Obsessed Read online

  “I won’t, Dad. Just a few chapters.” I smile at him in my doorway.

  “Saw your light on late last night. Everything okay?”

  “Yeah, just that chemistry test. No big deal. Glad it’s over.” The last words come out as the beginning of a long sigh.

  He nods his head and gently taps the wooden door frame. “I sure am proud of you.” An army brat who grew up in every corner of Texas, he has a rich, deep drawl, which leaks through against his will. Especially when he’s trying to be serious.

  We make eye contact but I look away quickly. Parent emotions. Dislike. I roll my eyes. “Yeah, thanks, Dad.” I vaguely raise an eyebrow in his direction

  He pauses there for a few moments, looking at me with a half smile. “Good night, sweetie.”

  “Good night,” I mumble, already a few sentences into the book.

  Ten pages later, I am lying flat, arms sprawled and eyes closed. Through my open window I barely register the guttural croaks of bullfrogs from the pond at the base of our cul-de-sac, the occasional hum of a passing car, the silence of a Thursday night in the suburbs.

  Slowly, over minutes or hours, the calls of the bullfrogs morph into the gravelly voice of a middle-aged, white-coated doctor. My bed becomes the examining table, my sheets the thin paper hospital gown. The doctor is standing uncomfortably close to me, hand on my knee, gesturing at the dark images and shadows on the computer screen: “You have brain cancer, Allison. And I’m afraid there is nothing we can do.” He points specifically at a golf-ball-shaped blur somewhere above one of my ears. I don’t breathe, can’t breathe, until my mother’s wails shatter the humming silence of the fluorescent lights. Dizzy, nauseous, I slump over, crumbling onto the cold tile floor. When I lift myself up, I am in the parking lot of my high school. Shapes whirl past. There is a siren, the sound of screeching tires. Stumbling, disoriented, I begin to tell my classmates, who have surrounded me, the fateful news of my sickness, my imminent death. Their screams of sadness erupt with the force of a bomb, and I am immediately, violently thrown backward.

  A flash goes off and I’m vomiting. It flashes again: the pinch of a needle. Swaths of my hair fall in a pile on the floor. Flash. My mother crumpled at my bedside. Flash. A prom dress with an oxygen tank. An IV dripping poison into my veins. I am gasping, crying. Thick black surgical stitches stretching savagely across my bald head. My mother and father, a dark room, the ragged breaths. “It’s okay, sweetheart, you can let go now.”

  I am torn from sleep with a sharp breath in. An autumn breeze filters gently through my window along with the gray light of the early morning. My body is still sluggish with sleep, but my mind and heart are awake, vibrating, racing with fear. I am crying, real ragged sobs of sorrow that shake my entire body. I clutch my quilt and wrap myself around it, latching onto it like a small child to its mother. A cyclone of grief and terror rages within me, and I force my face deeper into the pillows. Terminal brain cancer. The words shatter through me, causing an explosion of emotions. After everything I’ve done for my future, after how hard I’ve worked? I’m only fifteen! I have so much left to do! Prom, college, sex, a real job, marriage. I can’t die yet. I haven’t even gotten started. With each reason I list for not wanting to die, I am smacked with a gruesome image from the dream. I’m too young! Shaved head. So much left to do! A thick-needled IV taped to the inside bend of my arm.

  I know I wasn’t actually in the hospital or the parking lot, but that girl I saw was me. Is me. Somehow. I roll over onto my other side, leaving behind a soaked pillowcase. I’m here lying in bed. She’s there in a paper exam gown. I’m awake. She lives in my dreams. But we are the same person. I know her.

  A car horn blares outside. I am jolted from my thoughts and hurtle into a slumped sitting position. I rub at one of my wet eyes and let my arm fall listlessly back onto the bed. I stare without seeing at the wall, breathing slowly as thoughts filter into my brain. What just happened? My mind is silent in response.

