ii.
The persimmon orange embers contained inside the fireplace squirm with great vitality, heating up the room in a matter of seconds. Nestled up in a blanket, she presses her face up against the chilled glass, and stares out unto the moon, its splendor not in any way spoiled by the interfering window. Moonlight floods through the open curtains, and the only sound for a couple of minutes is the unremitting buzzing of the flickering light bulb.
“It’s not much,” Lucas speaks under his breath, obviously feeling a bit ignominious for bringing her to a room with such low quality.
“It’ll do.”
  He scratches the back of his naked scalp and paces the room back and forth, much to Eve’s annoyance.
“Isn’t the medicine you’re on supposed to enfeeble you?”
“Essentially.”
“In that case, rest your muscles,” she orders, hauling a chair across the mahogany floor, collectively abrading it as she did so.
He does so, much like a dog sits when commanded to do so. He lasts a millisecond before he jolts back up.
  “Hot chocolate?” he proposes.
“What is so difficult about sitting down?”
“I just want to make hot chocolate.”
“Well, I can’t resist such a delicious offer.”
He chuckles softly, “Any specialties I should know about?” he asks.
“I fancy marshmallows.”
Minutes later, he traverses back the long hallway from the mini-kitchen, cupping two Styrofoam cups teeming with saccharine-sweet hot chocolate, and almost over-flowing with fluffy marshmallows.
She nods her gratitude, and vigilantly takes the cup from his hands.
“So, what’s been alluring your attention outside the window?”
She sighs deeply, “Well, for a minute it was just the moon and its dazzling effulgence. But, then my eyes started to wander to the streets, and to the teenagers. I want to be one. I want to be a photocopied, replica of the people who meander the streets underneath the jet black skies—polluted mind, dirtied soul and all.”
  “There’s ways,” Lucas assures, hurdling unto the cluttered couch, his eyes achingly tender.
“How?” she asks desperately.
  He immerses himself in deep thought. “We party,” he answers, shooting up from the couch with a great amount of fortitude. “Tonight Eve, we’ll live as if cancer is non-existent, and Myocarditis is a fictional term. By the nights end, we’ll be surrounded by heaps of cardboard pizza boxes, and our insides will be brimming with scalding hot chocolate, and it’ll be the most satisfying pain we’ve ever had to subdue. Tonight Eve, we both live, instead of merely existing.”
“That, my sick friend, sounds like a plan.”
***
“Yes, I want the pizza delivered to the First National Hospital, first floor, third door on the left,” Lucas reprises into the phone, his tone exuding increasing vexation. He takes long strides across the room, evidently frustrated with the man on the other end.
“No, we aren’t doctors. Actually, I have Childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, and my friend here has Myocarditis, but should that hinder us from stuffing our faces with pepperoni?”
  The sly grin that slithers on his face seconds later tells me that something splendid must’ve been responded.
“And, the pizza should be here in ten minutes,” he states.
“All I want out of life before I die is a greasy slab of pizza,” she whispers under her breath, emanating a dry chortle.
“Why must you talk like that?” Lucas asks, rather livid.
“Because, I am dying.”
“Everyone is, Eve. But, meanwhile you’re still alive.”
“You don’t understand,” she quips. “I need a new heart, Lucas, and it’s not as simple as just buying it over the counter and getting it replaced. There’s an extensive line for a heart. I have come to terms that I am far too down the list to ever be recognized as a possible applicant for a new heart. The nurses expect me to keep a pager, just in case a heart does happen to come in. But, it’s pointless to carry such a thing around. Now, all I desire is to live as if I never had to go to sleep at night, with the echo of Mother’s wail circulating in my brain, because her precious daughter had been diagnosed with such a sadistic heart disease. All I really want, is to experience life with no worries at all.”           
“I remember seeing you the first day you arrived. Your crumbling mother could barely stand, but you seemed resilient. You know you were going to make it out okay, and I think that’s why you seemed so fearless from a perspective. Where did that optimism go?”
She stares down into her empty cup of hot chocolate, drowning in Lucas’s words; and she didn’t know how to swim, but for some reason it was okay—drowning in his words was bliss. And, she’ll never comprehend how someone so physically incapable, could be so sanguine, but she’ll tell you, his positivity made a fire blaze in her heart.
“The fact that my heart was slowing starting to languish finally sank in Lucas,” she admits, “and I just gave up. It was just too chaotic, deciding to stay that is. Because, there was so much reason to endure the pain, but it seemed easier to just let go.”
   The hollow knock on the door interrupts her thoughts. Lucas answers it, swiftly takes the pizza, and explains his reasoning behind leaving no tip (the debacle over the phone).
“Cheese?” he asks, hauling four large boxes inside of the abandoned room.
She nods lukewarmly.
He takes a bite into the scorching cheese, and looks at her uneasily.
  “I’ve guessed I’ve always been petrified of the idea of a new heart. It sounds like with it, I’ll be someone completely different, and that unnerves me.”
“You dangle your legs over roofs to see the moon, Eve. A new heart is nothing more than a night looking at the stars for you.”
  And with that, Lucas once again makes Eve feel invincible, and she realizes she could get used to such flattery. “Where's that slice of cheese pizza?" she requests.
***

