Or like, whatever.
The Bellas picked Beca up from the hospital bright and early the next morning: she was discharged and drugged up in time to be helped into the Bellas minivan at 9am.
Chloe’s heart was racing as Stacie helped Beca onto the bus. On the one hand, she was wracked with guilt at having left Beca alone in the hospital the previous night: on the other hand, she knew perfectly well that she would have been chucked out 15 minutes later and wouldn’t have been allowed back onto the ward until 10am the next morning. Chloe cycled between listening to the guilt gnawing at her conscience, and stubbornly denying it on the basis that she had done nothing wrong and had given Beca time to think.
Also sitting in Chloe’s stomach, weighing it down as if it were on a mission to get to her feet, was exactly what she and Beca had talked about last night. Beca. Dying.
Chloe had never really thought about that before, and even as the words had been coming out of her mouth she hadn’t really believed them. Beca was Beca. She was Beca who mixed music, Beca who left the lid off the toothpaste, Beca who she liked to make blush by interrupting her showers, Beca who either slept curled up like a baby or spread eagled on her front, one foot sticking out of the duvet. She was Beca who couldn’t bake for shit but adored chocolate chip cookies, Beca who had stayed up all night with a weeping Legacy the first time the younger girl had failed an exam, Beca who always knew to bring Chloe Galaxy chocolate and watch (500) Days of Summer when she was sad, Beca who’s resting bitch face rivalled any on this Earth but who would secretly replenish the House Emergency Chocolate cupboard and believe no one knew it was her. She was Beca and she was young and alive and strong until suddenly she wasn’t so strong any more. And it had been 5 months but sometimes Chloe still felt like she had whiplash.
As Stacie helped Beca onto the bus – although she was much stronger for the infusion of fluid, electrolytes and sugars the hospital had given her, Beca still struggled with stairs because of her leg – Chloe’s stomach tightened. Now Beca had to choose where to sit. Should Chloe be looking at her, asking with her eyes for the brunette to sit next to her? Or should she be looking out the window, feigning disinterest, allowing the girl to have her space some more. The decision was taken out of Chloe’s hands: her eye caught Beca’s and she instinctively jumped and looked away, cursing the extra squeeze in her stomach as she did so.
She was surprised, therefore, to hear the springs in the seat next to her squeak, and then to feel one of Beca’s many blanket’s brush against her leg as the brunette got herself comfy and put her seat belt on. Chloe turned instinctively, met Beca’s eyes for a second, turned back and fumbled in her bag to find her iPod, determined to be distracted from the brunette sitting beside her.s
“Let’s get this show on the road, bitches!” Amy yelled as soon as she could see that Beca’s seat belt was done up: the Bellas were heading home.
Unlike the journey on the way, the next two hours were almost silent. Although the Bellas hadn’t gone out in the end the previous night, they had crammed into one of the three hotel rooms and drunk themselves silly on boxed wine and Vodkat, and the majority were still sleeping off the substantial hangovers they had acquired. Other than Beca, only Stacie and Aubrey were awake, Aubrey with her head on the taller girl’s shoulder, and both listening to their iPods and staring contemplatively out the window, hands linked in Stacie’s lap. Amy was, of course, awake, but even she was quiet for once, only humming along to the music playing softly on the radio in the cab.
Which left Beca to the relative silence of her own thoughts. The swooshing of cars overtaking them on the motorway, and the low buzz of the minivan’s engines acted as a white noise soundtrack to her ponderings.
Chloe. Cancer. Chloe. Cancer.
It will come as a surprise to no one that Beca hated having cancer. She hated that her body seemed to react particularly badly to the chemo and that she was weak all the time. She hated that she was too tired to mix most of the time, and that it had taken her the almost 5 months since she started chemo to make one mix for each of the Bellas, and an extra one for Chloe. She hated that her voice was so often hoarse, her lips cracked, her mouth too dry to sing. She hated that she wasn’t sure of anything anymore, if she would be able to compete next year, if she would ever finish university. She had filled in her interruption of studies form, wondering if there was any point, if she would ever finish this degree, would ever be a Bella again. Would she ever be the music producer she had always dreamed of being? Would she ever be in a relationship she really cared about? Would she ever get married? Would she ever have kids? She couldn’t carry them, but Beca knew enough about life to know that there is more than one way to make a family. Would she ever be old? Would she pay tax? Would she collect her pension? Would she be the old biddy playing bingo in the town hall complaining about the price of bread and milk and how hard it was to get an appointment with the doctor these days? Would this be it? Would 20 years old and half way through a degree be as far as she ever got in her life?
Beca didn’t know. She couldn’t know.
And Chloe., who’s head had dropped onto Beca’s shoulder, who’s hair was scratching her neck, clouding her thought vision. Bringing Chloe into that uncertainty… Tying her to the knowledge that Beca might not make it. Chloe might say that she understood that Beca might die, but Beca didn’t really believe that she did. Beca’s uncle had died a couple of years ago. He had been sick for 10 months before he died, and the diagnosis he had been given right at the beginning carried a guaranteed death sentence within the year. When he’d been given a diagnosis, it felt like he had died, it felt like the family was grieving. And then he carried on, and he got worse and worse and less and less likehimself, and yet somehow, it never really felt like he was going to die until he did. And then they had to grieve all over again. Chloe, Beca knew, had never had anyone close to her die. Sometimes Beca wished there was someone she could talk to about the dying thing. It isn’t something you think about much when you’re a healthy, it isn’t something that really occurs to you, or that you’ve ever had to consider. Your own mortality. Sometimes Beca wishes they didn’t have to pretend all the time that she was definitely going to be ok. She had had a glimpse of that last night with Chloe, and even in the pain and difficult of the argument, there was that feather-light feeling of relief settling on her shoulders when they both acknowledge, out loud, that this might be it.
Chloe. Who was asleep next to her. Who said she loved her. Could she do this?
For a second, when she first woke up, Chloe forgot. She forgot that the shoulder under her head belonged to the girl she’d kissed, and who had run away, and who had cancer. She forgot even that she lead her team to win the Regional championship, and almost by default, Nationals. She forgot that she was wracked with guilt at leaving her best friend alone on a hospital last night. She was just warm, and comfy, and sleepy, and happy.
And she remembered, and up she sat with a jolt. Looking out the window she realised that they were stationary, that the bus was empty, that Beca was still beside her.
That Beca had waited for her, had let her sleep.
That Beca was talking,
“So I was thinking… Maybe right before my surgery, we could like, go out for dinner, or like, whatever, I mean, if you still want to.”
And as there were no witnesses there is no one to refute Chloe’s denial that at that point she squealed like a tiny child, clapped her hands together, bounced on her seat and gave Beca and smacking kiss on the cheek before saying yes a thousand times. But I think we can have our suspicions, don’t you?