Avi Cantor Has Six Months to Live Read online

  Avi Cantor Has Six Months To Live

  by Sacha Lamb

  Book Smugglers Publishing

  Copyright Information

  Avi Cantor Has Six Months To Live

  Published by Book Smugglers Publishing

  Copyright © 2017 Sacha Lamb

  Cover Illustration by Ira Gladkova

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  978-1-942302-61-2 (Ebook)

  Book Design and Ebook Conversion by Thea James

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written prior permission of the copyright owners. If you would like to use material from the book, please inquire at [email protected]

  For Pip, who wanted to rescue me, and for the kids who need a rescue.

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Avi Cantor Has Six Months To Live

  Inspirations and Influences

  A Chat with the Author

  About the Author

  About the Artist

  Book Smugglers Publishing

  Avi Cantor Has Six Months To Live

  Avi Cantor has six months to live. It’s scrawled on the bathroom mirror in what looks like eyeliner pencil. Maybe the message should scare me, but I’m more worried about how they knew the name I haven’t even told my mother yet. I go over and scrub the Avi off with the end of my sleeve, leaving greasy smudges of pigment. Then I stand there and take in the rest of the message. Six months to live. If it’s meant as an intimidation tactic, if it’s coming from the people who push me around because they can sense that something about me doesn’t fit, then six months is an awfully long time to give me. It would have been better to leave the timeline vague, let me look over my shoulder the whole school year waiting for whatever they plan to do to me.

  On the other hand, if they’re genuinely planning to murder me by the end of the year, maybe I should be frightened.

  But I’m not. I’m just numb. I leave the rest of the message on the mirror and find another bathroom.

  By lunchtime the next day I’m sure the message was left in other places. People keep whispering and looking at me with big, hungry eyes. I hate to think of all these people knowing my secret–secret identity–and so I tell myself they saw Cantor and made an educated guess. At lunch a girl who only ever looks at me when she wants to demolish whatever I said in class asks if I have “cancer, or something.” I ask if she’ll feel bad if I tell her yes. She looks blank for a second and then shrugs.

  I don’t ask her what she’s heard. I don’t want the details. I tell myself it will have blown over by the end of the week. The girl takes her tray elsewhere.

  I’m sick of it by Friday. People have started passing me notes in class with their condolences. I try to ignore it, because it’s a stupid joke, the latest in a long series of stupid jokes, and I don’t get how they can find it entertaining, but I’m beginning to wonder. What if they noticed that I don’t react anymore, and they want to really hurt me? I used to be scared all the time, until scared turned into normal and then normal meant feeling nothing at all. But what if this time they do something my mom will notice? She doesn’t have time to be worried about me.

  Planning an actual murder would be too much effort, right? It’s not as if I’ve ever done anything to any of them. My list of sins is very short, comprising entirely things I can’t do anything about.

  Looks just brown enough that you’re not sure where he’s from. Skips school for weird holidays even though his mom has to work all the time, so he just sits in his room, alone, and eats frozen food from the kosher section. Dresses like a boy, which is a problem, because none of us have any imagination.

  It doesn’t seem like enough to kill somebody.

  I’m walking through the woods by the reservoir, my shortcut home, when I hear footsteps behind me. Not a jogger or a dog-walker. It’s the sound of someone trying to catch up.

  I let my mind flicker through a few images of myself, dead and buried in the woods. All of my classmates saying yes, they’re so, so sorry, they miss me so much. Even though the fact that none of them asked about names means probably none of them remember what mine is supposed to be, aside from an A and an I and a Cantor.

  I turn and see Ian Keane, looking out of breath and concerned. I’ve never talked to Ian, because he has never teased me. We don’t run in the same circles. We have maybe one class together, and we sit nowhere close. Ian is an athlete, but I can’t remember which sport. He’s wearing shorts even though it’s cold and his legs look tanned and hairless. Maybe he swims?

  “Avi,” he says. “Wait up.”

  I don’t. He shouldn’t even know that name, so why should I answer to it? I haven’t told anyone. But if I tell him that, he’ll know it bothers me. I cut him with my eyes and keep walking.

  But Ian’s legs are longer than mine, and he catches up easily, slowing to keep pace once he has.

  “Hey,” he says. “I just wanted to ask how you’re doing.”

  “Why?” I glare at him. Up close, I can see that his ear used to be pierced. It doesn’t make sense with the rest of him. I blink at the scar and forget what I was going to say.

  “Because,” he says. He’s still catching his breath. How far did he run after me? “Because everyone’s been talking about you all week, and I’m worried maybe you’re not ok.”

  “I’m not sick,” I tell him. “It’s some joke. It’s normal.”

  He shakes his head. “No.”

  What does he know? I scowl and turn away again.

  “I mean, it’s not fair to you,” he says. “People shouldn’t joke about that stuff.”

  It’s not worth pointing out that they do anyway.

  “Hey,” he says. “Come do homework with me? I’ll buy you a coffee.”

