Free Skinny by Donna Cooner

tears.
    “I just need to talk to her.”
    I think of my stepmom. “You can talk to Charlotte.” I pat his hand awkwardly.
    “Charlotte’s great. I’m really lucky she came along. . . .” His voice trails off. “But it’s not the same.”
    “I know, Dad.”
    “She’d know exactly what to say to you right now. She was so good at that.” He pats my hand carefully so he doesn’t mess up the tubes in my arm. “Remember when you were a kid and were afraid of the dark? I thought you’d never sleep all night in that room by yourself.”
    “Yes.” I smile at the memory. “She always asked me what exactly I was afraid of.”
    “And you said?”
    “One time I was afraid all the door hinges would turn into snakes. One time I was afraid of the seven dwarfs marching down the hall with shovels. One time I said I was afraid of fear itself. I think I heard that one on TV. She never laughed. She never said I was crazy. She would just sigh and lead me back to my room and she’d wait there, on the side of my bed, until my eyes were simply too heavy to keep open anymore.”
    “Then I’d yell for you to go to sleep,” Dad says, “and for your mother to come back to bed and turn out the light.”
    “But do you know what she’d always tell me before she left?” I ask.
    He shakes his head.
    “ ‘Your dad’s not mad at you. He’s just tired.’ ”
    “As usual, she was right.”
    We sit there for a while in quiet. Waiting. I’ve never been that great at waiting. Like when I was a kid, and sometimes even now, I could never wait for Christmas. When my mom would leave for the grocery store, I would go under the Christmas tree and carefully unwrap the end of each of my presents just far enough to figure out what was inside. Then I’d wrap them back up again before Mom got back. It actually kind of ruined Christmas, but it took away the whole waiting thing.
    The hard thing about waiting is the not knowing how it’s >going to go. That’s what makes me really crazy. It could be great — like the doctor saying the test results are back and all the cancer is gone. Or it could be really bad — like the doctor saying something terrible, something you can’t even imagine — but you’re just supposed to go about your life like that waiting thing is not hanging over your head every single minute of every single day.
    The sound of laughter and murmuring voices drift in from the hallway. Rat comes back and stands beside my dad because there is only one chair in the tiny pre-op room.
    “Anything happen while I was gone?” he asks.
    “Not really,” I say. “We’re just waiting.”
    The curtain is flung open, and the nurse with the smiley-face scrubs is back. This time she is with a tall man with blue baggies on his feet that make a swishing sound when he walks. I wonder if the baggies are to keep the blood off his shoes. That kind of freaks me out. Baggie Man introduces himself as Dr. Boyett, the anesthesiologist, and shakes my dad’s hand. He has >a big syringe with him and he grins down at me like he has brought me a piece of chocolate birthday cake.
    “How you feeling?”
    “A little nervous,” I say.
    “Nervous is normal.”
    “You’ll never be normal.”
    “Time for the good stuff.” Dr. Boyett sticks the big syringe into the tube snaking out of my arm and pushes the plunger.
    “That should take the edge off.”
    “How long before I start to feel something?” I ask, but before I can even finish the question, my head starts to feel lighter, like it just floated off my body. “Oh, there it is.”
    My dad laughs nervously. “That didn’t take long.”
    “Say your good-byes,” Smiley Face says. “They’ll be here for you any minute.”
    Rat’s face is serious, but he gives me a fake smile and a little wave, then steps back out of the way so my dad can move closer. A shadow moves behind my father’s shoulder. With the fuzziness seeping into my body, I can’t see clearly, but I know who it is. My