Once Upon a Wish (46 page)

When Serena entered high school, she remained true to who she was. She sported her “I wish you were a piñata” T-shirt, which she was forced to cover with her hooded sweatshirt, and dyed her hair bright blue with gold tints. Accused of craving attention, the word
loner
was thrown at her, settling beneath her thickening skin, but she walked through the halls proudly, spoke up in class, and held her own.

One day during speech class, she decided to let her assuming classmates all the way in, to risk total rejection, and to express her love for music. She presented the history of some of her favorite
bands and artists—Culture Club, ABBA, Darren Hayes—adding her love for their music, their influence on the world. When she heard a classmate whisper, “freak,” her mind’s volume cranked to high.

She stared long and hard into the eyes of her fellow ninth graders. Some stared back, disgusted; others scribbled in their notebooks, pretending the room’s thick tension was a light, comfortable breeze.

Serena was going to spend the next three years with these students, trying to make this her home, but it was then that she realized she was as much a stranger to them as she was the day she stepped foot on campus as “the new girl” in that small town.

She finished her speech and sat down, deciding in that moment that acceptance, approval, didn’t matter. Remaining true to herself was the only thing that did.

It wasn’t until she approached the end of her junior year that Serena felt an ounce of validation. She signed up for a music lyrics and analysis class, designed to encourage students to analyze music—from death metal to R & B—with no boundaries, no judgment, no right or wrong answer. Her voice was finally heard, finally accepted, and those ninety minutes of freedom, of self-expression, were exactly what she needed to coast into her senior year.

She had made it through isolation, through five iodine radiation treatments, through “faker” and “liar” whispers following her down the school hallways, haunting and tormenting her.

“Your hair didn’t fall out,” her classmates had said when she returned to school at the end of her sophomore year. “You didn’t really have cancer.”

She had missed a quarter of tenth grade, undergoing radiation, keeping distance from her family—from the world—visiting the hospital for body scans, dealing with the pain and misery of being off her thyroid medication.

She had gained thirty pounds in one month, and that cruel, dead weight settled and grabbed at her muscles, pushing, pounding. She nearly buckled every day beneath its relentless strength while climbing the stairs of her school’s campus, those spiteful whispers, real or imagined, pulling back at her.

She pushed ahead, to and from class, restless through lectures, pain at the forefront of her mind. Cancer had become her identity, solitude, her friend, and Darren Hayes, her musical companion. Lyrics to “Affirmation,” the song that had brought peace to her when cancer first entered her life on the way to her grandfather’s funeral, became part of her thoughts, her inner voice. Darren seemed to have a song for her every mood, lessons to teach, music to inspire, and he was there every step of the way.

My problems don’t exist
, Serena thought, absorbing the words to his song “Spin.” She had escaped. During all her isolation, he had taken her somewhere else—somewhere outside of that room, beyond the walls of her confinement, to a world where only words mattered.

Before, she had been engulfed with thoughts like
What did I do to deserve this? Nobody understands. I am so alone. Why me?
But
it was words from songs on Darren’s album
Spin
that had guided Serena for days and weeks, pushing thoughts of
why me?
from her mind.

Serena had maintained a happy face while hiding these thoughts from her family. Beneath her smiles, she was sinking into the weight of their pull, drowning in their desperate hold. To the world, she remained strong, but facing cancer and living a life that had separated her—emotionally and physically—from that world was something that she, at the age of fifteen, could not deal with on her own. She was reminded in Darren’s song, “What You Like,” that he was with her as he sang about unity between people and starting over, of life’s journey beginning and ending together.

Even just a voice in her speakers, Darren Hayes had become Serena’s comfort, guiding her through her journey.

   5   

Serena went back to school during the last quarter of her sophomore year, and in the two years between then and graduation, she maintained friendships with others like herself who didn’t quite fit in, played music, and focused on the day she would toss her green and silver cap into the air. With disapproval and accusing whispers still haunting her daily, she kept smiling, but behind that smile was pain, darkness, and a million unanswered questions.

Why did cancer choose me? What did I do to deserve it? Will it ever come back? Why won’t the other kids believe me?

These thoughts and others consumed her, with moments of relief coming only from indulging in her music, those words.

It’s gonna be fine
, she told herself as she continued to listen to Darren’s “Good Enough.”

Through this song, Darren had warned that life’s roads can get tough, but Serena never imagined just how tough hers was about to get.

