Sick Kids In Love Read online

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  What’s your favorite place in New York?

  Chapter One

  What would your last meal be?

  Chapter Two

  What’s your best tip for time management?

  Chapter Three

  What’s your idea of a good time?

  Chapter Four

  What’s the strangest coincidence you’ve ever experienced?

  Chapter Five

  What are you looking forward to?

  Chapter Six

  What’s your favorite subway line?

  Chapter Seven

  What’s your idea of a perfect date?

  Chapter Eight

  What are you thankful for?

  Chapter Nine

  Who’s the last person you talked to on the phone?

  Chapter Ten

  What secret are you keeping?

  Chapter Eleven

  Should Sick Girl date Sick Boy?

  Chapter Twelve

  What would you do if it was your last night in New York?

  Chapter Thirteen

  What was the best thing that happened this year?

  Chapter Fourteen

  What’s the best thing anyone’s ever given you?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Who do you trust?

  Chapter Sixteen

  How do you figure out your priorities?

  Chapter Seventeen

  Are you where you’re supposed to be?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Why are you the way you are?

  Chapter Nineteen

  What’s the worst thing you've ever said?

  Chapter Twenty

  What are you afraid of?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Should Sick Girl call her mom?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  What’s the worst thing that could happen?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  How are you feeling?

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  What happens next?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Readers' Group Guide

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Let's be friends!

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Hannah Moskowitz. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  2614 South Timberline Road

  Suite 105

  Fort Collins, CO 80525

  [email protected]

  Entangled Teen is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

  Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

  Edited by Lydia Sharp

  Cover illustrated by Elizabeth Turner Stokes

  Interior design by Heather Howland

  Print ISBN 978-1-64063-732-0

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-64063-736-8

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition November 2019

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Garrett, Benni, and Jack, who wait

  for my love story with me.

  What’s your favorite place

  in New York?

  The High Line. Is that too cliché? If you go like midday on a weekday it’s not super touristy. You can get brussels sprouts and doughnuts at the market and then go up there and feel like you’re about to fall off the edge of the world. Plus if you’re there midday it means you’re not in class, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

  —Maura Cho, 16, basketball player

  Dumbo. The bars don’t card and I like hanging out under a bridge and feeling like a mole person.

  —Luke Stellwater, 15, currently starring as Pippin in “Pippin”

  My favorite place in New York isn’t there anymore. It was called Kelly’s Diner, and it was on 31st Street in Astoria. 31st and…I can’t remember. 23rd. 23rd. I used to go there every Wednesday during my residency, and I’d have a tuna melt, coleslaw, and a chocolate shake. Every Wednesday. I was there when I found out I was getting my fellowship, and I was there when I found out I was going to be a father. Now it’s a Wendy’s.

  —John Garfinkel, 49, Physician in Chief at Linefield and West Memorial Hospital

  The Octagon on Roosevelt Island. It’s like someone built a church to honor a place and then keeps on forgetting it exists. It’s beautiful, though. You can really think there.

  —Claire Lennon, 16, dead

  I don’t know. What’s wrong with right here? Are you gonna buy something?

  —Helen, ???, manager at my bodega

  Chapter One

  “Hospital” should be a setting on white noise machines. The nurses laughing at the station and the sound of their squeaky sneakers on the floor. The rush of the pneumatic tubes sending blood back and forth from the lab. The rhythmic beeping of someone rolling over onto an IV. Every once in a while, that flurry of activity like an awkward dance break.

  It always sounds the same here.

  I get infusions at Linefield and West once a month, after school on the first Monday. I could do injections at home instead, but those are twice a month instead of once, so I’ll trade the inconvenience for half the needle sticks. Plus I’m here all the time anyway. It’s not that much trouble to go down to the drip room—that’s what we call the Ambulatory Medical Unit, because come on—sit in one of the comfy chairs, eat Goldfish crackers, and study for two hours.

  It’s always kind of awkward because the other people there are usually cancer patients, and I know they probably assume I’m a cancer patient, too, and it feels like lying to let them assume that. Some of them are dying. I’m not dying. I’m just sick, and have been for eleven years now. And I don’t look like I’m dying. People come down from their rooms to get chemo wearing their hospital gowns and scrub caps over their heads, and I’m looking like I just walked out of high school, because I did.

  I think they hate me. The cancer people.

  This is only my second month doing infusions. I was fine on pills for a long time, but lately my fingers have been swelling and making it hard to type, and my ankles have been keeping me out of gym class, which is sort of fine by me but also sort of not, in that complicated way like when you win an argument but by doing something really shady and gross. My doctor wanted to try something else, so here I am with a new treatment plan and a new set of people to look at me and think I don’t look sick enough.

