CHAPTER ONE
MON, AUG 3, 5:51 P.M.
Dad: Are you yelling? I hear yelling.
Ivy: just watching TV.
Dad: Food network?
Ivy: yep.
She’s going for the ice cream machine. That’s a rookie mistake. I’m surprised she even made it to the dessert round. She was my pick to win, but she clearly doesn’t know how to play the game.
“Iggy?” I hear my little brother call. It’s my dad’s nickname for me, and Ethan only calls me that when he wants something.
“In here,” I yell back. I’m on the couch, extremely comfortable under the electric blanket, and I am so not moving unless it’s an emergency. I’m talking life or death. I took my weekly handful of chemo meds yesterday, so I’m in the purgatory between last week’s meds wearing off and yesterday’s meds kicking in. The heat calms my raging joints just the slightest bit.
Ethan comes stomping into the room, and I mean literally stomping. He has his baseball cleats on, for some reason. His footsteps are so booming, they have to be damaging the hardwood. Even if they’re not, they’re impairing my ability to hear what this chef is doing with the Bartlett pears he received in his ingredient basket for the dessert round. My grandmother had this amazing recipe for a mixed-berry fruit tart. That’s probably what I’d make.
Since his competitor decided to use the ice-cream machine, he’s my new pick to win.
“Look,” Ethan says, throwing a foot over my lap. “I got new cleats.”
“That’s wonderful.” I shove his foot away, because despite them being brand-new shoes, they still somehow already smell. Ethan’s thirteen. I should never doubt his ability to stink. Nausea is a side effect of this immunosuppressant purgatory, and his stench is not helping.
Onscreen, my former favorite drops a spoon in the ice cream machine. “Oh my God, no way,” I groan. It clunks around like change in a dryer. I knew making ice cream was a mistake. Making ice cream is always a mistake.
“What are you watching?” Ethan asks. He sits next to me, putting his new cleats up on the coffee table. They’re neon green and seriously obnoxious. I see why he loves them so much.
“Chopped. It’s a special season where Alton Brown makes the baskets, so they’re all horrible. It’s awesome.”
“You’re really weird,” Ethan says. The show goes to commercial, and I actually look at him. He has dirt all over his face, for some reason. The cleats are spotless, but he’s a giant mess. I haven’t seen
him much today, which probably explains it. If my sister or I don’t keep an eye on him during summer days like this when our parents are at work, he gets into trouble.
“Did Mom take you shopping for cleats with dirt all over you like that?” I ask, because I know she didn’t. My fingers itch to wipe crumbles of dirt off the throw pillow behind him.
“No, we went shopping then went to meet my new coaches. One of them is—”
“Shh. The show’s back on.”
Ethan shuts up, because he knows what’s good for him.
“What’s so horrible about these baskets?” he asks eventually, because talking about the show is really the closest thing to shutting up that he’s capable of doing, long-term.
I laugh. “The terrible thing in this one is livermush. It was submitted by a fan from North Carolina.”
“Oh, gross.” Ethan makes a horrified face.
I don’t make a habit of considering anything about regional cuisines disgusting, but since livermush is a part of my regional cuisine, I’m just going to say it: it’s disgusting. The thought of it actually makes me queasy (or maybe that’s the meds again). These unlucky people have to put liver, and who knows what else, in their desserts. That’s why it’s so ridiculous that she chose to make ice cream. I’m still upset about it. I was rooting for her.
The show goes to commercial again, and I turn back to Ethan.
“Okay, what about the coaches?” I don’t enjoy social situations, but both my siblings are innately social creatures, and I do enjoy hearing about their unique brands of chaos.
“One of them is your age. He’s, like, a really good baseball player or something.
He’s so cool.”
“Why is someone my age coaching baseball?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say. I didn’t ask. But he said he liked my new cleats and my Braves shirt, and he taught us how to slide—”
“Taught you how to slide? Is that how you got dirt on your face?”
Ethan nods.
“What did Mom say about this?” Mom, the only other person on the side of calm in this hectic household.
“Nothing. The other coach was talking to the parents while we were on the field. When she asked how I got dirty, I told her I fell.”
“On your face?”
He shrugs. It’s not so unbelievable, actually, the idea that he could fall on his face.
“This guy sounds like a bad influence.”
“He said bad words, too.”
I roll my eyes. I’m about to ask him which ones, but the show comes back on. They tell Ice Cream Lady that her dessert tastes like metal because she dropped a spoon in the machine, and her ice cream base wasn’t that good to begin with. (She put her livermush in the ice cream, so I could’ve told them that.) She gets chopped.