The blow came faster than lightning, a small fist, thunder cracking against Serena’s head. She hardly knew the girl’s name. She was a friend of a friend of a friend—one of those high school acquaintances whose paths you cross only by association. Serena had never spoken to the girl, never gave her a reason to hate.

The power of the girl’s close-handed punch to Serena’s forehead shot her body—weakened from radiation, easily bruised from blood thinners—back in movie-like slow motion, instant pain freezing as her mind scrambled frantically to understand what had just happened.

In that moment, every whispered threat, every blatant tease, every closed mind and judgmental stare pounded through Serena’s body. Her classmates’ disapproval, their haunting laughs, Serena’s cries, the town’s rejection, crashed into her. The emotional torment she had suffered from the time she had moved to that small town finally reached deeper than her soul, slapped harder than her outer shell could handle. This was a literal punch in the face, and Serena cracked.

High school, to that point, had been something she trudged through day by day, living moment to moment. It was a place of misery but never a place of fear.

As Serena sat across from the school’s assistant principal, a goose egg swelling and throbbing on her head, tears choking words, she instantly knew that’s what it had just become—a place of bias and fear.

“She said you wouldn’t shut up,” the vice principal said, a combined look of
you’re wasting my time
and
you deserved this
settling into her stone eyes as they scooted from Serena’s neon Converse high-tops to her jet-black pants, to her
Nightmare Before Christmas
hoodie.

Serena had already explained that, in the middle of a private conversation she was having with a group of her friends in the cafeteria, the girl—who, according to the vice principal, was “troubled with problems at home”—walked over to Serena, criticized her for an opinion she was sharing with her friends about a particular musician she no longer liked, and slugged her in the face.

Serena didn’t care about the girl’s “problems at home.” She had plenty of her own, and she wasn’t taking them out on the faces of strangers. The vice principal knew nothing of the misery Serena had been through, and mostly likely, she wouldn’t care.

The vice principal had spoken to the witnesses, had heard it straight from the girl who hit her that she “rapped her on the head because she wouldn’t shut up.”

Rapped?
Serena thought as the vice principal spoke.
Is that some sort of Midwestern slang for hitting a person unnecessarily?

Kevin and Sedra sat beside Serena, her eyes filling with tears at the very thought that she could get punched in the face for doing nothing and feel like the accused.

Though she admitted to “rapping” Serena in the head, the girl was sent home for the rest of that school day but was back the next.

This would never happen in Tucson
, Serena thought, sickened by the injustice, disheartened by the thought of facing possible bullying for the next two years while worrying about cancer’s return. It seemed like too much, like more than any high school sophomore should have to deal with, but she did, and Serena made it to her senior year with bullying continuing only in the form of the judgmental stares and whispered laughs she had learned to live with before the punch she took to the head.

Regular checkups during those two years always revealed Thyroglobulin, a “tumor marker” protein in Serena’s blood, but the numbers were never alarming to doctors until she and her family decided to get a second opinion.

During Serena’s senior year, about six months before graduation, her new doctor didn’t like the persisting levels, so his solution was a “mega dose” of radiation.

I don’t want to do this again
, she thought, but there was no choice, no bargaining with the inevitable. She needed this treatment, which meant another month-long, low-iodine diet and a lot of pain.

When Serena’s doctor took her off of her thyroid medicine once again, the instant weight gain grabbed at her bones and joints, tugging until fatigue came to her rescue. Fifteen-hour sleep nights felt invisible, forgotten, the moment after waking, forcing Serena back into bed or onto the couch to keep from falling over with open eyes in the middle of the day.

She once heard someone say that stopping a person’s thyroid medicine was like exposing them to a slow form of death—“They try to kill you, and once you’re on the brink of death, they revive you”—and she concurred.

After the “mega dose,” Serena was secluded to a small, corner hospital room for twenty-four hours. A week later, she was sent back to school.

As graduation approached, Serena’s dad applied for and accepted a job as vice president of administration at Cochise College back in Arizona.

They were going home.

Things were looking up. Her cancer was gone. The town was about to be, too, and so were its people—gone from her life. She woke up on the day of graduation and made a very important, life-changing decision.

I need a negativity purge
, she thought.

She had spent hours in the confines of her bedroom, pen in hand, letting her darkest thoughts, her greatest fears, bleed onto the pages of her hidden journal, becoming lyrics to depressing, handwritten songs scribbled within the pages: