Chapter 191 How much worse...

Chapter 191 How much worse...
The side effects this time around were brutal.
I dreaded every day I had to go to the hospital because I knew what was waiting for me on the other side of the infusion. There was always that strange little stretch at the beginning when I could still pretend I was okay, when the medication hadn't quite caught up with me yet and I could still hold a conversation without losing the thread halfway through it.
Then it would start.
The nausea. The exhaustion. The headaches that seemed to settle behind my eyes and stay there. The bone-deep aches. The metallic taste that made everything I ate taste faintly wrong. The dizziness. The strange, cotton-wool feeling in my head that made even simple thoughts feel like they had to travel through fog to reach me.
And afterwards, I would feel empty. Not emotionally....or not only emotionally. Empty in the literal sense. Like the treatment had reached inside me and scooped something out, leaving me with nothing but the shell of myself to carry around.
So we learned to make use of the pockets. The little windows where I felt almost like myself. Michael and I went to the park when I could manage it. Sometimes we went for drives with no destination in mind, which I insisted counted as an activity because there was technically movement involved. We watched things together, though I fell asleep through more than a few of them. And we worked on our photo album.
That was probably my favourite.
It had been brand new not long ago, but already looked slightly worn from how often I'd opened it. I liked arranging the photographs. I liked writing little things beneath them.
Tuesday. Terrible coffee. Excellent weather. Hawaii, technically.
There was something comforting about giving ordinary moments somewhere permanent to live.
We FaceTimed my parents often. Michael took his space whenever he needed it. Sometimes it was only an hour. Sometimes longer. I still never asked where he went. I knew he needed somewhere he could put down the version of himself that had to be strong all the time.
And Chloe Sanders kept coming. Every day, actually. Sometimes she simply appeared. Other times we'd find her sitting in the hospital lobby with her backpack between her feet, and she'd look up when she saw us and stand. Then she'd quietly follow us upstairs.
At first, she barely spoke, she just crocheted. I'd assumed she was making something small until I finally realized the red thing growing across her lap was a blanket. One afternoon, during an infusion, Michael watched her hands for a while before asking, "Where did you learn that?"
"Online."
She kept working, then she said, quietly, "I'm making it for my mum. Red's her favorite color." Her hook paused. "She's not doing too good." Michael glanced at me, Chloe kept her eyes on the yarn. "She has paranoid schizophrenia."
The words came out matter-of-factly, as though she'd been saying them for years. "It's pretty bad right now, so they admitted her to a facility."
That was the most she'd ever told us. After that, she started talking. She told us she'd lied about having an older sister. There wasn't one. She and her mother had been living with an uncle until he'd eventually told them they couldn't stay anymore. The state had placed her in foster care afterward. And she'd known it was me who'd urged the school to look into her situation.
She'd been furious with me for it.
"I hated you," she'd said with the smallest shrug. I hadn't known what to say. Then she'd looked down at her blanket and quietly added, "But I'm not mad anymore."
Michael and I had both stayed quiet. I kept watching her hands instead. The movements changed depending on what she was feeling. When she was anxious, they became quick and almost frantic. When she was calm, they slowed. When she was zoning out, she'd sometimes stop altogether, the hook resting between her fingers while she stared at nothing.
She'd looked up at me and her eyes were wet. "What's your favourite colour, Mr. Ashbrook?"
Before I could answer, Michael said, "Blue."
Chloe nodded once and returned to her blanket. The silence came back. I probably should have said something encouraging. Something comforting. Something a teacher was supposed to say. But I had a feeling she'd heard enough comforting words lately.
So I let her crochet. I let her talk to Michael when she felt like it. Sometimes they talked about absolutely nothing. Books. Food. Crochet stitches I couldn't understand even when she explained them twice. I mostly listened, though sometimes I couldn't even do that. I'd close my eyes while they talked and let their voices blur together. Michael bought her lunch every day. Eventually, he made her teach him how to crochet. He was terrible...Chloe told him so.
I think he liked having her there. Not because she made things easier, but she gave him someone else to talk to. Someone whose trust had to be earned slowly, carefully, without forcing anything.
Maybe he needed that.
Maybe she did too.
During my last infusion, I told Chloe it was the final one and she looked really disappointed. It caught me off guard. I was relieved. I wanted to go home and never see that particular chair again. But she had clearly liked being there. Maybe we'd become something she hadn't expected to find.
"Can you tell me whenever you're at the hospital? So I can say hi?"
She said it lightly, but I wasn't sure. She was my student...or had been. There were boundaries I wasn't entirely sure how to navigate anymore. But then Michael simply said, "Okay." And he gave her his number.
We said goodbye and went home. And the next few days were some of the worst of my life. My throat became so sore that swallowing felt like scraping something raw against an open wound. There were days when standing up felt like an unreasonable demand. My hair, which had somehow held on through the first two rounds, finally gave in.
It started falling in clustered chunks. I'd find strands on my pillow, on my shirt, in the shower. Then enough came away in my hands that pretending it wasn't happening became ridiculous. I'd remembered what I'd told Michael at the beginning of all this.
I'd deal with it when it got patchy and tragic.
So I dealt with it. Or, more accurately, Michael did. I sat in front of the bathroom mirror while he cut it. The first few passes felt strangely detached. I watched pieces of myself fall into the sink. I'd spent weeks imagining this moment without realizing I'd been rehearsing it. I'd stood in front of mirrors and tried to picture what I'd look like without my hair. I could always make out some version of myself there, but the image had remained deliberately vague, softened by the fact that, in reality, I still had plenty of hair.
This was different, this wasn't imagination. This was what I actually looked like. And I hated it, but I accepted it. Maybe because I'd already mourned it a little in all those imaginary versions of the future I'd been quietly creating. When Michael finished, I stared at myself for a long time. I looked like someone had taken a familiar photograph of me and erased just enough of it to make me unrecognizable.
My parents hated it too.
They tried not to. When we FaceTimed, my mum stared at me for half a second too long before smiling. She told me I looked handsome. That not many people could pull that look off. We smiled at each other through the screen, all three of us pretending not to notice the grief sitting quietly between us.
Neither of us said anything about how different I looked.
Neither of us said how much worse it had become.