“Is that why you came in here, to tell me about baseball?” I ask Ethan as I stretch out my locked-up joints. I try to stand, but my left hip and knee decide they’ve taken the day off from being a hip and knee, so I sit back down.
“No. I was going to ask you to make lemon chicken for dinner.”
Lemon would smell a lot better than he does right now. I could probably handle cooking at this level of queasiness.
“Fine, but you have to do the dishes.”
“Deal.”
CHAPTER TWO
TUES, AUG 4, 4:32 P.M.
Caroline: Can you chill, pls? I can’t hear myself think over here.
Ivy: Let me live.
Caroline: What are you making?
Ivy: Grandma’s marinara sauce.
Caroline: Never mind. Carry on.
I’m in the kitchen, like always. The rest of my family is rustling randomly around the house. Someone will be drifting in soon to ask what I’m making for dinner. It’ll be Mom, probably. I’d say it’s her watching TV in the living room right now: the news is on, and I hear something about a backup on I-85. In Charlotte, there’s always a backup on I-85.
I stop chopping for a moment; the blurriness in my eyes is making my precise knife cuts come out all wonky. I rub my eyes against the sleeve of my worn black T-shirt. Everything feels better today. The nausea, my joints, and my general disposition—despite the aromatic tears.
“It smells good in—wait, are you crying?” Mom asks as she walks into the kitchen. She leans against the island where I’m working, and I notice she still has faint pink marks on her face from the throw pillow on the couch. She hasn’t been watching the news, then. She’s been sleeping through it.
I hold up the onions I just finished chopping. Dinner really doesn’t smell like anything yet; I don’t even have these onions cooking. She’s probably just smelling the spice jars open in front of me. I always do it that way—open the spices first. I like the barely-there scent of them all mixed together. In my imagination, it’s what a Food Network set smells like.
Mom sits down at the dining room table, and I put my finely diced onions into my favorite saucepan with a heavy dose of freshly minced garlic. They’re met with sizzling applause, because I have the oil temperature just right. There’s nothing better than that noise.
“So how was your day?” Mom asks. I think about how to answer.
“Fine. Pretty typical.” It was just another summer day. Sleeping entirely too late, doing entirely too little. Cooking. Watching other people cook on TV. The end. “I started watching an old season of Worst Cooks in America. Someone tried to cook a whole rack of lamb in a toaster oven.”
“I’m sure you found
that personally offensive,” Mom remarks.
I did. But it was hilarious. Bad cooking like that is my ultimate comic relief. I chuckle to myself at the memory.
“How was your day?” I ask, chopping tomatoes to tip in next. Mom is in the middle of prepping for a new school year. As a counselor, she’s neck-deep in paperwork and placement test scores. I can already see the exhaustion setting in. The tension in her shoulders is visible from here.
“You should see my office. It looks like the kitchen when you’re done with it.” Mom smiles at me, running her fingers over her forehead as if she can smooth out the lines already forming.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! I always clean up my messes.” To illustrate my point, I swipe away tomato juice that jumps from the sparkling silver saucepan. I even move my grandmother’s recipe cards farther away from the danger zone.
I have them all memorized, but they mean more to me than the words scrawled across the torn, yellowed paper. And I’ve been trying to do this...challenge, I guess. The goal is to make all of my grandma’s recipes gluten-free, and thus safe for consumption in this house. She’s been gone a while now, and I’ve been making gluten-free stuff for years, so I thought it would be easy. Something easy enough to accomplish over a summer. But summer is winding down to an unceremonious close, and there’s still a stack of recipe cards left unadapted.
“I wish someone would clean up mine,” Mom huffs.
“Why don’t you take Caroline with you tomorrow? You know she’s an organizational genius.”
My older sister is the only reason we can find anything in our home, and the reason my kitchen runs like a navy-ship kitchen. Or an Iron Chef kitchen. I’ve seen a lot more Iron Chef kitchens than I have navy kitchens.
“Speaking of Caroline...” Mom starts to say.
Caroline herself appears in the doorway, dressed to go out. Not go out go out, just go out somewhere. She went out last night, actually, even though
it’s not the weekend. I guess all summer days are weekends, in a way. It was a date, I think—she didn’t call it that, but she didn’t come home until after midnight. Even though I’m happy here, with my baking supplies and my cookbooks, there are parts of Caroline I can’t help but wish I could be more like.
