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

Preview of Sick Kids in Love

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.