You Take It From Here by Pamela Ribon

off to boarding school. But it wasn’t supposed to be here ever again. Not after she beat it. Not once we called her a survivor. We had a party. We wore T-shirts. There was a cake. Once you’ve eaten your survivor cake, that’s supposed to signify an ending. That time was supposed to be over.
    So how was it here again? Why would cancer rear up like a phoenix? This should be the twisted joke. I wanted her to bust into a grin, shocked that I once again fell for something that couldn’t possibly be true. You can’t get cancer twice, silly! That would be so unfair!
    I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that your mother didn’t start crying. Even in that moment she wouldn’t let her face get wet. Rather, she was slapping a pillar of the gigantic chair’s leg, batting at it like a vending machine that stole her money. A tiny little lady battling an enormous piece of furniture as she invented curse words for this situation, barking in furious gasps.
    “I just wanted to see this . . . suck-crap chair because . . . I’m trying to get some . . . goddamn things done before I’m . . . shitballs dead!”
    “Smeh,” I said, but I could hardly hear myself. “Smeh,” I tried again, but I knew if I kept talking, I’d cry.
    Smidge threw herself back against the chair leg. She swallowed and punched her thighs before staring me down. “My stupid cancer is back,” she said. “And now I’m going to be dead just like my daddy. I can’t believe it. Fucking cancer. Fucking cancer, Danielle! Again!”
    Cainsir. That’s how she said it. Hospitals and needles and vomiting and tests and no, please, not this again.
    I forced a question past my lips. “What can I do?”
    All the little muscles in her face relaxed as she resumed control. “I’m glad you asked,” she said, as she folded her arms across her chest. I was right; they were thinner. “I have a job for you,” she said, all business.
    “Anything.”
    “Can I get that word in writing?”
    “Why, what do you mean?”
    “Get me to a drink, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
    I stumbled over to my small friend and pulled her in tight. I hugged her as hard as I could, until I worried I was pressing tiny tumors into her heart.
    “I still need you to take a picture of this chair. I mean, we drove all this way.”

 
     
    EIGHT

     
     
     
    I ’d known Smidge longer than I’d known how to use a curling iron. I know that’s a fact, because Smidge is the one who taught me.
    I was fourteen when my dad moved us from Brooklyn to Ogden. I remember being so pissed off my first day at Neville High. All my preconceived notions of what living in the South was going to be like were bouncing around in my head, notions that were mostly acquired from television shows. I assumed everyone would own a horse; they’d all get into their cars by jumping through the windows. I figured everyone I’d meet would have a lump of tobacco jammed in his cheek.
    My mother takes some of the blame for this. Right around the last time I ever saw her, she told me she was leaving and had absolutely no desire to haul her ass down to a “po-dunk, racist-ass, shit-kicking, cousin-fucker town just because your father thinks he owns me.”
    You never met my mom. I don’t really talk to her all that much. Never to her face, anyway. I sometimes talk to the idea of her, when I get really frustrated. I talk to the memory ofher, ask why she didn’t care to find out what happened to me once I left Brooklyn. I ask her if she started doing drugs and that’s why she forgot about me, or if she reinvented herself and became a happy homemaker with three kids and another on the way. That last one I could almost understand. Maybe for her it’s just too painful that even though she eventually got it right, there’s a little girl in her past for whom she got it spectacularly wrong.
    My parents were very young when they had me, as it wasn’t something they were planning on doing. They got married because that’s