I envy her casual style. Her easy confidence. Her distinct lack of anxieties, social or otherwise. Even the headband in her auburn hair seems to sparkle. Everything about Caroline is just more than everything about me. Her jeans fit better. She speaks more freely. She actually enjoys going outside? I don’t know why, but she does. The idea that we’re so closely related is just strange.
They call us Irish twins. Not us, specifically, but kids as close in age as we are. Though, with the red hair and the green eyes, we look as much like actual Irish twins as anyone else.
“Yes, speaking of me.” Caroline smiles. It’s one of those I’m about to get you in trouble smiles I’ve been on the receiving end of for all of my seventeen years. She convinced me to follow her up a tree once, and this was the smile she used to do it.
I turn away, taste my building marinara sauce, and add more oregano. Grandma’s recipe doesn’t specify how much to use: her philosophy was to make that decision with your soul. I almost grab the cilantro, but Caroline’s one of those people who thinks cilantro tastes like soap, so that’s a catastrophe narrowly avoided. The cilantro shouldn’t be right next to the oregano, anyway. My spices are supposed to be in alphabetical order. I start to reorganize them, but I stop when I realize Mom and Caroline are both still staring at me.
“Listen, Ivy, come sit down.” Mom waves me out to the dining room, sits, and pats the seat next to her at our giant wooden table. I’m not in the mood for a sit-down discussion. I’m not particularly in the
mood for any kind of discussion, to be honest.
“Spaghetti, cool!” Ethan appears, beelining right for the stove.
“Nope, don’t you dare!” I point my wooden spoon at him, knowing he’s about to stick a finger in the sauce. He reaches past me, grabs a spoon from the drawer, and steals a taste.
“No fingers, see?” he teases.
“You better put that spoon right back where you found it!” I say, hoping I sound intimidating. He’s as tall as me now, so I don’t have the advantage I used to. He reaches over me again, like he’s actually going to toss his spit-covered spoon back in the drawer. “Gross, wash it first!”
“Kids, can we be civil for just one minute, please?” If there’s a way to beg with authority, that’s what Mom is doing. Ethan drops the spoon in the sink and leaves the room. He’s not a fan of common civility.
“Ivy, honey,” she begins again, “we need to talk.”
God, how I hate those words. I hate when life stops for a minute for everyone to sit down face-to-face. Talking, I can do...but bent over a stove, or with flour-coated hands.
I sit down at the head of the table with a huff, keeping an eye on my simmering sauce. Maybe I can just pretend I’m still standing there stirring it if I try hard enough. Caroline stays standing leaned against the doorway, one ankle crossed over the other, careful not to scuff her pristine white sneakers.
“I went to Dr. Anthony’s last week...” As soon as Mom starts speaking, red flags pop up in my head like my brain’s infected with a computer virus. Mom’s visits to her rheumatologist are standard operating procedure around here. She’s had lupus since shortly after Ethan was born, and I don’t remember a time before her illness was a part of our lives.
But we barely even talk about doctor’s visits like these—especially not over a week after the fact. I feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. If we’re talking about it, that must mean something bad. Lupus is a giant wrecking ball hanging over our entire house, and it feels poised to drop. Is something wrong? They’d have told me
already if something was wrong. Dad would be here for that kind of talk. So would Ethan. I saw her last blood work results myself. They weren’t bad—but maybe they were?
“Nothing’s wrong; I can see the terror in your face,” Caroline says. She relaxes some, and so do I. I hadn’t realized how tightly I’ve been holding my hands closed under the table. Now I can’t move them. Oops.
“No, no. Everything’s fine. Sorry, I should’ve led with that.” Mom smiles. “I just...I saw a flyer for this support group.”
I feel myself brighten, just a little. This is good. Mom doesn’t take her illness seriously sometimes. A support group would be good for her. She does too much and doesn’t rest enough. Maybe a group could help with that.
“It’s for teenagers. Kids like us,” Caroline says.
“What do you mean, like us?” For a second, I don’t put those pieces together. Besides the way we look, there aren’t many things Caroline and I have in common. Other than being sisters and almost twins, there isn’t much that makes us an us. Then, it clicks.
“Kids with chronic illnesses.” Mom doesn’t whisper it or lower her voice as if she’s telling a terrible secret, the way some people speak about chronic illness. I appreciate that, but my spine tightens all on its own.
This was never about Mom, then. It’s about us.
I want to tuck and roll out of here. Or find some way to travel back in time and prevent this conversation from happening.
