Hey, hey all... So this chapter is a bit of a filler and it's also kind of long just because I've got a bunch of stuff I have to set up to carry to the end of the story so I hope its still enjoyable. Thanks all for commenting/reading as always you guys always make me feel so giddy inside :)


Chapter 56: Make the Weak Strong

Monday, February 6th, 2012

BROOKE

The entirety of my day yesterday, or at the very least, the entirety of my evening, had wound up being so absolutely, insurmountably perfect, to the point that it was almost dreamlike, that when the sun rose on the next day, and I was welcomed with totally un-open arms back into the real world's realities of sitting back in a hospital with Sam as she underwent the first of her latest chemotherapy treatments, the reminder that I hadn't positively floated away into never-never land or something at some point last night physically hit me with the force of a speeding truck.

But it wasn't all that bad I guess, after all, things stayed relatively dull, just the way we liked it, and even after that typical threshold of Sam's treatment struck where she was left way too exhausted to ever possibly stay awake, I was still spared from my usual decline into boredom by the presence of Haley and Peyton, where the three of us remained circled tightly around each other as they quietly begged me for more information about the plethora of gossip I had for them as a result of the action packed day that I'd had yesterday.

"Oh my God Brooke, how did he do it? What did he say? Come on, don't leave anything out, I want details okay?" Haley spoke rapidly in her excitement, barely pausing between words while meanwhile, my arm was starting to get tired from having to hold my arm out continuously for the past hour or so just so that her and Peyton could ogle over my ring… But of course, I could hardly mind; after all, as most people already knew, I took every chance that I could get in order to show off.

"He did it in the kitchen," I laughed, knowing full well that that probably wasn't at all what either of them had expected to hear, that they'd envisioned something a lot more romantic than him proposing to me while I was wearing a bathrobe surrounded by dirty dishes and a depleted pantry.

"We're not really into crowds… News tends to travel pretty quickly when people know who you are, you know? Besides, Julian and I kind of just want to keep this on the down low… for now at least."

Haley shrugged quickly, nodding her head in her acceptance of my explanation because I knew just as well as she did what happened when you were a figure of the public eye and somebody that you didn't want finding out all about your personal life actually did.

"So when's the big day B. Davis-almost-Baker?" Peyton cut in, but I could only shrug, continuing in my series of disappointing answers to important questions.

"We have absolutely no idea." I couldn't even pretend that I had the slightest hint of a notion as to when we were actually going to be doing this… The only thing that I could think to say in response was that at the rate we're going, hopefully Julian and I would be married at one point within the next ten years, and even then, I wasn't so sure how accurate that statement would be, "We want to wait until Sam is completely healthy again you know? I mean, just to make sure that she can definitely be there and that we don't have to worry about her being too sick or having to do some kind of crazy treatment on that day or something."

"Well whenever the day is Brooke, you can sure as hell count me in for being there." Peyton spoke with an assuring nod in her personal, verbal RSVP, leaving Haley more than willing to jump on the bandwagon herself in her agreement.

"Yeah, me too,"

"So, Brooke… how did Sam take the big news?" Haley asked me, nodding her head over towards the sleeping girl to our right, who had been passed out cold for a solid or so now, barely moving an inch even despite the several moments where Haley, Peyton, and my conversation got, well… rather animated in volume in our excitement.

"I think that she might have actually been happier than I was." I couldn't help but laugh to myself at the mere memory of the look on Sam's face last night, speaking with the knowledge that Sam has always been ridiculously involved with the relationship between Julian and me, even when there wasn't even a relationship to be had… At times, I even thought that she might have even been more into it than either me or Julian, "I swear to it, sometimes I think that Sam was ready for Julian to propose to me the first day that I met him… But hey, speaking of Sam, there's actually more that I have to tell you guys… Julian asked me if he could adopt Sam last night too… you know… like be a real family together… all four of us."

I finished my sentence with a subconscious motion of my hands down against my stomach, which still remained determinedly flat no matter how much I thought that I could positively feel it grow larger and larger by the very second.

"Wow… Brooke that's huge…" Peyton and Haley's eyes were wide; both of them looking pretty much exactly how I felt last night, and still today… overwhelmed in all of these seemingly remarkable, seemingly surreal developments that had occurred in mine and Julian's relationship all within the time span of a couple of minutes last night.

"I know," I sighed in a deep agreement towards Peyton's comment, still trying to wrap my head around just how huge this actually was, how much of an impact that it would happen on my life, how much it would change it; for once, for the best, "I'm having a hard time believing it you know? It all just seems so crazy... Every time I stop to think about it I can't help but think that I'm lost inside of this crazy dream world or something…"

"Well Brooke… if anyone deserves to be lost inside of a crazy dream world it's you, Julian, and Sam… and trust me, you're supposed to be feeling like you're walking on thin air right about now… so take advantage of it while you can okay?"

Haley gave me her quick speech, grinning up at me broadly for the first time in what seemed like forever, and all of a sudden, I completely forgot all about me, and about Julian, and about Sam and the baby, and instead, I focused on Haley, and how much better I suddenly felt, even though I didn't even think that was possible a couple of seconds ago, just from seeing her smile again because it has seemed so long since I'd seen her actually do so… and considering how guilty I felt about her being so miserable all the time lately, to see her this happy again actually made me feel even better.

"Thanks Hales… Hey, by the way, how have you been feeling lately?" I attempted to feed off of her comment in my production of a not-so-discrete subject change in my question, but I was sick of talking about myself which is saying a lot considering myself was my favorite subject, but after all I really had been concerned about her lately, and therefore, I truly felt a strong desire to be given an update as to how it was that she's been getting along lately.

"Actually, things have been going pretty well lately," Haley nodded to me, addressing that she recognized exactly what I had been trying to do, and accepting the invitation gratefully which came as a relief to me considering I was worried that she wouldn't want to mention it, that she would be for some reason or another unnecessarily ashamed to let her best friends, who were more ridiculously worried about her than she would ever know, into what was going on in her life, "I mean, I guess I was a little bit skeptical at first about being put on medication, you know what they say about stuff like that, but… yeah, I mean it seems to helping so far anyway, so… I don't know."

She drifted off and I nodded in my understanding, because I know that Haley and I were thinking on the exact same page here, because at the same time, our eyes subconsciously glanced over towards Sam, in the exact definition of calming down that we were talking about here…

"Yeah…" I muttered, mainly speaking to myself more than I was anybody else, "Yeah, I think I know what you mean."