  I hear my mom’s alarm go off down the hall. That means it’s five forty-five a.m., only five minutes before my own alarm would blast me out of bed. She is moving around her room. She turns on lights, opens the windows, warms up the shower. The comfortable, muted sounds of her morning routine shock me with bolts of terror and misery. My crying turns to bawling as I remember her falling apart in the doctor’s office, the glaring shapes on the doomed MRI glinting off her tearstained chin. How is she supposed to continue after losing her only child? Imagining her pain and suffering is almost as bad as thinking about my own terrible destiny.

  No dream has ever felt like this before. I’m choking violently on sobs. My tongue is clumsy and swollen, my mind at once panicked and groggy. Images from the dream pass like a slow-motion video reel through my head. My wailing friends in the parking lot, a prom night filled with nausea and needles, a new tombstone carved with 1989–2004. Gulping for air, fighting to breathe against a thick layer of mucus and tears, I burrow headfirst into my sheets, allowing my face to slide against the mattress and deep into a cocoon of blankets. Under the weight of multiple layers of cotton, my rapid breath begins to slow, and the small hideout quickly warms. In the darkness I am forced face-to-face with my thoughts, with the painful images that filter through the background of my mind. What happened last night looked like a dream and dressed like a dream, but from the knots in my stomach I know that it was much more than that. Something this powerful did not exist without purpose. This was not a dream. This was a message, a warning. I have brain cancer.

  I lift my head a few inches off the mattress as this thought floats across my consciousness. I watch it move around weightlessly, a jellyfish in an illuminated aquarium. I evaluate it from afar like a newly discovered species. Something about the idea’s sharp, ragged edges feels horribly right. An abandoned corner inside me is strangely fulfilled, as if it had been expecting something exactly this terrible to happen all along. As if it knew this life, this happiness, was all just too good to be true.

  The truth of my brain cancer lies heavily on my inert body. I haven’t tried to move, but I doubt that I could. I am frozen in my cocoon, stunned.

  • • •

  “It’s all in my head. / I think about it over and over again.”

  My alarm. It is 5:50 a.m., and Nelly and Tim McGraw’s current radio hit “Over and Over” knifes itself into my brain. I lurch to sit up but am forced back down by a taut layer of tangled blankets. I look around the darkness in confusion until I recognize the source of the noise and gradually relax back into the comfort of my bed, mindlessly following along with the radio. It’s one of those songs you just can’t escape. In the grocery store, in the car, in line at the pharmacy. I know every word. “ ’Cause it’s all in my head / I think about it over and over again.” I take two or three breaths before the thought clicks into place. I feel it snap together like two Legos. My heart thuds as I slowly repeat the song’s chorus: It’s . . . all . . . in . . . my . . . head. . . .

  It knows about my cancer. The radio knows about my dream. It’s warning me, about the illness all in my head. I dig my fingertips into my sheets. Overnight I was sent a premonition masquerading as a dream, and now I am being blasted awake by a song that is clearly referencing the dark shadow on my brain. Clever. Very clever. This alarm is another barely veiled message (from who?) that there is something horribly wrong with me.

  Smoothly, as if I had practice with this sort of maneuver, I slide myself out of the sheets, smack the top of my radio hard with my palm, and slide back through the small entry into my cave. In one fluid motion, my face is again covered in cotton, surrounded by a calm darkness, in less than three seconds. But the blast of outside air has shaken me a bit. As I get comfortable again, there’s a slightly different hue to my thoughts. I have never felt such strong emotions in a dream or, for that matter, in my entire life. It seemed so real. And then there was the message from the radio. But, wriggling for a fresh air pocket in my cocoon, fighting against the cloud of warm
breath that has gathered from my collective exhales, I think that maybe it was just a coincidence? Maybe I had a terrible, terrifying nightmare and then just so happened to wake up to a song by two wildly popular music artists. It is a major radio hit, after all. It’s on all the time.

  But that song? my brain screams in protest into the silence, with that chorus? What are the chances that it would be playing at the very moment my alarm is set to go off on the very morning I wake up from what I might go so far as to call a borderline paranormal experience? How much clearer do the messages need to be?

