Love and Other Unknown Variables (18 page)

5.3

S
ince Thanksgiving, Ms. Finch has had her classroom rearranged to face the windows in the back of the room instead of the whiteboard in the front (backfire: “What a beautiful idea. Let’s all write poems about the fall foliage outside our windows”), her podium wrapped in holiday paper with penguins on it (“A gift? For me? You shouldn’t have”), and, my personal favorite, a full-scale cardboard cutout of Darth Vader with Ms. Finch’s face and the caption, “Come to the dark side.” She snapped a picture of it and texted someone immediately. Everyone’s hearts were racing that day, thinking Dr. Whiting had been on the other end of that text. (It was Charlotte, and she had this to say: “That’s the best you geeks can do?”).

Ms. Finch’s been marking off the days until winter break on the wall calendar with a fat red marker. Today she’ll “X” off the last day. I think we’re both relieved. It’s funny because I may have started this revolution against Ms. Finch, but the longer it wages, the more sympathetic I feel toward her, and the more I want to call the whole thing off and walk away.

My lack of fight isn’t because Charlotte is off-limits and my poor southern hemisphere is losing. Honestly, I feel helpless in the face of Charlotte’s disease. I want to make everything else in her life as smooth as possible, since I’ve got no way of making the cancer better. I’m pretty sure that’s what Ms. Finch is doing, too. We’re fighting the same fight to protect Charlotte.

Defeating Ms. Finch is like defeating myself.

Ms. Finch has a book open on her lap at the beginning of class. The book is old and dog-eared and the pages are covered with ink illustrations and writing so there is more black than white. I’ve noticed she carries it around with her wherever she goes lately.

She closes the book and sets it on her podium when the bell rings. Clearing her throat she begins.

“There are many kinds of heroes in literature, and people love to argue over what makes a hero and who represents them best. I’m going to give each of you a slip of paper with a quote from a literary character on it. I’d like you to read the quote aloud and then we’ll decide whether the character is a hero.” She pauses to pull a large glass jar from under her podium. It’s filled with colorful scraps of paper that remind me of rose petals aloft in the sky. “Oh, and why the character is heroic. Never forget
why
.”

She walks up and down the aisles holding out the jar for each of us.

I pull an orange paper from the jar.

“I wanted you to see what real courage is… It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”

–Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird

It’s like a wave that has been pulling back from the shore, building upon itself and towering over me since I met Charlotte Finch crashes over me, and I’m choking on the salty water. I can’t win, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try. I can’t hold onto Charlotte forever, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t hold her now. I can’t—breathe. I fucking can’t breathe.

Ms. Finch reads the slip of paper over my shoulder. She touches my desk, her fingers fluttering there like leaves in a breeze.

“It’s true, you know,” she says quietly beside me. I want to yell at her. Of course it’s true, but I’m not that brave. I barely keep myself contained for the rest of class. All I want is Charlotte. I want to win just one more kiss and then another and…is it possible?

It’s the longest class in the history of ever.

Ms. Finch doesn’t linger after class. Today is Charlotte’s birthday. I’m sure they have plans. No one else sticks around either. Winter formal is tonight. I wish I had asked Charlotte, but…I was afraid—of hurting Becca, but mostly of rejection. On my way out the door, I notice Ms. Finch forgot her book where she’d left it on the podium. Curious, I glance at the title:
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

It’s the book—the book that will tell me more about this Atticus fellow whose words are making my insides explode.

I grab the book without further thought. I’ll return it after break. She’ll never even know it’s missing. I just need to know. Did Atticus win?

5.4

“
C
harlie?” My name is whispered across the darkness of my room that night. I fell asleep with my face on my physics book like it’s a pillow, so I can’t see so much as feel someone in here with me. My heart stalls. Charlotte?

Becca leans over and whispers my name again.

I groan and grab my sheets to pull them over my head, but she stops me. “Charlie, I need your help.”

I sit up, my eyes adjusting to the darkness and the shadowy figure of my sister. I notice she’s dressed. “What’s up?”

“It’s Charlotte,” Becca says, waving her cell phone at me. I see now the screen is lit and Charlotte is on the line. Becca foists the phone at me and starts tugging at a strand of her hair.

“’Lo?”

“CHaRliEEE!”

“Charlotte? You okay?”

“Iss my birthday! HaPPy BIRthDay to ME!”

“Oh-kay? Happy birthday, Charlotte. Whatcha doing?”

“I’m at my BirTHDay PartEEEE!”

I pull the phone away from my ear. “I don’t understand. What party?”

Becca’s finger is lost in a tangle of her hair. She loosens the bite on the inside of her lip. “We went to dinner earlier for her birthday. She said she had to go home and celebrate with her sister. She dropped me off here. That’s all I know.”

“So this isn’t really her birthday party?”

Becca shakes her head.

I nod and get back to the phone. “Charlotte, where are you? Becca and I want to come to your birthday party, too.”

“You do? How lovely,” she says, her voice tinged with sadness.

The party isn’t far from us. It’s in the neighborhood. The guy who lives here goes to school with Becca and Charlotte. We park the car amongst the others on the street and head toward the house. I’m still talking to Charlotte, narrating our every move.

