Work Text:
Ravi’s best friend in the entire world– and his world is very small as a four-year-old– is May Grant.
When he’d first moved to California, and into a bigger house with a nice neighborhood, Ravi hadn’t been very sure about the entire thing.
“But why did we have to move, Amma ?” He complains quietly, holding her hand as they walk up their neighbor’s driveway, his feet plodding against the concrete.
“Your papa got a job, remember?” Maelani says, patient, as she always is with Ravi. “So we had to move to California.”
Ravi stares at the potted plants on the rocks beside the sidewalk and wants to say something else, maybe about how the sun is too hot against his skin and that he’d like to go back to Texas when they arrive at the red-painted door. His mother raises her hand and gently taps on it, carefully balancing the plate of cookies.
He still doesn’t think it was very fair his older sister, Anaya, didn’t have to come along to introduce herself to the neighbors. But she had claimed that she had to get ready for a sleepover, already having dozens upon dozens of friends at her new school.
Hiding behind his mom’s legs, Ravi just barely peeks out from behind her as the door swings open. A woman, with kind eyes, smiles unsurely at them.
“Hi?”
“Hello,” Maelani smiles gently. “We’re your new neighbors, we baked you some cookies,”
“Oh, welcome to the neighborhood!” She says, carefully taking the plate. “I’m Athena, here, come on in, it’s way too hot outside for you to stand out in the sun.”
“Thank you,” His mom laughs and shuffles into the walkway, smiling at Athena brightly. The door shuts behind them, and Ravi silently wonders if he threw a fit they could go back to their house.
Athena’s gaze falls to Ravi, giving a small smile to him. “Hi there, what’s your name?”
Immediately, he hides his face in his Amma’s knee.
Maelani chuckles, gently combing her fingers through his curly hair. “This is Ravi, he’s a little shy.”
Ravi dares a glance up, somewhat encouraged by his mom’s soft touch. “Hi,” He whispers ever so quietly. Athena smiles at him again, which he tries to shakily return but listen, he’s only four years old and can’t be expected to be so confident when it comes to strangers.
Clearly, that’s not how May is. The soft pitter-patter of footsteps against tile behind him makes him turn to look at the stairs. A little girl, around the same height as him, peers back at him with no fear, lighting up like the sun outside.
“Hi!” She says loudly, slightly hurting Ravi’s ears. “Who are you?”
May steps closer, mud all over her hands from playing in the backyard– and he hears Athena groan and his mother stifle a laugh– her smile is aimed at Ravi, and he slowly steps away from his mom’s leg some more.
“I’m Ravi Panikkar,” He’s just learned how to spell his last name, and sometimes he hears his papa introduce himself as Nadeesh Panikkar, so it’s only natural he echoes it. “What’s your name?”
His voice is soft still, but he’s engaging with someone at least, which probably has Maelani beaming, since he’s never really been one to make friends. At least not as fast as his older sister does. They’re only four years apart, but Anaya still sees him as basically a baby, which doesn’t seem very fair.
“I’m May Grant.” May says, bouncing on her toes slightly. Her blue dress swishes at the motion, and he hesitantly smiles. “Do you want to come play outside with me?”
Ravi looks up at his mom, who nods her head reassuringly. “Go ahead, baby.”
Nervously releasing his hold on her jeans, Ravi takes May’s muddy hand that she outstretches to him and lets himself be slowly pulled away.
May holds his hand all the way to the sliding door which is open to let the cool breeze in– and probably to let May come and go into the house– and they slip outside into the garden.
“How old are you?” May fills the silence with ease, something he’s never been able to do, though he finds he doesn’t mind answering May’s questions much.
“I’m four.” Ravi says, allowing some pride to seep into his voice. Afterall, he is kind of a big kid now. Though it would be more impressive to be able to raise all five of his fingers on one hand.
“Me too,” She grins, and he finds himself smiling right back. “That’s so cool. Are you going to be in my class?”
“I don’t know,” Ravi answers honestly, as they sit down on the porch’s ground where May’s toys are scattered everywhere. She has a dinosaur that catches his eye, but he doesn’t make a move to grab it since his Amma always told him to ask for something that isn’t his before he touches it. “We only just moved to our house…”
“Where did you move from?” May’s eyebrows furrow, her legs folded beneath her.
“Texas.” He says, hesitantly picking at his jeans as he criss cross applesauces his legs. Ravi looks up at May again, who seems excited to talk to him. It’s not something that happens very often, at least not at his old preschool. Maybe California is different?
“Is it hot there?”
He nods. Looking at the spread of May’s toys in front of him, he’s not really sure what kind of games she likes to play. There’s a Barbie, a dinosaur toy, building blocks, and a big plastic excavator with handfuls of mud in the bucket. Ravi points to the Barbie doll.
“I have a sister who plays with those,” He says, and May beams at him.
“You have a sister? I don’t have any siblings,” May frowns for a second, barreling on. “But it must be nice to have one.”
“Not really,” He admits. A little surprised at himself, he picks at the mud on his skin, smeared from holding May’s hand. “Well, sometimes. She doesn’t like to play with me anymore,”
May hesitates, and then shuffles closer to him on her knees. “Well, I’ll play with you then. I don’t like to play by myself either.”
“Okay,” Ravi whispers, staring at May with a hint of awe. Was this how everyone else felt making friends? Finding it so easy? “What do you want to play?”
“I’m using mud to stick my blocks together to make a house for Barbie. And her pet dinosaur. Do you wanna help?”
He can hear his Amma talking with Athena in the living room, the two of them laughing and offering stories between each other like they’d known each other forever.
Ravi definitely has a new friend. A new best friend, and her name is May Grant.
He runs over to his front door, sitting on the floor and yanking on his shoes with the speed of a mad-man.
“Slow down, Ravi!” Maelani says distractedly, helping Anaya braid her hair. He can’t slow down though, it’s May’s birthday. Her sixth birthday. And it was only a few days after Christmas– four days exactly, because he made his mom check off the calendar until May’s special day– but May was finally going to be the same age as him again.
At least for two months.
“We’re going to be late Amma,” Ravi whines, messily tying his shoes. One bunny ear, two bunny ears, loop it...and, he frowns at his lopsided bow, but shrugs. “It’s May’s birthday, we can’t be late!”
And they were going to be late because of Anaya, who insisted on coming. He wasn’t sure why, after all, May was his best friend, not hers.
“We’re literally only next door, Ravi. We won’t be late.” Anaya says confidently as Maelani snaps the hair tie into place. He rolls his eyes, pushing himself up and off the floor. His new converses that he got for the holiday squeak against the wooden floors. Anaya thinks she knows everything just because she’s ten now.
“We could be,” Ravi fires back, and Maelani hushes them both.
“Both of you calm down,” She says. “Ravi, do you have May’s gift?”
He nods his head up and down quickly. “Yeah, can we go now?”
Anaya runs her hand down her braid, feeling it to see if it looks good. Ravi thinks she looks pretty, but he’s not saying that to her.
“Okay, you can head over,” Maelani says, and he instantly darts away. “Walk, please!”
“I will,” Ravi shouts back, maybe lying just a tiny bit and shuts their door closed behind him. His feet thud against the driveway as he runs all the way over to May’s house, her gift clutched in his hands, a tiny paper bag banging against the side of his legs every so often.
He can’t wait to give it to her.
He skids to a stop at the red front door, smiling as he taps his knuckles against it. There’s a few more cars in the driveway than he’s used to, all of May’s other friends from school invited. He was friends with some of them too, but hardly in the way he is with May.
May is his best friend, and she gets him like no other. Why would he need more friends?
Athena opens the door and he beams. “Hi Mrs. Athena.” Ravi waves with his hand holding the bag, a little awkwardly, loud crinkling echoing from it.
“Hi Ravi,” Athena smiles, all too used to the image of Ravi standing at her door. May and Ravi are inseparable. If one of them wasn’t at school, the teachers would ask them where the other one was. If Ravi got permission to go to the park, he would run straight to May’s house to ask her to come with. “Come on in, May is in the dining room.”
He smiles and follows Athena in. “My mom is coming over soon,” Ravi says. “She’s bringing some jalebi.”
“Jalebi? Sounds delicious.” She ruffles Ravi’s hair, making him groan and fix it because he styled it real good for May’s party.
“It is,” He says and waves at Athena before running down the stairs to see May. “Bye Athena!”
He hears her laugh but doesn’t have time to stop and figure out what about, because he sees May. She’s smiling with another girl, Anna, from their class but that doesn’t stop him. At least not much. He does have the decency to slow down some.
“Happy Birthday, May!” Ravi shouts.
She turns and squeals as she sees him, and Ravi throws his arms around her, hugging her tight. Anna giggles and whispers something into another kid’s ear nearby. Releasing May, he grins. “You’re six now!”
“I know!” May eagerly responds.
Ravi beams at her, and thrusts out his hand with the party bag– that’s a little banged up from his mad dash to here– towards her.
“I got you a present,”
“Thank you!” She smiles right back at him, taking the bag from his hands and curiously peeking in. “Dad, can I open it now?” May turns around to look at her dad, Michael, who is getting some snacks for everyone ready in the kitchen.
Ravi turns his gaze to May’s dad as well, trying his best to look convincing, with a shy smile and bouncing on his toes. “Please?” He draws out the ‘e’ at the end.
Micheal laughs, and who can stand two sets of puppy dog brown eyes begging for something? Certainly not him. “Go ahead, baby, just clean up the mess when you’re done.”
“Yes!” May cheers and takes his hand, leading him over to the rug by the couch. Ravi has lost count of how many times he’s laid on this rug, watching movies with May after playing outside until it started to grow dark, staying for dinner most of the time. At least after he ran back and checked with his mom.
“I think you’re going to like it,” Ravi declares. Afterall, he had gone to the store with his Papa and picked it out himself. It cost a full fifteen dollars, taken straight from his piggy bank. Well, his dinosaur bank. It wasn’t really a pig.
She smiles at him and carefully pulls the tissue paper out of the bag– literal tissues, because he didn’t have the fancy colored kind at home– and grabs the small box at the bottom with a confused furrow of her brows.
“What is it?” She asks.
“Open it up!”
He wiggles impatiently as she tugs at the top, the front door opening again, and he can hear his Amma and Anaya’s voices talking to Athena. May lets out a gasp, staring at his present.
It’s a little bracelet with a silver chain, a heart threaded in the middle. The heart is engraved with May’s name and a tiny extra heart below it, because she’s his best best friend, after all. “It was really hard to find your name, but I did it.” Ravi grins.
