All Chapters of Fighting For Normal: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

26 Chapters

Infusion Room C

Infusion Room C smelled like antiseptic and something underneath it I didn’t have a word for yet, the specific smell of a place you were going to know better than you wanted to.Six recliners. Each one had a rolling IV stand, a small table, and a mounted screen nobody seemed to be watching. The chairs were a dull teal, a color chosen to be neutral that ended up being just slightly off. Three of the chairs were taken when we walked in. A man in his sixties with his eyes closed. A woman around my mom’s age, if I had one, reading on a tablet. And a girl two chairs down from the one the nurse directed me to.The girl had a lilac bob, feet tucked under her, a book with no cover in her lap. She didn’t look up when Maekynzie and I came in, which somehow made her stand out more.“Alright,” Maekynzie said, at a volume better suited to a much larger space. “This is fine. Everything is completely fine. I’ve been to hospitals before. I’m a very calm person.”“You’re the least calm person I know.”

The Overlook

Emory had found a stick somewhere between the parking area and the guardrail and was using it to point at things.“That’s the Springs,” he announced, gesturing at a smudge of grid on the horizon. “Probably. Or Pueblo. One of them.” Another gesture at something that could have been clouds. “And that -”“Emory,” Stetson said, “if you point that stick at me one more time I’m throwing it off the overlook.”“The stick is educational.”“The stick is a hazard.”I was sitting on the hood of Chandler’s Jeep with my legs stretched out in front of me and a jacket that was doing about sixty percent of the work required of it. The overlook was a flat pull-off on the south side of the ridge, twenty minutes outside town, the kind of place that existed in every Colorado zip code: a patch of gravel, a guardrail, and a view that made the guardrail feel almost insulting. You could see the whole valley from up here. On a clear day you could see the mountains stacked behind each other like something staged

Foosball

Evan was clearly losing and had no intention of admitting it.“That doesn’t count,” he said.“It went in the goal.”“Your guy was out of position.”“That’s not a rule.”“It should be.”He twisted the rod and reset the ball, and I let him because the game was loud and the basement was warm and I was three days out from the second cycle’s IE week. The nausea had finally eased enough that I could stand there without doing math about it. That felt like something worth protecting. So I let him reset.His basement was finished in a way that meant someone had actually thought about it. Built-in shelves, a TV that wasn’t an afterthought, recessed lighting on a dimmer set low. The kind of room that came from a check written with intention rather than things accumulating over time. The foosball table was in the center like it had always been the main event, which made sense.Evan stood at the table the way he stood at most things, weight on one hip, fingers loose on the rods, like the game was m

The Date

I spent forty minutes figuring out what to wear and landed on a cream ribbed top, dark jeans, and my white New Balances, which was more or less what I would have worn any other Saturday. That was kind of the point. I didn’t want to look like I’d tried. I had tried. That difference mattered.Evan picked me up at six in a dark green SUV, big and quiet in the way of cars that cost a lot. He had on a dark navy henley and light wash jeans, the look of someone who grabbed the first thing available, which either meant great instincts or he had also tried and was better at hiding it than I was.I went with instincts.The Tanuki on Fifth was louder than I expected, which helped. Loud meant no silence to fill, which meant I could sit across from him and let the night happen without engineering it. The reminder I’d given myself on the drive over.Evan studied the menu with focus that suggested he already knew what he wanted and was giving his eyes somewhere to be. I was doing the same thing.“The

What Lylah Knows

The anti-nausea meds hit harder this cycle.Hanna had warned me, third round sometimes did this, the body recalibrating in ways that made the recalibration worse before it made it better. She’d said it lightly. It was landing less lightly now.The recliner was fully back. Tinsley had brought a blanket from home, cream knit, the kind that smelled like someone else’s laundry in a way that was almost the same as comfort. She’d draped it over my lap without asking and gone back to her book. She’d also brought a water bottle she put on my small table without comment, a pack of crackers I hadn’t asked for, and earbuds she offered once and put away when I didn’t take them. That was very Tinsley.The room was the room. Teal recliners, fluorescent light, the mounted screen running a nature documentary nobody was watching. Hanna’s cart in the corner. The particular smell of Infusion Room C that I’d stopped noticing three cycles ago.Lylah was two chairs down.She’d been there when we arrived, al