“Okay, we’re here. Should we ring the bell?” Charlotte laughs maniacally. I decide that means no. I can hear loud music and voices. “Listen, Charlotte, once we get in here, how can we find you?”

“I’m upstairs.”

“Upstairs?”

“Un-huh,” her voice drifts away like she’s bored or on the edge of passing out.

I take a deep breath and look at Becca. Her face is pale, a sheen of sweat on her brow. I try to smile at her, like,
No worries, I regularly crash stranger’s parties to retrieve drunk, terminally ill friends. I got this.
We slip in. My plan is to get to Charlotte and get out without anyone noticing us.

“We’re heading upstairs. Where are you up here?”

“Bathroom.”

“Which door? There’s like six.”

“Ummm…”

Damn. I nod at Becca to start checking rooms. The first is unoccupied. The next is dark, but I can hear a lot of panting, so I’m guessing—occupied. Becca’s is a closet. The next one we try is locked.

“Hey, Charlotte? Did you lock the door?”

“Dunno.”

I chuckle. This is a pain in the ass expedition, but I have to admit, drunk Charley sounds awfully cute, from sober Charlie’s perspective. “Could you check? I’m standing outside a locked door and before I kick it in and rescue you, I’d like to know I’ve got the right princess.” I hear laughing, both on the phone and off. Yep. It’s this one. “Ha. Ha. Open up, will ya?”

“I wanna see you kick it down.”

I stare at the door.

“Go ’head. I’m waiting,” she says.

“Charlotte, come out,” I holler, pounding on the door. My hand throbs, irrefutable evidence I could never kick it down.

“All right,” she says, pulling it open in my face. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch. Geez.”

Becca pulls Charlotte to her in a big hug.

“Let’s go, ladies, before I’m spotted and someone tries to stuff me in a locker.”

“But, Charlie,” Becca says, looking around the dim hallway. “There aren’t any.”

Charlotte doubles over with a fit of laughter, slurred, but still musical. Someone else tonight must have been snared by her Siren call because a half-naked guy steps into the hall calling, “Charley, that you? Where’ve you been?”

Mostly-Naked stops short when he sees Becca and me propping Charlotte up between us. Beside me, Charlotte’s spine stiffens and she mutters something sounding like, “not this asshole again.” Which makes me smile because she isn’t talking about me.

“Who the hell are you?” Mostly-Naked asks, advancing at an angle.

“Uh…I’m Charlie.”
Smooth, nut sack
.
Maybe you should run now?
I start hauling Charlotte toward the stairs.

“Hey!” he shouts behind us. Charlotte’s feet aren’t working well, so he catches up, grabbing Charlotte by the shoulder and trying to wrench her from my grip.

Something snaps in my brain. “Back off, man. She’s drunk. I’m taking her home.”

“Who are you talking to, you little bitch?”

Becca untangles her arm and turns to face Mostly-Naked. “
To whom
are
you
talking, Derrick No-Dick?” she asks, her lips grim lines of distaste. “My brother and I are here to collect our friend. Can you wrap the only organ in your body smaller than your penis around that fact?”

My little sister. I’m so proud.

Charlotte snorts with laughter and throws her hand in the air, “Oh, yes, speak the gospel, sister-friend.” Becca grins and smacks Charlotte with a high-five.

Derrick No-Dick doesn’t find it funny, though. He advances on me, even though I’m the only one here not insulting him. I’m trying to figure out how to avoid being hit
and
hold Charlotte when Charlotte relieves me of my second duty. Standing on her own, she stumbles toward Derrick and places her hands on his shoulders.

“Uh, Charlotte?”

She leans close to his ear, like she’s going to whisper something to him and he gives me this total
suck it, assface
grin. Charlotte knocks it off his face by ramming her knee in his groin. Big or little, that hurts like hell. My sixth grade experiment proved that, if nothing else.

Becca grabs Charlotte and takes off down the hallway. “Come on, Charlie.”

Derrick crumples to the carpet.

“Keys,” Becca says as we hit the curb. I toss them over and help Charlotte into the backseat. Then, I slide in beside her. Becca takes the first corner too fast, so Charlotte thumps into my shoulder. She rests her head there and looks up at me. “Thanks for coming to my party.”

“It was a real killer,” I deadpan.

She giggles again, which makes her hiccup. Her face, pink from the heat of the party, pales.

“You okay?”

Charlotte leans away and starts groping for the door handle even though we’re going forty miles per hour through the neighborhood.

“Whoa! Hold on.” I grab for her hands. “Stop, Becca.”

The car’s barely stopped before Charlotte bolts. She crawls behind an inflatable Santa and retches.

“Do you think puking on Santa gets you an automatic spot on the naughty list?”

“Not funny, Charlie,” Becca whisper-shouts. “Go help her,” she says with a shove.

“What about you?” I ask, but Becca’s paler than Santa’s beard. I’ll have two puking girls on my hands if I send her in to help.

Charlotte’s no longer puking, but she’s not moving either. She’s on all fours staring at the contents of her stomach. The smell is foul, the alcohol still strong enough to burn the inside of my nose. I gag. Smooth.