But you would think that I would have learned by now to stop thinking that everything could stay alright for too long, or at the very least, to stop saying things like that out loud, to learn how to simply keep my big mouth shut, because ten times out of ten, every time I did, I jinxed it, and it was all over after that…

And this time was absolutely no exception, because literally not five seconds after the words were out of my mouth, Sam let out this painful sounding cough in her sleep, simultaneously rolling over onto her side in her sudden forced awake state as every muscle in her body heaving threateningly so that I knew in an instant that my previously eluded to moment of calm had suddenly vanished in such a manner that it literally made me feel as if it were mocking me for ever even thinking that I could ever possibly fully achieve it.

"Brooke?" Her voice slurred as she called out to me in her half-asleep state, sounding groggy and downright miserable, but that was okay; after all, I was already way ahead of her, half way from the chair that I had previously been sitting in to her side before the sound of my name so much as even escaped out of her mouth.

My tunnel vision struck me across the face harshly and suddenly, focused so intently onto Sam that I'd actually forgotten that my best friends were behind me, even though I had been sitting around talking to them not thirty seconds ago. But it was a standard feeling for me; something that I was used to, and something that I was sure as hell certain that my friends were used to, because whenever Sam needed me ever, well nobody else seemed to matter… hell, nobody else seemed to even exist…

"Hey kiddo, are you alright?" I asked, approaching her side carefully just in case the vomit started flying like I was so used to it doing, reaching down to rest a comforting hand between her shoulder blades so that I could actually feel the spasms of her muscles underneath my palm, which told me the answer to my question before she could even shake her head at me in a silent 'no'.

"Do you want me to take you to the bathroom?" I asked her, watching her carefully as she started to sneak tentative glances over towards where Haley and Peyton were watching us nervously from the corner, knowing full well that her self-conscious always got to her when she started getting sick in front of other people…even when those other people were Peyton and Haley.

"I don't think I'll make it Brooke." She muttered feebly as meanwhile the contractions of her body that I was feeling underneath my hands started growing more and more powerful in support of her statement so that I was suddenly left scrambling to find some place for her to deposit the contents of her stomach, cursing when I didn't see her typical barf bucket resting in its usual place.

The typical gagging noises signifying the beginning of the end began to emit themselves from the back of her throat so that I knew I only had mere seconds to act, leaving me to simply grab at the first thing that I saw, which just so happened to be the small garbage can in the corner of the room, and thrust it directly in front of her just into time for her to bury her face inside of it and heave powerfully, leaving me to grimace as I heard the sound of the liquid splattering against the plastic bottom of the can.

"It's okay Sam, it's okay… you're okay…" I muttered my routine words of comfort, performing the typical figure eights across her back just like I always did in an attempt to make this situation at least a little bit better.

I hated having to see her like this… I don't know, you would think that I'd get used to this after a while, watching as my daughter got sicker than she had ever gotten in her entire life while meanwhile, I was left to do nothing about it other than watch, but I'll tell you, I never did… this feeling, it never changed, it never got better… it was there on the first day that I had found myself in this exact same position with Sam, and you know what, it was still there now… Hell, I don't think it has even gotten the slightest bit better with time.

It had taken me a while to pinpoint it to its exact, but I think that I'd finally gotten it… I was starting to realize that it wasn't the pain, it wasn't the suffering, hell, it wasn't even the fear… No, instead, the one thing it was, the one thing that always got to me was the guilt…

You see, things like this, well it makes me very aware, almost painfully so, that people used to look at Sam and see nothing more than a bad kid; a kid destined for nothing but failure, a kid with no future, no family, no life, and absolutely no respect… and the reason I always went back to this, the reason that it really did kill me as much as it did was because no matter how hard I tried to forget, no matter how much I tried to think that I wasn't, I just never could shake the notion that I used to be one of those people who thought like that.

Every time that I saw her like this, every time I had to watch her unable to do anything about it, I realized that this must have been by punishment, that this was exactly what I deserved; I deserved the blame, I deserved to feel so much at fault, but I'll tell you this much; Sam sure as hell didn't deserve being forced to take the brunt of all of the wrongdoings in my life, she didn't deserve having to be the source of my guilt that I knew had been brought upon me for ever thinking that this girl was anything less than simply misunderstood.

Now, once I found myself falling into such a pit of selfish despair, I usually found it pretty difficult to pull myself back out of it, but not today; today was different, today there was something to counter act it, something to distract me, but the problem was, I couldn't help but wonder if I preferred feeling the way I had before, or the way I was feeling now…

It started as the quickest of flashes; something that at first, I thought was a mere trick of the light before I saw it for a second time…

I had been rubbing her back as I usually was, in my frenzy, my motions coming off so frantically that the hem of her shirt wrinkled, it bunched, and it lifted slightly in order to expose most of her lower back to me.

Through the corner of my eye, I caught the quickest flash of blue; a flash that I initially didn't think anything of, believing it to be nothing more than a reflection; an image of the scrub pants that she had been wearing bouncing off the thin layer of sweat that was glistening across her entire body… but then I saw it again… and again… and then one more time, and finally, I decided to investigate a little bit further.

Sam wouldn't have noticed the sudden shift in my body position; I knew that, she was much too preoccupied at the moment to notice much of anything other than the bottom of her garbage can at the moment… That's why I wasn't too concerned when I moved quickly in order to arch across her awkwardly and get a glimpse towards my point of interest at the region right above her tailbone.

My hands grazed themselves briefly across the hem of her shirt line, moving with slow, sharp movements as I lifted the fabric up slightly in order to expose the skin even more as unmistakably, directly in front of my exact range of vision, I identified the evenly patterned mosaic of light blue and purple; a small cluster of bruises splayed out almost artistically across the base of her spine.

My brows furrowed with instant worry combined with a sense of confusion regarding where it was exactly any of these could have possibly come from… I was overwhelmed with a sudden sense of worry, finding myself performing quick, jerky movements as I lifted the back of her shirt even higher, exposing each pointy, protruding bone of her vertebrae which was organized in a perfectly straight line up to about mid-back where, as expected, there was an even larger pattern of bruises blotted prominently across her skin in such a numerous fashion that they made her look like some kind of weird Dalmatian or something.

I could feel my breathing increase exponentially in the back of my throat as I begged the panic that was currently seeping through my veins to subside, repeated to myself over and over again that it was okay, that this wasn't necessarily what I was thinking it was… but of course, these methods were simply wishful thinking; if anything, I think it actually just made it worse.

I couldn't help but think it; I couldn't help but remember how things had been when Sam was first diagnosed; when she had been so anemic from the cancer that had been ravaging her body at the time that she would get bruises simply from leaning forward against the car seatbelt too hard… and I wasn't too soon about to forget the shiner that she'd had that lingered for a solid two months across her eye simply from a little boy lobbing a basketball at her…

I thought about this, and then I thought all about what Dr. Miller has been telling us for weeks now; about how because of everything that has been going on with Sam's kidneys lately, they had decided to reduce the dosage of chemotherapy that she was currently receiving, substantially increasing her risk of relapsing back into the severely leukemic state that had put us all into this position to begin with…

So yeah… my mind was currently assuming the worst at the moment to the point where my heart actually felt as if it were about to explode, but really… could you blame me?

