Chapters (47)
- Front Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Part Two
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Part Three
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Acknowledgments
- Excerpt from Survive the Dome
- Prologue
- 6 Months Later
- One
- About the Author
- Back Cover
I can hear my own heartbeat thumping. I can feel every red blood cell careening through my veins at what feels like hundreds of miles per hour. My palms feel warm, and my vision is black around the edges, making everything look blurry, like when a droplet of water connects with a watercolor painting.
I reread the email, hoping I missed a crucial word that will change the meaning completely.
No such luck.
Not graduating with my class, with Isobel, is a shot to the gut, but even if I do what they say, I still lose my salutatorian status? I worked hard for that! How many countless nights did I spend substituting books for blankets? How many weekends in the library? Parties missed? Dates turned down?
I swallow thickly, but my throat is dry and the scratchiness of it makes me wince. Dozens of questions fly through my head at a rate I can’t control. What will happen to me now? Will I ever graduate? What will Mom and Dad think? They’ll be beyond disappointed that their ten-year plan for me—college, medical school, the works—is being thrown out of sync.
Instead of focusing on getting better and returning to my life, I’m trying to decide how to salvage it.
“Fuck cancer.”
If none of this had ever happened, I’d have a normal life. I’d be graduating next year. I’d be going to UPenn. I’d be making some piss-poor decisions with Izzy next summer. Now I’m stuck living my life on a loop.
It’s like I’m being punished twice: first by the cancer and now by possibly having to repeat this year if I don’t pass these classes.
I wish I could just go back in time and do it all over again. Go back, like, three years, tell my parents to take me to the doctor, find the cancer when it’s stage 0, and stop all of this from happening.
I put the letter down, and all I can think about is how nice my bed will feel. How my mom says a good nap always makes things look better.
She should trademark that.
When the back of my legs connect with the edge of the bed, I let gravity do the rest. All I can think of as I fall backward into my covers is how much I hope everything will be better when I wake up.
But the comforter that my head hits feels hard. Not only that, it feels wet, like…dew?
Did Clyde, our husky, pee on my bed? Again? That’s the first thing that comes to mind when I fall into wet bedsheets. But it’s also suddenly colder. Did Mom turn the AC up to full arctic blast, blatantly disregarding how the AC destroys our atmosphere?