May’s arms wrap around his neck and tackles him to the ground, the two bursting out in giggles.
“Thank you, Ravi!” May shouts, sitting back up and carefully tugging her bracelet out of the box. “Mom, can you help me put it on?” She says as Athena walks down the steps with Maelani, who is smiling fondly at the two. Anaya even cracks a small smile at him.
“Of course, May.” Athena carefully leans over and snaps the clip onto the bracelet, leaving it secured to May’s wrist. “This is a really pretty bracelet, Ravi.” She says, smiling at him.
His cheeks feel warm, and he giggles. “Thank you.”
“Why don’t you show May the second part of your gift?” Maelani says to Ravi, and he straightens up. He’d forgotten all about that!
“Oh, right!” May turns quizzically to him, pausing in her admiring of the bracelet. Ravi sticks out his wrist to her, tugging his sweater’s sleeve up to his elbow.
A silver chain glints on his wrist too, matching with May in every way but their engravings. Nadeesh, Ravi’s dad, had to pick out a blank heart bracelet for him because no matter how hard they looked, a bracelet with Ravi’s name was nowhere to be seen.
So, the engraving of his name and the heart below it was…a little lopsided and scrawled. His Papa had personally engraved it for him, so he could match with May.
“We match!” Ravi says, just in case May didn’t understand. “It’s just like BFF bracelets– oomph!”
May has tackled him to the rug again, hugging him tighter than she ever has before.
“I love them, Ravi!” She says into his shoulder, and Ravi hugs her back just as tight.
“Time for cake!” Michael shouts from the kitchen, yet despite how much May likes cake, she still takes her sweet time letting go.
Ravi goes down the yellow slide right after May, almost crashing straight into her back as she scrambles to get out of the way in time. He flops to the playground’s warm sand dramatically, and May giggles.
“Ravi! Come on, get up!” She pokes his ribs, which makes him squirm ticklishly. May sticks her hand out for Ravi to grab, which he does, and allows her to pull him up from the ground, bits of sand sticking to his shirt.
“I’m up!”
It’s a warm, sunny day and a perfect day for a picnic and playdate at the park. Ravi looks at where his mom and Athena have set up the blanket on the grass, talking quietly together. It looks serious, and he isn’t entirely sure what to make of that. His Amma keeps looking more worried every day, and he thinks it has something to do with how he keeps waking up in pain at night.
Ravi would stop doing that if he could, really. He doesn’t like making his mom sad.
May brushes her hand down his t-shirt, shaking off the grains of sand from his clothes with a huff. “What’s the matter?”
Ravi furrows his brows, turning back to her. “What do you mean?”
“You’re being weird,” May says. He frowns.
“No, I’m not,” He retorts, awkwardly folding his arms, one hand coming up to cup his sore elbow.
“Yes you are,” She shoots right back and Ravi groans.
The one bad thing about being May Grant’s best friend is that she never ever drops anything.
Ravi is slightly out of breath just from standing up and talking so he wanders off to the other side of the playground– away from his Amma because he doesn’t want to hear her worry about him– and slumps against the rough bark of a tree. May follows right behind him, her frown more worried.
“What’s the matter, Ravi?” She says softly, and sits down in the dirt right beside him, her jeans scuffed green with grass stains.
He swallows. “My bones really hurt,” His chin tips down to rest on his knees. “And I keep waking up crying. So my mom is sad.”
May looks like she doesn’t know what to say to that. “...Why do your bones hurt?”
“I don’t know,” Ravi whispers brokenly.
He takes a deep breath, rubbing at his elbow again to try and soothe the bone-deep ache that won’t go away. No matter how many ice packs, hot packs, and kisses his Amma puts on it, it still hurts.
May scuffles in the dirt beside him, moving so she’s right beside him now.
Her hand gently rests on his shoulder, and he turns his head to look at her. May peers at him with the softest eyes, and a weak smile stretched on her face. Her hair is frizzy from rolling around on the ground with him earlier. “It’s going to be okay, Ravi…”
Ravi blinks back the tears that bubble up in his eyes. “Okay,” he says, trusting her. Maybe it’s just growing pains. He’s heard some kids in their class complaining about them, now that they’re in second grade and seven years old.
“Where does it hurt the most?” May asks, and right now he points to his elbow, though at night it radiates through his entire body until he can’t move an inch without crying and begging his mom to make it stop.
Without hesitating, she leans forward and places a gentle kiss to his skin, right where he pointed and then pulls back.
“There, all better,” May declares, her face pinched with determination, like if she believes it enough it would be true.
Ravi smiles at his best friend and tries to believe that it does feel all better.
At least for now.
“Ravi, May!” Maelani says, walking over to them with a worried frown. “Why aren’t you two playing? Are you okay?”
He doesn’t want to worry his mom anymore, but before he can say it’s nothing, May speaks for him. “Ravi got a little out of breath. And his elbow hurt, so we were just resting,” She replies, using her hands to push herself up off the ground.
Ravi follows suit, ignoring the twinge of pain everywhere and what feels like creaking metal where his bones should be. “Sorry, Amma.” He whispers, though he’s not really sure what he’s sorry for.
Maelani just frowns at him, pushes the curls away from his forehead and plants a kiss to his temple gently. His mom is always gentle with him, and for some reason it only makes him feel worse.
That night, his mom tucks him in like he always does– despite how he’s started to complain how embarrassing it is– and turns off the light in his room.
The nightlight gives off an eerie glow, and he burrows his body underneath the comforter more. He’s almost scared to go to sleep. Not because of monsters like every other kid believes in, but because he’s scared of the monster that grows in his bones will ambush him in his sleep, and drag him kicking and screaming back into the waking world where his mother will panic and cry with him.
Ravi really wants his mom to get some rest tonight, because she always seems so tired because of him. So he tries to stay awake. He counts on his fingers about things he wants to do with May. He thinks of ways to annoy his older sister tomorrow. He tosses his ideas of what he wants to make his Father’s Day card look like at school back and forth, which is happening in school on Tuesday.
But eventually, the day of playing in the sand and running around the park catches up to him, and his eyes slip closed.
The pain is the first thing he feels that night, when he wakes up screaming and begging for his mom to help him. The monster has sunk its teeth deep into his flesh and torn it open, gnawing on his bones with the ferocity of a hyena. “Amma!” He howls in pain, tears leaking down his cheeks.
His hair is stuck to his skin from sweat and he feels his mom before he sees her through the blurriness of his tears.
Her hand is cold as it brushes against his forehead. “It’s okay, I’m here, baby, I’m here,”
She kisses his temples over and over again, and Ravi wishes and wishes that it made the pain stop. But it just hurts . He sobs and weeps, and twists in his bedsheets, soaked with sweat.
“Mama, mama, it hurts.” He cries.
“What’s wrong with Ravi, Papa?” He hears Anaya ask from the hallway, barely peeking her head into his room. Tears gather in her eyes too.
“Go to your room, Anaya!”
“Shh, shh, it’s okay, Ravi, breathe, breathe…”
He can’t breathe, it hurts so much. Through he sobs, he blows out a breath. “Amma, it hurts!”
His Papa calls 9-1-1 not even two minutes later.
It isn’t growing pains, that much Ravi knows. No one goes to the hospital for growing pains.
Osteosarcoma. It’s a long word, and Ravi’s not sure how to pronounce it, despite how many times he hears it in one day. It’s a type of cancer, his Papa explains to him. Gently, like how his mom does because she’s too busy trying to hide her tears to answer his questions when the doctors leave.
He’s admitted into the hospital, and there’s so many scans, and tests that Ravi wishes he could have been a big boy and pretended it didn’t hurt, so he would have never woken up his mom and they would have never gone to the hospital.
Even Anaya is nicer to him, which when she’s eleven is a feat in itself. She doesn’t say mean things to him anymore, and even shares her McFlurry with him, which she always refused to do before. Though he’d like to keep the ice cream, he wishes she’d go back to hurting his feelings.
Ravi hasn’t even been able to see May for weeks.
It’s cold in the hospital, and his chest hurts from where they’d inserted something they called a port. It was for his chemotherapy, which would help make the monster in his bones go away. His mom keeps talking with Papa about getting a job to help with the money, and Ravi is old enough now to know it’s his fault.
Picking at the blanket that he got from the nurses, Ravi frowns. Not even his sister is here to keep him company, instead at school.
And then the door creaks open and a voice he hasn’t heard in ages lights up his hospital room.
“Ravi!”
He looks up from his lap and stares wide-eyed at May. “May!” Ravi returns, straightening up slightly. He wants to get up from the bed, but his chest and his bones hurt so much, so he just stays where he is.
Athena walks quietly in behind May, Micheal staying back by the door with his Papa. His mom is at an interview, at least that’s what Anaya had said. “Careful, May, remember?” Athena says and Ravi deflates ever so slightly now.
He doesn’t want to have to be careful with May. Athena picks May up by her armpits and lifts her up onto his bed, where she carefully sits pressed against his legs. The touch feels grounding, something familiar in the unfamiliar around him.
Ravi only notices now that May has something in her hands. Colored paper and crayons. His eyebrows furrow curiously, looking back to May’s face. She smiles at him just like she has all those times before.
“I asked Mrs. Holland if I could take home some stuff for you to make your Father’s Day card,” She whispers shyly, gently setting the paper down on his lap. Ravi looks at it for a second, and wonders if his fingers will even work long enough to finish a card now.
“Will you help me?” He swallows and asks then, and May nods with no hesitation. Determination to help him, her best friend, flashes in her eyes and Ravi thinks that maybe not everything has to change.
Nadeesh moves the portable desk, so it hovers over top of the hospital bed, with its scratchy blankets and rock-hard pillows. Ravi lifts himself upwards carefully, and sits criss-cross applesauce like he did when he first met May, so she has enough room across the table from him.
She sets the crayons down on the side of it carefully, as Ravi sets his blue card on the desk. He’d like the paper to be yellow for his Father’s Day Card, bright like the sun and his dad’s smile, but finds himself too tired to be picky about it.
His fingers ache as he picks up the black crayon in a gentle hold– and tries not to think about how black represents death– and starts to carefully write out happy Father’s Day.
He only makes it to ‘Happy Fa’ before he has to hand the crayon to May and let her finish the rest of his card, as the nurse hooks him up to his second day of chemotherapy.
Ravi tries to focus on how May’s eyebrows furrow in concentration, rather than how the IV bag hanging above him has a yellow sticker on it that says CAUTION, do not handle without gloves.
All he can think is, how can it run through my body, if no one else can touch it without gloves?
May smiles at him, and he points to where he wants the words Love, Ravi, to sit.