"Hey Sam has your back been bothering you at all lately?" I tried to be discrete about my question, unable to take my eyes off of the bruises spotted across her back as she took a brief space between her bouts of vomiting to turn her head over her shoulder and glance at me, confused as to why I would be asking such a seemingly ridiculous and completely irrelevant question at such a time like this.

"No… why?" She shook her head slowly through deep breaths, her words spaced apart, each syllable being pushed out of thin air so that I'd almost missed it… Meanwhile, I put the most neutral look on my face that I could manage, but still consciously recognizing the fact that I was failing miserably, so I chose not to answer her honestly; a white lie that I had designated to tell because I didn't want her to worry, I didn't want her to think anything more out of the ordinary was going on with her health than it already was… especially when I was still speculating…

"No reason…" I tried to sound convincing, but it was more than obvious that I was far from it, especially considering the fact that I was currently having such a hard time convincing myself, there was no way in hell I could try and convince other people too… "I was just wondering, that's all."

She glanced at my suspiciously for an extra second or two, analyzing my terrible excuse for what it really was, and for a little while, I tensed nervously, afraid that she would trap me into a corner like she was so good at doing these days and force the answer out of me, but luckily, and I felt terribly for putting it like that really I did, she didn't have time to linger; instead, she turned her head forward once again, back towards her makeshift puke bucket, buried her face inside of it, and let lose once again so suddenly, it didn't seem so important to her why I was acting so strangely anymore.

"Hey Brooke… is everything okay?" Peyton whispered, careful in her approach, particular in order to be as silent as possible as to not allow Sam to hear her expression of concern.

Great… now I knew that I was being obvious in my panic, because if Peyton and Haley were coming over here to comfort me as opposed to comforting the girl in front of us currently puking her guts up, well then I know that something was wrong with this picture here.

"Yeah, yeah… I'm just over worrying myself that's all." I tried to convince not only Peyton and Haley, but myself as well, but the fact of the matter was that my voice shook, and that wasn't exactly supporting my cause at the moment…

"No… Brooke, there is something going on here… I can see it in your face Brooke, come on you can tell me… What's going on Brooke?"

I felt my eyes gloss over with the recognition that I had been caught in my incredibly terrible attempts at a cover up, quickly glancing sideways just to make sure that Sam was still too preoccupied with getting sick to hear anything that I had to say before I reached down silently and exposed Sam's back to them as well…

I watched as Peyton and Haley's eyes followed downward the path I had laid out for them, recognizing exactly what I had suddenly found myself so concerned over in a wide eyed realization… To my left, I actually heard Haley accidentally release a gasp go loud that I was afraid that Sam would have heard it even with her ears muffled by the walls of the thick plastic garbage can that she was currently making very, very good friends with.

"Oh my God Brooke… what happened?" She tried whispering, but her voice squeaked in her concern an extra volume notch higher in her horrified shock.

"I don't know Haley… but I can't stop thinking that… that this is like what it was like with before… you know, right before she was diagnosed when… when…" I couldn't even bring myself to finish my own sentence, of course, the implication was strong enough that they were able to catch the hint; a fact that was confirmed by the look on their faces that matched mine in fear in an instant.

"Can you guys stay with her and watch her for a minute or two… I need to go find her doctor."

"Yeah… Yeah Brooke, of course," Peyton nodded her head, practically pushing me over towards the direction of the door, completely understanding of my urgency… But of course, while her and Haley were supportive, eager even towards the understanding of my need to go, there was somebody else in the room that didn't seem to be as eager for me to leave… even if it was for just a little while.

"Where are you going Brooke?" The tone of her voice alone was enough to stop me dead in her tracks; the fact that she reached out her arm to grab onto me in an unconscious effort to force me to say was the deciding factor that made me actually turn back to her, suddenly much more hesitant about whether or not to complete this journey.

"I'll be right back Sam okay, I promise… I'm just gonna go out into the hallway real quick and see if I can find your doctor to come in here to check up on you." I was as vague with her as I possibly could be, determined to carry this burden for her just because it was one of the few that I knew I had… for now at least.

"Don't leave Brooke… please don't leave me." My heart cleaved into two distinct pieces at the sound of her plea so that I couldn't help myself but to hesitate, I couldn't help but to think that maybe if I stayed here with Sam right now and simply ignored all of this pain, all of this heart ache, it would simply just go away… Of course, I had already learned the hard way that that wasn't exactly how things worked in this life, as much as I may have wished that it was.

"Sam honey, Haley and I are going to stay here with you for a couple of minutes okay… We're gonna take good care of you while your mom goes to get your doctor. She'll be right back, alright?"

I appreciated Peyton's attempt to try and help to make sense of everything that was going on all around her right now, but I wasn't sure how much better it could have possibly made Sam feel, because I didn't linger; instead I took the brief moment of neutral calm to force myself away before I was turned back, I darted out of the room without so much as a second glance back, and I ran through the hallway like a mad women in search for the first familiar face that I could find that would actually be able to help me with this situation that I had currently found myself in.

Have you ever felt as if your world was crashing down all around you? Have you ever felt like you have lost absolutely everything in your entire life that you could ever stand to possibly lose? Well if you hadn't, take a close look at me right here right now because this is exactly what that looks like. This is the exact expression of that feeling, a sneak peak of what it might appear to be like just in case you're lucky enough to have never experienced it for yourself firsthand.

"Brooke is everything okay?" I rounded the corner of the hallway, skidding to an abrupt stop directly in front of the nurse's station… Hell, I hadn't even come to a complete halt before the handful of nurses that had been sitting behind the desk at the time of my sudden appearance jumped upwards, demanding to know what was wrong just so that I was suddenly very aware of how obvious my terror was across my face.

"It's Sam…" I started, but then I had to stop myself because I was stating the obvious here and more likely than not, I probably sounded like a babbling idiot, "I need Dr. Miller."

I skipped through all of the technicalities and went straight to the point, my vagueness and my apparent alarm probably panicking these poor nurses into thinking that Sam was in cardiac arrest or something… But of course, the way that my heart was racing, and the way that I was suddenly feeling, I couldn't help but think that hell; she might as well have been.

"Brooke what happened?" Kelly had been Sam's charge nurse since she'd been in the hospital since her first dialysis session; we'd had more than our fair share of scares regarding Sam together, and I guess you could just add right now to that list, because she ran around from behind the desk in her alarm at my panic, not even waiting for a response from me before indicating for me to follow her back in the direction of Sam's room, moving quickly in her urgency, barely pausing to listen to my response.