  “Good morning, honey. Time to get up!” my mother coos as she pads down the hall toward my room. My entire body goes rigid. I can’t let her see me. I’m sure my eyes are swollen, my face all red and blotchy. She will know immediately that I’ve been crying and swoop in close with a million questions. I stay buried deep under the blankets. There is a change in the air when she enters the room. “It’s almost six o’clock, sweetie! Up, up, up!” She tickles the bottom of my feet.

  “Mooooom,” I moan, “I’m awake.” My voice cracks unintentionally.

  “Oh, honey, you sound very stuffed up! I’ll make sure to put some allergy medicine out for you downstairs. Are you feeling okay? Do you need a tissue?” She pauses briefly, wiggling my calf through the thick comforter. With my extended silence, her tone changes. “You need to get up or you are going to be late. I’m not leaving this room until I see your smiling face out from under these covers.” She claps a few times. “Now. Up.” I continue to lie still, facedown in the sheets damp with my own tears. “Allison Marie. It’s time to get up now. Five . . . four . . . three . . .” There is nothing more infuriating than when my mother starts a countdown. It makes me feel like I’m six years old and getting bullied into cleaning up a mess of toys.

  “Mooom. Okaayyy.” I mean to groan at her, but it comes out more like a snarling growl. “Go away. Please.” A few seconds pass in awkward silence. “I don’t need your step-by-step assistance, thank you.” I can feel her presence as she stands quietly above me for a few moments. I rarely talk to her like this, and I know she is debating whether to make this into a parenting moment. After about ten seconds, and with what I imagine to be a shake of her head, she walks away down the hall.

  CHAPTER 2

  I haven’t made a single mark on the blank sheet of notebook paper lying in front of me on my desk. I don’t know for sure that I have brain cancer—there is a chance the dream was just a dream and the alarm was just an alarm—but the heavy feeling deep in my gut tells me the real truth. I look around at the students who will go on to live long, happy lives filled with graduations, weddings, children. They won’t know the suffering, the injustice, of dying at fifteen. Dying before your life has even started.

  In the distance, my Civics and Ethics teacher is halfway through an overly intricate flowchart of how a bill becomes a law. I would be impressed by his effort if he hadn’t already drawn the same picture three times this school year. It is the crown jewel of his teaching repertoire, and it is losing its effect more quickly than he seems to know. Above him, running along the edge of the board, is a row of presidential faces and names. Stoic-looking old men in lacy shirts and stiff jackets. The history teacher’s version of the alphabet.

  Mr. Roberts is intently focused on ensuring that the lines of the arrows connecting the steps in his flowchart are straight. As his dutiful pupils, we are supposed to be following along, copying his work, again. For the fourth time. Half the class is scribbling away on procrastinated homework assignments while the rest are staring down into their laps, not even trying to hide that they’re on their phones. The arrangement works. Mr. Roberts doesn’t have to actually ever talk to his students, and we don’t have to pretend like we’re paying attention.

  The silence is interrupted by the jarring ring of our classroom telephone. The phones rarely ring unless it is to call a student up to the office for one reason or another. Who would it be, who would it be? After carefully replacing the lid on his marker, Mr. Roberts shuffles calmly across the room toward the landline phone on his desk. Lifting the receiver off its base, he stares at it hesitantly, seemingly concerned about its cleanliness.

  “Mmm, hello?” he inquires, a bit too loudly, holding the phone three inches from his face. Like the rest of the class, I am leaning toward him, eager to get the inside scoop on this exciting development. Sara will expect me to text her immediately if anyone interesting gets called to the office. “Yes, she is here today.” It’s a she! That eliminates half the class. “Yes. Yes.” Twenty-five sets of eyes scan the female population. One of us is the chosen one, for better or worse. “Okay, I will send her.” He places the phone down and plods back toward the board, oblivious to the rapt attention of his students. Picking up his pen to resume his drawing and without turning around, he says, “Allison, dear. Your presence is requested in the office. Only twenty minutes left in class. Best if you take your belongings with you.” He continues along with his squeaky scribbles on the whiteboard without even looking at me.