He tries not to watch as his Papa sobs into Athena’s shoulder, his entire body trembling.
In a year, a lot has changed. He’s finally out of the hospital, his cancer symptoms less, less painful, less bad, just less . It’s called remission, something Ravi tests on his tongue in the mirror. Remission, remission, remission, he mouths until it feels real.
He’s back in school, his hair curlier than it ever used to be before. It’s dry, and still breaks easily, but it beats having chunks of hair falling out everyday. Ravi thinks he still looks the same as he always was– minus a scar on his chest and how purple bags appear under his eyes– but kids stare at him like he’s not meant to be here.
Fussing with his hair, Ravi slides into his seat, after hanging up his backpack in Mrs. Holland’s cubby that she has for each kid. May isn’t here yet, but he is a little early because his mom had an early shift.
Mrs. Holland smiles hesitantly at him and walks up to his desk. “Hi Ravi, how are you feeling?”
“Good,” he says. And it’s true. His bones don’t hurt as much as they did a year ago. He’s eight years old, and he feels better, like the monster has gone away and never wanted to poke its head out again.
Remission, remission, remission.
“That’s good,” Mrs. Holland says and then, “I’ve actually moved your seat, over there,” She points to a chair, all the way to the back of the classroom, and he frowns unsurely. “We had a new kid join the classroom while you were gone, and this is his seat now.” She explains softly.
But it was his seat first. Ravi doesn’t understand, but nods anyway. He gets back up, breathing out carefully, and hesitantly walks to his new seat.
Maybe he’s just that easy to be forgotten about and moved.
Remission, remission, remission, doesn’t feel so steady now.
May runs into the classroom, ignoring her cubby and Mrs. Holland’s reminder to walk and darts straight over to him. Her arms around his shoulders and her face is pressed into his hair in seconds. Ravi laughs softly, ever so slightly suffocated by her, and smiles.
“You saw me yesterday,” He says when May finally pulls back, and beams at him.
Like the sun, Ravi thinks, dazzlingly.
“Yeah, but that was at your house,” May says, like that makes all the difference. “But now you’re back.”
“I guess so,” He replies. “Mrs. Holland moved my seat.” Ravi says after her face twists in confusion.
“But you’re supposed to sit beside me,” May answers, like that’s where he belongs. Right beside her.
“I know,” He echos, frowning. It doesn’t seem very fair at all, and May looks like she might be two seconds away from asking Mrs. Holland to move her seat too. “But we can still play together at recess,” He doesn’t want to be a bother to Mrs. Holland too, in the way he is to Anaya. Like he is to his Amma, and his Papa.
Ravi is just glad he’s not a bother to May, like he is to so many other people.
May furrows her brow at him and walks over to Mrs. Holland. He can’t really hear what they say to each other, but seconds later, May messily throws her backpack into her cubby and collapses in the seat next to him.
“Now we’re together again,” She says, and Ravi feels like he could jump to the moon, even with how his bones still ache sometimes.
It’s only twenty minutes after class starts that Ravi realizes how far behind he is. Nothing the teacher is talking about makes sense. They’re learning division, and while multiplication worksheets were hard enough in the hospital, with only Anaya to sometimes help him understand, division feels like the opposite of everything multiplication is.
He doesn’t understand. Frustrated, Ravi squints at his worksheet, like it will make the numbers merge together and give him the answer, it doesn’t. He pushes back the tears, because he’s eight years old and he’s in remission.
May sticks out her tongue and scribbles down her answers, her bright yellow t-shirt glowing in the sun that shines through the window in Mrs. Holland’s classroom.
“May,” He whispers weakly, but she hears him anyway– like she always does. “I don’t understand…”
It’s independent work time, but May has never let anything stop her, and she scoots her chair closer to his, peering over at his worksheet. Ravi can’t help but notice how his is empty and May has so many numbers on hers.
It feels like one big joke he’s not allowed in on.
“I like to put the apples in a box,” May quietly says, taking her pencil and clumsily drawing a box around five of the apples. The problem above says 30 divided by 5. “Because you take as many fives as you can out of the thirty,”
It feels like a lightbulb moment, how May explains it.
“So, it’s like subtraction?” He asks softly.
May nods, and smiles at him like he’s brilliant. “Yeah, kind of, and then when you finish putting the apples in boxes, you count how many boxes you have.”
Ravi nods and takes his pencil, carefully holding it in his frail grip and carefully draws a box around the remaining apples. “Six,” He whispers under his breath once he finishes, and writes down a messy six beside the equal sign.
May grins at him, and he grins right back.
“May, Ravi, no talking!” Mrs. Holland reminds them, and so May carefully shuffles her chair back to her paper and starts to write on her worksheet again.
Her hand slips under the table and grabs one of his hands, and he clutches onto it. It feels like a promise.
May will always be there for him.
Especially when it comes to division.
Ravi has four years of freedom before he’s back in the hospital. Remission slipped out of his fingers in minutes when he woke up, pain flaring in his bones worse than the occasional pain he gets over the years. A needle biopsy and MRI confirms that his cancer is back.
Osteosarcoma is an easy word to say now. They attack it this time with a harsher round of chemo, tearing down his immune system just to rebuild it again, and then repeat. It’s an exhausting, nauseating ordeal. He remembers feeling like this the first time he was diagnosed with cancer but it felt easier then, when he was seven and not twelve.
Twelve, he knows everything. Seven, all he knew was the watered down version from his parents.
Ravi presses his forehead against the cool surface of the toilet seat, his skin feeling too hot and stretched over his body, like it’s not quite a right fit for him.
“There you go, get it all out,” Anaya says quietly, rubbing her hand up and down his back.
She’s sixteen now, a real teenager– his Papa says when she slams her door shut loudly at home– and nicer than she’s ever been to him.
Ravi feels like it might be pity, though he can’t find himself to be too mad about it when he’s hunched over a toilet, feeling like death and throwing it up too.
“I am,” Ravi spits out raspily, before he hurls again. He doesn’t even have a big enough appetite to throw up this much, and hospital food is disgusting, so he vaguely wonders where it’s all coming from.
He sighs, slumping back onto his knees when he finishes, his stomach not churning anymore.
Ravi is in the clear, at least for now, until he eats something again.
Anaya brushes the curls out of his eyes– so reminisce of his mother– and sighs. “Back to bed?”
He nods, and Anaya helps him stand up off the grimy hospital floor, leaning him against the sink and not removing her hands from him until she’s sure he can really still stand up on his own anymore.
Ravi rinses out his mouth, scrubbing the taste of acid from his tongue with his toothbrush and the tiny dot of toothpaste as Anaya flushes the toilet, sending his chemo-vomit–as Anaya calls it, at least– swirling down.
When he’s settled in bed, blanket pulled over his lap and the TV turned to a low volume, Anaya speaks again. “I could go for a McFlurry right now,” She tries to say casually, but he catches onto what she’s doing. He’s not seven anymore, after all.
He’s twelve, and it somehow feels too big and too small all at the same time.
Ravi swallows back the bile in his throat. “I’m not very hungry,” He whispers quietly, and Anaya doesn’t speak again until Nadeesh is back from the hospital cafeteria, a bitter cup of coffee in his hand, and a wrapped up slice of sandwich for Anaya.
He smooths down the blanket on his lap, and quietly turns to his Papa, softly asking, “Can I text May?”
Nadeesh smiles sadly at Ravi. He remembers how it was once like the sun, but now it feels like it’s always weighted down by a heavy cloud. Ravi is a heavy cloud, blocking the sun from shining. “Sure, beta.” He says softly, handing Ravi his phone.
Swiping up on the lockscreen he types in his father’s password– the date of which he was put into remission– and opens the messages. He taps on Athena’s contact, because May and him still don’t have phones. Unlike some of their classmates, at least that’s what May tells him every few times she comes around across the weeks of his chemo rounds.
Alongside school gossip, May fills him in on what’s happening at her house. A few things have changed in May’s life, because despite how it feels like the world ends with another cancer diagnosis, it keeps turning. She’s a big sister to a little boy named Harry Grant. He was born when Ravi was nine and May still eight and has him wrapped around his finger. Even May thought he was cool, until he started walking and talking, and getting into her things. Maybe it’s an older sister thing, he thinks, smiling as he peers at Anaya for a second, who is devouring her sandwich.
The bad thing is that Harry can’t really come to the hospital to see him, and with how heavy his chemo rounds are this time around, it’s not safe for him to go outside, where he could pick up all kinds of germs. Ravi doesn’t really want Harry to see him like this anyway.
Ravi texts May– or Athena– a simple hi and asks when she’s coming over to the hospital next.
He misses his best friend.
That night, his Amma spends the night with him. Ravi can’t sleep, tossing and turning under the hospital's scratchy blankets. Something keeps gnawing at his mind.
He’s wasting everyone’s time. Everyone’s money. Everyone’s love.
“Amma?” Ravi whispers, finally just sitting up in his bed. She immediately looks up from her phone to him, worry creasing her face.
“What’s the matter? Do you not feel good? Do you need to throw up?”
Ravi grimaces. He never feels good, but he doesn’t want his mom to worry. “No, I just…”
Maelani seems to realize something is on his mind. Her eyes soften, and she gets up from the chair she always sleeps in– at least when it’s her nights to stay with him– and motions for him to scoot over.
Ravi does so instantly.
She sits beside him, gently running her fingers through his hair as he leans back into her side. It feels comforting. Like he’s four years old again and complaining to his Amma that he doesn’t want to introduce himself to their new neighbors.
“What’s the matter, baby?” She says softly.
He hesitates. “It’s just…why do you keep spending money on my treatments?”
Maelani furrows her brows. “What do you mean?”
“I’m only going to get sick again anyway,” He swallows back the bile in his throat, knowing it has to be true.
Her fingers stop moving through his hair, and he furrows his brows. Ravi doesn’t want to think about how she won’t even be able to do that soon in a month or two.
He feels like he’s said something wrong. Ravi peers up at his Amma unsurely, almost startled to see tears gathering in her eyes. Why? It’s only true.
“Ravi,” Maelani says slowly. “We spend money on your treatments, because we love you.”
He almost wants to ask why. All he does is throw up and cry nowadays.
“We love you, so, so, so, much.” Amma continues, like she could name a thousand different reasons as to why. Her fingers gently curl through his hair again. “I couldn’t imagine my life without you. Without my sun, my Ravi, in my life.” She murmurs quietly, imagining it too painful.
“I couldn’t imagine my life without you either, Amma.” He leans his cheek against her side more, letting her take some of the weight off of him, if only for a little bit. It’s true, he can’t imagine going through this without his mom right by his side. It feels like she was always meant to be here with him.
