Read Online We Were Never Here by Jennifer Gilmore - Free Book Online

such a romantic disease that I’ve got. I couldn’t haveplanned a better one,” I say, “for college, I mean.”
    Connor laughs. Full-on, head thrown back. It’s amazing. Verlaine jumps down and goes to sit next to him. That’s how good the laugh is.
    â€œFair enough. Okay, So I guess I have to ask then. What do you have? Why are you here?”
    â€œYou don’t know?”
    â€œMe? God, no. There’s all kinds of confidentiality here. I know the children’s hospital, where I also go, has most of the young people with cancer. And here we are, on the cancer ward. So. Cancer?”
    I try not to seem self-conscious about Thelma, who’s probably sleeping anyway.
    I shake my head. “That was ruled out two days ago.” Was it Day Eight? It seems more like seven years, seven decades, seven centuries. “They put me on this floor because it’s safer than the general illness unit with all those infectious diseases. It’s kind of surreal, though, being here.” I nod my head in Thelma’s direction.
    I have turned into my mother in here.
    Connor pets Verlaine silently.
    â€œOh, so I have this disease called ulcerative colitis. It’s embarrassing, really.” I could not say anything, I know, but what’s the point? It is what it is here, people. But I do realize that part of the pain I’ve got in here is shame. It hurts me. How ashamed I am, even just when my father enters the room with a teddy bear. It’s that kind of a disease.
    â€œBeing sick is like that, I think,” Connor says. “I see all kinds of people in here. No matter what they have, everyone seems tofeel ashamed. Bodies,” he says.
    I swallow, big. I wait, but that’s all he says. I nod. “Bodies.”
    I feel like Connor knows everything. And understands.
    â€œAlso, not just bodies.”
    I wait for an explanation, but one doesn’t come. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen,” I say.
    This is the part I haven’t mentioned, not to anyone. If the colon doesn’t get saved, I’ll have to have a bag attached to me. I can’t say it. He will never come near me if I do. If this really happens, no one will. I will be a freak. A freak with an ileostomy bag.
    Connor nods, but he doesn’t look at me. And then he does. Right at me. “You’re still you, you know,” he says. He scootches the chair so it’s right next to my bed. “I think that this place and being sick can make you feel like you’re not you, but you’ll be back. To yourself.”
    And who was that? A girl on a dock with her feet in the water, waiting to be pretty? What did that even say about me?
    The thing is, I won’t actually really be me. What will I even look like? I can’t picture it; I don’t want to picture it. Eventually the bag comes off, if I’m to believe what I hear. There will be some sort of reconstruction , as if my body is recovering from the Civil War. I don’t know anything that will happen yet, but I do know I will never be the same.
    I feel like I will choke. How does he know absolutely everything? It’s like he is on the moon with me and no one else has gotten here yet. No one else is coming.
    He takes my arm, which I hadn’t realized was sort of dangling helplessly over the side of the bed. He turns it over, holds myhand in one of his, and then runs his eaten fingers up them along the inside of my wrist. There are veins there, and I feel him tracing them. His touch is as light as a buttercup.
    I resist the urge to snap my arm back, tuck it into my disgusting hamster nest of a bed. “I bet you do this to all the girls,” I say. What I mean is: now who will ever love me, come to my door with flowers, write my name in wet cement, throw stones at my window?
    â€œNope.” Connor says. His fingertips tickle my wrist, and it’s hard not to smile.
    I look over at the IV stand,