"Hey, there is nothing wrong with my music tastes." She abandons her pizza slice and wipes her greasy fingertips on a napkin. "I read up on him some, too. Like how he died and all that."

Another look shared between me and Adam and I wonder if he's thinking what I'm thinking: where is this leading? I hope Casper didn't call this little get-together in order to talk about dying. Which is a stupid thought considering death is what brought us into each others' lives to begin with.

"Anyway." Casper waves her napkin like a white flag. "I wanted to talk to you guys, since we're here."

Adam licks a spot of sauce from his bottom lip. It makes me want to keep staring at his mouth. "About...?"

"Joey's dead."

My head snaps up. Adam quickly swallows his bite of pizza. "What? I thought he was still—"

"Trying treatment. Yeah. He was." Casper picks at her pepperoni. "According to the last few emails he sent, anyway. He shot himself."

Adam and I say nothing, too stunned to know what to say. Casper never met Joey. In fact, she's only mentioned him to me a handful of times. But he was, to her, a kindred spirit of sorts. Someone dealing with the same everyday pain and torment she herself was going through. But last I heard, Joey was keeping his chin up, not ready to throw in the towel. Not just yet.

What the hell happened?

Casper has her head down. "I convinced my parents to let me stop treatment."

Double-whammy.

We go still.

This shouldn't surprise me like it does. The first conversation Casper and I ever had, she said she was sick of chemo and radiation and would rather enjoy what time she had left without it. But knowing someone wants to change something and actually having them change it is different.

Adam opens his mouth, closes it again. Words are lost to him. So it's up to me to ask, "What does that mean?"

"It means I've got three months, at the outset, if I'm lucky." She props her elbows on her knees and refuses to look at either of us. "Maybe less, but no more. And who knows how much of that time I'll be...functional."

I try to imagine someone as bright and noisy as Casper bed-ridden and I don't like it. She's always so full of energy. Even when she's tired and hurting, you can see in her eyes it's only skin-deep. Mentally, she's so restless she can't stand it. The world moves around Casper in blinding blurs of color and she wants nothing more than to be a part of it, except now her body won't let her keep up.

Functional. Like she's some kind of machine.

"You're getting to a point," I say. A point that has nothing to do with stopping treatment or having a few months left to live.

"Yeah." Casper pushes her thin shoulders back, straightens, finally looks up to meet our inquiring stares. "I want to know if, when it's time, when I'm done, if I can count on you for help." Before I can open my mouth, she adds, "I don't mean I want you to shoot me in the face or something. I mean, if I call you up one night and ask you to come get me, will you?"