  I look up at him again, suspicious. I can’t see anything in his face but that wide-eyed concern, but people have been looking at me like that for days. It’s all fake. I’m surprised they got Ian into it, but maybe it’s a rite of passage. He just moved here last year and maybe he doesn’t totally fit in.

  “I promise it’s not a trick, or anything.” He holds out his hands, palms up, empty. Unarmed. “I just think you should have someone–a friend.”

  I wonder if Ian is gay. I wonder if he is being bullied. The earring. The legs. The bright, open face. He looks like somebody who’d be easy to hurt. I wonder if he is going to hand me over in exchange for being left alone. I imagine a group of shadowy ringleaders, even though I know it’s more likely that there aren’t any, that everyone just latches on spontaneously to all the parts of me that don’t fit.

  “Please, Avi,” Ian says. “Please trust me. Listen, I’ll tell you a secret if you trust me.”

  Ian digs in his pocket and retrieves something. A little rectangle of plastic. A driver’s license. He stops me with a hand on my shoulder and holds it up in front of my face, so I take it out of instinct.

  I look at the card. I read it twice, and then I look up at his face. Scars on both earlobes, I can see now that we’re facing each other. He has long eyelashes. He’s biting his lip, waiting for my reaction.

  “Why would you show me that?” I ask. I don’t give him back his license. I put it in my pocket, like I’m holding it hostage. I th
ink Ian knows I wouldn’t use it, though. That’s why he came after me.

  “Because I think maybe you’re the same,” he says. “I mean, you responded to Avi. I looked that up and it said it’s a boy’s name. Like, is it short for Abraham? You’re an old man.”

  I don’t say anything. When did he look up my name, and why? How does he even know my name? I want to scream.

  “Yeah,” he says. “You’re definitely an old man, I mean, look at that face, dude.”

  I flip him off and turn away, keep walking. “I can’t drink coffee. Get me something else.”

  Ian takes me to a cafe I’ve never been in before, because it looks expensive. It is expensive, and it makes me nervous, but he buys me a mug of hot cider and makes me sit down and then he comes back with a collection of pastries. I wonder if he is thinking of me as a wild animal, a creature he can tame with food.

  I’m not sure he’s wrong, if he is.

  “How did you know my name?” I finally ask him, when he sits down. He has a lot of nervous energy, Ian. When he’s not taking a sip from his coffee he’s rearranging the packets of sugar or folding his napkin over and over. He reminds me of a squirrel. I’m the one who should be nervous, I don’t tell him, but then it occurs to me that I never reacted to his secret, not really.

  “Oh,” he says. He glances around the cafe, and I follow his eyes, but there’s no one here except a woman in a pencil skirt who’s working on a laptop on the other side of the room. Ian sort of hunches his shoulders to shut her out when she glances up at us. “Just–I heard it, I guess. Somebody told me.”

  “I haven’t told anyone.”

  “Don’t look at me like that!” He raises his empty hands again. “I promise I didn’t leave those notes or anything.”

  “I know you probably don’t pay attention in class,” I tell him, “But in class I’m called April. So what gives?”

  “Don’t ask me. I didn’t start it, I promise.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to talk to me,” I remind him.

  “It’s just, Avi Cantor,” he says. “It had to be you, right?”

  Sure. It had to be. If anyone at our school is doomed, it had to be me, right?

  “Right,” I say, twisting the word around to cut him.

  “So, I’m right, though, aren’t I? That makes us the same,” he says. “We should be friends.”

  The same. Sure. You, with your freckles and your bright open eyes that your mom probably says are hazel or even green even though they’re basically just brown. You, a team player. You, going by Ian, and getting away with it.

  “Whatever,” I tell him. “We can be friends if you know how to do algebra.”

  Ian sticks to me like a newly-adopted puppy. I ask him why he’s not scared that I’m contagious. Doesn’t he worry that if people see us together, they’ll start to notice the things that made him look at me and think maybe we were the same?

  He says he’s not worried. He thinks him hanging out with me will protect me. He doesn’t think he could ever be a target like me. I don’t know how he can be so confident. If our positions were reversed, I’d stay a mile away from him.

  On Wednesday he brings me back to his house. He kicks off his shoes by the door and yells “Mom!” and a woman yells back “Which one?”

  “Whichever!” Ian takes my hand and leads me through a hallway painted a perfect shade of cream and hung with pieces of art like I’ve only seen in museums. Who are these people? “Mom, I brought Avi.”

  I suppose it makes sense that he would have told his parents about me. I should have probably told my mom about him, but I never see her. She’s asleep while I’m at school, and at work when I’m not. I’m not sure when was the last time we had a real conversation.

  Ian’s mom, whichever, is in her bright, polished kitchen, chopping cucumbers. She’s barefoot and wearing a long skirt. She has dark curly hair and she’s browner than I am. I mean, she looks nothing like Ian.

  “Avi!” She swoops down and kisses me, left cheek, right cheek. “We’ve heard so much about you!”

  “This is my mom number one,” Ian says, stealing a slice of cucumber. “Rosa.”

