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Chapter Fifteen


Nick

“You need to tell the other guys,” Jaymie said.

This was her mantra.

It was about two weeks after the Night of the Seizures and I was packing my shit to rejoin the fellas on tour the next day. Jaymie was perched on the bed, sitting Indian-style, holding her toes. She stared at me, a nervous look in her eyes.

Since that night, things had changed - a lot. Jaymie had decided I was somehow fragile, and seemed to watch every move I made with these vigilante eyes that followed me everywhere. When I brought Nacho out on the beach, she stood on the deck and stared down at us. She’d stand in doorways and her eyebrows would knit together worryingly. And she stared as I fell asleep, pushing hair off of my forehead and biting her lips, as though she was just waiting for the moment she’d have to haul my ass to the ER again.

She had spent a lot of these hours of staring and worrying trying to diplomatically talk me into getting the treatment.

Which I was still uninterested in.

And worst of all, as she stared at me falling asleep, she laid in my bed, wearing actual pajamas that she refused to remove because she was worried about having sex.

“I’m just not sure you’re ready yet,” she’d argued one night.

“I’m telling you,” I said, “I’m ready.” My crotch was practically a mountain. “Oh-man-oh-man, am I ready. I am reaaaaaady.”

She just shook her head.

So was I regretting her finding out about the anaplastic astrocycoma? Yeah-huh.

In every possible way.

“I doubt the Boys want to do the tour if they knew what was really going on,” Jaymie said, stretching out her legs over the bedsheets, like a little kid sitting in a sandbox. “They’d wanna postpone it a little longer. Let you get better, then wrap things up on the road.” She played with the shoulder strap of the duffle bag. “They’d understand.”

“I know they would,” I replied.

“So… so why don’t you do that?” she said, as though this was the first time she’d suggested it. As though this time I’d just suddenly, magically agree with her, as though all my prior responses were invalid.

“Because,” I said, for the millionth time in the last fourteen-or-so days, “I don’t want the last show I do to be the one where I had a heart attack on stage.”

“It won’t be. You’ll do more shows,” she said, “Just... you’ll do them after the treatment is over, that’s all.”

“Not if I’m dead.”

“Yeah, exactly. And you’re going to die if you don’t do the treatment,” she argued.

“You don’t know that,” I snapped.

“Yes I do,” she snapped back. “You will die if you don’t get this fixed. You will.”

“Yeah. But I could die in the middle of getting it, too,” I answered. “On a table, in a fucking hospital, under plastic, with some doctor’s hands up in my head, fishing around in there.” I wiggled my fingers at my forehead.

“You could be in the middle of dancing on the stage and suddenly one of the show lights hits you wrong and triggers a seizure,” Jaymie countered. “You could die on a stage, in a stadium, under the stare of 2,500 of your biggest fans, screaming and howling while security helps EMTs drag you off in a body bag.”

I shrugged, “Still preferable to the operating room.”

Jaymie pursed her lips. “You could be in a hotel in fucking Sweden or something and just die,” she said, “Alone. In the middle of the night. Like you would’ve if I hadn’t been here last time.”

I sighed. That was the only thing I was really worried about in all this. I turned and grabbed another handful of shirts from the closet and shoved them roughly, unfolded, into the duffle bag, frustrated.

“Please,” she said. “I don’t want you to be alone. I can’t even go out to my apartment without worrying and that’s attached to the house, for Christ’s sake, Nick. I can’t handle the idea of you being a world away without someone there to watch over you, to make sure you’re okay.”

“Then come with me,” I said.

Jaymie looked bewildered, “What?”

“Come with me.”

She stared at me like I had seventeen heads coming out of my body. “And -- what?”

“I dunno. Be there. Watch me. Make sure I don’t drop dead or something. That’s all you’re doing here anyways. Might as well do it in another country as to do it here.” I shrugged.

“Baby sit you.”

“Basically,” I answered. I pushed the bag of prescriptions the doctors had given me in lieu of actual treatment into the midst of the shirts. My eyes met hers. “I mean, if you care so much and all.”

She hesitated.

“You’re the only person who knows,” I said after a long pause of her thinking about what I was saying. “And that’s how I want to keep it for right now. Because if everyone knows about it then I’ll feel more weak, and right now I need to stay strong to keep it from killing me. I need to feel invincible. Just a little longer. And if you don’t go, there won’t be anyone there who knows at all.” I chewed the inside of my lip as I paused in my speech. I zipped up the dufflebag, then looked up at her again. “I know it’s crazy. But I’ve never known anybody who’s taken cancer treatment and lived through it. My grandmother had breast cancer, she tried treatment, she died. I’ve seen tons of fans fighting and dying of cancer over the years. And I’m not a fighter that way. You know how I am when I’m sick. I get sick and I get convinced I’m dying. Over, like, a cold.” I shook my head, “I’d convince myself there was no living through treatment and sometimes I think shit like that really is mind over matter. Once I start treatment, I ain’t gonna see the other side of it. I ain’t gonna get better. I’m gonna die. And I’m not ready to yet. So. That said, I’m going to finish the tour, I’m going to prepare myself, and when I get back, after I’ve said my goodbyes properly to the fans and to the fellas, then I’ll get the treatment. Then I’ll die.”

Jaymie looked down at her hands. “So much for optimism, huh?” she squeaked.

“I’m a glass mostly-empty kinda guy, Jaymie,” I said. “So.” I took a deep breath. “So, you can come and help me and make it easier to fight this thing my way, or you can stay here and miss the last of me,” I said. “Your choice.”