"I'm not sure… she started to get sick from the chemotherapy and while I was trying to help her I saw her back and I noticed that there were bruises all over it so I… I…" I followed the nurse in her rapid power-walk down the hallway towards Sam's room, unable to finish my sentence but knowing full well that she would understand the concern that I was trying to project in my unspoken words.

She turned sharply to her left, straight into Sam's room a step or two in front of me; our entry causing a relatively large commotion giving how rushed the two of us both were, but even still, our motions went hardly noticed; Sam was busy with her head buried at the bottom of her garbage can once again, and Peyton and Haley were busy looking overwhelmingly confused as to what it was exactly that they should be doing right now to try and help her.

"Brooke, I'm going to send a page to Dr. Miller okay? She should be able to get down here in a minute or two." I nodded towards her in a symbol of my appreciation towards her rushing, but still I couldn't quite pinpoint whether that comforted me because it provided me with the notion that I wasn't crazy in that I was the only one over here who thought that this was serious enough to warrant such a response, or if it left me positively panicked over the fact that this really was something that we had to worry about over here.

She paged and moved towards Sam with simultaneous motions, making me very grateful that Sam had just so happened to be assigned to a nurse this morning whose expertise seemed to be multi tasking.

I followed her at her heels, trying desperately to throw my most appreciative glance possible over towards Peyton and Haley for staying here with Sam during my brief absence that I really hoped they would catch amidst the chaos as they slowly began to back away from Sam's bed in order to make more room for the experts to move in.

"Here Sam honey, let me get you a clean bucket here." The nurse made her initial presence well known to Sam by moving in to act as Sam's instant saving grace; taking advantage of the space of time between Sam's sessions of vomiting in order to relieve her of having to keep her head at the bottom of a garbage can filled with her own puke, replacing it with that standard pink basin that I had been looking for at the beginning of all of this.

"Thanks," Sam spluttered in her gratitude, spitting that single residual trace of vomit up and out of her mouth, straight into the clean container which was otherwise kept relatively unsoiled… for now that is.

"Sam, here's what I'm gonna do; I'm going to raise the dosage of Zofran that you're getting a little bit okay, so just give it a minute or two to kick in… Do you feel any better after throwing up at least?"

I watched Sam shake her head pitifully in response to the nurse's question as she curled herself up into a protective ball in an effort to protect herself from the wrath of her own body so that I was suddenly very overcome with the urge to switch bodies with her and take over in this burden of the disease… It wasn't the first time that I had felt this way, and it was sure as hell not going to be the last.

"Okay honey, well your IV is all set, so you should start feeling better soon."

I watched the nurse as she circled around Sam in her fluid motions to care for my daughter for me considering the fact that her problems were currently much too complex, much too severe for somebody like me to be able to deal with myself.

I watched as she paused briefly, hovering over into the space where Sam's back was perfectly turned to her, analyzing the damaged skin that had caused me to go out and fetch her in the first place… I couldn't help but find myself staring a hole right through her, trying desperately to read the expression on her face in order to attempt to tell what it was that she was thinking…

But the woman had a stone cold poker face; all of the people who worked here did… It wasn't the first time that I had got to thinking that learning how to do so was a part of the training here or something… It was the best explanation that I could possibly come up with anyway.

A knock on the door had suddenly filled my room that was previously silent with a sharp tone like a drum that made my heart leap in shock and my muscles subconsciously turn over towards the source of the noise; the doorway where Dr. Miller was suddenly standing with an expression of inquisitive concern across her face as to silently ask what the exact reason for the 911 page that she had just received regarding Sam was.

"Brooke… is everything okay in here?" She addressed me before anybody else, not waiting for an answer before taking a couple steps further inside in order to investigate just what it was for herself.

"She started getting pretty sick a couple of minutes ago." I stepped away from Sam's bed in order to meet the doctor in the middle for two main reasons; the first being to speed up this entire process, and the second being so that Sam wouldn't hear what it was that I had to say regarding her at the moment, "But I noticed lately that she's been sleeping a lot more than usually, and then today I saw a bunch of bruises on her back… I was just concerned that if she's anemic, it might mean that… it may mean… well… you know."

I tried not to allow my worry to express itself inside of my voice so that I couldn't help the fact that I point blank refused to allow myself to go straight out and say that I had this horrible feeling racing inside of me right now that this was the first sign that her cancer was back full swing rearing its ugly head.

Of course, the way that Dr. Miller still nodded her head in response to her acknowledgment of my concern, I knew that that was exactly how she'd taken it… and without wasting another moment, she rushed towards Sam's side in an effort to assist the nurse, who was still struggling to get Sam to move so much as an inch out of the ball that she was currently rolled up in so that she could obtain a descent set of vitals from the ailing girl.

"Hey Sam, what's going on over here?" Dr. Miller approached the girl quickly, hoping that she would be at least coherent enough to provide some straight answers for her in regards to exactly how she was feeling at the moment so that maybe she would be able to figure out exactly how to fix it.

"I don't know." Sam muttered miserably, still determinedly wrapped up in her protective fetal position.

"Are you just feeling sick from today's round of chemo or do you think that it feels different than what it usually does?" She asked while meanwhile, I watched her as she both carefully and conspicuously analyzed the patterned bruises alongside Sam's back with the nurse, sharing a quick glance with her co-worker that per usual, I couldn't quite read, but I still didn't feel very good about.

"It feels different… worse than it usually does." She mumbled, breaking my heart with the mere expression of the pain clearly evident behind her voice.

"Okay… do you think that maybe you can try to sit up for me for a second or two so that we can try and see what's going on here?" The doctor pushed her luck in trying to get a very, very unwilling Sam to move, and we all held our breaths just waiting for a response, watching carefully as Sam sighed, indicating that she wanted to do absolutely nothing of the sort, but still nodded her head despite herself anyway.

"Alright Sam, we're gonna try to make this as easy as we can okay, so here's what we're gonna do; we're going to roll you over onto your back real quick and then I'm going to sit you up in your bed… Just let us know if you need us to stop at any time and we will alright?"

Sam just nodded, finished with words in order to conserve her energy as she took a couple deep breaths and braced herself for the inevitable pain that she was about to experience as the nurse grabbed her under one arm, Dr. Miller grabbed her under the other arm, and I had to physically force myself to keep from jumping over and helping because I could tell by the way that Sam kept her muscles tense and her eyes closed in a natural mechanism of defense to try and will her body to stop betraying her in such a severe manner, that she didn't need anybody else crowding around her in this moment.

"Are you still doing alright over there Sam?" Dr. Miller asked her after the short, yet so devastatingly painful shift from her side onto her back.

Sam nodded her head in response; eyes remaining firmly closed as she silently focused all of her attention on the swarming in her stomach and the overwhelming pressure in her head, just begging them to go away, or at the very least, just ease up a little bit.

