11:37 AM, June 27, 2021  

A warm breeze drafted in through the open window and sunlight poured in, making the tiny hospital room hot and sticky. My legs stuck to the plastic chair beneath me and sweat dripped slowly down my forehead. I’d go close the window, or get a more comfortable chair, but I was scared to move. I was scared I’d turn my back for one second and his breathing, which had been slowing even more over the past couple of days, would come to a stop. I couldn’t think about that though, because the more I thought about him dying, the more real the situation at hand became. I held his hand tighter, willing him to hold on; to life, to me. But the grip of his once-strong hands was weak in mine. 

“Clara, go get something to eat, you’ve been in here for hours,” a nurse called from behind me. I knew she wanted me out so she could run more tests and change some tubes that do who-knows-what else she did when I wasn’t in the room, but I wasn’t having it.  

“I’m not hungry, I’ll stay here. Don’t you have other patients to check up on?” I snapped back with my eyes trained on the hospital bed. The last thing I wanted was to look at her face that somehow remained emotionless even while patients died around her.  

“He’s asleep right now, he won’t notice your absence.” Something about how calm she was, like everything was going to be okay, p***ed me off.  

Nothing was okay. 
 

3:42 PM, November 22, 2020 

The first snow flurries of the year began to flutter down, only to melt at my feet as soon as they hit the ground. I shivered as the cold breeze pierced my skin until a large jacket fell over my shoulders.  

“Here, take this,” Nate said as he tucked it around me. I grinned up at him, but my smile quickly fell as I noticed his bare arms. 

“Nate, what’s with the bruises?” I asked. Even though he was our school’s starting quarterback, he’d never had so many. 

“What bruises?” he shot back defensively. 

“Uh. . . the ones all over your arms.” 

“Oh, probably from the game last Saturday, I got sacked pretty hard.” 
 

“You mean the game where you were benched because of your sprained wrist?” Nate was good at many things, but lying to me was not one of them.  
 

12:16 PM, June 27, 2021 

“Clara, honey, are you going to eat that sandwich or not?” I looked down at the crumbling sandwich in my hands. In the half-hour I’d been in the hospital’s waiting room ‘eating’ lunch with my mom, I hadn’t taken one bite. 

“I’m not hungry,” I muttered.  

“You need to eat something; you haven’t eaten in days.” 

“Well, I haven’t been hungry.” I looked up to meet her eyes but cast mine back down at the uneaten sandwich almost immediately; the worried expression across her face was enough to make tears well up in my eyes.  

“Clara, not eating won’t help Nate heal any faster,” my mom said softly, wrapping her arms around my shoulders as I began to sob. I cried out everything I had been holding in for the past months since Nate had been hospitalized. I couldn’t stay strong anymore, I couldn’t keep pretending like everything was okay when it was so obvious that nothing was okay.  
 

7:55 AM, April 8, 2021 

I checked my phone, but there were no more notifications than there had been five seconds ago. Where the hell was Nate? I was already 10 minutes late for school and he still hadn’t come to pick me up. I began to get antsy; it wasn’t like Nate to show up this late or to stand me up, something had to be wrong. I called him, but my phone went straight to voicemail.  

Screw it, I thought and began to walk towards the school. 

 
8:13 AM, April 8, 2021 

I quietly slipped through the door and into a seat in the back of my first period classroom, trying to be discreet in my entrance so that no one would notice that I had arrived almost a half an hour late.  

“Why, hello, Clara, so nice of you to join our lesson today,” said Mrs. Dietz, my homeroom teacher of the past two years, as she spun around and came straight towards my desk. For a five-foot-tall 60-year-old, Mrs. Dietz could be pretty terrifying if you got on her bad side. “Do you realize you have already missed half of the period?” 

“Sorry,” I replied meekly, feeling a red blush creep up my face as the entire class turned in their seats to look at me. 

“Could Benjamin McKinney and Clara Streng please report to the front office? Benjamin McKinney and Clara Streng to the front office.” 

Mrs. Dietz glanced around as if looking for where the announcement had come from. “Hm, special today aren’t we, Clara?” she spat while practically shoving me out of the classroom.  
When I pushed open the door into the front office, I saw Ben already standing in the middle of the reception-like office area that was located in the front of the school.  

“Do you know what we’re here for?” I whispered to Ben. He shrugged. Even though Ben was Nate’s best friend, I hardly ever talked to him, and had never had an interaction with him without Nate there with us.  

We both stood in awkward silence until our school’s principal, an older man named John West, came around a small hallway leading who-knows-where from the office and took a seat behind the desk. 

“Hello Clara, Benjamin,” he greeted while casually adjusting the cuff links of his suit. “Nate Stanley’s mother told me you two are his closest friends in this school, correct?” Principal West looked between us, waiting for a response. Ben nodded in affirmation. “She wanted me to tell you before word gets out that Nate got hospitalized for Leukemia this morning.” 