  In a single synchronized moment, the entire class swivels toward me with questioning eyes. I stare at the back of Mr. Roberts’s shirt without moving. “What did you do?” freckled Sean Morren asks eagerly from the desk beside me. I shrug. I have no idea. “Wow, I hope no one died.” With a meaningful glance at him across the aisle, I gather my supplies in my bag and walk toward the classroom door with the eyes of all my classmates burning into the back of my head. The irony of Sean’s comment threatens to pull a fresh set of tears down my cheeks as I quietly close the door behind me.

  Maybe the school knows about my brain cancer too? I wonder as I trudge toward three sets of double doors that lead out of the building. Plodding down the hall, I can think of nothing but the slow, miserable decline into death that lies in my future. The prolonged chemo, the endless surgeries, all leading me toward the inevitable. I push my way out of the humanities building and am accosted by brilliant sunlight rushing forward from the October sky. A chorus of birds relaxes high in a towering oak tree, a few young squirrels scamper happily across the grass. Cowering away from the beaming light, I scowl at Mother Nature. I have just found out my life is coming to a gruesome end and she taunts me with the beauty of her creation. I deserve a thunderstorm. Or at the very least some dark and rumbling clouds.

  Samuelson High School was built in the 1940s and has grown over the decades to accommodate the ever-increasing student population. At this point the school’s sprawling campus includes ten separate buildings, each with its own dedicated academic subject, in addition to an administrative building, a library, and a gym. The large brick structures echo the seventies with their orange window trim and decorative geometric mosaics. All the buildings are connected by a series of covered, aged concrete pathways bordered with azaleas, daffodils, and patchy grass. I walk toward the main office, using my hand to shield my eyes from the shimmering morning sun. On any other day, my mind would be abuzz in a panicked effort to figure out why I am being called to the office. It could really only mean I’m in serious trouble or, like Sean said, someone has died. My grandma’s face flashes quickly behind my eyes, followed by my other elderly relatives, in descending order. But today, and probably for the rest of my ill-fated life, my brain is consumed with my own sadness.

  Eyes cast downward, I am watching my gold flip-flops swish past each other over the gray concrete path when I see my foot land on a crack in the sidewalk. In this exact instant, as if it has been triggered, I am forcefully swept up in the memory of a long-forgotten rhyme from elementary school: Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Although I haven’t thought of this childhood chant for years, it is now glowing like a neon sign in my mind. My brain latches onto the idea and I freeze with my foot still directly on top of the crack. If stepping on a crack can break my mother’s back, can it . . . can it also cause brain cancer?

  The question hits my mind with a thud. Confused, I look up into the towering oak tree above me,
my eyes scanning the sky for a hint. How can stepping on a crack affect my brain (or my mother)? The question feels awkward and nonsensical, but the idea has power. It refuses to leave. I examine my fingernails, squinting against the sun at the carnage I caused while studying for chemistry. Finding a tiny corner of skin, I peel, peel, peel it back until a dot of red blood appears. I wince and wipe it off on my jeans. The idea that cracks are related to cancer makes no rational sense, I tell myself, but the thought that maybe, just maybe, stepping on this crack could worsen my illness or speed my imminent demise is too frightening to ignore. This inspiration for the elementary-school rhyme appeared so randomly that it could be another sly message (from who?), like the dream and the alarm.

  I feel a dull pain low and deep within my skull. The tumor. As I close my eyes against the ache, the words flash across my mind like a breaking story on the local news: Cracks cause brain cancer. And with them my head explodes in agony. I clamp my hands to my ears and collapse to the warm sidewalk. Through the radiating pain, I feel the idea repeat over and over: Cracks cause brain cancer. Cracks cause brain cancer. Cracks cause brain cancer. I am squatting now, attempting to gain composure in the face of what I assume is some sort of tumor attack. An explosive side effect of my terrible fate. Cracks cause brain cancer. My eyes are frantic, darting. Sirens blare in my ears, blocking my thoughts. I lean forward, trying to find a position to stop the chaotic tornado roaring within me. Nails screech down a chalkboard. Cracks cause brain cancer. Adjusting my stance, I see my gold flip-flop still planted on the original crack. As a sharp alarm sounds in my left ear, I shift my weight to my arms and forcefully extend my leg, pushing my foot off the sidewalk crack.