Jaymie

I adjusted my sunglasses.

Nick was settling in next to me, shifting his weight in this annoying way that kept making our shared armrest wobble. He’d insisted I take the window seat (“I swear to fuck I’ll puke everywhere if I have to sit there,” he’d said), and was untangling the cord to his white Beats. I chewed my lip, my Nook resting on my lap, palms sweaty the way they always got just before take off in a plane. I looked over at him. He was concentrating on the headphones. “I hate flying,” I said.

Nick smirked, but didn’t look up. “Join the club.”

I tightened my seatbelt.

It was far less than ideal to be on the plane to begin with. I would’ve much rathered to be holding his hand at some specialist clinic getting him fixed than to be preparing for cruising altitude for ten hours over the Atlantic, but whatever. When it came to Nick, I’d learned long ago that he was stubborn as all hell and it was basically his way or the highway, and having been invited to come along and be there for him was as close to a compromise as I was going to get. It just scared the shit out of me, the idea of what exactly we were facing, what we weren’t saying, what was hanging there, like an invisible curtain, between us.

Nick got his cord untangled and grinned at me with this cheesy, triumphant look on his face, waving the plug at me with satisfaction. “You know, they say these things are tangle-free cords,” he said, shaking his head, “But fuck that shit, it tangles all the damn time.”

“Sometimes things just get messy,” I said with a shrug.

Nick nodded. He gently folded the cord back up and put the headphones in the pouch in front of him with his iPod, two football magazines, a book about UFO mysteries, PSP system, and four granola bars.

You just never know what is priority in a person’s life until you see how they entertain themselves during a long flight.

And my story in that department would tell you just as much as his did. On my Nook, I had loaded several research papers about anaplastic astrocycomas and the treatment options that went along with them.

The plane took off, mine and Nick’s hands wrapped tight around each other for moral support as gravity released it’s grip on us and we rose into the air at the mercy of a steel bird. My knuckles were white as my fingers tangled around his desperately. Somewhere on the plane, a kid was crying and the mother was shushing it and I was just sitting there thinking how awful I would’ve been feeling if Nick had left without me. I probably would’ve been sitting in the parking lot of LAX watching planes take off worrying about what would happen while he was out of my sight and reach.

There was a time when Nick leaving for tour had sounded like a break - like vacation sounds to most people with real “jobs” and lives that don’t basically revolve around a 24/7 availability for sex with a Backstreet Boy. A part of me missed that, suddenly, that callous belief that he’d be there forever.

Now, in the air and no longer anxious about the actual take off, I found my mind wandering ahead to the tour and the time I was about to spend on the road with him and the other Boys. It was going to be awkward, that was certain. I mean the other Backstreet Boys were still not very enthusiastic about my presence in Nick’s life and being that none of them knew about the tumor, none of them were going to understand why I was with Nick on the tour -- other than suspecting that he’d taken me along for the getting laid factor.

I glanced over at Nick, who had put his headphones on and was flipping through one of the NFL magazines, reading stats of recently drafted players, his lips moving as he read.

He didn’t know it yet, but I had this plan - this mostly evil plan - to make him tell the fellas as soon as possible without actually betraying him in anyway. I just had to figure out how to get him to do it. I knew if they knew about the tumor they’d send him home immediately, or at least I hoped that was the truth. Surely they wouldn’t try to force him to keep touring knowing he had a fucking ball of cancer in his skull, right?

I turned on my Nook and started reading, too, about the various forms of radiation and chemotherapy and operations that could be performed to treat the anaplastic astrocycoma. Most of them sounded quite terrifying and I really couldn’t blame Nick for being nervous about them. They involved doing things like cutting open his skull and inserting cameras on long wires and months of repeated chemical, vomiting-inducing injections. It was frustrating to me that something like a tumor could be picked up on a scan enough to be seen clearly, but not just as easily removed.

About two hours into the flight, Nick had devoured his four granola bars, flipped through the magazines and book until he was bored of them, and played his PSP until his battery was at half. He put the PSP back in the pouch and folded his arms across his chest, leaning back in the seat. He glanced over at me, then leaned his head against my shoulder. “I’m bored,” he commented.

“Don’t be bored,” I answered. I was about six pages deep on a nearly-impossible-to-understand research paper by a Korean doctor who didn’t believe in chemotherapy.

“But I am,” he replied. He watched me read for a few moments, then said, “Jaymie.”

“What?” I asked.

“Talk to me. I’m bored.”

“What do you wanna talk about?” I asked, still reading.

“I dunno.” Nick reached up and rubbed his nose before putting his face back against my shoulder. “What’cha readin’ about?”

“Your tumor,” I replied.

He frowned. “Borrrr-ring.”

“It’s not boring. It’s called being informed,” I replied. I scrolled the Nook to the next page.

“Yeah but, still. Boring reading stuff like that. What’s it, like a medical journal?”

I nodded.

He sighed heavily. “Jaymie. I’m bored,” he repeated.

“I heard’ja, but we’re on a plane,” I said, “There’s not a whole lot to do on a plane.”

Nick chewed his lip, and then pressed his teeth gently against the skin of my shoulder, “Jaaaaayyyyymie,” he whispered, voice husky.

“Nick. If you say you’re bored one more time --”

“Are you a member of the Mile High Club?” he asked.

I lowered the Nook and looked at him.

His eyes were twinkling dangerously.