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Prologue

The cancer would take its tiinning Her lymphoma wouldn’t be like what happens to someone’s random uncle, where he finds a weird lue four, and baht it sooner,” everyone would say

Sasha and I kneouldn’t be like that

Her cancer would take a slow journey, infla her lymph nodes one by one until she could connect the painful dots all over her body like tourist stops on a road map to death The treat Sasha’s adoptive parents’ savings account Luckily, they could afford it

It was clear from the moment Sasha returned from that fateful doctor visit that cancer was the villain in ic life story As we sat on the brick retaining wall in front of her house a week after the news, Sasha told me not to think of it like that She didn’t want the cancer to be the bad guy here She didn’t want to give it credit for anything,her life, because she was still alive and she still had things to accomplish

That lish class, we’d all had to recite our villain narratives The assign We had to take a known villain, soeneral population hated, and write five hundred words fro the audience that they weren’t actually villains at all Mrs Rakoanted us to make our villains relatable, maybe even characters worthy of pity

I had chosen Gaston froers shook as I read my narrative aloud in front of the classroo, intelligent wife There were tooover him, but he wanted a wo of hihtful as she? Was he really so bad?

Sasha winked atwith pride as I walked back to ht behind hers

“Told you you’d rock it,” she whispered as I slid back into er than you think you are”

Sasha had been the first to read her narrative, on pageant ht didn’t bother her — she didn’t exactly revel in it, but she wasn’t bothered As someone as pretty much universally loved in school, she was used to people noticing her

Matt Phillips took small strides to the front of the class He looked eventhe middle of the room where Sasha and I sat

“Cancer, by Matt Phillips,” he said, sing and then glancing briefly toward Sasha Her shoulders lifted

Matt was in a constant battle for valedictorian with Celeste Cho, so it goes without saying that his narrative was incredibly ritten He spoke in first person, as cancer

Cancer si its children as cells and tumors so they could spread and have a happy fa — it wanted to live Just as huen and fresh water, just as they eat the flesh of animals to survive, so did the cancer need flesh to thrive Human flesh

It didn’t mean any har the body’s ability to live In fact, it was sorry it had to come to this

After all, cancer just wanted to feel the thrill of living, just like we all do

The class was deadly silent during his reading — even the students busy on their phones had shifted their attention toward him When he was finished and everybody in the room had chills from head to toe, he looked directly at Sasha, his shoulders slu into his bottom lip