  I should stop wearing makeup on infusion days. Blush makes anyone look healthy.

  So I look away when people come in, and I study, and sometimes I drift off a little because of the hospital noises. Today, there’s nobody else in the infusion room, just me and the florescent lights and a bird on the tree outside the window who looks like he’s trying to pick a fight with another bird on the tree outside my window, and I close my eyes for what feels like a second, but must have been longer, because…now there’s someone here, in the chair two over from mine.

  The first thing I notice is he’s the first person I’ve ever seen in here who looks about my age.

  The second thing I notice is the way his hair curls behind his ears.

  He’s watching something on his phone, but I’m thinking you’re pretty you’re pretty you’re pretty hard enough that I guess he hears it, which honestly is probably possible
considering exactly how hard I am thinking it, and he looks up at me with an eyebrow quirked.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  He keeps looking at me.

  “Not a lot of young people here,” I explain.

  “There’s that six-year-old with leukemia,” he says. “He’s always bringing those trucks that are the size of his arms and just”—he mimes it—“smashing them together. I think it’s supposed to be violent, but there’s something kind of…romantic about it? Like the trucks just can’t stay away from each other. They don’t want to drive around like the other trucks. They want to…I don’t know. Dance. He’s a little kid. I’m sure they’re just dancing.”

  “What,” I say.

  “Oh, you don’t know the kid?”

  “I’m only here once a month.”

  He cranes his neck to look at my IV bag, like it’s going to be some special color. They all look the same. “What are you in for?” he says.

  A lot of the people here have central lines, but I just have an IV going into my hand, since it’s not like they need easy access to my veins. He has the same setup.

  “DMARD infusions,” I say.

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Rheumatoid arthritis.”

  “Oh, no way,” he says, in the same voice you’d use if someone told you their uncle had the same birthday as you.

  “Mmhmm, since I was nine.”

  He nods at the notebook in my lap. “What are you working on?”

  “What’s on your phone?”

  He grins. “I asked you first.” I hope he doesn’t have cancer. His eyelashes are so long. He can’t lose those eyelashes. This is the worst thing I’ve ever thought.

  I hold my notebook up to my chest and stare him down. He’s pale, in both a white way and a sick way, but his eyes are this bright sparkly green.

  He smiles and tilts his phone toward me. Oh God, he has dimples. Just slay me in the drip room. “It’s this woman who makes robots, and then she posts videos of them not working correctly. Like this one’s supposed to be tying her shoe, and instead it rips the shoe open. This is what I want to do with my life.”

  “Build robots that don’t work?”

  “Yeah.”

  I show him my notebook. “I have an advice column in my school newspaper. Or…I edit the advice column. Every week I come up with a few questions, and then I gather people’s answers and pick the good ones and write up a summary of it, sort of. I think of a way to bring everything they say together and make some kind of point about it. So…there you have it.”

  “Oh, neat, that’s what I want to do with my life now. Forget the robots.”

  “You can’t, I’m doing it.”

  “You’re gonna do this forever? You’re gonna want to retire at some point.”

  “So you want to take over for me when I get old? I don’t know, what do you have? How long are you living, here?” Well, now I have the worst thing I’ve ever said to go along with the worst thing I’ve ever thought. It sounded cute and edgy in my head, but now that it’s out I just can’t believe I said it in the room where the cancer people come. They might not be here right now, but if he could hear my thoughts earlier, then they probably can, too, wherever they are. Cancer people know.

  Plus, he could, y’know. Actually be dying.

  “That was beautifully distasteful,” he says.

  “I can’t believe I said that.”

  “No, it’s good. Now we’ve established we have the same sense of humor.”

  I don’t know if I do have that sense of humor or if I was just trying to be the cool girl because of his eyelashes, but I’m willing to try.

  “And,” he says, “lucky for both of us, I have some hipster disease you’ve never heard of, and it’s not fatal, so nice try. Though I wish it were, just for how awkward you’d feel in this moment now.”

  “I’d know if you were dying,” I say.

  “Oh yeah, how?”

  “Wouldn’t be wasting your time talking to me.”

  “You talked to me first. Maybe I’m just being polite.”

  “And I bet I have heard of it,” I say. “My dad’s a doctor. I know a lot of shit.”

  “Gow-Shay disease,” he says, or something to that effect.

  “Yeah, I don’t even know how to spell that one. What is it?”

  “Google it, you have a phone.”

  “I can’t. I don’t know how to spell it.”

  He grins. “Your dad’s a doctor?”

  “Yeah, sick girl with a doctor dad. Pretty lucky.”