She leans over and presses a kiss to his temple, and he smiles softly. It’s his bedtime, but Amma lets him stay up for a little while, just sitting with him in the quiet of his cold hospital room.
They slowly watch the sun come up through the hospital window together.
He spends his next birthday in the cancer ward. And May’s birthday, and Christmas, stuck in the hospital. It isn’t ideal, and Ravi didn’t even get to see May the day she turned twelve, but the day after.
It’s small, but it still hurts.
Ravi is thirteen, and he should be a teenager now, but he had felt like one six years ago, when he was seven, and then twelve.
The nurses had sung him Happy Birthday on his special day– which he tried to enjoy, but it felt like the people who really loved him, who were really burdened by him– weren’t there.
Anaya had gotten her first job as a seventeen-year-old because she wasn’t going to be here for him forever and needed to find her own way. Amma was still working as a cashier, raking in extra money for his medical bills, while his Papa had to go into work for an extra shift.
The only good thing about his birthday was that he got it. He got a phone. And May had gotten one too, after countless begging of Ravi and May to both parents.
Now, he doesn’t have to type in his dad’s password, whenever he wants to talk to May.
Ravi can now take his phone off the portable desk beside his hospital bed, and text May, knowing she will immediately text back.
Except that one time where Harry had stolen her phone and tried to throw it in the path of the sprinklers.
He had laughed at May over the phone when she told him the story, though now he just feels a weak tug in his chest because he should have been there. The doctors were slowly lowering his chemo doses, so that he would be able to go home in between rounds, and Ravi can’t wait.
It’s nine at night when May texts him, saying that she misses him and she made another friend, named Laila, and that middle school is not all it seems. He smiles a little, reading it and carefully slides out of his bed.
His bones ache still, but he’s finally able to walk properly on his own, without a fear of falling. It gives him more hope than it should, because he knows all too easy how remission is fickle. Not that he’s in remission yet, but it feels like it’s heading that way.
Ravi shuts the bathroom door behind him, and slides to the floor. He doesn’t want to wake up his Amma, who is sleeping on the chair in his room tonight, rather than his dad– they take turns, and sometimes even Anaya offers to stay the night– because really, he should be asleep.
He presses the facetime button minutes after May has texted him, on the bathroom floor, and wearing a gray beanie that Athena had knitted for him, so he didn’t get so cold in the hospital after losing all his hair, again.
May’s face appears on his screen, curled up on her side in her bed, beaming at him.
They’re thirteen, but it still feels just like it did when they were four.
“Hey,” He whispers, and May snorts at him.
“Are you even supposed to be up right now?”
“Of course not,” He retorts, grinning. “Are you?”
“No…”
Ravi stifles his laughter. “So, who’s this Laila?”
“She’s a new girl in our class,” May says, and his heart thumps at our. It’s really May’s class, but maybe it feels like it belongs to both of them. “And she’s funny, kind of,”
Ravi frowns, pulling his beanie over his head more. The tile in the bathroom is so cold, he almost wishes he brought his blanket in here with him. But then he remembers how grimy these floors are and is glad he didn’t. “Kind of?”
May hesitates. “She can be…a little mean?”
“Mean?” He echoes.
“Not, mean, mean,” May rushes to correct, sitting up in bed. “Just, sometimes she makes jokes that aren’t always so funny…”
“Is she mean to you?” Ravi presses on, and May flounders for a second.
“No?”
“No as in really no, or as in, no?”
“Ravi, calm down,” May sighs. “She’s nice to me, I swear. I’m just bad at explaining it.”
He takes a deep breath as the nausea hits him again, and May’s expression grows more pinched.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, sorry, just…” Ravi trails off. Tired? Worried? More nauseous than a sailor?
“I’ll let you go, you should be getting some rest anyway,” May says and he holds in a sigh. Sometimes he wishes everyone wasn’t so worried about him.
“Okay,” Ravi quietly whispers instead. “I get out of the hospital soon anyway,”
“I know, mom told me a few days ago,” May smiles at him. “I can’t wait.”
“Me neither.” Ravi almost doesn’t want to get up off the bathroom floor and return to his hospital bed. Because here, being with May– even if she’s not physically here– feels like the most normal his life will ever be.
The two smile, just staring at each other for a few seconds.
“Okay,” he says softly. “I’m going to hang up now. You’ll call me tomorrow, right?”
“As always,” May affirms.
Ravi nods and hurriedly ends the call, rushing to the toilet as his stomach churns, barely making it in time as he throws up his dinner.
The sound of the bathroom door opening and his Amma’s soft, “Oh, baby,” has tears springing to his eyes, that he blames on the acidy taste burning his mouth, instead of the way his mom is still so gentle with him, sitting with him despite the horrid retching.
Ravi doesn’t get out of the hospital in a few weeks. His scans got worse, the pain in his bones flared up so bad Ravi was almost begging his parents to let him die, and he had to have surgery to remove a tumor that cropped up away from where they were focusing most of the chemo at.
It’s months later, just a few weeks after May’s birthday, that he’s finally out of the hospital. He’s finally at a place where the chemo doesn’t absolutely destroy his body, a few weeks of recovery separating the mind-numbing schedule of being poked and prodded like a lab-rat.
It’s not like he hadn’t seen May at all during everything, but with one of their parents always nearby, Ravi didn’t feel comfortable enough to really press May about Laila again, and whenever he sat on the cold tile of the bathroom floor for their secret facetimes, it never felt right to bring it up.
So, Ravi’s first week home from the hospital was spent with his family at home, recuperating and trying to remind himself that his bedroom really is still his, despite how he hasn’t slept in it in years.
The day immediately following after his first week home, Ravi begs his Amma to let him have a sleepover at May’s.
“It’s just next door,” Ravi presses over dinner the night before. “And Athena knows practically everything about my…” He can’t bring himself to say cancer, really, not yet, despite how long he’s had it. “Just, everything.”
Nadeesh and Maelani share an uncertain look over the dinner table, and Anaya looks a little annoyed with him.
“Are you sure, Ravi? We thought you’d like to stay home for a little bit,” Nadeesh says softly, and Ravi tries not to let the guilt eat him alive.
“I did,” He points out, taking a small bite of his chana masala, pointedly ignoring the rice. “I just want to spend some time with May…”
“Well, we can check with Athena, but if that’s what you really want,” Amma says, and Ravi immediately perks up.
“Yes, thank you!” He smiles brightly at his parents and kicks his feet under the table.
Nadeesh turns to Anaya, with a frown, fiddling with his glasses. “Anaya, that means you have to stay home tomorrow night.”
“What?” Anaya shouts, dropping her fork against her plate loudly. Ravi winces. “Why? I’ve had these plans in place for weeks, Baba.”
“Just in case something happens with Ravi, I want you in the house, so we don’t have to worry about two of you.”
Ravi ducks his head, staring at his untouched rice.
“Baba,” Anaya says again, somewhat pleadingly.
“Anaya, I said no. You can go some other time.”
Anaya pushes her chair back so hard it hits the ground, thudding loudly in the sudden silence. She stares right at Ravi. “God, why do you ruin everything?!”
“Me?” Ravi replies, a hint of hurt in his voice before his eyebrows furrow. “I didn’t do anything!”
“No, everything is always about you!”
“Well, sorry, it’s not like I asked for cancer!” Ravi stands up now too, shoving his chair back.
“Everything is about you,” Anaya shouts. “Amma even made you a whole fucking separate meal because your stomach is too sensitive!”
Ravi glances at the biryani on his sister’s plate and then to his chana masala.
“Anaya!” Nadeesh shouts. “Enough. That is enough!”
She screams again, and stomps off to her room, the door slamming shut hard enough to shake the lights above the dinner table. Ravi swallows and tries to remind himself to breathe.
Nobody says anything else as Ravi walks away and slams his door shut too.
Ravi lays on May’s rug, cuddled up in a sleeping bag as he stares at the ceiling of May’s bedroom. Leaving for May’s house this morning had been awkward. Anaya had refused to come out of her room, not even when Amma knocked on her door for breakfast.
He twists, trying to get to sleep, before finally giving up and whispering, “May? Are you up?”
There’s a pause before she answers. “Yeah.” He hears her sit up, and Ravi carefully unzips himself from the bag.
May scoots over without saying anything else and Ravi slides under her covers, swallowing as he leans his head back against her pillows. She shuffles closer, warm beside him.
“What’s wrong?” She says quietly, leaning her cheek against his shoulder.
“I got into a fight with Anaya,” He admits. “It was…bad.”
“...How bad?” May murmurs.
“She said that everything is always about me,” Ravi swallows past the lump in his throat, just remembering it hurts. “That…I don’t know, just… everything is about me.”
“It’s not like you asked for this,” May says, and even without looking at her he knows her eyebrows are furrowed.
“I guess not, but she’s kind of right, isn’t she?”
“Ravi,” May frowns. Her arms wrap around him slightly now, and Ravi basks in the glow of being held for once. He’s so alone in his hospital room, all the time– even when someone is right beside him– and Ravi allows himself to imagine he’s a normal kid, for a second.
That the beanie on his head is actually hair, and the chemo port sticking out his chest, that May has to carefully avoid, isn’t really there.
He’s just a normal kid, at a sleepover.
The illusion only lasts a second when May gently apologies for nudging him ever so softly– because she knows how bad his bones hurt.
“She’s right,” he says again. “I mean, everything is scheduled around me. When I’m in the hospital, when I’m out of the hospital, when I’m just–” Ravi breathes out, trailing off.
May sits up carefully beside him. “Ravi, you didn’t ask to have cancer. You didn’t ask for any of this– and maybe it’s unfair to Anaya, but it’s also unfair to you.” She frowns, her hand holding his. Sparks settle down into his skin from where her thumb swipes across his palm.
“...Maybe,” He swallows. Tears well up in his eyes, and he needs to change the topic. May settles back down beside him, pressed tightly into his side– like she needs the gentle touch of his skin against hers too. “How is it going? At school, I mean. With…Laila?”
He feels May tense beside him and furrows his brows. “What?” He says. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” May shakes her head, and tucks her face into the side of his arm. Why is she hiding? Is something wrong? He frowns and opens his mouth to ask when she barrels on. “I’ve gotten more friends. I’m kind of in their group now. They like me.”
Who is she convincing? Him, or herself?
“...But,”
“Ravi, come on,” She laughs shakily. “I can’t wait for you to come back to school forever. I need some friends, at least.”
He stiffens and tries not to let it sting as much as it does. “...Yeah,” He whispers. “I guess.”
