Invincible Read Online Free Page B

accepted my decision. I get to go home in a couple of days. It took Dr. Jacobs and Dan describing in great detail how much pain and suffering I would experience if we went ahead with treatment. Did my parents really want to trade the slight possibility of my living a few extra months if the time I had left was going to be so miserable? Did they really think I wasgoing to make it, or were they afraid of accepting the inevitable fact that they were going to have to let me go? Dan held my mom while she sobbed, and she looked so small in his long arms.
    When she finally came up for air, she could not look at me. “Okay,” she finally said. I looked out the window. My mother had just given permission for me to die.
    We’ve found a new peace since then. Mom still breaks down in tears sometimes and I still float away, but mostly we’re keeping our shit together as a family. Telling Stella and Caleb wasn’t as hard as I thought it’d be, maybe because we already sort of accepted that a condition of our friendship is that one of us could die at any second. We hugged and shed a few tears, then we vowed not to talk about it anymore.
    Telling Kasey was the hardest because, unlike Stella and Caleb, she did not have the courtesy to save her strong feelings for later, so I had to comfort her through her meltdown. I was the one telling her everything is going to be okay, that life will go on just fine without me. That’s a strange position to be in, comforting someone else about your own death.
    But none of this comes close to what will be the most terrible part of all. I don’t know how I’m going to tell Will that I’m giving up on the promise we made that we’d get through this together, that I’m leaving him to get through this alone, without me.
    â€œCan you believe this shit?” Stella says, showing me a page featuring a scantily clad teen holding a math textbook with a confused look on her face. She has written in a thought bubble above the model’s head: Keep me stupid so I don’t ask questions. “I can’t believe this is legal. It’s like child porn.”
    â€œI’m sure she’s eighteen,” I say, grateful for the interruption of the depressing mess inside my head. Stella rolls her eyes.
    â€œHey guys,” Caleb says as he walks through the door with two construction-paper hearts. He hands one to each of us with a big dopey grin on his face.
    It’s still shocking to see him sometimes, so unlike the rest of us. We are all so obviously sick, but Caleb still seems healthy. He walks around the halls unassisted most of the time. He goes around cheering up little kids. Most of the time, he doesn’t seem sick at all, definitely not sick enough to be an inpatient. But then he’ll disappear for a day or two with a migraine that makes him unable to move, or he’ll get really confused all of a sudden and forget how to talk and we have to get a nurse to take him away. But he always comes back cheerful and full of hope, even with double vision, even with sores in his mouth from the radiation. Brain cancer can be weird like that. One day you’re doing your math homework, then all of a sudden you forget your name. Then you have a seizure and end up here, where doctors find a tumor the size of a Ping-Pong ball in your head.
    Caleb’s brain cancer was “cured” at age six, so he had a whole nine years of believing he was done with it, nine years to forget what being sick felt like, to forget the fear, nine years to create a normal life. He had nine years to feel grateful, to believe every day was a miracle. But at fifteen, just a semester into his first year of high school, just a week after getting cast in the school musical, he found out God made a mistake. He took back the cure. And yet Caleb still believes in Him, now more than ever.
    The heart Caleb made me has a white doily stuck to it and several sparkly heart stickers. He