We Are All Made of Stars Read Online Free Page B

wrong to be here, taking up a room that someone else needs more than me, and I’ve got things to do.’
    Before the weird kind of limbo that is Marie Francis, there were several weeks in hospital, and a lot of drugs and pain and fear. My fear, my parents’ fear, my friends’ fear, even Ben, who’d come to see me and tell me funny stories about the latest customers in his shop, but I could tell even he was afraid that this was it, because he wasn’t nearly as annoying as he usually is.
    Mum cried quite a lot and Dad brought me things: magazines that I would never read, junk food that I didn’t want, soft toys holding stuffed love hearts proclaiming a series of increasingly inappropriate messages, not to mention the fact that they were soft toys and I am a grown woman, even if I am one who can sometimes wear a bunny-rabbit onesie all day. The last one said ‘You Are My Sweet Heart’ – an on-sale remnant of Valentine’s Day, I presume. I appreciated the sentiment, but still, I tucked the bear right at the back of my growing pile of plush bodies, underneath the blue rabbit that assured me: ‘It’s a boy!’
    Finally I was transferred to the Marie Francis Hospice and Rehabilitation Centre for the final part of my recuperation before they will let me go home. I should have been in the specialist CF unit, but my local hospital had seen a ream of cutbacks that meant cutting two beds, and the other four were full. So, not well enough to go home, and the next CF specialist bed half a country away, they found me a bed here, close to my parents, for my final phase of close-care recuperation. I’ve ended up here, but at least I am not
ending
up here. The drugs worked, my body fought back. I am on the mend, or as mended as I will ever be, considering that I was born faulty.
    I mean, every breath hurts. It’s still a gargantuan effort to suck air and push it out again – a sort of crazy catch-22 where breathing exhausts me so much that I only breathe harder, desperate for more air. But I’m past the worst: the part where my lungs each had less capacity than a can of coke. And, although acid still swirls up my throat and into my mouth from my inefficient gut, and it’s hard to pretend it’s not me giving off noxious gasses when there is no one else around to blame it on, I feel better, a lot better.
    I said no thank you, Death, I’m not ready and I am still alive. And bored out of my mind.
    Stella glances at the notebooks open on my bed, and I hope she can’t read my sappy lyrics upside down; if she can, she’d probably change her stance on euthanasia.
    â€˜You should try to get some sleep. It’s late,’ she says. It’s like her mantra – she says it almost every time she sees me, even though she looks like she never sleeps: she is pale and wraith-like, like what she needs most in the world is a good sunbed.
    â€˜Is it?’ I glance out of the window, but only the reflection of my room bounces back at me out of the dark. ‘It’s hard to tell in here. It’s like time stands still, or the seconds move very, very … slow-ly.’ Stella watches as I stretch the last word out for a long, long time, benignly tolerant of my show of immaturity – because I am, after all, only twenty-one.
    â€˜If you need stuff to do, you could join in with any of the activities in the daytime.’ Stella completes her notes carefully. ‘Or take a look in the library. We may rely on donated books, but we get lots and we always seem to have the latest bestsellers … There’s some good stuff in there, I’ve heard.’
    â€˜Yes, I had a look,’ I say, thinking it would be churlish to mention that I’d already read anything worth reading, and everything else was twaddle, because that would make me seem like a snob. Stella probably wouldn’t guess the large percentage of the limited hours of my life that