But instead I wait, because I know Caroline will keep talking. She always does. “I thought it would be good for us to talk about this kind of stuff with people who get it.”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing? We have each other. It’s not like any of us is alone.”
“Come on, please? I don’t want to go by myself.”
I look up at my sister. There’s something genuine in her eyes. I know Caroline’s always
felt this kind of otherness since she was diagnosed with celiac disease as a kid. It makes her different from her cornucopia of friends. I don’t feel the same way. At least, I try not to. I’ve only been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis for a little over a year, but I know that sense of awareness of my differences will grow.
I think over everything for a minute. They’re silent, knowing I would never just mindlessly agree. I don’t know what they want from me, or what part of social anxiety they’re not understanding.
I’m going to say no. I don’t willingly go out and talk to people for fun—I’m certainly not going to go out and talk about being sick.
No way.
Not happening.
“You know I’m not going to talk,” I find myself saying.
I don’t want to be saying it. I don’t remember telling my mouth to form those words, but here we are.
I just can’t seem to say no to her. It’s her eyes. They’re the same eyes I see in the mirror every day, in the same face—but I physically can’t make the pouty expression she always uses when she doesn’t get her way.
This is our typical compromise, anyway. As long as I don’t have to talk, I’ll begrudgingly go almost anywhere, just to get Caroline to stop talking. So why fight it this time?
“No one will force you to talk,” Mom promises.
“I’ll do all the talking. I just don’t want to walk in alone.”
I imagine Caroline walking in alone anywhere. Music blares from invisible speakers. There’s a wind machine. Spotlights appear from the ceiling, hitting the high points of her face. It’s a display of the kind of brightness and vividness that everyone sees when they look at her.
In contrast to me. If there’s a brightness near me—say, the brightest ray of sunshine North Carolina has ever seen—I’ll hide behind it, with decaying joints and too many freckles.
I hear a gurgling noise that means my sauce is getting too hot. I jump up, hitting my knee against the solid wood underside of the table. It throbs, but just the slightest bit more than my baseline level of pain.
“When is this?” I ask. I feel myself calming down as I rhythmically stir, even though my hand threatens to lock around the spoon.
“Tonight. We have to leave in half an hour.”
I lean my head forward against the solid oak cabinets. This was an ambush, then. They did it this way so I wouldn’t agree to go and then back out later.
I’ll have to change. I’ll have to do something with the rat’s nest on top of my head. I’ll have to abandon the spaghetti I haven’t even put on to boil yet. I turn the burner off, place a lid over the saucepan, and sigh. I point the red-stained spoon at my mother. She’s smiling, because she knows she’s won.
“Don’t let Ethan touch this while I’m gone.”
CHAPTER THREE
TUES, AUG 4, 6:03 P.M.
Rory: How’s ur summer? Haven’t heard from u in a while
Ivy: Okay. How’s yours?
Rory: Ok I guess. I’m touring colleges in Raleigh
Ivy: Which ones again?
Rory: All of them. there are so many colleges in Raleigh 
Rory: we’re at Meredith rn
Ivy: sorry I couldn’t make it
“Where is this thing, anyway?” I ask. I took so long deciding what to wear that I end up having to do my hair in the car. I didn’t want to change out of my marinara-stained pajamas, because they’re my favorites, but I can’t meet people in blue fuzzy pants with pizza slices all over them.
Why social rules like that exist, I’ll never know. My life would be so much easier if they didn’t exist. It’d be so much easier if I didn’t care about them.
“S&F Fitness, that gym near South Meck.”
I pause mid-braid. I was expecting a church, or one of the community centers. “We’re going to a gym? Kill me now.”
Caroline laughs, like I’m not serious. “I know. I don’t get it, either. I’m sure there’s a
a story there.”
“Why are we really doing this?” I wrap a hair tie around the end of my auburn braid, then pull the visor mirror down again. Just one more look.
My hair’s frizzing in the southern humidity. It used to be pin straight, like Caroline’s, but that was before I started my meds. No one warned me about that—how much my body would change. At least the color is the same.
There’s a stray eyelash under one eye. The dark orange is a stark contrast against my pale skin, offsetting the deep green of my eyes. I swipe it away and decide against making a wish. I don’t need to wish for anything, anyway.
Caroline sighs.
“I saw the flyer last time I went to my GI, and Mom saw it again last week. I just thought it would be fun to not be the weird one for once, you know?”
Her words are sobering. I haven’t been sick my whole life like Caroline has—I just woke up one day hurting, and I haven’t gotten better—but I have been the weird one. I’ve always been the weird one. ...
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