"Okay then… Kelly here is going to take some vital signs from you and then what we're gonna do is draw some blood and send it down to the lab so that we can see exactly what's going on right now so that we'll be able to fix it… I'm gonna go and talk to your mom in the hall real quick, but we'll be right outside the door so if you need anything from either one of us, just shout."

For the first time in several minutes, I turned my focus away from Sam in response to the doctor making her intentions of speaking to me in private clear, feeling as my heart started to race with every step closer that she took towards me out of fear that she was about to tell me something awful; that just by looking at her that she could already see that Sam was positively dying.

I just had that feeling deep inside of my gut, and I'd learned the hard way that when that feeling came, that it was usually right. Something was very wrong; I just knew it.

I followed her into the hallway, refusing to go more than a few steps beyond the door just so that I could keep a close eye on Sam simultaneously, barely waiting until I stopped walking to become the first to speak.

"Dr. Miller what do you think it is? Do you think that it could be the cancer?" I babbled like an idiot, the worst case scenario situation that had been banging itself into my mind for the past several minutes now spewing out of my mouth with such a frantic, abrupt force, that it probably made the doctor think that I was positively crazy… but then again, these days I couldn't help but think to myself that maybe I actually was just that.

"I'm not sure Brooke." If it was even physically possible at this point, I was pretty sure that my heart fell even further in the expression of her uncertainty… There was just something about the idea that Sam was so sick, that she was in so much pain for reasons that even the best team of doctor's that this hospital could offer couldn't figure out that made me feeling very unsettled, "But listen, this is what I'm thinking okay, and now remember, we won't know for sure until we get the blood work back but the fatigue, the anemia, her taking to the chemotherapy pretty hard today… these aren't necessarily specific symptoms of leukemia, they're also side effects of dialysis and of kidney dysfunction… We don't need to be jumping to any sort of conclusions quite yet Brooke, but just to be completely certain, I'll rush the order downstairs in the lab… We should have the results in maybe an hour… two at most."

I nodded my head up towards her, afraid that if I spoke in this moment, my voice would positively crumble in its weakness and then after that, the rest of me would follow as well.

She put the gentlest of comforting hands briefly on my shoulder, trying to seep a little bit of her sense of calm onto me before just as quickly detaching herself from me, turning in order to go back to Sam so that she could retrieve said blood sample that I had just heard so much about and get them into the lab as quickly as possible so that we could get the answers we so desperately needed as quickly as possible.'

And with one more quick nod of the head, she delivered that same essence of assurance onto Sam as she had to me, making sure that the girl was indeed as comfortable as humanly possible before finally turning out of the room, reinstating me in my position as the single only person that would be able to properly care for Sam in this moment…

"Sam honey, are you feeling any better?" I asked, slowly approaching her, running my hands gently along the length of her exposed scalp just to make sure that my presence was known to her.

"A little…" Sam muttered softly, but I could tell simply by the tone of her voice that by a little she meant a very, very little.

"That's good…" I muttered in my completely unoriginal response, disappointed in myself for not being able to come up with something more clever than that… But luckily Sam had made it easy on me, because she had managed to come up with something to say in response to everything that had just happened herself.

"Hey Brooke?"

"Yeah honey"

"What's going on with me?" Okay… so forget that whole "making it easier on me" thing that I just mentioned, because now that this was the question that was currently out in the open, I suddenly found myself much more preferential to the silence.

I didn't know what to say, I didn't know what to do… Should I tell Sam the truth, or should I simply continue with this lie that there was no particular reason that she was feeling extra crappy today; that she was fine, and that she would always continue to be fine as long as I was here to protect her…

And suddenly, it was as if I had lost what little amount of control that I actually had left of this situation in its entirety, and you know what, out of everything that was going on here, I think that that was the thing that actually ended up killing me the most…

You see, with me the thing about control is that it used to be something that I could do; it used to be something that I was downright good at, and this new notion of no longer being able to retain that control over things like the speed of time, the rate of aging, the rate of positively dying was something that I still wasn't used to; it was something that I definitely wasn't ready for, and it was something that I definitely didn't like…

But as much as I preferred my control over control, I was starting to get the idea in my head that it was very likely that I would never be able to get that sense back now that I had completely lost it what seemed like for good.


HALEY

I don't think that silence has ever sounded so loud in my entire life.

Before today, I never used to think that silence could actually produce any sort of noise, but I was suddenly finding myself to be proven very, very wrong, because my ears were positively ringing over how loud the room actually was despite it being so quiet… Hell, I had half a mind to reach up and clasp my hands up over my ears if it wouldn't have appeared to be so rude.

I tried to think of something to say, tried to come up with a method of escape that would be able to effectively ease the budding tension, but every time so much as a single word came to mind, I would go over it one more time in the back of my head and realize just how stupid it sounded… There was nothing that I could possibly say that could make any sense of any of this, there was nothing that I could do that would make us forget al about the test results that we were so desperately waiting for; the test results that were the exact reason for the silence that had currently befallen us.

But the reason that I was trying so desperately hard to come up with something to say wasn't particularly to make things better, or to ease the fears of my friends around me… I mean, don't take that the wrong way or anything, the only thing that I'm trying to say here is that my biggest concern at the moment is to distract myself from those familiar anxious jitters that I could feel creeping slowly up my spine; the sensation that made me positively curse my weakness, my lack of self control in managing my insanity.

Slowly but surely, I began to drum my fingers incessantly against the arm rest of my chair, the beat increasing steadily in tempo with each passing second so that the sound of my fingers of my right hand created a steady rhythm against the wood that quickly became the only sound in the entire room so that it echoed like a freaking bass drum.

I was suddenly very much so aware of the fact that I had left my prescription at home; my crazy pills, as I liked to call them, and the incessant thought in the back of my mind repeating to me over and over again how much I needed them in this moment was honestly only making things worse, thus creating this cyclic chain of events that I'd found leaving me trembling, sweating, and positively gasping for breath.

"Hey Haley," I hadn't even realized how significantly I'd just zone out until I was brought back into reality, my vision widening in order to expand the entirety of the room, rather than simply that same spot on the wall that I had been focusing all of my attention on for the past several minutes so that I suddenly noticed that Brooke and Peyton were standing, propped inside of the door frame instead of sitting in their chairs like they were the last time I'd actually noticed them.

"Hm?" I snapped my neck upwards suddenly with a fake sense of a rapt attentiveness that I was trying to use in order to compensate the fact that I'd been so out of it for the past God knows how long.

"I was just saying would you mind staying here with Sam for a minute or two? I'm gonna go take Brooke down to the cafeteria to get something to eat." Peyton twitched her head back, indicating towards Brooke who had already wandered ahead of Peyton out into the hallway, walking aimlessly in her incoherent nervous state.

"She doesn't look so good you know," Peyton dropped her voice when she was certain that Brooke was completely out of ear shot, "Plus I just want to try and get her mind off of things for a little while at least."

"Yeah… yeah that's fine." I nodded quickly in response to Peyton's request, trying desperately to contort the most neutral, no, the most sane-looking expression on my face that I could possibly muster, a difficult task considering the fact that I felt nothing even close to either of those things at the moment.

"Alright, we'll be back up as soon as we can, okay?" Peyton made her position on her expected swiftness quite clear to me before turning out of the hallway, leaving me to sink back into the chair to finish what I'd started in finding myself losing myself into the depths of my own mind… and trust me on this one, there was absolutely nothing more dangerous than me getting lost in my own mind…

But I couldn't get this image out of my mind; this picture of Brooke's face imprinted across my brain so vividly that it was as if she was standing right in front of me… The last time that I'd seen her I couldn't help but notice that she looked pretty much exactly how I felt in this moment… But of course, Brooke had every reason to be worried; she had every reason to feel like this… I didn't; I had absolutely no reason other than the fact that I was way too weak.

And as if we hadn't already had enough to worry about over here, all at once, yet another anxious idea manifested and molded itself unmoving within my mind; the idea that if Brooke was this worked up, if she was this stressed… well let me just put it this way; not only was I worried about Brooke, but I was suddenly just as concerned for my unborn niece or nephew growing inside of her as well…

I understood that Brooke was concerned… hell, I would be worried about her if she wasn't concerned, after all, being stressed was part of the game; I knew that, hell, I was concerned and I wasn't even as deeply wrapped up inside of it all as she was… but that didn't mean that I couldn't be nervous for her or for this baby.

And as much as I wished beyond wished that Sam would simply just somehow get magically better and give Brooke a minute or two to relax, I knew it was impossible… we all did.

And just as this sudden thought of Sam came into my mind, I found myself suddenly forced very abruptly out of my thoughts by the very physical Sam right in front of me as she released a small, involuntary whimper of pain from within her bed where she'd been feigning sleep for a while now… of course, I wasn't sure if she was faking sleep simply because she didn't want to talk to any of us, or if she was truly trying to sleep but just found herself unable to she was so sick… But I didn't want to mention it; I figured that I would let her rest… she deserved that much at the very least.

But it happened suddenly; that previous thought process pulled itself out of my mind, suddenly overcome with the desire to call out to Sam, to talk to her, to beg her to tell me her secret of how she managed to stay so strong with everything crumbling to the ground around her…

And before I had the opportunity to suppress this desire and push it back into the inner-most working of her mind, my subconscious acted in on itself and spoke for me so that I knew that there was absolutely no going back now…

"Hey," I called out into the otherwise silent room, currently empty save for me and Sam so that it was very obvious that I was talking to her… I watched carefully for her response as she snuck a single eye open, slowly at first so that she could analyze the safety of her surroundings, but completely once she finally realized that she was in the clear.

"How'd you know that I was awake?"

"I'm a mom Sam, trust me, when that happens to you you'll learn to pick up on the details pretty quickly too…" She simply shrugged, turning her head away with a steep exhale that I couldn't quite read despite the fact that I'd basically just told Sam that I was a master with emotion…

"So how have you been Sam?" I recognized the conversation for the rapid downward spiral that it already was so I said the first thing that I came to my mind simply to keep the words flowing… of course, the second the question was out of my mouth, I realized how stupid they actually were.

"I'm not bad," She replied with a shrug, still refusing to turn her head around to look at me, "I guess that I've been better though… I'm sorry by the way, you know for not getting the chance to talk to you before… I was kind of busy you know…"

"Puking," I finished her sentence for her, my voice sounding suddenly somber; morose even, "But how are you feeling now? Any better at least?"

"I have my moments," She smirked but there was a sadness behind her features, "I think that Brooke sees me having a good day and automatically thinks that I'm cured or something… but I don't know, days like that don't usually last that long anymore."

"What do you mean?" My heart clenched, but that was only because I knew exactly what she meant… I just didn't want to have to actually hear it.

"You know what they've been saying about me right?" She asked me after a couple of seconds, forcing herself to speak amidst a steep exhale, needing a full breath of air just to find enough power inside of her to ask a question of such magnetite… and despite her acknowledgment that this was a question beyond which either of us wished to even think about, let alone discuss, I knew that she expected me to answer it for her honestly…

I think the saddest part of it all was that I was probably the only person in the world who she could ever ask that question to and still expect an honest answer.

"They're saying that you're not doing so well Sam." I told her, while meanwhile, all she did in response was nod her head in a slow agreement… but still, I could have sworn that I actually saw the cornerns of her mouth turn upward in the smallest hint of a smirk.

"Thanks Haley."

"Thanks for what?"

"You're the first person that's actually told me the truth about any of this…" My heart froze; all at once, the entire world seemed to defog around me so that the room became clearer, brighter, more defined that it has ever been, and I realized that maybe I could actually be the person that Sam needed me to be after all.

"But Sam… that doesn't mean that you have to listen to what they're all saying about you okay? I mean… you don't have to sink down just because everybody's telling you that you are… Don't give in without a fight okay Sam, do you hear me?"

"I hear you," She nodded her head, finally turning back towards me just to add an extra emphasis to her assurance, "But the same thing goes for you too okay Haley?"

"You don't need to worry about me Sam." I whispered slowly, cautious of the fact that I'd realized that she had suddenly cornered me into a trap by calling me out in the fact that while her body was slowly destroying itself, my mind was doing the same exact thing to me.

"Are you sure about that?"

"Let me tell you something Sam," I nodded to her, leaning forward in my chair so that I was as close to her as I could possibly get, my posture telling her that I wanted her to listen closely to exactly what it was that I had to say next because it was probably one of the most important lessons that I would ever give her… that I would ever give anybody in my entire life, "Don't be that voice that never sings… Don't end up like me Sam, okay? Whatever you do, I don't want you to ever end up like me."

She tilted her chin slowly upwards, her eyes, drained of all things life-like simply from the morning she'd spent enduring testing and disease, and with all of the energy that the girl had left inside of her fragile body, and this I will swear to, she leaned in close to me, parted her lips, chapped to the point that they were cracked down the center and so pale that they blended in with her white bed sheets, and spoke in the most miniscule whisper, near silent so that I knew that I'd almost missed it…

"Why wouldn't I want to end up like you Haley?"

I sighed… she clearly wasn't getting the point that I was trying to make, and honestly, it was just making it harder in my attempt to tell her that I was no role model here; I wasn't somebody you would ever want to look up to in your life.

"Because then you would be that voice that never sings Sam." I told her softly, watching closely as she looked up at me with a deep frown on her face.

