To My Romeo, with Love novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: After

Fraser got me out of that room by putting my hand flat on his chest and breathing slowly until I matched him.

It took four minutes.

The oncologist came back, looked at me with an expert's calm, and said it was common and that it was nothing to be ashamed of.

I was ashamed anyway.

I went home to a house full of flowers and cards, with a clean scan in my pocket.

I did not know what to do with my hands.

For seven months I'd had a job.

My job was to be sick well.

I had schedules, and pills in a plastic box, and nurses who knew my numbers.

Now I had a kitchen table, and a Tuesday, and nothing on it.

The house was silent in the afternoons.

Dad was back on the night shift, and Fraser was at the shop, where he'd finally started the Portland application.

I sat in the living room with the clock ticking.

It was the sound I'd been afraid of since I was sixteen.

It was the sound of my father at the kitchen table after the funeral, with the casseroles piling up and nobody to eat them.

I had spent seven months holding that sound off, and here it was anyway.

The school principal called on Wednesday.

She was kind, and she told me the spring concert needed a music teacher, and that nobody expected me back until fall.

"But would you like to come by?" she said. "See the kids?"

I said yes.

I drove to Brookside Elementary on Thursday morning and sat in the parking lot for forty minutes.

I could see my classroom window from there, the one with the paper snowflakes still taped to the glass.

I could not make my legs get out of the car.

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