In the morning, Ravi eats breakfast with May, Athena and Harry– Michael having to leave early for a construction job– and plays with Harry, who is a lot bigger than he remembers and is five years old. It’s weird to think he and May used to be four when they met.
He waves his goodbyes to Athena and gives a weak smile to May before he’s out the door and slowly walking back to his house, a little out of breath just from the short walk when he gets home.
To his surprise, Anaya is waiting for him at the kitchen table, hesitantly hovering over her phone, like she was about to text him.
Ravi swallows, and pushes the anger away– because he’s so tired of being angry, and hesitantly rasps. “What’s this?” He stares at the lone McFlurry sitting on the table, a little melted with droplets of water on the outside.
“I got us a McFlurry…to share.” Anaya says softly, and Ravi carefully walks over to the table, pulling out a chair and sitting down.
“Okay,” he says, and Anaya breaks into a relieved smile, sitting beside him and producing two spoons out of midair.
He snorts. “Were you just holding two spoons, waiting for me to get home?”
“Watch it smart mouth,” Anaya laughs and hands him one, which he takes gingerly in his sore fingers. “But…maybe I was.”
Ravi stifles his laugh, getting a spoonful of Oreo ice-cream and shoving it in his mouth. It melts on his tongue and tastes just like he remembers, when he was seven years old.
He swallows and takes a deep breath. “How do the ice cream machines always work when you get these?”
“Pure luck,” She grins at him, her long hair carefully tucked back into a braid.
His eyes roll, and they quietly take turns spooning out bits of ice cream. Ravi tries to ignore how bad his hands shake and ache after a few minutes, hiding the trembling by resting his arm against the wooden table.
“...So how did the sleepover with May go?”
Ravi thinks back to May’s words before they both went to bed. I can’t wait for you forever. He swallows past the hurt, and nods shakily. “Yeah. Good,” Clearing his throat, he musters up enough energy to get another scoop of ice cream. “Um, it went…good.”
Remission feels like a bitter taste in his mouth, not at all like the sweet Oreo ice cream he shares with his sister more often now that she’s nineteen and he’s still fifteen.
The transition back to school hurts more than it did at seven, because May’s focus splits between him and Laila. He wishes it was just May and him against division again. But now it’s him and his tutor, against algebra.
Which…has him just as confused as division did.
The good news is, May invited him over for exams. Well, studying for their exams. Ravi’s pretty sure he’s going to fail anyway, but he’ll take any excuse to be close to May. Knocking on the door, he hears soft footsteps before the door opens.
May beams at him, shaking her head. “You’ve been my best friend for like eleven years. You realize you don’t have to knock anymore?”
Ravi laughs. “Hey, it’s polite,” he tries to ignore how the phrase best friend leaves a sudden sour feeling in his stomach and his heart dropping. It’s probably nothing.
“My mom literally gave you keys, what else do you consider a greeting to come in whenever?” May smiles at him, and he kicks off his shoes, grinning at the floor.
“Knocking.”
“Ugh,” She throws her head back. “That was so bad, even for you.”
He giggles and follows May to her bedroom, setting his bag on the floor and sitting down at the end of her bed. Ravi eyes the textbooks surrounding her computer and notebooks, giving an amused smile. “Wow, didn’t know you took studying this seriously?”
“Come on, I study!”
Ravi fixes her with a deadpan stare.
“Okay, I’m trying something new,” She admits. “Besides, it’s my turn to write notes for the group.”
“The group?” Ravi frowns. “Wait, like, Laila and everyone? You share notes?”
“Well…sometimes,” May hesitates. “Are you going to be weird about this again?”
“I’m not being weird, it’s just, well it’s a little odd. How often do you end up doing these notes?”
“Ravi.” She groans.
“Okay, sorry.” He sighs, not wanting to get into another fight about Laila. “What are we doing first?”
May shrugs. “I was thinking science, since we have that class together?”
Ravi nods. “Okay, scoot your stuff over,” He huffs and May snorts, making space for him beside her at the top of the bed. She stacks the textbooks on her nightstand and opens up their science teacher’s google slides.
“...I hate studying,” Ravi admits, not even two seconds in.
“Ravi!” May groans, laughing. They press their legs together, because they can do that– now that Ravi’s bones don’t feel so brittle that they’ll break with every moment he makes. “You’re the worst study buddy ever.”
“Please. I’m not, I am so, very helpful.”
May pokes his ribs and he squeaks.
“May, you know I’m ticklish!”
Another poke.
“Oh my God, you’re worse than a teenage boy.”
“Ravi, you are a teenage boy.”
“Yeah, and? I’m not like other teenage boys.” Ravi laughs.
“Never say that again.”
“What? That I’m not like other teenage boys?”
“Ravi!”
“What?” He says innocently.
“Ugh.” May gives up, shaking her head as she lays it against his shoulder.
His heart literally jumps at the touch, and he blinks. Okay. That’s a little weird. “Uh,” he uselessly says before haltingly speaking. “Sorry, what’s the mitochondria do again?”
“Powerhouse of the cell, Ravi.” She says, writing down something in her notes.
“Right. I totally knew that.” He clears his throat and jots down vague notes, because his head is spinning for some reason that he’s not too sure he wants to know.
Studying for the next two hours takes a lot more energy than he’s used to, so when Athena yells, “Kids! Dinner!” He could jump for joy. Ravi hops out of bed, startling May so much that she squawks as her pencil slides and messes up her writing.
“Ravi,” She groans, despite the smile on her face.
“What? It’s dinnertime, come on!” He laughs, sliding on his socks across the walkway, almost falling on his face down the stairs but it was worth it. Ravi’s too used to being careful, it’s fun when he gets moments to just be.
Though he’s not too sure his Amma would agree with him sliding across floors near stairs.
Ravi smiles at Michael, waving a little as May follows behind him at a much slower pace. There’s a weird buzz in the air, at least between Athena and Michael that has him furrowing his brow, but Michael greets him like he always does, with a side hug and a gentle ruffle of his growing-in curls, so he tries to ignore it.
“Hey Harry,” Ravi grins at the six-year-old, who smiles back.
“Hi Ravi!”
It feels like he belongs here, beside May at the dinner table.
And when his hand brushes against hers as they reach for the salt at the same time, he tries to ignore the buzz in his stomach.
And how his fingers are starting to ache again.
Ravi falls back out of remission again, a few months after his sixteenth birthday. It’s not a big surprise, since Ravi had been quietly convincing himself the random moments of pain weren’t a big deal. That they were just small flare ups, because really, he doesn’t remember a time where his bones weren’t always in pain.
It’s a little more upsetting losing his hair now though. The good news is that they’re trying radiation now, instead of just chemo, which means he gets to be out of the hospital more.
Ravi texts May that he’s coming over, two days after he comes home from his last round of chemo. He’s sixteen now, so he doesn’t have to ask his parents for permission, allowed to leave post it notes on the counter instead.
Though he doubts by the time they see them, it will be worth much, since they’re both pulling more shifts so they can afford his third relapse. Faltering in his steps– because of bone pain and guilt– Ravi sighs and pulls out the spare key he has to Athena’s house. Michael is at work, and Athena is too, and Harry is at a playdate. Which Ravi tries not to feel bitter about, because it’s not Harry’s fault he never really got to go on those.
So, it’s just May and him.
“May?” Ravi calls into the house quietly, shutting the door behind him and locking it. His eyebrows furrow as he gets no response.
He raps his knuckles against May’s closed door before peeking his head in.
May has her face stuffed in her pillow, rolled onto her stomach.
His eyebrows furrow, and he inches closer. “May?”
Ravi sits beside May on her bed, almost like she did when she first ever visited him in the hospital. His thigh presses against hers, and Ravi ignores the pain of his bones deep settled ache that never goes away.
“What’s the matter?” He sets his hand on her back, and May groans.
“Nothing…”
Ravi frowns. “It doesn’t seem like nothing.”
“I’m just…sad, okay?” May sighs, and pushes her face further into her pillow. Slightly worried about suffocating, he pokes her ribcage, making her squirm and flip over to face him.
“Any particular reason?” He says softly, and May avoids his eyes. Okay. Operation Mitochondria May: Bringing the Power Back to the Cell. Or something. He’ll work on the name. “Alright, come on,” Ravi sighs and gets up, holding his hand out to May like she’s done for him so many times.
She grabs it, her brows knitting together. “What are we doing?”
“The house is empty,” Ravi says. “It’s just you and me, so we’re going to bake cookies and listen to Taylor Swift.”
“Do you even know who Taylor Swift is?” May replies, as he guides her down the stairs and he shrugs.
“I heard she makes people feel things.”
She snorts behind him, and it feels like a small victory. Score 1 for Ravi. Operation Mitochondria May is a go. And he’s keeping the name, because honestly, it’s kind of brilliant.
Ravi enters the kitchen and opens the fridge as May hovers by the counter, watching him for a minute. “Ravi, if you’re too tired…”
“I’m fine,” He lies easily, grabbing the basic ingredients he knows cookies need. Truth be told, Ravi hasn’t ever really baked cookies before, but he knows May has. She’ll be able to guide them through it. Hopefully. “Don’t you know people going through chemo have superpowers?” Ravi says, grinning slightly. It’s a poster in the chemotherapy room where he goes to get chemo– because he doesn’t have to stay in a hospital room anymore–that literally says you’re a superhero. It’s probably for the younger kids, but Ravi likes it anyway.
“Superpowers,” May replies dubiously and he cracks a grin over his shoulder, setting the milk, butter and eggs on the counter.
“Yeah. Uh, we need flour, right?”
“...For cookies?”
“Yes?” His eyebrows furrow. “Wait, did the shows lie to me?”
“No,” She laughs. “We do need flour, I just…didn’t realize you didn’t really know that.”
He hesitantly smiles, because he’s a little behind in all aspects of the world, and maybe it is a little humorous. “Yeah, sorry.”
“Don’t be,” May clears her throat and smiles at him. Something in him flutters. “I’ll grab the rest of the stuff you…sit down or something, before you pass out.”
“I’m not going to pass out,” Ravi retorts, though he does carefully lift himself up to sit on the counter by the sink, watching May get the rolling pins and baking sheets out. “So…”
May shakes her head. “What is it?”
“Is everything okay?” His voice drops the teasing tone. Ravi really looks at her. She looks tired, a little puffy-eyed like she’s been crying.
May shrugs. “I…can’t really complain, Ravi.” A lot of people–like you– have it worse, is what goes unsaid.
“But you can,” Ravi says. “With me, at least.”
