“ How long?” I stopped walking and let my knees fall forward into sand. My butt fell back onto my heels. Snowy sand stuck to my legs, exfoliating my pale skin.
“ Eight months.”
Eight months of life is what Caroline had to plan for. What I had to plan for. I felt an overwhelming need to scream building within me, building in my stomach and winding up my trachea and throat, pressing into my lungs. Then, when it reached my mouth, I counted to ten. This wasn’t my illness. This wasn’t about me. Caroline needed me to be strong. She needed the best fucking eight months of her life.
“ Can I come pick you up and take you on the rest of the road trip with us?” I asked, praying she would say yes.
“ I don’t know when I’ll be out of the hospital, but what if when you get back we go on one. Just you and me.” That sounded like heaven. I instantly thought of all the fun places we could stay together. We could go to Hollywood and walk the star mile and find every celebrity we’d ever pined over.
“ Sounds perfect.”
“ Any updates for me?” she asked, and for the first time that night, I heard hope in her voice. She really was living vicariously through me.
I shifted around to see who was still around. The party had cleared out pretty quickly, but Beck was still on the beach a few yards away. He was sitting on his butt in the sand with his arms bent around his knees. His face was angled toward the ocean. The moonlight hit each of his sharp features. He was probably making sure I didn’t get kidnapped, but I appreciated the privacy he gave me.
I told Caroline everything about the bonfire, the kissing, and the sandbar confessions from the other day . She eagerly listened to every detail. When I admitted that she was the devil sitting on my shoulder at each moment, she cheered into the phone.
“ You’re damn right I am. I’ve never been prouder,” she admitted, and I could hear the smile in her voice.
“ You would have loved the surfing instructor. He was straight off Laguna Beach .”
“ Meh. He doesn’t sound as hot as Mr. Lap Dance.”
I burst out laughing. “I should call him that from now on.”
Once our laughter died down, the crashing waves settled in and I just sat there on the phone with her, wondering what she was looking at in her hospital room.
“ Once we hang up, I’ll take a picture of the ocean and text it to you.”
“ Thanks. I’ll put it as my background,” she answered wistfully.
“ I love you, Caroline.”
“ I love you, too, Abs.”
…
“ That’s a lot of pills,” Beck mentioned as we drove out of Corpus. We’d left just after breakfast and I’d forgotten to take my medicine beforehand. My medicine bag sounded much more ominous when there was no music playing in the car, so I switched the stereo on low before I started rattling through each pill bottle.
“ They’re for my sex change operation,” I quipped, not really wanting to get into the details of them.
“ You’re turning into a man?” he asked, eying me skeptically from his driver’s seat. “I think you’d make a really good one. You weigh, what? A hundred pounds? Nothing says dude like chicken legs.”
I dropped one of the bottles back into the bag and narrowed my eyes toward him. “They’re not chicken legs!”
“ I know,” he smirked. “They’re perfect.” He’d slipped the compliment in so flawlessly that I almost missed it. “What are the pills actually for?”
He knew about my transplant, so there was no point in harping on it even more. “I’m one of those people that grows hair on every surface of my body. Have you seen those shows on discovery channel?”