Not Yet
I sit in a room with about six other kids at Memorial Hospital. Most of the others look younger than me, which is sad. I'm fifteen, and I'm about to lose a leg. I wonder what they're doing here? Mom and Dad are talking with a doctor about the surgery. They didn't want me to get nervous or whatever, so they just had me wait here. But of course I'm going to be nervous. I mean, they're cutting off my freaking leg!
The room is supposed to cheer you up, but really it just irritates me. The walls are a bright sunny yellow, with paintings of kids smiling and holding hands. Might I add that all these kids look perfectly healthy.
The door opens and a new kid comes in. Even though I'm sitting on the opposite side of the room from everyone else, he comes over and sits next to me.
"Hi," I say after a few minutes of silence, in which two of the other kids leave. Alisa and Kade, I think their names were.
"Hi," he says, "I'm Isaac, and I'm guessing you don't care."
"I'm Augustus," I say, smiling at his comment.
"What are you here for?" he asks.
"Getting rid of this old thing," I say, patting my right leg. "You?"
"Losing this one," he says, pointing at his eye.
Before I get a chance to respond, the door opens again and a nurse looks at her clipboard and says, "Augustus Waters?"
I get up to go with her, and Isaac says, "Good luck."
"You, too."
Several Hours Later
Dad wheels me to checkout, and I'll give you three guesses who was in line behind us. Isaac, sans eye.
"Hey," I say to him, "How'd it go?"
He shrugs and replies, "I'm not dead yet. What about you?"
"Not yet."
I don't know when or how it happened, but we became friends that day. Now, we spend most of our time in my basement, playing Counterinsurgence and wishing for the normal lives we're never going to have. And every time one of us asks the other how we are, we just shrug and say,
"Not yet."