She pauses and looks back at him, wobbly smiling. “I know. I’m just, well…I don’t know, Ravi.”
“Take your time,” He shrugs. “We’ve got all day.” And they do, since it’s a Saturday and their parents are all working. “...Can I get off the counter now?” Ravi laughs.
May grins and nods, shaking her head as she sprays the cookie sheet with non-stick spray.
Ravi carefully lowers himself down, a sharp pang running through his bones no matter how carefully he does it. Shaking it off, because chemo patients have superpowers, he stands beside May, peering at the mixing bowl.
“...So, what now?”
“This was your idea!” May says, and he holds his hands up in defeat.
“Okay, but like I’ve never made cookies before. Haven’t you?”
“Only when I was like, five with my dad!” She retorts before falling quiet again.
Okay. So, it might be something with her dad. Ravi files that away for later, poking her shoulder. “Okay, fine, we’ll look it up. How hard can it be?”
The answer is very hard.
There’s a lot of recipes on the internet, and when they finally decide on one, it has…a lot of parts.
Ravi furrows his brow, somehow covered in flour, and egg yolk.
“I’m so confused. Were we not supposed to mix the dry ingredients in with the wet ones yet?” He looks into the bowl of suspicious cookie dough batter. It looks…crystalized. A little. It should be fine. Might burn off in the oven, right?
“...I have no clue.” May admits. “I don’t think we’re bakers.”
“I think you might be right,” Ravi sighs.
Still, they power through it, sticking little dollops of cookie dough balls on the sheet and setting them in the oven at 350 degrees for fifteen minutes.
Which means he has fifteen minutes to bring the power back to the cell. He has to stop with analogies, he’s not made for it, really.
“...Is it Laila?” He asks quietly as they sit on the counter together, their socked feet gently kicking the cabinets as they wait, somewhat impatiently for their mutant cookies.
“No,” She sighs, and he turns to look at her. “Really, it’s not,”
Not entirely sure he believes her, Ravi nods anyway. “So what is it?”
“...It’s my dad,” May admits, her body slouching into itself, like she’s finally let go of this big secret weighing down her shoulders.
“Okay,” Ravi says slowly.
“He’s…” May sighs. “I don’t know if I can tell you.”
“It is…bad?”
“Not– no, not really? It’s just,”
“Personal?” He questions.
“Yeah.” May seems to smile at him in relief, for just getting it. Getting her.
“Okay. Do you…not want to talk about it?” Ravi isn’t really sure what personal means for them, because ever since he’s met May they tell each other everything. Well. Maybe Ravi doesn’t tell May everything, but it’s different. Because he’s actively dying, and who wants to remember sad conversations with their best friend before they passed away?
I'm not going to die, Ravi has to remind himself.
So then when will I?
“I don’t know.” May says, staring at their socked feet, that keep kicking against the cabinet doors below them.
The oven beeps, startling Ravi so much he jumps about a foot in the air, his hand clutching his heart. “God, is that thing set to the highest volume possible?”
“My Dad does burn a lot of food,” May tearfully laughs and hops down off the counter. She grabs an oven mit in the drawer beside the oven and carefully sticks her hand in to retrieve the fruits of their labor.
They’re maybe just…rotting fruit instead of juicy apples. If that makes sense. Ravi cringes.
“...Maybe we should make sandwiches next time,”
“I think that’d be smart.” May deadpans.
The crystalized texture to their cookie dough batter has not gone away in the oven after all and it looks honestly, pretty unappetizing– though Ravi can’t say anything really looked appetizing to him anymore with how nauseous he gets. Except maybe for the chocolate melting from the chips they stuck in there as a last-ditch effort to save their cookies.
“Do we really have to eat these?” Ravi asks and turns to look at May who looks a little horrified by the cookies as well.
“...We probably should, right? So, we don’t, like…” She hesitates. “Waste food?”
Ravi briefly wonders if he can use the excuse of chemo to get out of it but decides if it makes May happy– he’ll eat the crystalized cookies.
“...Okay.” He sighs, and they wait for the cookies to cool. After all, that’s part of the recipe too. Totally not them putting off the inevitable.
“Thank you, Ravi,” May says after a moment of silence between them. “I needed this today.”
“Anytime,” He turns and smiles at her. “Even if I never, ever, want to make cookies with you again.”
“Same here.”
The cookies have cooled enough to be bitten into now, though Ravi really isn’t sure if this is good for his health. Or May’s really, but if anything, maybe they’ve made a brilliant new cookie recipe.
He’s not holding out hope, honestly.
“Cheers?” Ravi says as he holds his cookie, that’s actually kind of disintegrating before his eyes without him even biting into it.
“There’s nothing to cheer about with this,” May sighs and then takes a bite of the cookie.
Ravi watches her with disgust, before taking his own bite, because if you can’t trust your friend to do something dumb beside you, who can you trust?
It’s an instant regret. The chocolate leaks out from the cookie in the most disgusting way possible, and the dough is supposed to be soft. But it kind of feels like rock candy mixed with sand.
May doesn’t look like she’s enjoying it either, simply kind of holding it in her mouth, like it will go away if she doesn’t swallow it.
Ravi swallows it. He wants it off his taste buds. Though going down, it doesn’t taste very good then either. “Oh my God,” He spits into the sink beside him, gagging. “I’m going to vomit,”
He says, and it’s a very real possibility honestly. Though Ravi tries to avoid throwing up in front of May whenever possible. He shudders to remember that time when May was finally able to visit him a few weeks after his second relapse out of remission and he vomited on her shirt on accident.
It was a bad time. And a total accident, Ravi really didn’t mean to do it.
May still kind of just looks like a squirrel, and so Ravi hops off the counter, gagging and shaking his head. He grabs the cup off the counter– listen, he doesn’t care whose cup it is, it’s his now– and fills it with water, chugging it down and swirling some in his mouth.
“Ugh,” Ravi groans, and presses his forehead to the cool metal edge around the sink. “That’s the worst mistake I’ve made in my life.”
Finally able to talk after spitting her cookie in the trashcan, May shakes her head. “You’ve made a lot worse mistakes. Probably.”
“Name one,” He retorts.
“Ugh,” May just responds.
The new plan the doctors laid out for him wasn’t working. Maybe it has something to do with those cookies, but that could just be Ravi being dramatic. The radiation was hardly doing anything to him anymore, after a few rounds it, and so it was back to the drawing board.
And by drawing board, he means they pumped him full of a harsher round of chemo, and kind of crossed their fingers that it would do something.
Cancer becomes really resilient against chemo when you’ve relapsed three times, it turns out.
But he’s admitted and stuck in a hospital room again. Ravi doesn’t feel like he has superpowers from chemo anymore.
The day the world kind of ends for Ravi is a normal day of testing and an IV bag of chemotherapy to keep him company. Well, that and his Amma’s presence.
Ravi looks up as Maelani stares at her phone in shock, his eyebrows furrowing. “Mom? What’s wrong?”
His Amma doesn’t answer him, standing up from the chair tucked in the corner of the room and walks out. Ravi’s eyebrows raise in shock. What’s going on?
It has to be bad, right? His mom has never just…walked out before. Not like that. Not in near tears. He’s hooked up to his chemo still, and desperately pushes the nurse’s call button before he rips it out himself to find out what’s going on. It has to be something bad. Is it Anaya? Did his Papa get in a car crash?
It can’t be good, it can’t be–
His favorite nurse, Anika, walks in, smiling unsurely at him because, well Ravi really isn’t one to push the call button. “Ravi? What’s the matter?”
“I need this off,” Ravi swallows against the bitter feeling in the back of his throat. “I need this off, right now.”
“Ravi–”
“Please. Please, I need it–”
“Ravi, it’s your chemo– we can’t just–”
“Please,” Ravi wants to cry. He wants to beg. He wants to scream, and he wants to throw a temper tantrum like his seven year old self would. “Anika, please.”
She hesitates. There really isn’t a protocol for this, is there? Ravi swallows and musters up all of the courage inside of him, and stares her right in the eyes.
“If you don’t take this out, right now–” He says. “I’m going to take it out myself.”
That lets him get his way quickly.
Free from an IV bag full of radiation, Ravi hobbles out of his hospital room, distractedly looking around for his Amma. “Mom?” He calls out for her, frowning.
Anika follows behind him worriedly, because really Ravi can’t– and shouldn’t– be walking around this much, especially not after unhooking him off of his chemotherapy in the middle of it.
Not like he gave her much of a choice.
Rounding a corner, his hand using the wall for support, he sees his mom. She’s holding her face in her hands, shoulders shaking. Ravi’s never really seen her cry before– not fully, because she always tried to be strong, and gentle for him.
“Amma? ” Ravi quietly says. He hates how young he sounds. He sounds like he’s seven years old and doesn’t know how to pronounce osteosarcoma again.
"Beta,” she says, and that’s when he really knows something is wrong, because only his Papa ever calls him that. “Beta, it’s May.”
His whole world cracks in front of his eyes, and there’s nothing he can do about it.
May had tried to kill herself, is what Ravi managed to understand after multiple attempts of explaining to him from his Amma, and his Papa, and Anaya. A suicide attempt. It doesn’t make sense. Not to Ravi.
She would never do that to him. May would never leave him alone like that. She wouldn’t. There had to be some other explanation for why she took those pills. Maybe she had a toothache. A really, really bad one.
It just didn’t make sense.
And no one would let him see her.
Nadeesh forced him back into the hospital bed– some yelling and kicking happening from Ravi’s end– and made him get hooked back up onto the chemo.
“Because we can’t lose you too, Ravi!” Nadeesh had screamed in his face.
He doesn’t know what that means. May can’t be gone, because then he’d be all alone. All alone, in a hospital room, where he doesn’t even really know who he really is outside of it.
It’s midnight, and Ravi can’t sleep. How can he? Anaya is sleeping in the chair tonight, his parents down in the ICU waiting room, with Athena and Michael.
How could Athena even let May get those pills? Why did she still have them?
He wants to blame someone. Anyone. There has to be a reason. A why. May would never do this to him. Not without a why.
Ravi pulls on the gray hat, knitted for him by Athena, and kicks his blankets off his legs. It hurts, but he needs to go. He needs to see her.
Anaya doesn’t stir as he leaves the room, shutting the door behind him and walking down the empty halls. The hospital lights are as bright as always, and Ravi scratches at the band around his wrist.
He follows the signs to the elevator, because honestly, whenever Ravi is here he tries not to memorize the place. Because if he memorizes the place, maybe he really will have to stay.
He hits the button for the first floor.