My breathing started to shake and I tried to speak, but my mouth wouldn’t move. “What?” I managed to wheeze, but it was barely audible. Principal West kept talking, but his voice sounded like a drone in the back of my mind.  
 

12:30 PM, June 27, 2021 

“Just let me in,” I sighed. Why the nurse wouldn’t let me see Nate was a mystery to me. How could letting me back into the room make him any sicker than he already was? 

“No, sweetie, it would be better for the both of you if you just went home and got some rest,” she replied without budging from the doorway.  

“Yeah, no, I don’t think so,” I said, trying to duck under her arm. She grabbed me and pushed me back out into the hallway. “ARGH! Let. Me In.” I kept pushing at her shoulders and shouting until I heard a tiny voice from inside of the room. 

“Clara?” Even with a chronic illness growing quickly inside of him and breathing tubes hooked up to his face, I still recognized that voice like I recognized my own mother’s. 

“Nate, you’re awake? Tell this b**** to let me in!” I called back to him. I needed to see his face, to know that he was doing alright, and to assure myself that I wasn’t just hallucinating from lack of sleep.  

The nurse turned around, even more startled than I was, and I took the opportunity to duck under her arm and rush into the room. But my excitement at hearing Nate’s voice quickly faded when I saw him. He was deathly pale, making the bruises covering his body very prominent and he looked even skinnier than he had just an hour ago. His breathing was slow, but his heart was pounding as if it wanted to beat out of his chest.  

I tried to say something, to tell Nate that I was there for him, but nothing seemed adequate. How could I tell him that he would be okay when it was so clear he wouldn’t be? 
 

3:44 PM, April 8, 2021 

I threw open the door to Ben’s old Volkswagen the second he crossed the threshold into the hospital parking lot and sprinted as fast as my legs could carry me to the front doors. 

“Jesus, Clara, wait for me!” he shouted after me through the open door, but my mind was on one track: getting to Nate. “You could have at least shut the door behind you!” I burst into the hospital and barged straight into the front desk.  

“I’m here for Nate!” I said to her, still panting.  

“I’m going to need a full name of the patient you’re visiting and your relation to him,” she replied calmly, as though I hadn’t just bulldozed into her desk.  

“Nate Stanley. I’m his girlfriend,” I said, my words jumbling together from how rushed I’d spoken. I began tapping my hands rapidly on the desk; could this woman work any slower? 

“We’re only letting relatives see him right now, you can wait here or come back in an hour,” the nurse stated. I groaned and spun around, collapsing into one of the reception chairs. I buried my head in my hands and cried silently, wondering how any of this was possible. 

“Rough day?” I peered up between my hands to see Ben sitting in the chair next to me. 

“Yeah,” I replied softly. 

“Me too, bro, me too.” 
 

1:32 PM, June 28, 2021 

I sat in my sticky chair in Nate’s room, listening to the heart monitor beep above us. The warm breeze which had made me so uncomfortable over the past few weeks now felt like home. I stroked the thin remnants of Nate’s thick brown hair off of his face, unpeeling the clumps stuck to his forehead with sweat. I stared down at him, wondering how someone on the verge of death could still be so handsome. I leaned back into the chair, and for the first time in at least a week, I began to doze off.  
 

2:41 PM, June 28, 2021 

I slowly returned to consciousness as an annoyingly long beep went off above me.  

“Can you shut that off?” I muttered to whoever might have been there to hear me. Someone hefted my shoulders up and began to guide me out of the room.  

“We’re going to have to get you out of here before we do that, Honey.” I think that was what brought me back into focus: the voice of the nurse who had the audacity to keep blocking me from seeing Nate. When I finally forced my eyes open, my gaze fell upon the heart monitor above in the corner of the room, and I realized what the beeping was. My heart raced and I began to thrash in the nurse’s arms.  

I easily broke free of the nurse’s grasp and rushed to the bedside. I pressed my fingers to Nate’s neck, to wrist, to anywhere I thought I could find a pulse, but there was no pulse to be found.  

“No, no, no,” I cried. I clutched Nate’s limp hands for dear life, wishing he’d come back. “Don’t leave, please don’t leave me here.”  

The nurse wrapped her arms around my shoulders, and I let her. I let her guide me from the room into the reception where I had sat with Ben just after we found out about Nate’s illness. I let her unpeel snot-covered hair from my face. I let her hold me while I cried out every last ounce of water that I had in my body. “I know it hurts, honey. In time you’ll be back to normal again and everything will be okay,” she comforted me, and I let her, but that didn’t mean what she said was true. I shook my head.  

“Nothing will be okay.”