Zac and Mia Read Online Free Page B

doesn’t snore—that she barely even sleeps—but I know the truth. When she’s at her noisiest, I’m at my most awake.
    It’s not Mum’s fault: it’s the 3 a.m. curse. I wake up busting, go for the third slash of the night, then can’t get back to sleep.
    Three is the worst hour. It’s too dark, too bright, too late, too early. It’s when the questions come, droning like flies, nudging me one by one until my mind’s full of them.
    Am I a miner? Addicted to late-night television shopping? A long-distance skier? A musician? A juggler?
    It’s 3.04 and I’m wondering who I am.
    The marrow’s German—the doctors were allowed to tell me that much. I’ve had German marrow for fourteen days, and though I’m not yet craving pretzels or beer or lederhosen, it doesn’t mean I’m not changed in other ways. Alex and Matt have nicknamed me ‘Helga’, and it’s caught on. Now the whole footy team thinks it’s hilarious that I could be part pretzel-baking, beer-swilling, plait-swinging-Fräulein from Bavaria with massive
die Brust
.
    But is it true? Could I be?
    I try to catch myself being someone else.
    I know it sounds like a B-grade thriller
—When Marrow Attacks!
—but if my own marrow’s been wiped out of my bones then replaced with a stranger’s, shouldn’t that change who I am? Isn’t marrow where my cells are born, to bump their way through the bloodstream and to every part of me? So if thebirthplace of my cells now stems from another human being, shouldn’t this change everything?
    I’m told I’m now 99.9 per cent someone else. I’m told this is a good thing, but how can I know for sure? There’s nothing in this room to test myself with. What if I now kick a footy with the skill of a German beer wench? What if I’ve forgotten how to drive a ute or ride a quad bike? What if my body doesn’t remember how to run? What if these things aren’t stored in my head or muscles, but down deeper, in my marrow? What if … what if all of this is just a waste of time and the leukaemia comes back anyway?
    At 3.07 I switch on the iPad, dim the brightness, and track my way through the maze of blogs and forums, safe from the prying eyes of Mum. Snoring in the recliner beside me, she’s oblivious to my dirty secret.
    In 0.23 seconds, Google tells me there are over 742 million sites on cancer. Almost 8 million are about leukaemia; 6 million on acute myeloid leukaemia. If I google ‘cancer survival rate’ there are over 18 million sites offering me numbers, odds and percentages. I don’t need to read them: I know most of the stats by heart.
    On YouTube, the word ‘cancer’ leads to 4.6 million videos. Of these, 20,000 are from bone marrow transplant patients like me, stuck in isolation. Some are online right now. It may be 3.10 a.m. in Perth, but it’s 7.10 a.m. in Auckland, 3.10 p.m. in Washington, and 8.10 p.m. in Dublin. The world is turning and thousands of people are awake, updating their posts on the bookmarked sites that I trawl through. I’ve come toknow these people better than my mates. I can understand their feelings better than my own. Somehow, I feel like I’m intruding. Yet I watch their video uploads with my headphones in. I track their treatment, their side effects and successes. And I keep a tally of the losses.
    Then I hear the flush of the toilet next door.
    The new girl and I have one thing in common, at least.

4
ZAC
    Fourteen days post-transplant, and it’s official. I am hideous.
    I’d known my face had puffed up—steroids will do that to you—but I hadn’t realised how much. Either Nina has switched my ensuite mirror with one from the House of Mirrors, or my head has been replaced with a giant Rice Bubble.
    Why hasn’t anyone told me? Why have they been pussyfooting around the obvious deformity that is my head? Only two days ago Dr Aneta called me a ‘hottie’, and I’d assumed she wasn’t referring to my temperature. Nina was talking me up too, and took my photo with