The elevator lurches beneath his feet and Ravi leans against the wall to keep upright, because his head is spinning, and his legs are aching. Ravi hopes he doesn’t pass out. He needs to see May.
He needs to see her like he never has before, not even when he was young and scared and missed out on making his Father’s Day Card that one Tuesday.
The elevator stops and Ravi staggers out, trying not to draw too much attention to himself. He yanks his sweater’s sleeve– the one May got him for his fourteenth birthday after he complained how cold the cancer ward was– over his hospital band, so that nurses won’t look at it and try to send him back to his room.
Ravi would rather kick and scream and fight his way to May’s side then go back to that room.
The signs on the walls take him exactly where he needs to be– just outside the ICU rooms.
He kind of wishes he’d had enough time to casually ask his parents what room May was in. Now he has to poke his head into each room of potentially near-death patients, hoping he finds May.
His bones ache, and feel like they’re twisting in his body, and the bile is rising in his throat– that he forces himself to swallow down– he can’t stop for nothing. Not even chemo-vomit.
His socked feet– just like they were when May made cookies with him– gently pad against the hall’s polished concrete flooring. The doors are mostly left open– probably in case the staff had to run inside quickly to help someone– so Ravi, thankfully, doesn’t have to peer into every doorway to find May.
He exhales shakily, rubbing his sore elbow with his fingers gently. It hurts. It all hurts so much. Ravi doesn’t understand why May would do this.
He comes to a stuttering halt.
May. She’s in a hospital bed.
The sick feeling in his stomach makes its presence known again. Was this how she felt, looking at him in the cancer ward every time? Like he doesn’t belong in a hospital bed? Like he should never even be lying there in the first place?
Ravi is sixteen years old, yet he feels every single age he’s ever been with May by his side when he walks into her room.
“...May?” Ravi whispers. He carefully moves closer to her. She looks like she’s just sleeping, her cheek turned gently into the pillowcase– like how she sometimes lays her head against his shoulder during sleepovers.
He lifts himself up on shaky arms, sitting beside her legs.
“Careful, May, remember?” He hears Athena say in the back of his mind, and he understands now. May looks so fragile, lying in front of him. Too small for a hospital bed.
“May?”
She turns slightly towards him, her eyebrows furrowing together. Maybe she thinks it worked, and that he’s dead too.
“May, are you okay?” He whispers shakily. Because what do you say when your best friend, the only one who’s ever been by your side, tries to kill themself? His hand outstretches for hers, grasping it tightly. Like he can hold her, so that she never wants to slip away again.
“...I don’t know,” May tearfully answers, her voice wobbling. “I didn’t mean to, Ravi.”
He stares.
“I swear, I didn’t want to die. It just…I just–”
“Then what did you want, May?” Ravi feels like shouting, but it just comes out in a broken whisper. “Because you almost died. I thought you had died.”
“I’m sorry,” May’s face crumbles, and suddenly she’s sobbing. And Ravi is sobbing too.
“What were you thinking?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m sorry, I’m sorry–”
Ravi wraps his arms around her neck and sobs into her shoulder. “I thought you were dead,” He gasps out, his hot breath against her skin. “I thought– I thought–”
May is crying just as hard as him, her arm wrapped around him and squeezing him tighter than she ever does, when she’s too worried about how frail is his. But they’re weak, and frail together now, and it feels like two negatives make a positive.
It feels like hours before they stop crying, clinging to each other just as tight, despite how the tears stop. Ravi can’t move. His bones hurt too much, and it feels like if he does, May will slip out of his fingers again.
Ravi never wants to feel the fear of thinking May was dead ever again.
“Ravi?” Athena says, and he startles, turning in May’s hold.
He’s busted. Athena might just kill him for stupid enough to leave his hospital room and stumble down the ICU hall despite the fact he is undergoing cancer treatment. In hindsight, it’s not the greatest idea he’s ever had in his entire life. Especially now that he can feel the throbbing pain radiating from his bones all the way to the outside of his skin.
It would hurt less to be dead.
“Sorry,” Ravi gasps out, his voice small. “I’m sorry, Athena…”
She doesn’t say anything, just frowns at him softly, and he knows she gets it, because there’s nothing, she wouldn’t do for May either.
“I can’t move,” He manages to say. “It…hurts, too much.” His voice shakes.
Athena presses the call button on May’s bed, and it’s only then he notices May has fallen asleep, pressed into his side, her face tucked away in his shoulder to hide from the world.
“Here,” She murmurs gently. “Let me help you sit up,”
Athena gently grabs him– like a little kid– and carefully helps him shift upright in the bed, May’s head lulling to the side, undisturbed.
Ravi’s bones feel like they expanded underneath his skin and just don’t fit right anymore. It hurts, even worse than the night he first had to go to the hospital, when Anaya was scared, and the monster had first sunk its teeth into him.
Nurses arrive at the room, and they fuss over him, figuring out how to get him back to his room. Athena doesn’t let go of his hand the entire time they carefully move him into a wheelchair, where he tries not to cry, because no matter how gentle they are, they’ll never be as gentle as his mom.
Prom is all May talks about. Well. Maybe not literally, but if Ravi has to hear one more thing about Darius, he might just let the chemo take him.
Or those awful cookies that almost killed him when he was sixteen.
Some things have changed, while others stay the same. Like how May has a stepfather now, Bobby Nash, who Ravi has met a few times, through facetime videos and only a handful of actual visits.
He feels calm, and steady, something Ravi thinks he could use a lot.
And it doesn’t hurt that Bobby can actually bake cookies.
May sits on the end of his hospital bed– which suits her much better, he thinks– and smiles hesitantly at him.
“Do you think it’s dumb? You think it’s dumb!”
“No, I don’t!” Ravi hastily assures her, shaking his head as the chemo drips from the IV bag into his veins. “I just…you want me to tell you what dress to wear? To prom?”
“You think it’s dumb,” May groans into her hands.
Ravi coughs to hide his laugh. “I don’t, I swear. Just…May, I’m not exactly one for fashion. I mean, I’ve kind of been wearing the same gown since I was seven.”
“Ravi, that’s not funny,” She complains.
“Sorry,” He smiles. “Okay, I’m serious now. What dress are we getting, girl?”
“Never say that again.”
“My bad, girl.”
“Ravi, I swear.”
He snorts. “Okay, okay, I’ll stop.”
“Thank you,” May huffs. “Scoot over, I’ll show you the pictures Mom took of me.”
Ravi obliges immediately because he’s pretty sure any dress May wears would be pretty.
“Sorry, I can’t go,” Ravi murmurs quietly as she settles against his side, tucked right where she’s supposed to be, her cheek leaning against his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” May smiles sadly, and it’s decidedly not okay, but what could they do? Bring the whole prom to the cancer floor? She clicks her phone on, the lockscreen of him and May lightning up. It’s his favorite picture of them, despite how blurry it is, taken on his fifteenth birthday. Ravi has his arms around May’s neck, while May is holding him around the waist and slightly leaned into his neck. For some reason, her hands cover her mouth, but Ravi doesn’t care. It showed some sort of carefree time when he didn’t have to worry about being the kid with cancer– he could just be himself. Himself with May.
She puts in her passcode– which he is not allowed to know anymore after he took pictures of her drooling when she fell asleep in the hospital chair of his room– and opens her photo apps.
Ravi furrows his brows as he catches a glimpse of Darius and May in her camera roll, swallowing thickly in disgust. Luckily, before he has too much time to decide if vomiting would be too much of a reaction, she clicks on the photos of the dresses.
He leans forward in interest, because his sister Anaya always said prom dresses were fancy, and for a completely unknown reason, he wants to see May wearing a pretty dress that she feels confident in. Ravi definitely files that feeling away for later.
The first dress May shows him is an emerald green floor length dress, with a slit up the side and a small train behind. The sleeves are half off her shoulders, with a piece of fabric going right around blending in seamlessly. The dress sparkles dazzlingly in the shop’s lights, at least from what he can tell by the picture.
“It looks nice,” He offers, unable to help how he notices May seems to shrink in on herself in the photo. “I just don’t think you really like it much,”
“Could you tell?” She cringes. “My mom picked it out.”
Ravi snorts into his fist.
“Don’t laugh!”
“I’m not, you look really pretty,” He assures her, bumping their shoulders together gently.
May’s cheeks flush, and he tries not to hang onto that.
“Okay, okay, next picture,” She swipes to another dress– one she looks much more confident in and Ravi can tell that she picked out this dress.
This dress is a floral pattern, but subtle, a greenish blue with a much smaller slit up the side. On the opposite side, it's tied on one shoulder only, and a small gap between the two straps knotting it into one. It reaches about to her ankles.
Ravi grins. “I like this one, it’s very…”
“Pretty?” May says hopefully.
“Yes,” He settles on, because he really doesn’t have the words for it. Though to be fair, he did warn May he was not great at rating dresses. “I think you look gorgeous.” Ravi swallows, and tries to focus on the pictures again instead of how he can literally feel the chemo running down his arm.
He feels a little sick, but he doesn’t know if it’s because May is asking him to choose out a dress for her to wear as she goes to prom with Darius, or because he’s stuck in a hospital, as he always is, and can’t even be there for such a big event.
“Is that all of them?” Ravi asks, and May shrugs.
“The ones worth showing at least…Harry said one of them went up to my belly button. He’s so dramatic.”
Ravi chuckles. “Maybe he gets it from you.”
She slaps his arm.
“Ow!” Ravi squeaks. “You can’t slap me, I’ve got bone cancer!”
“Ravi!”
He is eighteen years old when it all stops.
In a good way, at least.
The hospital visits were over. Well, at least the long visits were. He still has too many checkups and blood draws he has to go to monthly. But he’s free. As free as he wishes he was when he was seven, eleven years ago. It’s weird to think about how young he was and now how old he is when the pain in his bones is almost non-existent. His cancer symptoms are finally undetectable, instead of lessened.
And he’s a graduate. Much to everyone’s surprise. Especially Anaya’s, who didn’t even try to hide her shock.
But Ravi doesn’t think he’s seen his parents ever look so proud of him– unless you count the times he beat cancer, but that’s happened three times, so the awe eventually lessened each time. He’s kidding…probably.
The party at May’s house is a lot more than he was expecting. Bobby’s coworkers, the 118, all came to celebrate May’s– and his, he guesses– accomplishment. It’s hard to soak in, when most of the parties he’s experienced have been his nurses singing to him and the two birthday parties he went to before he got sick.
Ravi hesitates, hovering at the top of the stairs. It’s…a lot. May spots him before he can decide if maybe he can run away and beams at him. He smiles right back, unable to help himself, and May rushes over to grab his hand and lead him to the middle of the party.
