You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead by Marieke Hardy

friend Glenn over accumulating online friends and with concerted effort had locked in over one thousand in a week. She was brash and infuriating and somebody you always wanted to be around.
    She had called me directly from the doctor’s office.
    â€˜They found a lump,’ she said in a flat, dull voice. ‘It’s big. I know it’s cancer. I just know. ’
    It was three days before her thirty-sixth birthday. She had been freaking out about the milestone, gently, in that self-deprecating, self-conscious way we all had of facing birthdays in our thirties. We had been making jokes about adult nappies and jailbait boyfriends who looked at us blankly when we referenced generational things like Mudhoney and Joan Kirner. We were planning our annual liquor-sodden picnic in the park, where we would toast each other, lushly and repeatedly, and watch from half-lidded sprawlings on the grass while the children of our friends beat a piñata senseless.
    Now all of a sudden the party was on hold and Gen was sitting on my couch sobbing and I was trying to half-heartedly reassure her that everybody had lumpy bosoms and it was only recently that my GP had had a prod around my décolletage and bluntly pronounced it ‘one of the lumpiest damn chests I’ve ever encountered’.
    Even talking about cancer felt hollow and Hallmark, like we were faking sincerity in some overblown daytime soap opera.
    â€˜Everything’s going to be okay,’ I heard myself saying to Gen in a high shrill voice. ‘You’re going to be okay. We’ll get through this.’ Given another half hour without a script I feared I would soon slip into excruciating desk calendar quotes and a montage set to the music of Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes’s ‘Up Where We Belong’ involving the two of us running along a beach in slow motion.
    There were tests, of course. There had to be, it was apparently the regulation thing for people with obscenely lumpy bosoms. I met with Gen and her family at the Royal Melbourne to get the results, all of us full of nervous energy and optimism. We did the crossword and made jokes about the trite photocopied posters advertising African drumming workshops for chemo patients. I imagined the oncologist laughing in our faces as he tore up the test findings, promising with chuckles how he would regale his fellow cancer specialists with the tale of this buffoon from Northcote who had wasted his entire morning falsely believing she had breast cancer.
    â€˜Wait ’til I tell the guys you thought that lump was cancer !’ I pictured him saying, with matey nudges in the ribs of a giggling breast care nurse.
    After an interminable wait, we were ushered into a windowless room. A clumsy young man in a too-short tie introduced himself, saying he was a student doctor and was it alright with us if he sat in on the consultation ‘for learning purposes’. ‘Sure,’ shrugged Gen. The room was already crowded. Her sister was leaning against a disposal bin for used needles. Her mother was next to her at the desk. I was sitting on the examining table, swinging my legs.
    There was a palpable silence now. None of us were able to keep up that forced banter, the lighthearted small talk diverting our attention from the looming destiny of diagnosis. Gen’s mother picked nervously at her fingernails. Gen stared directly ahead, brave, stoic, beautiful. Her blue eyes were very clear. The sequins on her jumper winked beneath the fluorescent light.
    In a spectacular case of failing to read the mood of a room, the student doctor thought now might be as good a time as any to break the ice.
    â€˜Sooooo,’ he opened with. ‘What’s the deali-o here today? What are we in for?’
    We all looked to Gen. This had to be her call. How much she wanted to tell him, the details.
    â€˜I’m waiting to get some results,’ she said finally. ‘I’ve had some . . .