  He does this low whistle then points through the window of the drip room at a guy signing paperwork at the counter.

  “That’s your dad?” I say.

  “It is.” He looks young, maybe late thirties, and like he does a lot of hiking. Probably not with this sick boy next to me. “He comes with me every week,” he says. “I’m sixteen and three months, and I’ve been doing this my whole life, and he comes with me every time.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “It is, yeah.”

  “You’re younger than me.”

  “That’s why it’s up to me to take over your advice column.” He coughs a little. “How old are you? Thirty-five?”

  “Thirty-five,” I say. “Seriously?”

  “Do you have a career? Are you retired?”

  “I’m sixteen and nine months.”

  “So I was close. What’s your name?”

  “Isabel.”

  “That was my grandmother’s name,” he says.

  I laugh accidentally.

  He puts his hand on his chest like he’s offended. “Hey, she was a lovely woman,” he says. “She wasn’t allergic to poison ivy. Used to pull it right out of the ground with her bare hands. I tried to copy it once.”

  “Didn’t go well?”

  “It did not.”

  “Is that how you got your disease?”

  “It’s genetic, doctor,” he says. He pushes his hair back from his eyes and smiles at me. “Sasha.”

  “What?”

  “That’s my name. Sasha Sverdlov-Deckler.”

  “No shit,” I say.

  He tilts his head back and grins. “No shit.”

  “That’s quite a name.”

  “Eh,” he says. “It’s no Isabel. So what’s your answer?”

  “What?”

  “To your question. What’s your favorite place in New York?”

  “Oh,” I say. “I don’t answer the questions. I just ask them.”

  “Hmm,” he says.

  “It’s actually for the best.” I shift around in the chair some. “Sometimes I can sneak in, like, questions about me and my life and make people answer them.”

  “That’s smart,” he says. “That’s some clever shit right there.”

  “Sometimes I get way too specific, and then I can’t use them in the paper,” I say. “But I still get the advice. And an excuse to talk to people. I like to talk to people.”

  “Sure, how else are you gonna ask them when they’re going to die?”

  “Please,” I say. “We’re gonna pretend that didn’t happen. We have to.”

  “So ask me your question, then,” he says. “Change the subject.”

  “Okay. What’s your favorite place in New York?”

  “My favorite place… I think it’s right here.”

  “The drip room.”

  He laughs. “Not the drip room specifically. Just…here. Linefield and West Memorial Hospital.”

  “You like the hospital.”

  “I know,” he says. “It’s weird.”

  “No, I…I’ve never met another person who likes hospitals.”

  “I don’t always like them,” he says. “But hey, you’re not always g
onna like anywhere, right? At least here you get to just relax and be sick and not have to be anything else. You should see me when I’m admitted. Just total sick caricature. Demanding Jell-O and shit. Plus they know me here. I live in Chelsea and I still trek out to Queens every ten days to visit this place.”

  “I grew up here,” I say. “My dad’s the chief physician.”

  “No shit,” he says.

  “No shit.”

  “Well,” he says. “I like your house.”

  “I need a job title for you,” I say, showing him my notebook. “See, it’ll say Sasha, uh…”

  “Sverdlov-Deckler.”

  “Right. And then sixteen. And then your job. You can pick something funny if you want. I let people put down whatever they want.”

  “Brother,” he says. “Put brother.” He looks at my IV. “Looks like your bag’s done.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “See you next time?” he says.

  “I’m only here once a month,” I say.

  “Yeah, but you live here, right?” He closes his eyes, smiling. “I’m just kidding,” he says. “I can be patient. Probably. Well, I can try it. I like trying new things.”

  Cathy, one of the nurses, comes and tapes up my IV. “Bye, Sasha,” I say.

  His eyes are still closed. “See ya, Grandma.”

  I take my phone out of my pocket on the way to the elevator and open up a text to Maura, but my fingers feel cold and stiff, like frozen tree branches. I stretch them toward my palm and back up to my wrist.

  Me: Met a cute boy.

  She always answers immediately, which is why she’s always the first person I text for play-by-plays.

  Maura: NO BOYS!!! You know your job.

  I roll my eyes and press the button for the cafeteria. I love Maura, but she has no idea the real reason why I don’t date.

  Not that it matters. The point is that I don’t. If that boy’s waiting for me, he’ll be waiting a long time.

  What would your last meal be?

  Pecan-encrusted salmon with mango coulis, a peanut butter and banana milkshake, flourless chocolate cake, and some really, really greasy fried chicken. Oh God, put me to death right now so I can have it. Is this like one of those TV shows where you’re gonna bring it out now? Do me a solid, Ibby.

  —Ashley Baker, 17, just got an A on her Physics test