"Hey Haley, do you think you can do me a favor?" She finally asked me after a couple seconds of silence.

"Sure,"

"Don't let that silence swallow you either okay?"

"I'll try Sam," I sniffled heavily in an effort to block the tears, forcing my eyes away from Sam just in case I slipped up and allowed a few of them to pass through the barrier of my eyes, "But it's starting to get pretty hard over here."

"Yeah… yeah, I think I know what you mean." She nodded, her statement flushing me with a pang of guilt towards the realization that I had just spent all of this time complaining about my problems when they were nowhere near as complex, as tragic as her own… and somewhere deep inside of the back of my head, my mind shut off once again.

"Hey… we're back." I turned my head over my shoulder sharply, watching as Peyton and Brooke slid back through the door with what looked much more like an armful of candy and sodas that they'd simply received from a vending machine or something rather than a nutritious hospital cafeteria meal.

"Sam… you're awake," Brooke stated simply; her tunnel vision bringing her straight to her daughter's side… I think that the room could probably have been fire and Brooke still would have noticed Sam before she'd noticed anything else… "How are you feeling honey?"

"A little bit better…"Sam replied, although I wasn't sure if there really had been any truth behind her statement or if she was simply just trying to make Brooke feel better because that was the kind of person that Sam was.

I suddenly felt very much so like I was intruding on a very private moment between the two. I suddenly didn't feel like I belonged in this mix, that I shouldn't be a part of the experience between mother and child… so I backed up slowly, lingering in the doorway next to Peyton, who apparently was feeling the same way that I was in her hesitancy to move further into the room.

"She wouldn't let me take her off of the floor." Peyton sighed under her breath to nobody in particular, really just feeling the desire to express out loud how concerned about Brooke she actually was, "She told me that she needed to stay close by just in case the doctors came back with the test results… I was surprised that I got her as far as the vending machines on the other side of the hallway."

I took a deep breath that shook much more prominently than I had intended, closing my eyes tightly as my fingers began to fidget in dangerously rapid movements that I no longer found myself able to control in my rising panic, growing amidst what had just happened between me and Sam, what was happening with Brooke right now…

"I'm worried about her Hales… You know, with the baby and with everything that's going on with her… I'm worried; I'm really worried."

The worst part was that I didn't even think that Peyton knew the half of it.

"Hey… are you okay Hales?" She turned towards me suddenly, apparently noticing that I was behaving rather strangely at the moment despite my best efforts to conceal just that.

"Yeah…" I breathed out, but the stutter that had infiltrated the middle of my response hadn't exactly helped my cause at all, "Listen Peyton… I think that I… I think I have to go… Can you do me a favor and call me to let me know when the test results come back in?"

"Yeah of course… Hales are you sure that you're okay?"

"I'm fine." I assured her firmly, backing my body steadily out of the door until I had finally found myself into the hallway, keeping my eyes determinedly attached to Peyton's as she continued to express her prominent, yet silent concern towards me until I could simply no longer take it anymore and I turned away, walking briskly down the length of the hallway until I knew that I was completely out of the view of Sam's room…

And once I knew I was in the clear, I ran; I ran the length of the hallway, I ran down six flights in the staircase, and I ran through the entire parking garage… I moved faster than I had ever moved in my entire life, attracting stares but avoiding the scene until I had finally reached my car… but even after that; it didn't stop there.

I drove home so quickly that I was actually surprised that I didn't kill anybody…actually, now that I stopped to truly think about it, I didn't really have any recollection of the details of my drive home so who knew; maybe I did kill somebody, maybe I had freaking hit somebody with my car and drove away without so much as noticing it, maybe there was a freaking paddy wagon on its way to my house right now to come and take me away, to lock me up and throw away the key forever…

My thoughts were blank throughout the entirety of the journey; barely recalling a single moment that had occurred between me driving home from the hospital and me tearing through my house like a freaking hurricane, rushing straight into my bathroom and practically ripping the small mirror-cabinet above the sink off of the wall in its entirety as I ripped it open and dug my hands straight inside in my desperate search for the small orange pill bottle that was glowing back at me like gold from its position on the top shelf.

The remaining contents of the shelf all came toppling down around me as my movements began becoming more and more erratic, more destructive, while all the while, I simultaneously found myself caring less and less with each passing second about how much of a mess I was currently making or even whether or not anybody even heard me up here.

"Mommy what are you thinking about?" I had just started fumbling with the child safety lock on the lid of my medicine bottle when I froze; snapping abruptly out of my trance, focusing so carefully that my eyes actually hurt, and making a very conscious effort to address my six year old son, who was suddenly standing directly in front of me, like a normal human being.

"Jamie honey… what are you doing in here?" I choked over my own words, mainly out of disappointment in myself that I had actually allowed my son to see me in such a state than anything else.

"You looked sad when you came home momma… I just wanted to know what you were thinking about." I found myself suddenly very tongue tied, and the funny thing was, it sent me right back to Sam, right back to the conversation we had mere minutes ago although it felt like hours now…

She'd told me not to allow me to destroy myself, not to let my voice fade away, and I'd promised her that I wouldn't… but here I was…

"I'm just thinking about your Aunt Brooke and Sam, Jamie." I told him, deciding that it would probably be best to be honest with the kid, that maybe it was about time that I stopped lying to him about all of the things that were going on all around him… after all; I'd always said that Jamie was much smarter for his age than he ever should be.

"Is Sam sick again?" I stared at the boy closely, watching as he averted his eyes and folded his hands nervously into his jeans pockets so that he would have looked adorable if I wasn't too busy thinking about how much what I would have to say to him in response to his question would hurt him.

I nodded my head, carefully contorting my facial expression into a look of determined neutrality… It was hard to have to explain things like this to him over and over again; the thing was, I don't think that he ever truly understood that Sam never really stopped being sick… she just had her good days and then she had her bad; and unfortunately for us, she had been stuck in a very long stretch of bad lately.

"Yeah Jamie, Sam is sick again." I refused to go into details, especially considering the fact that I didn't really know what they were myself anyway.

"Is she back in the hospital momma?" I nodded back towards him knowing that I should have been giving him more credit than I ever did all along. He always did have a tendency to catch onto things quicker than anybody else; some days, even me.

"Can we go see her!" His face brightened and fell again the instant I shrugged my shoulders and gave him the slightest of grimaces in response to his question, expressing the idea that I wasn't so sure that I wanted to take him to see Sam right now… not when she was so sick, not when she was like this… But still, I had been the one who had brought it up to begin with, so I couldn't back down now…

Besides, Jamie wasn't about to take no for an answer, I knew that… One day I would remember to yell at his Aunt Brooke for teaching him how to be so stubborn.

