Anya stands at the vending machine, wishing that she had laser vision like some comic book character, able to saw through solid sheetrock and steel with red beams shooting out of her eyes. But no matter how much she stares at the glass vending machine case before her, she can't make the 99 cent bag of Cheez Doodles become unstuck from the row of rings.
Frustrated and exhausted, Anya rests her head on the cool glass case. She's tired of being in this hospital, tired of looking into her classmates' pinched, weary faces, and most of all, waiting to hear the inevitable.
She shakes her head and squeezes her eyes shut tight, a small child trying to ward off the monsters she is certain are lurking in the dark night. She doesn't need to think like that.
That's why she had to get out of that godawful waiting room. Get out, take a walk for awhile, move around, clear her head. That room is beginning to remind her of a black hole; a region from which nothing that enters ever escapes- no light, hope, faith, or optimism. Feeding off the collective terror and worries of all the people crowded in there, a dark child born of their own worst fears. If she stayed in this room, it would suck her down with the rest of them, absorbing every last shred of light they still had left to cling to.
She wonders about what will happen once, as every black hole does, it reaches the "event horizon"- the point of no return. The end of this night, when fate has made its decision and there is either one outcome or the other, instead of this terrible limbo they're hovering in.
Forcing herself very hard to not think about it, she had propelled herself out of her chair, nearly power walking out of the waiting room and heading down the hospital corridors. As she lost herself in the labyrinth of colorless hallways and overbright lights, she was pleasantly surprised to see that everything here was pretty much as per usual to the hospital she visits when her mother gets her treatments, despite being on the other side of town. But apparently, if you have seen one hospital, you had seen them all. Everything here is normal procedure: the unsympathetic fluorescent lights that nearly blind you with their over-brightness, the terrible Styrofoam coffee, the ding of the elevator. There is comfort in this routine and precision, and it helps push some of those terrible thoughts to the back of her mind, at least for now.
Anya would rather go anywhere else than back to that waiting room, but she can't stand here forever, locked in a staring contest with an impassive vending machine. Still, she stays rooted in place, hoping that just a few more minutes of standing in place might be enough to earn her the bag of Cheez Doodles and a few more stolen moments away from being sucked into the waiting room's despairing orbit.
Bargaining. It makes her want to snort. The sheer ridiculousness of the idea- bargaining with something higher than you were, with chips that couldn't possibly hold any real weight in the grand cosmic conjuncture of the universe.
Anya is well-versed in the concept of bargaining. When her mother was first diagnosed, a hospital psychologist had sat her and her parents down and spoken to them on the idea that a lot of patients and families had when they or someone they loved was diagnosed with an illness. Denial, the counselor had explained, is an important coping mechanism. The sick person- or the family of the sick person- may be in denial of the entire situation because the possibility of death is too frightening, overwhelming, and too much of a threat to their sense of control. It is a natural form of protection, allowing the reality of the situation to sink in bit by bit as the parties can contemplate death. And, the counselor had pointed out, as long as denial did not cause any harm, it wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
The counselor had also told them that, sometimes, families found it helpful to talk to a spiritual advisor of some sort. Did they attend church? Did they have a pastor, rabbi, priest, some other kind of spiritual consultant they could speak to if the need be for a neutral mediator? It might, she had suggested, provide insight they hadn't previously found, and if anything else, it was just a place to open up and be honest with one another. Sometimes, that was easier with an uninvolved party there to diffuse the tension and make everyone's opinion heard.
Her father proclaims to not believe in anything, but her mother had gone to Catholic school from childhood onward, though she doesn't go to church anymore or show any outward signs of still practicing her faith. When was the last time she had been in a church? Probably her grandmother's funeral, when she was in junior high- seventh or eighth grade, Anya can't remember. All she remembers is going into the chapel, not really there for anything except out of obligation and to pay her respects to her grandmother.
She remembers thinking: I don't know what I'm supposed to be thinking.
Was she supposed to be praying for her grandmother's soul? Praying that it was in heaven? Praying that she was in a better place, as some relatives claimed?
Did she even believe in heaven? In a "better place?" In God himself, with a capital G?
Anya cannot answer those questions, anymore now at 17 than she could back then at 13.
