Everything started around the beginning of December, right before her birthday, when Carol started mentioning that she wasn't feeling good.
"Carol, you need to eat. I haven't seen you take a bite of anything in three days." I said to her one morning while we were waiting in the cafeteria for the first bell to ring.
"I know, I'm just not hungry. I don't feel right. I'm nauseous. Tired." she crossed her arms on the table and slumped her head down on top of them. "I think I'm pregnant."
The bell rang and we abandoned the situation.
For the next week it was more of the same. Carol got more and more thin and all of her energy was visibly drained out of her already tiny frame. It was decided that if need be, she would take a pregnancy test so we could at least rule out, or take care of, that option.
The following weekend I was asleep in bed- I forget if it was a Saturday or Sunday morning. I felt a nudge on my arm and heard someone whisper, "Alexis, wake up." I forced one eye open to see my mom standing over me, the phone in her hand.
"It's Claudia," she said as I struggled to roll over and open the other eye. "She says it's important." There was a look on my mom's face that I hadn't seen before. At the time, she wasn't thrilled with my choice of friends, but there was some kind of concern and worry pulsing through her gaze that made me reach out and take the phone from her.
"Mmm, hello?" I mumbled, slouching my face back into my pillow. All that followed were hysterical sobs from Claudia and words sliding together that I couldn't understand. I sat up straight and switched the phone to my other ear.
"Claud, what's wrong, what happened."
There were a few gasps and then, "Carol has cancer."
I sat there like a rock as she explained that Carol's mom had taken her to the doctor for some tests, which came back positive for Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Claudia then told me she needed to go throw up, and disconnected. I pushed END on my own phone, and sat for a second, staring at it. I then leaned forward and threw it across my room in a fit of rage. It bounced off the opposite wall and slid back across the floor where it spun in circles. I watched it until it finally slowed down and came to a stop just as I began to feel heaving waves of tears come screaming out of my eyes.
My mom had been waiting outside. She walked towards me slowly and stood next to the phone on the floor.
"What happened?" she asked, even though I was sure she already knew. She always already knew.
"Carol has cancer. We thought she was pregnant but she has cancer."
The following Monday I didn't say a word in school to anybody. Claudia and I watched as three thousand students and faculty went about their day, laughing and joking and breathing and not having cancer.
Carol's operation was on Wednesday. Her chemo and radiation started on Thursday. On Friday, Claudia and I skipped out of our last period gym class early and drove in the truck to the hospital down the street. On the way we talked about anything but what we were doing. We talked about how much we hated the snow. We talked about how even though it was ridiculously cliche, we wanted to lose our virginity to our boyfriends on prom night. We talked about how fucking ridiculous it was that you couldn't find fucking parking within three blocks of the fucking hospital that as we spoke was pumping bags of fucking poison into our best friend.
It took us awhile to find the cancer ward because neither of us had really been in the hospital before, let alone by ourselves. Everything was white and linoleum and spelled like that purple goo your mom always shoved down your throat every time you were sick as a kid. Carol's room was three floors up, down the hall, to the right. The corner room with the most windows and biggest bathroom and the comfiest chairs. We could hear the voices of her mom and aunt as we approached the door and knocked softly.
"Come in."
Claudia reached for the doorknob as I reached forward and grabbed her other hand, not able to let go even if I wanted to. We walked inside.
The shades to the windows were drawn. The door to the bathroom was closed. The chairs were all pushed together in one corner. Lying in the bed in the middle of the room was Carol, tubes coming out of every inch of her body and bandages covering the spots on her neck where they had removed the cancerous lymph nodes. Her hair, which she had just dyed red a few weeks ago, was matted with sweat to her forehead. I looked down at her wrists which for as long as I could remember were always surrounded by black rubber bracelets that she never took off. In our history class I used to reach over and grab her arm, placing in on my desk. I would count her bracelets over and over again, amazed that she could fit so many on there. She always had fifteen on her right arm, seventeen on her left. Now for the first time I saw her bare, pale wrists, tinier than any wrist should ever be. They were bruised from all the needles that had been poked into her in the past couple days.
"Hey Carol." Claudia whispered while I continued to look on in silence. I could feel the tears coming back and I didn't want Carol to see.
Carol made a noise and squinted her eyes, moving her head towards us. Her mom and aunt left the room so we could be alone.
To be honest, I don't remember anything that was ever said during our visits to see her. I remember around New Years we brought her a hat covered in green glitter and some of those noise makers that you blow into. There is only one picture of Carol that I know of while she was in the hospital, and it is of her wearing that hat, looking exhausted but smiling. I remember Claudia and I used to sit on the window ledge and make sarcastic flirting eyes at all the young male doctors that walked past the open door. I think we may have brought Carol balloons. I remember Carol saying how much this sucked.
Carol didn't return to school until the end of January, maybe even the beginning of February- again, I'm not quite sure. She had lost all of her hair because of the chemo, and when she was just around us she would wear only a bandana. But once she got back to school she had a wig. It was a lot shorter than her old hair, so everyone thought that she had just gotten it cut. It was like they didn't even realize she had been gone for two months or that her skin was yellow or that her clothes hung off of her like she was a three year old dressing up in her mommy's dresses.
I do remember asking Carol what the worst part about all of this was.
She smiled and sniffed. "Losing your nose hair," she told me at lunch one day as I watched her eat for the first time in months, "you never realize how fucking cold your nostrils get until there's nothing there."
I laughed and reached forward to grab her arm, counting her bracelets to make sure there were fifteen on the right arm, seventeen on the left.
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