  I feel very small and out of place in this house, like a rat that has somehow snuck into a high-end hotel. Ian’s house is made of sunshine, Ian’s mother is made of sunshine, Ian is made of sunshine. What am I doing here?

  “Number two mom and my sister are out somewhere, I guess,” Ian says.

  “She needs a dress for her recital,” says number one mom Rosa. Because these are the kind of people who have recitals. What am I doing here?

  “You ok?” Ian says, squeezing my hand, but he doesn’t wait for a response. “We were going to do homework. Can he stay for dinner?”

  I want to say, no, I can’t. I don’t belong here. But Rosa says yes, so I stay for dinner.

  Neither of them trips up for even a second over the pronoun. Neither do mom number two or Ian’s impossibly beautiful African-American sister, who plays the violin. They just act like it’s normal, like a boy can be any old shape he wants and all they see when they look at him is the boy that he is.

  After dinner, Rosa burns some herbs in a bronze bowl and tells me it’s a blessing. To keep the demons away. I didn’t realize I had demons.

  People at school haven’t given up on the joke. Avi Cantor has six months to live. Someone leaves a calendar on my locker, counting down the days. Ian puts it in his backpack and burns it after school, on the concrete retaining wall by the reservoir.

  “A Viking funeral,” he says. “Don’t tell my moms. They don’t know I have a lighter.”

  “This girl asked me today how come I’m hanging out with you, if I’m a lesbian,” I tell him. “And I’m pretty sure they’ve decided it’s AIDS.”

  He looks at me. His eyes are deep, deep, deep. Why did I think he was so easy to read, the first time I met him?

  “Don’t ask if I’m ok,” I tell him, sharply.

  He doesn’t. He just looks at me with those big sad eyes for a long time, and then he puts his hand down next to mine on the concrete, so our fingers are touching. No hesitation, like that’s just where both our hands belong.

  We sit there for a long time, and no one says anything. Ian’s fingers are warmer than mine. I can feel the warmth creeping up my arm, bit by bit, until if I close my eyes I can imagine it’s not just our hands touching, and it scares me, but it feels good, also.

  “Someday, though,” he says, when it’s been long enough to almost forget what we were talking about. “You will be ok, someday.”

  It scares me that I want to believe him.

  His mom, Alice, tries to give me some of his old clothes, when he’s out of the room. I think she noticed the tear on my jeans that I keep picking at. I think she knows I’ve been wearing the same pair of jeans for two weeks. I wonder if she and Rosa talk about me, at night, when they’re in bed together in that huge, king-sized bed with so many blankets and pillows it looks like you could drown in them, in the room that smells like a perfume Ian tells me is linden flower.

  I wonder if they talk about how their son picked me up out of nowhere, and now I’m here all the time. I wonder if they ask each other what my home life is like, why I never have to call a parent to ask for permission for anything, ever. I wonder if when they keep refilling my plate without asking, it’s on purpose. I wonder if they want to adopt me, add me to their collection of mismatched children.

  “I can’t wear my boyfriend’s clothes at school,” I tell her. “People will make fun of me.”

  Her eyes get big, I think because until I said boyfriend even I didn’t know that’s what we were. Then her eyes get sad. Everyone in his family has such sad eyes.

  I’m not a stray kitten, I want to tell her, but I don’t want to hurt her feelings. I look down at the granite counter-top and when she asks what to make for dinner I tell her I can’t eat spicy food and I’m lactose intolerant and also, if I had my way, you know, in an ideal world, I wish
I could keep kosher.

  Their whole family are vegetarians, anyway. It’s not a problem.

  Apparently nothing I do is a problem for them. I’m not sure I like it. It makes me feel unsettled, like I don’t quite know what shape I am anymore.

  The kids at school build a little memorial service on my desk. Teddy bears, flowers, candles. Ian is horrified when I call it charming.

  “Practice for your real funeral,” someone tells me. “We’re going to miss you so much.”

  I don’t think he even knows who I am.

  I stuff everything in my backpack and line it up on the windowsill at home. The bears make my room like a little less empty, a little less lonely.

  “You’re so morbid, Avi,” Ian says, when I tell him so later when we are hanging out at the reservoir .

  “Literally,” I tell him. “Morbid means dying.”

  “Shut up. You’re not dying. I put a magic spell on you so can never die.”

  I know he’s joking, but I tell him, half-serious, “I’d like it better if you put a magic spell on everybody else and made them die.”

  “I can’t,” he says, like he’s given it real thought. “Avi, that would be terrible. I can’t.”

  “God, I know. I was joking.” I wasn’t. “I know magic isn’t real.”

  Ian chews on his lip for a minute, like he’s thinking through something really difficult. And then he says, with deep conviction, almost angry at me, “Magic is real.”

  “So help me make a curse, maybe.”

  “I can’t,” he says. “I can’t.” Like I really am asking him to do something terrible.

  I like Ian so much. But I don’t understand him.

  He leans over so our foreheads are touching, and he says, really quiet, “You should want to not die, Avi.”

  “Everyone wants to not die,” I say, not believing it.