What she does know, however, is that there is no deep revelation, no epiphany, no abrupt moment where everything is all at once suddenly, profoundly clear. Anya had felt that in the church where they had paid their last respects to her grandmother, wondering if there really was any sort of presence in this room or if they had really just been talking to nobody and all they were doing was getting on their knees in front of a wooden box. She feels it when she turns to herself in anger, wanting to throw her head into the sky and shout out her fury that this illness has happened to her family, and the great injustice of the whole universe in general.
And she felt that in the waiting room, the same unasked question bubbling on each other classmates' lips- why?
The answer is that there is no answer, Anya thinks. That's life. There's really nothing you can do about it. It's messy and painful and sometimes it's just really, really hard. But if you put in virtue and expect to get rewards, you're going to be disappointed. It's not a vending machine; you don't get what you put into it.
Apparently that wasn't even true; she stares at the stuck bag of Cheez Doodles once more, disgruntled, then kicks the base of the machine. Her foot throbs with the jolt, and she feels tears prickling in her eyes, more from the futility of it all than any actual pain.
Stupid machine, she yells inside her own head. She kicks it again, harder this time, and bends her head forward, knocking her forehead against the glass, tears pooling in her eyes.
So what if she is optimistic or not. So what if she keeps up a straight face for the sake of her other classmates. So what. So what. SO WHAT. None of it matters. Nothing any of them do will ever make this okay, or make anything okay, for that matter. It's all a futile waste of time; there is no point in anything they do tonight, because this isn't up to them. Deny it all you want, but it's not going to stop it any. Whatever has their fate and Adam's- whether it's God or Buddha or the Easter Bunny or it's all some cosmic, random accident- it isn't going to be swayed by anything, whether it was prayer or denial or a child's tears.
"Anya?"
Her head stops banging against the machine, and she turns around to see Sav standing to her left, his hands in his pockets and looking a bit sheepish at having caught her in the act. She pulls away, as if it is perfectly normal to have been caught banging one's head against a vending machine.
"What?" she snaps.
"Uhhh, you okay?"
What kind of question is that. "Does it look like it?"
He takes a step closer to her, eyeing the Cheez Doodles. "All that for a pack of chips?" he says lightly.
Anya takes a step back and tucks her hair behind her ears, trying to regain some control over herself. "Yeah," she mutters, feeling kind of silly now at her little outburst.
He shrugs, like he's reading her mind. "Hey, I guess we're all feeling a little insane tonight."
She nods, and watches as he reaches into his pocket, pulling out a dollar and feeding it to the machine. The rings to a complete turn inside the glass case, and there's a light whump at the bottom as two bags of Cheez Doodles fall into the slot at her feet.
Anya reaches down and plucks them out. "Thanks," she says, offering him one.
He shakes his head. "Naw, don't worry about it."
Such a gentlemanly thing to do. No, she amends, such a Sav thing to do- wanting to please people, wanting to do whatever he needed to in order to make them happy.
She regards this boy standing in front of her carefully. If anyone still believes in the basic goodness of life, it is Sav. An easygoing guy who up until now has not seen much of the sobering side of the world that doesn't cotton well to those drunk on their own dreams, their own ignorance.
It makes her pity him a little.
With her mother's diagnosis- not to mention the at-time "crushing" (relatively speaking) revelation that she and Sav were not meant to be together- had come a new kind of understanding to Anya. Instead of the dreamy, positive girl that she had been, she had gained the understanding that there was very little that actually mattered in life, and what did could be taken away from you without a moment's notice. You were crazy to want so much- it meant you had so much more to lose. Nothing ever turned out like you thought it would. A lot of dreams tended to die on the vine before they ever came to fruition, and it was totally possible to look at your life and have absolutely no idea how you ended up in the place you were from the place you'd once been.
Maybe it's a little too pessimistic and overdramatic for Anya to be feeling like she's going through a midlife crisis at 17, but she's at a point in her life where she's really starting to feel and understand for the first time how futile everything is.
It makes her feel deep, to think something like that. But not in a way that makes her feel good. It's in a way that makes her feel old and used up, her youth and innocence and belief in life gone forever.
Author's Note: Ehhhhhh, not sure about this. I thought it was an important point to make, but didn't turn out like I wanted to write it.