She’s wearing a blue dress, just like the day Ravi met her, in this very same house.
“This is,” May blows out a breath that Ravi echoes.
“Yeah, it’s…”
“Yeah.” May whispers, and he realizes they’re still holding hands when Athena clears her throat.
“Hey, Athena,” Ravi jumps ever so slightly, rushing past the moment before Athena remembers she has her gun safe in the bedroom. “My parents will be here soon, they just have to finish making the badusha,”
“I love your parents badusha,” May gushes.
“Me too,” Ravi grins, poking her in the ribs with his elbow and Athena just looks amused.
“Come on, I’ll introduce you to everyone,” May says quietly, likely seeing that Ravi is starting to squirm a bit under Athena’s gaze. Even if has grown up practically beside May, Athena still manages to give him the stare down of a mother bear. It’s a little concerning actually.
“Yes, please.” Ravi nods, and May gently takes him by the arm, before remembering she doesn’t have to be as careful as she used to be, and squeezes herself closer to him.
He’s absolutely glowing. Because for once in his life, he’s a little bit just like everyone else.
Ravi meets Hen and Chimney first– only after saying hi to Bobby– and he tries his best not to make the absolute worst first impression of himself. He half-way succeeds, because Hen seems to know a few things about him already from Athena– including the time he accidentally threw up all over May that one time. Which May does glare at him for, when Hen reminds her of it.
“I am sorry about that, by the way,” Ravi grimaces as they walk away from the conversation. Apparently, according to May, he has to meet Buck.
“I know you are,” May snorts, shaking her head. “It was really disgusting though.”
“Oh yeah. It was.”
May leads him into the kitchen, where Ravi grabs a cup of water and chugs it to calm his nerves, because he’s really never been around this many people before. It’s a little overwhelming if he’s being honest.
“You okay?” May asks him softly, and he gives her the sanest grin he can muster.
“Yeah, just…big party. How many people does Bobby know?”
“Oh, just…well, his crew and some of their kids and some of their partners,” For some reason, May stares at him very softly when she says partners and it makes his heart thump in his chest.
“Oh.” He says, dumbly. His social skills could use some work, like, honest work. Studying from a textbook kind of work. “That’s nice. It must be nice to have a big…”
“Support group?” May grins at him and he nods in relief.
“Yeah.”
“Well, we’ll definitely need a big support group when we get into college.”
“Oh, right,” Ravi smiles weakly. College was never really on his mind because truthfully he never thought he’d live long enough to see it. And now here was, and all he really knows is that he’s going to try and get into the name college as May. “...Maybe I’ll study nursing,” he says quietly, and May’s smile wavers.
“Nursing?”
“Yeah. Pay it forward, you know?”
The silence hangs between them as they both know being stuck in a hospital again is the last thing Ravi wants, but he just needs to pretend– for one moment– that he knows where his life is heading.
Even if he silently acknowledges it’s in the wrong direction.
“May, I’m failing.” Ravi says as they lay on May’s bedroom in her dorm. His eyebrows furrow together, staring at his hands as May turns to him in confusion.
“...What do you mean?”
“I failed the end exam of this semester.” He admits. Nursing school was harder than he thought. Every time he thought he had a grasp on it, they would move onto something else that would make no sense despite how often he’s been stuck in hospitals, and how he really should know everything about nursing. Ravi thinks of Anika and feels like a failure.
May hesitates beside him. Her body is pressed against his, just like they were when they were thirteen and sixteen, and her hand comes up to brush some of the curls out of his eyes.
It all comes spilling out of him, like a fire that can’t be contained any longer. He can’t be contained any longer. “I can’t do it, May.” He swallows. “I can’t be a nurse. I can’t be– stuck in one place all my life.”
“Ravi–”
“I don’t even ,” A sob falls from his lips, and Ravi presses his eyes against his palms, trying to hold the tears back with brute force. “I don’t even know who I am, outside of a hospital. How fucking sad is that?”
“Oh Ravi…” She murmurs softly, and he turns into her, pressing his face into her neck. His shoulders shake with withheld sobs, May gently holding the back of his head as the other hand rubs up and down his back. “It’s okay,”
Her voice feels soothing against the tide of emotions churning inside his stomach, so reminiscence he almost forgets he’s not on chemo. That he’s not slowly dying anymore.
Remission, remission, remission.
“I don’t– I don’t know what to do, May.” His voice cracks and breaks, uneven.
May doesn’t say anything else, she just holds him tighter. He feels bad. After May started working part-time at dispatch, she deals with everyone else’s emergencies. And now she has to deal with his again.
Like how she had to at seven, and twelve, and fifteen.
‘It’s okay,” May says, softly. “It’s okay…”
Ravi wishes it still had to the same effect as it did when he was thirteen, and scared.
“We’ll figure it out, okay?” May tells him, and Ravi tries to cling to it.
He wishes he could go back to when he was four and met May for the first time. The first time in his life where it felt like he fit perfectly into the spot beside her, like it was made for him.
“How?” Ravi whispers, and May doesn’t have an answer for him.
She just holds him tighter as he begins to cry harder into her arms.
Bobby smiles at him as he joins the dinner table, sitting beside May. An invite to eat with the Grant-Nash family is exactly what he needs right now, after dropping out of college.
Having to tell his parents was weird. He could tell they were disappointed– and he knows if it was Anaya they would be yelling–but they never said anything other than, “Whatever you think is best for you, beta.”
And Ravi knows, now, what’s best for him. He just has to break the news tonight.
Ravi holds onto the steady feeling Bobby gives him as he quietly banters with Harry, who is ten years old now. Where does the time go? He thinks, remembering when he was in the hospital and only got to see him through FaceTime.
It’s after he sets the bowl of salad down in the middle of the table again that he finally drops the news. His Amma and Papa already know, as he told them last night, and held them while they cried and screamed at him for maybe the first time in his entire life.
“I’m joining the fire academy,” Ravi says, and everyone stops moving at the dinner table.
May is looking at him with a hurt expression, her eyebrows knitted together as she stares searchingly into his face. It’s like she can’t understand why he would choose such a dangerous job, after fighting his entire life to live.
“That’s great, Ravi,” Bobby smiles hesitantly at him after a moment, and Ravi tries not the let the warmth in his chest from the praise be too obvious. “If you think it’s right for you, I know you’re going to be a great firefighter.”
“Are you sure about this, Ravi?” Athena asks instead– ever the voice of reason.
“I’m sure,” Ravi says and tries not to let it sting that May hasn’t said anything yet. “I think this is it for me,”
He can tell by the look on May’s face she’s wondering if that means how he dies, or how he lives.
The rest of dinner goes by quietly, the only talk at the table after his announcement is about day-to-day things.
May still hasn’t said anything to him, until they’re both at the sink, sleeves pulled up to their elbows as they wash the dishes. They’re alone in the kitchen, Bobby and Harry getting a board game ready as Athena retrieves the blankets from the closet so she can set them on the ground, for Ravi’s knees that don’t ache anymore, but feel like they might any second.
“What if I lose you?” May says quietly, so quietly he almost doesn’t hear her over the running faucet in front of them.
“...I’ll be careful,” Ravi replies, soapy suds on his arms. He gently hip checks her, “Don’t worry about me, May. I can take care of myself, remember?”
She laughs tearfully, which Ravi politely doesn’t look at her face, for fear she might start bawling her eyes out. Which May hates doing.
“Yeah, I guess you can. But I can take care of you too, you know that, right?”
“Always,” Ravi says, and tries not to focus on how May knows exactly what he needs when he needs it, and what it means for them and the little dance they’ve been doing around each other since the graduation party.
It’s like they both know it’s there, but can’t– or won’t– do anything about it.
“And I’ll take care of you too, May.” He softly says.
“I know,” May answers back, a near whisper.
He flicks some soap bubbles at her face, and laughs when she does it right back, blinking away her tears.
He did it. He graduated the fire academy. Ravi was one of the top ones in his class, which feels like a feat that he never thought he’d be able to achieve. To be good at something.
All his life he’s been trying to catch up to where others are, but with firefighting, it comes like breathing. It’s six, long, hard, grueling months of training and navigating making friends with his academy peers, but he does it.
He’s offered a job at the 118 almost immediately, along with the 136 and 153, but he already knows he’s going to the 118. Where Bobby is a steady, calming presence. Where Eddie and Buck are like older brothers, who look out for him. Where Hen and Chimney, look at him and just know one day he’ll be an EMT like them.
When he gets the schedule for his first shift, it’s when he’s relaxing in his apartment– that his parents helped chip in for– with May.
She still doesn’t look sure about the whole thing, but she was there for him when he was training.
Even if she did kick his ass a bit with the endurance stuff. It was like she wanted him to suffer.
“So, this is it?” May says, hesitantly as she reads his work schedule of 24-hours on shift and 48-hours off.
“This is it,” Ravi blows out a breath, and tries not to let the nervousness in his belly affect him. He worked hard for this. He knows his Captain, and his coworkers– which definitely helps his nerves– and he knows he can do this job. This is it.
What he was made for.
She turns her head, and stares at him, giving a small nod. “Okay. This is it.”
It feels like they’re talking about something different now.
“...May?” He furrows his brows, his gaze flicking to her lips and back to her eyes. Ravi didn’t even realize how close they were. Close enough that he can see the little freckles that dart across May’s cheeks. He swallows, and May does the same.
“Ravi…”
His hand trembles as he tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, feeling her shiver at his touch. It’s startling. Ravi thought– well he thought they were never going to do anything about this.
It had felt like a silent agreement to not talk about it.
“Ravi, I’m–”
“I know,” he says, because it’s been on the tip of his tongue since he was seventeen, and maybe sixteen. He knows. “May.” Ravi says again, until she looks directly into his eyes. “I know.”
Their first kiss is awkward. It’s awkward, and it’s perfect and it’s so them.
His hands snake around her waist, pulling her close, close as she can be to him. Their lips hesitantly hover inches from each other for a few seconds before they barely brush. It runs down his arm in fiery sparks, not at all like the cold, aching feeling he’s so use to in his bones.
It’s everything, and it’s nothing, at the same time, because this feels like it was always meant to be.
May’s hands come up to cup his jaw as she deepens the kiss– his first kiss, and he’s pretty sure hers– and Ravi’s brows furrow intently. Their legs are moving, pushing, pulling.
He gently presses her against the wall, the two panting as they finally break apart.
“Are you sure?” Ravi asks.
“Always,” May answers, steady.
Ravi thanks everything good in the world that he was four years old when he met May, with her muddy hands, and her blue dress.