By the end of sixth period the next day, my hurt had calcified into something else, harder and offensive. I was spitting mad and righteous with it. If Zeus Garro thought he could just flick me away like a fucking bug, he was sorely mistaken. I wasn’t a little girl anymore and I’d made it my mandate since my diagnosis that absolutely no one could tell me what to do.
Not even my guardian monster.
Especially when he was being a fucking prick.
“You got fire in your eyes,” Reece noticed, leaning away from his position at my side so that he could push my hair behind my ear and peer at me. “What’s up?”
I chewed at my lower lip as shame swirled in my belly.
Reece and I had never talked about whether or not we were “dating”. It wasn’t so simple as that these days when there was a spectrum of togetherness that ranged from one-night stands, hook-ups, friends with benefits and “seeing each other” to the more serious stuff. I figured Reece and I were the latter of those options but seeing as how we had never rubber stamped it, I tried not to feel too guilty that I’d spent the past few weeks consumed with thoughts of another man.
“Just thinking about how excited I am for the Winter Hoops tournament next week,” I told him with a huge fake smile.
He frowned slightly because he had a good bullshit meter but talk of basketball always distracted him enough for me to get away with it. “Yeah, scouts are coming from U of T, Western and UBC.”
“That’s so great,” I said genuinely.
Reece was an amazing player and honest-to-God, the kind of boy I knew I should want. He was handsome and smart, moneyed and going somewhere bright but with that bit of an edge that made him interesting. He liked to party on Saturday nights and golf hung-over but functioning on Sundays with his father.
He was the kind of cool a normal teenage girl could hanker after safely.
Too bad I was the kind of teenage girl who dreamed of men who could murder with their bare hands, who swore like it was essential to the English language and believed in brotherhood more than the law.
Eh, everyone had their crosses to bear and I figured that was mine.
“Louise,” he called again, squeezing my bare thigh under the hem of my kilt.
“Distracted, sorry,” I murmured.
Instantly, his handsome face softened with empathy. “How’re you feeling?”
I bit my lip so hard it drew blood because his question shouldn’t have annoyed me but it did. I didn’t need or want the constant reminders, which was why I kept Loulou cancer-free. People didn’t want me to be honest about my response. Did they want to hear that it was hard to get out of bed in the morning because my body felt wrong, broken then mended in a way that meant I looked fine but couldn’t breathe right or pirouette in dance class anymore because my world didn’t stop spinning when I did?
The symptoms weren’t that bad at the moment. The one round of chemo I’d had during the summer had slowed the progress of the cancer but not stopped it, not reversed it. I was due for another, more intense, round in December and I knew it would be worse then. The shortness of breath, the itchy skin and constant weariness would be magnified by endless nausea and bone-deep aches.
So, for now, I was okay physically. I was fighting, feeling optimistic about it because that was the only way you could feel if you had a hope in hell of surviving.
But I was living on an island. It was the second kick in the gut of cancer, the way it isolated you from your loved ones, made you feel like no one could understand you and that no one wanted to, really, because you’d turned into some kind of hope-devouring monster, infected with nightmares and frighteningly contagious.
There was no one who could understand that.
No one, I’d thought, except for my own guardian monster.
The bell signaling the end of sixth period rang out, shattering my depressing reverie. Reece immediately threw his arm around my shoulders and ducked close to me, his eyes on mine as he whispered, “I’m here, Louise. You may not see that and damn, you might not even want it, sometimes I can’t tell. But you do want me, I’m here.”
I nodded mutely, guilty and stricken by how on target he was. He searched my eyes for a long moment more before he nodded then moved away to join the crowd of students funneling out the door.
“Louise,” Mr. Warren called out to me as I swung my messenger bag over my shoulder and made to follow after Reece. “Stay a minute.”
I nodded then waited for the last few students to leave so I could close the door behind them. Mr. Warren didn’t like to speak with the door open.
“What can I help you with, Mr. Warren?” I asked in my practiced, saccharine voice.
My biology teacher wasn’t my favourite teacher; that spot had been taken by Miss Irons, my former IB English and History teacher who had since quit amid a flurry of gossip about her banging a student. I didn’t believe the rumors and anyone who knew Miss Irons wouldn’t have either. She was the soul of discretion, a mild-mannered woman with a smile that made you feel like an angel was grinning down on you. She was the only person I’d told last year when I’d first been diagnosed and I missed our infrequent tea dates in her bookish classroom.
So, no, Mr. Warren wasn’t my favourite teacher.
But I was his favourite student.
He was beaming his beautiful smile at me as he came around his desk to lean against the front and hook his thumbs in the pockets of his bright blue dress pants. He was a pretty guy, the kind of immaculately groomed man that offended my sensibility because wasn’t a man supposed to be, well, manly?
“How’s my favourite student doing?” he asked.
I perched my butt on the end of a desk in the first row across from him and shrugged. “Good, excited for Winter Hoops.”
I wasn’t excited.
Being a cheerleader was something the women in the Lafayette family had been since Entrance Bay Academy was founded so I didn’t really have a choice in the matter.
School colours and pom-poms were so not my gig.
“Of course, the highlight of the fall semester.” He nodded. “Well, I won’t keep you long. I just wanted to ask if you’d be interested in being my teacher’s assistant this year. I know it’s a few weeks into term, but I like to take my time with these decisions and make sure I find the right pupil for the job.”
I blinked into his car salesman smile but the well-trained part of my brain was already saying, “Of course. Thank you for considering me.”
I didn’t have time to be his teacher’s assistant. I was training in the dance studio four times a week while my body could still stand to do such rigorous activity, I spent at least a few hours each week with my Autism mentee, Sammy, and I was in the full International Baccalaureate program at school, which was the equivalent of taking university-level courses.
And that was just as Louise.
As Loulou, I had an equally packed schedule and now the Zeus problem to figure out and spend additional hours each week stewing over.
But Mr. Warren was my dad’s best friend.
And what Benjamin Lafayette wanted, he got.
So I didn’t bother to refuse him because it was obvious that the two of them had already talked about it, decided on it and this was just a formality.
“Great.” He grinned and stepped forward to grasp me in a quick hug. “I’m so glad to have such a capable young woman on my team. I’ll need you every Wednesday after school for two hours. You can work in here with me.”
“Cool.”
His smile softened slightly and made me realize that he stood a little too close after giving me that awkward hug. I flinched slightly when his hand came up to tuck a piece of hair behind my ear.
“Glad to see you aren’t losing your hair,” he murmured.
“Me too,” I said, somewhat harshly because I didn’t like having him in my space.
“Looking forward to spending time with you, Louise. It was nice to see you so much this past summer,” he said, referencing the countless times I’d been forced to attend church functions, charity picnics and political events with my parents. “You’ve grown into a very beautiful and intelligent young woman.”
A timid knock on the door had him stepping away from me before I could react—negatively—to his over familiarity.
“Sorry, I can come back,” Lily Foster, a girl from the grade below me with pretty yellow hair, said from the door.
“No, Lily, you know I always have time for you.” Mr. Warren smiled that same smile at her, warm and fake as artificial light. “Louise was just leaving.”
Hot and cold flashes erupted across my skin as I shouldered my bag once more and brushed past an eager looking Lily on my way out the door and I couldn’t tell if it was a common side effect of the lymphoma or because Mr. Warren had seriously creeped me out.
