Page 37 of Summer Reading

“Okay, maybe just the PG version,” I said. “For the record, it was ah-mazing.”

She grinned. “Are you like boyfriend and girlfriend now?”

“No.” I shook my head. “We’re both here temporarily, and he’s a book person and I’m...”

“Not,” she said. I appreciated her simple acceptance sans judgment.

“Exactly,” I said. “If we have anything, it’s strictly a summer fling sort of thing.”

“Are you sure?” she said. “The way he was looking at you at the happy hour was not a ‘swipe right for a fun night’ look. It was definitely more.”

“But I can’t offer him more,” I said. “I mean, I have no idea where I’ll be in a few months.”

“So, you don’t think you’ll stay past summer?” she asked. She sounded forlorn.

“I can’t,” I said. “I have to get back to work... somewhere.”

“Oh.” She glanced down at her hands.

I didn’t know what to say, so I studied the book truck behind her. I recognized the stack of books from the colors of their spines. They were the same cancer books she’d been looking at the other day.

It hit me like a punch to the face that she had lied to me. She wasn’t looking up cancer information for a patron. It was for herself. Oh no, Em!

I couldn’t believe she hadn’t told me. I was her friend. And I had a million questions. What type of cancer was it? Had she been to the doctor? What had they said? Was it bad? Was she going to die? I couldn’t breathe.

Em looked up from her hands and followed the line of my gaze and then back at me. She turned a faint shade of pink. She was embarrassed. Embarrassed? About cancer?

Of course I stood there like an idiot, saying nothing. How could I? She hadn’t told me. I knew it shouldn’t have felt like a betrayal, after all health is a personal thing, but it did.

“Em, is everything—”

“Ben said that he approved the teen cooking program,” Em interrupted me. I couldn’t tell if she did it on purpose or not. “We should talk about that, you know, make a plan.”

“Okay,” I said. If she didn’t want to talk, I couldn’t force her, but I could be here. I could try and take her mind off things at least for a moment. But why hadn’t she told me? It occurred to me that it was because I had been so self-absorbed with my own career drama of late, I hadn’t given her a chance. Ugh.

Em grabbed a pad and pen and said, “Come on. We can work at the table over there, and I can still monitor the desk.”

I followed and took a seat across from her at the wooden table. The chair was hard, and I shifted trying to find a comfortable position. There wasn’t one. Guilt for being such a shitty friend was like a thumbtack on my seat making me restless and unable to sit still.

“We need a snappy name for the program,” she said. “Like ‘Tasty Teens.’ ”

“Sounds like a cannibal support group,” I said.

She huffed a laugh. “Fair point. What do you have?”

“I have a question,” I said.

She glanced down at her notebook, across the room, up at the ceiling, anywhere but at me.

“I think you know what I’m going to ask,” I said.

“I do,” she said. “And I don’t have an answer for you.”

“Okay, then let’s start with questions you can answer. Have you been to the doctor?”

“Not yet,” she said.

“Em, if you have concerns, if you think you have cancer, you have to go.”

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