Who Do You Love Read Free

could sit on her bed and listen to music, stretching the headphones wide so that she could hear the music in her left ear and I could listen with my right.
    â€œTake that stupid thing off,” she’d say, pointing at my mask. “Like that’s going to help anything.” Alice was terminal. “That means I’m going to die,” she’d told me the first day I’d gotten out of bed, when we were in the playroom, together on a couch. It was September in Florida, sunny and warm, and we could see palm trees outside the windows and hear the drone of the mower as a man in a khaki uniform steered it across the lawn. A five-year-old who’d come for a kidney transplant ran around pretending he was a fireman. A little girl with a bald head sat reading The Cat in the Hat with her mom. “They don’t ever say it in front of me. But I know.”
    I wanted to know if she was scared, but I didn’t want to insult her. “Does it hurt?” I asked instead.
    She pointed at the bag of clear fluids dripping into the IV attached to her arm. “They give me dope.”
    I nodded. After this most recent surgery, I’d had a button that I could press whenever it hurt.
    Alice looked down, adjusting her scarf, so that I couldn’t see her face when she said, “I think maybe, by the end, it’s going to hurt a lot.” Then she raised her head, tossing one of the long, trailing ends of the scarf over her shoulder.
    â€œElegant?”
    â€œVery.” Alice always wore bandanas or fancy fringed scarves in beautiful patterns, turquoise and hot pink and gold. Once, I’d been walking past her room and she’d been cross-legged on her bed with her scarf beside her, and I’d seen her head bare. She had only a thin coating of pale blond fuzz where her hair had been, and there were pink scars crisscrossing her scalp. The night after the playroom I’d had a terrible nightmare, a dream where Alice turned into a cat and came and sat on my chest. Cat-Alice clamped my nose shut with her paws, and when I opened my mouth, she breathed into me, blowing her sickness down my throat so that she’d be healthy again and I’d be the one who had cancer. “It’s going to hurt a lot,” Cat-Alice hissed, and I woke up sweaty, my heart beating hard enough to scareme.
    â€œWill Alice get better?” I asked Sandra, my favorite of all the nurses. Sandra was sure-handed and gentle when she had to give me a needle or start a line, and she’d always say “Lunch is served, madam!” when she dropped off my tray, lifting the plastic lids off the food like it was something great even when I was just on clear liquids and Jell-O. When the bed next to me was empty, she’d fill it with my swiftly expanding collection of stuffed animals, arranging them in funny displays, the bunny with its long ears spread out against a pillow, the monkey hanging from an IV pole by its tail.
    Sandra turned her head from side to side, like she was shaking water out of her ears. “We aren’t supposed to talk about other patients.” Then she smiled, to show that she hadn’t meant to hurt my feelings. She had a pretty accent—her parents had come from Cuba, so she’d learned to speak Spanish before English. Her hair was dark and shiny, her eyes were merry and brown, and she wore a sweet, flowery perfume. I’d take deep breaths whenever she was close, and try to hold the scent in my nose to overpower the smell of the hospital, floor cleaners and chicken soup and pee.
    â€œI hope she’ll get better. She’s my friend.” Sandra didn’t answer, but I saw her lips tighten and heard her ponytail whisk against her back as she turned her head away. That, I was learning, was how grown-ups told the truth, not with words, but with what they did. The next night after dinner, I was walking up and down the hall, the only exercise that I could do, and I saw a