"Maybe later Jamie,"

"Hey momma?" I sighed at his incessant questions… I loved my son to death, really I did, but his continuous presence, and my determination to put up a strong front in an effort to prevent him from seeing my weakness was starting to get difficult.

"What is it honey?"

"Are you sick like Sam is now too?"

In a single instant, my heart when from a painful tachycardia to a dead halt so abruptly that for a second there, I thought I might actually dropped dead… I mean, how positively insane must I look right now for my six year old son to even notice that something was wrong?

"No Jamie, I'm not sick…" I lied to him because I knew that I have gotten quite good at that in the past couple of months; and no, for the record, that wasn't something that I was particularly proud of.

"Then why do you have to take medicine like she does?" Somewhere deep in my subconscious mind, my hands twisted even tighter around the practically freaking fluorescent pill bottle that I was currently holding between them as I silently cursed myself for not thinking to hide it behind my back or something any sooner…

Jamie knew a pill bottle when he saw one, I knew that… Nathan and I had done our best to educate him when he was younger in order to make it quite clear that things like that weren't to be played with from when we had bottles of them lying around the house from Nathan's back injury.

"I'm… I'm fine honey; I don't need to take these because I don't feel well." It seemed like the only thing that I had to say to him today was dishonesties; an unusual feature considering I'd began this conversation with the decision that I was going to start telling him the truth from now on…

But it was a decision that I had made a long time ago; actually, it was a decision that both Nathan and I had made a long time ago that we weren't going to tell Jamie that I was currently being medicated for something that he probably wouldn't even be able to understand…

Of course, I knew more than anybody else that we all tended to underestimate just how much Jamie actually could understand… I mean if he understood the fact that Sam was sick, that she was positively dying, would he understand it if I tried to explain to him that his mother was a weak coward too?

I wasn't sure, and to be completely honest here, I didn't really want to find out either.

"Besides…" I continued beyond the realm of what I actually needed to speak because the way my lower jaw was currently trembling, the motions practically forced the words out of my mouth, "I could never be sick like Sam… she's much stronger than I could ever be."

He tilted his head to the side so that he suddenly very much so resembled a confused little puppy dog, and with the motion of his head came the instant realization that I'd actually just spoken out loud, to my grammar-school-aged son no less, the idea that had been filtering throughout my head for a while now…

"Jamie honey, why don't you go downstairs and see if your dad wants to play video games with you." I suddenly couldn't even look at him anymore. I was way too ashamed, way too disappointed in myself for placing this burden on his shoulders to so much as handle so much as being in the same room as him at the moment.

"Okay," He shrugged his shoulders acceptingly, the significance of what had just happened between the two of us seemingly going straight over his head due to the fact that an invitation to play video games with his father trumped everything else in his six year old mind set… It was a factor that I had been banking on when I'd come up with the diversion, and lucky for me, it had actually worked.

I stood still and silent for several seconds, breathing deeply as I listened to his tiny footprints as he pranced through the hallway and down the stairs until it was only the distant echo of his sneakered feet against the hard wood floor that I heard; and finally, when even that shallow noise escaped my ears in its entirety, I ripped open the bottle in my hands, downed two tablets whole, and finally threw the container back into my now sloppily unorganized cabinet, closing it much more gently than I had opened it as I leaned my forehead against the cool glass; my eyes closed and my breathing finally evening out.

It was a long time that I stayed like that, and honestly, if my phone hadn't gone off when it had, well than I knew that I sure as hell would have stayed there for even longer…

I scrambled to pick it up, having a sense of an idea as to who it probably was… When I saw Brooke's name flash across the banner of the screen and back into my eyes, I knew that my original thought had been right, and all at once, I felt that nervous tingle once again, so powerful that even my steady stream of SSRI's couldn't inhibit it as the realization flooded through me… this was it; the answer to the original question that had put me into this state of panic to begin with…

Was this thing with Sam really as bad as we all thought that it was?

"Brooke!" I answered the phone with a sense of urgency, hoping that the tone of my voice alone would be enough to signify to her that I wanted; no I needed her to skip over the small talk and just go straight to giving me answers, "What's going on? Did the test results come back yet? How's Sam?"

"She's okay Haley." Brooke took my subtle context clues for what they were, the first words out of her mouth being news about Sam so that I slowly released the breath that I had been holding as relief flooded through my body so powerful that it literally forced my body to slide down the wall of the bathroom until my ass actually touched the ground and my knees curled up into my chest,

"The blood work came back with no signs of any cancer cells or anything like that… they think that everything that happened today was probably just from the dialysis and her kidneys and things like that."

"Oh Brooke, thank God…" I brought my hand up to my chest, feeling my racing heart beat below my palm as it slowly began to steady out back to its baseline rhythm.

"Yeah… yeah, it's great… really." There was something about her voice that didn't settle well with me; something extra, something obscure, something that told me that maybe this news wasn't as good as I had taken it to be… Of course, if I was actually recovered from my first crises of the day, maybe I would have been able to process that a little bit better… but low and behold, I wasn't; and I hadn't.

"Listen Hales, I've gotta go Sam is calling me… I just wanted to call you real quick and let you know what was going on."

"Yeah, yeah of course," I spoke to her as if I really did understand exactly what she meant even though I knew that I didn't because I didn't know, I could never know what it was like when your child was that sick and was calling out to you because she so desperately needed your help, "Listen, make sure that you call me if you or Sam need anything okay?"

"Yeah… yeah okay, I will." She said it but I knew that she never would; those Davis women; I swear they were engineered to be as stubborn as freaking mules.

Brooke ended up being the one to hang up the phone first, and I followed suite rather quickly, but still, even after the conversation was over, even after the line was disconnected, even after the phone was out of my damn hands, I continued lying here on this bathroom floor, images flashing across my eyes like lightning; pictures of Sam being sick, of Jamie asking me whether I was that sick, my best friend's face plastered with pure panic as she spoke with her daughter's doctor about the chance that her child was dying…

The worst part was that no matter how long I kept my eyes closed, no matter how long I laid here on this bathroom floor, and no matter how hard I tried to push these thoughts away, they lingered; and eventually, they became too powerful for me to distinguish, for me to process all at once.

I wasn't sure exactly how it happened, or even why it happened, but all of a sudden, it became too much; all of it did... The worst part was, I had no idea what to do about it, or even if I could do anything about it; so naturally, my body took control on its own accord, doing the one thing that it could possibly think to do.

I shifted with completely involuntary motions so that my knees were suddenly raised up higher against my chest, my arms wrapped around them, and my face dug so far into my thighs that I couldn't even breathe.

I fell sideways still perfectly in this scrunched up little ball just as the tears began pouring trite and true from my eyes, so powerful, so loud, and so numerous that eventually, I almost had to get up and go into the bathroom just to give them a place to drain out…