The Seats They Took at Graduation

Learning to Be Someone Again

School had gotten away from me during the worst of treatment. I had missed most of eighth grade in pieces, a week here, ten days there, enough that by the time I was well enough to sit through a full day, I had forgotten how fractions worked and had to relearn long division sitting at Virginia’s kitchen table with a mug of reheated coffee she microwaved three times a night because she kept forgetting it while she quizzed me.

“Your father called you average,” she told me once, closing my math book with a snap that made Biscuit jump off the windowsill. “We are going to prove that man wrong on paper, since apparently that is the only language he speaks.”

By sixteen, I had caught back up to grade level. By seventeen, I was ahead of most of my class, mostly out of spite, which Virginia said was a perfectly good fuel as long as I eventually learned to run on something warmer.

I got my five year all clear the spring I turned eighteen, sitting in the same Riley Hospital clinic where it had all started, and Virginia cried in the parking garage afterward in a way she had never once let herself cry in front of me during the five years leading up to it. She gave me a thin silver ring that night at the diner, two small birthstones set side by side, hers and mine.

“So you always remember you were never carrying any of this by yourself,” she said, “even on the nights it felt like you were.”

I wore that ring through every science class at Bethel Springs High, through the first time I shadowed a hospice nurse on a class trip and felt something click into place in my chest that had nothing to do with a diagnosis, through every application I filled out my senior year listing Wabash Valley State University’s nursing program first because it was ninety minutes from Virginia’s kitchen table and because I had already decided, somewhere around sixteen, exactly what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing for other people’s worst nights.