The Beanie

The hair came out in the brush.Not all of it, not a dramatic fistful, just more than yesterday, more than the day before, the kind of more that had been building for weeks without a name. I knew it was coming. Hanna had told me in the specific careful way she told me things, factual and forward-facing, third cycle sometimes accelerates the timeline, and I’d nodded and gone home and not thought about it.I was thinking about it now.The brush was on the counter. I’d set it down carefully, the way you set something down when you need both hands free and don’t trust yourself with a single one. The bathroom light was making everything look slightly more true than I wanted it to. I pressed both palms flat on the cold edge of the sink. The tile under my feet was cold through my socks. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time without making it into anything.Then I opened the cabinet under the sink, got out the box of hair ties I’d been buying in bulk since September, and put my hair

Friday Night

The thing about a full house on a Friday night was that for a little while, nothing else existed.The takeout boxes were still on the coffee table, Raising Cane’s, the kind of Friday-night decision that happened when someone had a craving and nobody argued. Pops had made the run. He’d come back with extra sauce and said nothing about it, which was very him.I was on the floor with my back against the couch, not quite in the game, not quite out of it. Just in the great room. Everyone here, all the lights on, late November, and the warmth of it didn’t ask anything of me in return.The board game had started as something casual and was now, by all appearances, a situation. Stetson was taking it personally. Chandler was pretending not to care, which meant he was winning. Jake had appointed himself unofficial commentator and Dad had been overruled on a rules dispute fifteen minutes ago and hadn’t fully recovered. Bernard was under the coffee table hoping someone would drop something.Chand

Shopping Day

Noelle showed up with two boba teas, which meant she’d thought about it before she left her house. I took mine without comment and didn’t say what it meant that she’d thought of it.Lylah was already there. She looked up when we came through the door, did her small nod, went back to reading. Her arm, when she turned the page, was noticeably thinner than last cycle. Not dramatic. Just different in a way that stayed.Noelle sat down and put her earbuds in and that was the whole transaction. She’d learned early that the infusion room had its own rhythms and I didn’t need to perform anything in them.The nausea this cycle was different. Lower, more persistent, the kind that sat under everything and made the room feel slightly farther away than it was. I kept my eyes mostly closed and let the room do what it was going to do.Hanna came through on her rotation, checked my line, ran the questions. Then she moved to Lylah.Noelle’s earbuds were in. She was looking at her phone. But the one ne

Homecoming

The hook at the back of the dress was tiny, the kind that required two hands and a specific angle, and I’d been trying to get it for thirty seconds before Pops appeared in the doorway.“Turn around,” he said, which was the full extent of the conversation. He fastened it with the calm efficiency of someone who had figured out hooks a long time ago and didn’t feel the need to editorialize. I’d expected a comment. He didn’t make one. Hook fastened. Hand on my shoulder for one second. Gone.I turned back to the mirror. The burgundy dress fell the way it had in the boutique, that soft weight that moved when I did. The strappy heeled sandals added three inches I hadn’t fully accounted for. I’d practiced walking in them once, decided I was fine, and now I was discovering that fine and actually fine were slightly different things. I was taller than I’d expected to be. The gold earrings caught the light.Noelle knocked at the door frame. She’d been in the hallway, giving me the mirror without

Benched

Coach Mathieson asked me to stay after fourth period on Tuesday, which was how he always did it, the ask framed casually enough that you could pretend it was about something else until it wasn’t. I’d known since September that this conversation was coming. I just hadn’t known exactly which Tuesday.The hallway cleared out around us. He had his clipboard, which he always had, and he looked at me the way he looked at everything he’d already decided: direct and without apology.“I’m pulling you from active roster,” he said. “Effective today. You’ll stay on the team. Practice when you can. But I can’t put you in rotation right now and you know why.”I did know why. I’d known why since the first week of October when my serve had dropped six inches and my footwork had started compensating in ways I’d been hoping nobody noticed. Coach noticed everything. That was the whole thing about Coach.“Okay,” I said.He looked at me for a moment. Not the clipboard. Me. “You’re still their outside hitt

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