic. She was over at a fountain by a rose garden. The bright afternoon sunlight reflected off the fountain water. The lively patterns of water-reflected sunlight danced across her. Her face was down and vacant. Her eyes were red, and her cheeks shimmered from the wet streaks of recent tears.

When she saw me, she wiped her face and said,

“Hey Joey, thanks for coming today. That means a lot that you did. She doesn’t have too many friends in LA. Turns out it’s hard to make friends in a new city when you have cancer.”

“No problem. If you don’t mind. I’d love to visit whenever she’s in. I can catch her up on the lectures.”

She smiled. Nodded. Sniffed her running nose and wiped away a newly formed teardrop.

“Are you ok, Ms. Campbell?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine. It comes and goes. Just one of those things. You know, it’s so nice to see she’s making friends now. That means progress.”

“Oh. That’s good. Well, I’ll be late for class, so I better be going, but if you need anything, let me know.”

“Thanks, Joey. You’re sweet.”

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been into gaming. Back home, there is a photograph of a much younger me, not older than three, perched atop a stack of my dad’s books and magazines, my gaze fixed upon the glowing computer screen of the family desktop. There, on a digital highway of death, I guided a virtual amphibian through a gauntlet of hurtling cars and trucks.

By high school, I had built my own gaming PC. My gaming interests had grown from the simplistic pleasures of Frogger into the rich fantasy realms of role-playing games, like The Legend of Zelda, The Elder Scrolls, and, of course, World of Warcraft, where I logged countless hours and where my friends and I had formed a guild. Having been home-schooled through to the end of middle school and not being a part of any sports teams, World of Warcraft was my go-to habitat for socializing.

I couldn’t bring my gaming PC with me to LA as it was too hefty a machine, but I found a PC gaming room in nearby Brentwood where I could drive my Honda Civic to and rent a state-of-the-art rig to play online games.

That evening after visiting Autumn, I was dying to log into the world of Azeroth to take the edge off. I went to the PC gaming room, logged into my discord and Battlenet account, and found my best friend, Dani, already logged in. His in-game name was ‘Dragonfire,’ which, when he created it, was so proud of himself. As a matter of humbling him, the rest of us quickly referred to him as ‘Dragonfart,’ or, in voice-comms, simply as ‘Fart,’ which stuck.

“Hey, Fart,” I said as I logged in.

“Hey, Nim,” he replied. My username was ‘NimbleThimble,’ a name I came up with because I was really into cross-stitching at the time, a hobby that lasted maybe two months.

“What are you up to?” I asked.

“Just finished a random raid. What’s up with you?”

“The usual, like finding out my new friend has cancer.”

“Oh shit, really? I’m so sorry to hear that. How bad is it?”

“I think it’s pretty bad. It’s called Ewing Sarcoma. She’s going through chemo.”

“That sounds like it’s named after someone. Not a good sign.”

“Yeah. It’s a type of bone cancer. I didn’t ask her how bad it was. Was too afraid to.”

A long exhale came from the other side.

I just joined the game server. My character popped on screen — a tall, elegant night elf priestess.

I teleported to Dani’s location and found his character, a brawny dwarf hunter in the process of harassing the denizens of a dark forest. I started casting healing spells on his character while he attacked a plagued bear.

“All good, Dani?” I asked after a long silence had passed.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good. Just feeling a little bummed out all of a sudden.”

“No worries. It’s just… you made me think about my aunt Carrie.”

It took me a quick second, but then I remembered her.

“Oh yeah. I remember her. She died of breast cancer, right?”

“That was hard to go through, huh?”

At that point, we had wiped the forest clean of plagued bears and proceeded to crawl through a dungeon. An easy dungeon we were both over-leveled for, so it offered breezy mindless gameplay.

“Yeah, I mean, it was crazy. It was crazy to see her transform from the chemo. Then, after all that, she just…dies.”

“Aw, I’m sorry. I remember…”

“I mean, it’s weird because our families were not close at all before the chemo. Actually, before the cancer, I don’t remember my dad ever talking to her. And he never talked about her. Funny because we were in Alki, and she was living just down in Tacoma. Something came between them, you know? Anyway, after her diagnosis, we were always visiting. Like, whatever there was between them just vanished. And you know what? I got to be really close to her and to my cousins. It was kind of a shame that it took cancer to bring our families together, but hey, guess you take whatever life gives you.”

Another long silence as we attacked a group of bandits. As I clicked through my rotation of spells, my mind wandered back to Autumn, thinking of what Dani said about chemo transforming his aunt Carrie. A strong image came to me of Autumn sitting there in that big leather armchair. Her head bald, her face gaunt, deep shadows beneath her eyes, yet still somehow managing a chirpy cheeriness, snickering with her Muttley snicker. I wondered how she might have looked before the cancer. I wondered what her hair must have looked like. How her face must have appeared when it was softer, fuller of life than what brims there now. A strong urge came over to me to see her again. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to hug the cancer right out of her.

“Heals, Nim! I need heals!” Dani’s voice cracked, snapping me out of my daydream.

I looked at the computer screen and realized that Dani had strayed away from me and was now surrounded by a warlord and his henchmen, his health bar rapidly going down.

Frantically, I tried to save him, but there were too many of them, and he was also standing right in the middle of a large green toxic cloud.

“Stop standing in the fire, Fart!” I growled at him.

“I can’t! I’m stuck!” he growled back.

Then he died, and the bandits came after me and made quick work of me.

“Dang. We should not have died there,” Dani said.

“My bad,” I replied glumly.

“Oh well. Want to do a Black Temple run?” He asked.

“Yeah, why not? Let’s do it,” I replied.

The next meeting with Autumn in person was Friday of the following week. The Doxorubicin had hit her pretty hard. Her immune system was in a fragile state, so she had skipped classes all week to recover. Meanwhile, we texted back and forth frequently. Every time my phone buzzed with a text from her, little sprites of happiness burst inside of me, each text adding a little bit more brightness to my day, no matter how my day was going.

At first, we texted only about the project. She sent me photos of Jupiter and its moon after she had gotten a chance to edit the photos in her photo editing software.

“Check it out! See, it was Io, just like I said!”

I opened the JPEGs she sent and saw that she had touched up the colors. Jupiter really looked like Jupiter, and each moon was no longer bright oversaturated dots, but little spheres with slightly distinct colors.

“Awesome! But how do you know that’s Io?” I texted back.

“See how it’s sort of pinkish? That gives it away.”

“And what about the other moons?”

“Harder to say. Their color curves are too similar. LA light pollution. But another good night of shooting, and we’ll be able to figure it out.”

“That’s so cool! Great work! Can’t wait for our next photo shoot.”

“Me neither! 😊”

None of this was in the scope of the project per the procedure written by the professor. He just wanted us to take photos of Jupiter to prove we were out there doing observational astronomy and not just performing the calculations in the comforts of our dorm rooms. Before, I might have chided Autumn about the extra effort she had been putting into it, but seeing how much joy this brought her, I felt it was better to be encouraging.

We texted about things besides the class and the project, too. I was eager to know everything about her, and although I initially had some trepidations about getting closer to a person with cancer, that vanished as quick as a wisp of morning fog. I wanted to know more about her. I needed to know more about her — her interests, dreams, and fears — it was all a burning desire.

We texted back and forth late into the evenings. I found out her favorite band (The Red-Hot Chili Peppers), her favorite food (lasagna), her favorite movie (A close tie between Apollo 13 and Blade Runner), and her favorite flowers (daffodils).