“Can you stand?” I offer her my hand.

Charlotte crawls away from her pile of sick to where I’ve retreated from the stench. She reaches up, and I grab under her arms to help her to her feet. We stumble over each other until I can prop her against the hood of my car. She leans forward into my chest and her shoulders sag forward. “I want to go home.”

“What about your sister?” I ask. Charlotte moans. The vibration from her moaning is somehow both inside and outside my chest. “You can come home with me. Becca and I will take care of you.”

She lifts her face up toward me, and I feel that familiar urge to kiss her, but her eyes are so glazed, and she is hiccupping, and some puke is on her chin. I clean her face with a napkin from my glove box before helping her back into the car.

At home, we sneak up the stairs, which is exponentially harder to do with Charlotte stepping in all the wrong places, and settle Charlotte in Becca’s bed. Becca leaves to get aspirin and water for our patient.

Charlotte’s wearing a sleeveless shirt thingy that ties behind her neck, her skin prickled with a chill. Becca’s book page rose is pinned to the fabric just above her right breast. I will myself to look away and pull off my sweatshirt, so I can yank it over her head, making her glossy black curls stand up at odd, yet sexy, angles. As I’m putting her right arm through the shirt, she looks at me, her eyes more focused.

“Know what I miss the most from my old life?”

“Old life?”

“The one before I was dying.”

My heart catches. “Oh.”

“I miss the boredom.”

Instead of saying anything, I help thread her left arm through the other sleeve.

“I miss thinking I had enough time to be bored. Nowadays, it feels like such a waste. But, I’m tired. Tired of the constant motion. Tired of running away from something so—” She fixes me with her eyes. “Consuming.”

It feels like a hand is crushing my throat. “You can’t give up.”

“What if I’m not giving up? Nothing lasts forever. What if my number is up? Or, like, my number line thingy is simply a short line?”

“Number line thingy? Are you alluding to a math theory?”

She laughs, her small shoulders shaking inside my sweatshirt. “You said ‘allude,’ which is totally a literary term. We’re even.”

I smooth a mussed curl from her face and press my palm there. Her eyes widen, and I retract my hand.

“Sorry,” I say and lean away.

Her hand reaches up to the same spot. “I don’t know what to do,” she says, her voice a low note on a saxophone. When her eyes overflow, I wipe the tears from her cheek with my sleeve. She catches my hand and holds it.

“Jo’s making us stay with Dad for Christmas. I don’t want to go. I’m nothing but a cancer patient to him anymore. It’s so horrible, Charlie.”

“I’m so sorry.” I move closer to her.

“He’s too chicken-shit to admit I’m losing this fight; the tumors are winning. We just lie to each other, like I’ll live happily ever after, and I hate it. I hate the lies.”

She lets go of my hand to wipe away the second round of tears coursing down her cheeks. I open my mouth, but Charlotte cuts me off. “If you apologize to me again for something out of your control, Hanson, I swear I’ll make your nose bleed so badly you’ll need super-size tampons to staunch the bleeding.”

I need to change the subject, so I go with math. “Did you know—” My voice sounds too high, like my vocal chords are strung too tight. I clear my throat, “Did you know the number-line-thingy has a special place for imaginary numbers?”

She looks at me like maybe
my
brain is addled with tumors. “And?”

“Isn’t that strange?”

“Mathematically?” Her mouth scrunches up to one side. It’s kind of adorable. “I have no idea.”

“The mathematical term, oddly enough, is not ‘number-line-thingy.’ We call it the Real line.” One of her eyebrows arches. “And the imaginary line, which is part of the complex plane, intersects with the Real line.”

“Complex plane? Sounds about right.” Her lips pull into a smile.

“Mathematicians invented imaginary numbers to solve these ridiculously awesome problems. The real numbers weren’t enough.”

“What’s the point, Professor Weird?”

I take a long, shaky breath. I hadn’t realized how fast my heart was racing. “The point is, sometimes real problems have to be solved with imagination. Maybe the lies aren’t technically lies, but imaginary numbers, and your dad needs them to cope with losing you.”

“That and whiskey.”

“Right.”

“It’s a nice fairy tale, but I’m still going to die,” she says, lying back on Becca’s bed and closing her eyes.

I sit on the floor next to her. “Are you afraid?”

Her eyebrows pull into a frown. It makes her look like her sister. “I’m not a coward.”

“No, you are not.”

She’s quiet. The whole house is silent. Charlotte grabs my hand. Her fingers are frail and white in my palm, like the bare branches of the birch in the backyard. Her voice in the stillness hurts. “Yes. I am.”

Becca comes back, and bustles between Charlotte and me. “Mom and Dad are still asleep,” she reports, and then sits Charlotte up to administer water and aspirin like a nurse. I stand to leave, but Charlotte’s grip tightens.

I sit back down next to the bed and watch as Becca strokes Charlotte’s curls, untangling them so they lay neatly against her face. As Charlotte falls asleep, her fingers relax and fall away from mine. I want to grab them up and hold them again. I want to, but I don’t.