September 29th, 2013. The day I would turn eighteen. I closed my eyes and drifted into a fitful sleep the night of the 28th, feeling the angry cancer fingers in my lungs reaching out and gripping every breath, strangling the life out of the oxygen my body thirsted for. It had been six months since the Phalanxifor had stopped working, six months of treatments that failed to do anything to stop the colony of tumors in my lungs from approaching critical levels of overpopulation. I went every week to have the tube in my chest changed and my mother emptied the fluid into the sink (after measuring it and recording the measurement in a notebook to show Dr. Maria) every day. Dad couldn't do it, it made him gag. I didn't blame him; something about seeing plastic protruding from my ribs and the bag of dark cancer water turned my stomach, too. Which isn't really saying much. I wasn't keeping food down so often anymore. Gone were the days of the mall, and gone was Support Group. My parents had even let me try vodka. It was gross and made me throw up. I'm told that is a common reaction, even for those not afflicted by cancer.

The past couple of months had been hard on Mom and Dad especially. It wasn't that I didn't love them or appreciate them or want to soak up every final minute I had with them, but I just couldn't face it. I wanted to be alone, alone with the thoughts of him, alone to wish he could hold my hand and tell me sweet lies about our future even he would know I wouldn't believe. In the little over a year since Augustus' death I'd grown withdrawn and sad. Even Isaac didn't come over much anymore. I missed him, but in more than the superficial missing of someone when they've gone to London or prison or Siberia. I missed Augustus Waters with every piece of my body and every fiber of my being, down to my soul, which I wasn't entirely sure on the concept of. On more than one occasion it occurred to me to ask Dr. Maria if grieving speeds up dying, but saying the D word around Mom wasn't ever a good idea, and she was always present for my appointments, waiting to learn more about what was going to happen next, what we were going to try, and how likely it wasn't to work.

They put the feeding tube in my stomach in July of 2013. By then I felt like a cyborg. A PICC line in my chest, a tube in my side to drain fluid, and another tube feeding formula into me like a robot baby. The wheelchair came a month later. Mom and Dad sprung for the spiffy purple one, catching me somewhere between remaining forever the sick child I'd been for five years, the typical teenager I used to pretend I could be, and the grown woman I would never be. I named my wheelchair Nesbit, as it seemed a perfectly good name for a purple wheelchair and all vehicles require names. On the days I got out of bed, Nesbit and I wheeled around the house from kitchen to couch to bathroom and back to bed when my strength had been sapped. Sometimes he and I went to the doctors' office together, though they often had loaner wheelchairs (which made me think of the homophone 'loner', and are they really loner wheelchairs instead? Left behind by owners past who either didn't need them anymore in a good way, or didn't need them anymore in a more finite and depressing way). More often than that were the trips to the hospital, for which Nesbit stayed home. Dad could still carry me, even though I was almost of legal age and ought to have been beyond my father carrying me in his arms. I weighed eighty- two pounds.

It was the good days I lived for, the good days I persuaded my lungs in all their infinite damage to keep breathing for. Two days before my birthday was one such good day.

I awoke from a deep sleep to my mother knocking lightly on my bedroom door. "Hazel?" she murmured, and I opened my eyes and focused around the BI-PAP mask on her face. "Good, you're up."

Good? I thought. Sleep fights cancer, don't you remember?

"Isaac's here. He's waiting in the living room." I smiled under my mask and waited while she disconnected me from my personal dragon machine and hooked me up to my tank. I looked down at my rumpled pajamas, which had a cutesy pattern of sad looking basset hounds on them.

"How do I look?"

"Hazel, he's not going to mind how you look." She had a point. For one thing, I was exclusively interested and in love with a dead man, so impressing Isaac wasn't something I really worried about, and for another, no one criticizes the dying for wearing pajamas at 2:37pm, which is the time that my alarm clock showed. Additionally, Isaac was quite blind and had been for some time. All worries about appearance were therefore moot.

"I know that." I muttered. It wasn't like me to be argumentative, but for some reason I really didn't want Isaac to see me in my pink puppy pajamas. It then occurred to me that Isaac hadn't seen anything, whether it was covered in puppies or not, in over a year. The sentiment still applied however, and I chose to abide by the ideal that entertaining company in a garment made of flannel is poor etiquette.

"How about wearing this? It should work." Mom replied, holding up a loose fitting (everything was loose fitting on me now) tank top and knee-length tiered skirt. I was cold a lot of the time, so Mom had turned the heat on in the beginning of September. Our house's temperature could pass for tropical.

"Sure." I said, not pointing out that the outfit sort of looked like something you'd see on Spring Break Barbie. Mom slipped the pajamas over my head and replaced the top with the blue tank top. Careful to avoid touching my PICC line and tubes, she rolled it down my concave abdomen. As far as my mom seeing me with my shirt off went…it was hard to care at that point. Putting the skirt on was a simpler task, though I had to stand which I was no longer adept at doing and lean against Mom's shoulder while she pulled it up and hung it off of my slightly protruding hipbones. She leaned me back against the bed and grabbed Nesbit while I halfheartedly combed through my hair with my fingers. When was the last time it had been washed? Ah, Tuesday. It was now Friday. Not too gross, right? I gave up on the hair and wiped sleep crust from my eyes, then fidgeted with my cannula.

"Do you want shoes?" Mom asked, turning towards the hanging shelves on the back of my door where I kept them.

"No, what's the point?"

"Hazel." She said, her tone warning.

"That's not what I mean, I said, changing my tone a bit.

"We're probably just going to stay in the house. I don't need shoes for the house."

"Alright, ready?"

"Yup, bring on the boys." I said, dramatically throwing my arm back and thrusting my flat chest out.

Mom laughed. It was a nice sound to hear.