Star Witness

2

TOMÁS

Jesse has a star on his face.

It's weird. I love weird.

I'm holding up my skirt in front of the bathroom mirror, cleaning my new scrape with gritted teeth. This scrape hurts like a bitch. The embedded black dirt is refusing to scrub out, and every attempt is agony. I force my mind elsewhere while I dig at it, constant stream under my breath of fuck fuck fuck fuck.

He has a star on his face, right below the short sideburn in front of his ear. He has red hair, and freckles. I don't think I've ever seen red hair in the flesh before, which, to be fair, is probably because I don't come across a great deal of white people. (Ow, ow, ow.) But my favorite thing is his freckles. He's absolutely covered in them. Watercolor spots. God, I'm so jealous. If I had freckles, I would be exploding out of my skin with perfect happiness, but Jesse is the very opposite of exploding.

I pour alcohol onto a washcloth and press it into the scrape. The sting is like an electric shock; I widen my eyes at my reflection.

He's got a quiet voice. It's not shyness, not quite; to me, it seems like distance. It reminds me of Mia, my sister, who's also determined to remain gray in a colorful world. You know, Mia says it's my fatal flaw that whenever I see someone like that, I make them my project.

"People aren't pieces of paper," she said once. "You can't just unfold every sad one you meet."

To which I responded that I unfolded her. And she rolled her eyes, but she smiled.

I consider it to be a useless effort to hide from happiness. And to tell the truth, I think there are worse fatal flaws.

Like what? Mia would say. Hubris? You have that too.

-

"Mama. Did you know that after you die, the same enzymes that digest your food start to eat you?"

"Tomás, that is atrocious."

I lean back against the wall behind the cushioned exam table. Right now, we're at clinic, waiting for my doctor; we just did PFTs, which basically consist of me exhaling very forcefully into a machine to measure my lung function. It's down by a few percent, which is always disappointing, but I was actually anticipating for it to have dropped lower. I'm on the edge of an exacerbation right now, also known as a flare-up, also known as, I'll probably have to be admitted to the hospital soon. So things are worse, lung function included. This is on the list of things we need to talk to the head doctor of my CF team about. If he ever shows up.

"It's not atrocious. It's just death." I look back down to my library book. In a swift motion, my mama snatches it from me. "Hey!" I say, and when I reach down toward her chair to take it back, she grabs my hand and interlocks our fingers.

"Why can't you ever think about life instead?" she says.

"I have a lot of answers for that."

"I'll also take thinking about normal teenager things. Like pot. Or boys."

CF is part of me.

It's something you're born with, something you spend the vast majority of your life tending to, and something you eventually die from. In essence, it's a faulty gene. My very basic problem is that an overload of mucus accumulates in my body, primarily, of course, in the lungs. I've learned to get along with it, because I have to. At every turn, I'm surrounded by my health--especially after this fall. I have to have a relationship with it.

It's unfair, but we're well past that. Some people are more mortal than others. On the mortal scale, I am in the red zone. I'm an interactive exhibit on decomposition.