“Did she have Hodgkin’s too?”

“No, leukemia. She was sitting in the chair next to mine when I had my first chemo treatment. We spent a lot of time together after that.”

“Was she your age?”

“A little younger. She was fourteen.”

“What was she like?”

“She was kinda quiet. I thought she was really pretty. She’d already lost her hair though, and she hated that. She always wore a hat. When mine fell out she finally stopped being embarrassed. Then we just sat around like two baldies, and we didn’t care.”

“Losing your hair has to be hard.”

“Well, it’s probably worse for girls. Emma showed me some old pictures, and she had long blond hair.”

“Did you ever get to spend time together when you weren’t having chemo?”

“Yeah. She knew her way around the hospital. The nurses always looked the other way when they caught us making out somewhere. We went up to the rooftop garden at the hospital, and sat in the sun. I wanted to take her out, but her immune system couldn’t handle being in a crowd. One night the nurses let us watch a video in an empty room. We got in the bed together and they brought us popcorn.”

“How sick was she?”

“She was doing okay when we first met, but after about six months, she got a lot sicker. One night on the phone, she told me she’d made a list of things she wanted to do, and she told me she thought she might be running out of time.”

“Oh, T.J.”

“She’d turned fifteen by then, but she wanted to make it to sixteen so she could get her driver’s license. She wanted to go to prom, but she said any school dance would do.” I hesitated, but lying in the dark next to Anna made it easier to talk about things. “She told me she wanted to have sex, so she could know what it felt like. Her doctor had put her back in the hospital by then and she had a private room. I think the nurses knew, maybe she told them, but they left us alone and we managed to check one thing off that list. She died three weeks later.”

“That’s so sad, T.J.” Anna sounded like she was trying not to cry. “Were you in love with her?”

“I don’t know. I cared about her a lot, but it was such a weird time. My chemo stopped working, and I had to start radiation. It scared me when she died. Wouldn’t I know if I loved her, Anna?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

I hadn’t thought about Emma in a while. I’d never forget her though; it had been my first time, too.

“What did you decide about that guy, Anna?”

She didn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t want to tell me, or maybe she’d already fallen asleep. I listened to the waves crashing into the reef, the sound relaxing me, and I closed my eyes and didn’t open them until the sun woke me up the next morning.

Chapter 19 – Anna

“Do you want to play poker?” T.J. asked.

“Sure, but I left the cards down by the water.”

“I’ll go get them,” he said.

“That’s okay. I have to go to the bathroom. I’ll grab them on my way back.” I hated going anywhere near the woods after dark, and I had about two minutes before the sun went down.

I had just grabbed the cards when it happened. I never saw it coming, and it must have swooped out of the sky with some speed behind it, because when the bat collided with my head, it almost knocked me off my feet. It took me a second to figure out what hit me, and then I started screaming. I panicked, my hands raking through my hair to get the bat out.

T.J. ran to me. “What’s wrong?” Before I could answer him, the bat sank its teeth into my hand. I screamed louder. “There’s a bat in my hair,” I said, as stinging pain radiated across my palm. “It’s biting me!”

T.J. sprinted off. I shook my head back and forth, trying to dislodge the bat. When he returned, he pushed me down onto the sand until I was flat on the ground.

“Don’t move,” he said, cupping his hand around my head. Then he drove the blade of the knife through the bat’s body. It stopped wiggling. “Just hold on. I’m going to get it out of your hair.”

“Is it dead?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I lay still. My heart raced, and I wanted to freak out, but I forced myself to remain calm while T.J. untangled the bat from my hair.

“It’s out.”

We couldn’t see it very well in the sliver of moonlight, so T.J. went back to the fire and grabbed a burning log. He bent down and held it over the bat’s body.

It was disgusting, light brown with big black wings, pointy ears, and jagged teeth. Its body was covered with open sores. The fur around its mouth looked wet and slimy.

“Come on,” T.J. said. “Let’s get the first-aid kit.”

We walked back to the lean-to and sat down by the fire.

“Give me your hand.”

He cleaned the bite with the alcohol wipes, dabbed on antibiotic cream, and covered it with a band-aid. My hand throbbed.

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes.”

I could handle the pain, but the thought of what might be incubating in my bloodstream terrified me.

T.J. must have been thinking about it too, because before we went to bed he stuck the blade of the knife in the fire and left it there all night.

Chapter 20 – T.J.

Anna was awake and sitting by the fire when I got back from fishing the next morning.

“How’s your hand?”

She held out her palm, and I peeled back the band-aid.

“It doesn’t look too bad,” I said. The jagged wound seeped blood, and her hand had swollen a little overnight. “I’ll clean it again, and put another band-aid on it, okay?”

“Okay.”

I swiped another alcohol pad across the bite. “You look tired,” I said, noticing the dark circles under her eyes.

“I didn’t sleep very well.”

“Do you want to go back to bed?”

She shook her head. “I’ll nap later.”

I put a fresh band-aid on her hand. “There. You’re good as new.”

She must not have heard me though, because she stared off into space and didn’t say anything.

Later that morning, I finished framing the house and began putting up the walls. The breadfruit trees gave off a milky sap, and I patched the cracks with it.

Anna worked silently beside me, holding boards or handing me nails.

“You’re quiet,” I said.

“Yeah.”

I pounded a nail into the board, securing it into the frame and said, “You’re worrying about the bite?”

She nodded. “That bat looked sick, T.J.”

I put down the hammer and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. “It didn’t look good,” I admitted.

“Do you think it had rabies?”

I positioned the next board and picked up the hammer. “No, I’m sure it didn’t.” I knew bats sometimes carried the disease, though.

Anna took a deep breath. “I’ll have to wait it out, I guess. If I don’t get sick within a month, I’m probably okay.”

“What are the symptoms?”

“I don’t know. Fever, maybe? Convulsions? The disease attacks the central nervous system.”

That scared the shit out of me. “What do I do if you get sick?” I tried to remember what was in the first-aid kit.

Anna shook her head. “You don’t do anything, T.J.”

“Why not?”

“Because without rabies shots the disease is fatal.”

I couldn’t breathe for a second, like the wind had been knocked out of me. “I didn’t know that.”

She nodded, tears filling her eyes. I dropped my hammer and put my hands on her shoulders. “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’re going to be okay.”

I had no idea if she would, but I needed both of us to believe it.

I counted forward five weeks and circled the date in Anna’s datebook. She wanted to wait longer than a month, just to be sure.