Her burp comes to a rather resounding end after twenty straight seconds.
“You are the most wonderful being to ever ambulate on this Earth,” Lucas proclaims.         She guffaws over in laughter, something that felt rather revitalizing.  “Eve, you have made me feel more alive than I think I ever will in my lifetime,” he makes clear, sliding into the vacant area next to her, and marveling at the inanimate object in the sky along with her. “And tonight, you have donned a light on me that I didn’t know existed, and Eve, I think I may have fallen victim to one of the most horrific diseases in this Earth—more deadly than cancer itself.”
  “What is that?”
  “Love,” he drones slowly, cringing at the way it rolls of his tongue.
  “Oh, Lucas,” she voices, peeling her eyes off of the moon and on to him.
  “I am mesmerized by your eyes, and how they can change color within an hour’s notice. I adore how you will only drink hot chocolate with extra marshmallows, and how you have the ability to burp for an unnatural amount of time, and I love it. I love you,” he breaths.
  “Lucas. Love doesn’t exist for people like us, bound to death before the civilians that roam this Earth. We’re transported by a gurney, and our life is contingent upon what happens in a housing of people who are better off dead. Our feelings don’t mean anything, Lucas, when it comes down to the fact that you have Leukemia and I have Myocarditis, and we’re not normal—no pizza party can change our bounded destinies.”
She looks at him, succumbing to the intense pain she was feeling, and angrily swipes at the water droplets forming beneath her eyelids. “It could never be.”








 

iii.
Fatigued from sleep deprivation, Lucas had gotten up that morning to brew a cup of coffee and return to sulking in his bed room. He’d pursue the internet one last time for a time machine, or for some device to rewind time, but his efforts would end up ineffectual. 
As he waited for the coffee, he noticed hot chocolate packets, and individual packages of marshmallows adjacent to it. An agonizing smile crept from inside of him, and as incongruous as it might sound he couldn’t help but cackle.
  No matter what she did, or what she said, the after-taste she left on him would never be bitter. He grabbed the pot of coffee, and poured it into his coffee cup. After pondering the state of his coffee, he decided to leave it black. The unpleasant taste could mask some of the pain he felt from yesterday.
  As he turned around, a spunky blonde almost knocked him over, much like a belligerent football player would do to his enemy. He dismissed the accident, though, because he didn’t know the girl. But, when he felt a finger rapidly attacking him on the shoulder, his bewilderment got the best of him and he turned around, coming face to face with his infatuation.
“Eve?” he asked, completely astonished of the radiance she was giving off.
“Lucas, it beeped—by pager… it beeped. It was certainly buzzing around in one of my drawers today; I’m positive of it, and then it did so in my hand.”
  Lucas didn’t know how to react, for he was feeling so many things, that they all weren’t properly cooperating with his motor skills.
  Only listening to her heart, she wraps herself around Lucas, delirious with an overwhelming amount of emotions.
  “Eve, I have never been quite so captured by such feelings in my life,” he announces, a tear trembling onto her scalp. His voice breaks, and he weeps a little more.
“I will survive,” she mumbles, wiping away falling tears. “I just don’t think it’s my pager that helped me realize that.”
  Eve’s heart trembled and soared across her rib cage, “Lucas. I have fallen in love with the way you are physically incapable to stay still. I have come to notice that you can speak your mind when ordering food, and sometimes, in treacherous predicaments, you tend to have no control over your feet, and I love that. I love you.”
  Lucas looks at her, slack-jawed by the pivotal change in her.
“Love is as for us as much as it is for normal teenagers. Quite frankly, I kind of appreciate that our fates intertwined, here in this abominable hospital. And Lucas, if my pager hadn’t beeped today, I believe I still would’ve entwined myself into you, exactly as I’m doing right now, just because you flickered a new light on me—that is more brilliant than the moon.”
  He slowly reaches for her hand, his blazing body temperature adding a sufficient amount of warmth to her.
“And after today, Lucas, the thought of living excites me, and that’s something I never thought would happen again.”
  And, with that Eve, the girl who was oblivious to the fact that her name meant life, follows Lucas to the abandoned room, awaiting the presence of the moon together. Lucas could tell by the way she skipped more-so when she walked today, that a new heart already seemed to be inside of her.
But, new hearts desire the same things, and I believe Lucas will always have to go through the trouble of putting extra marshmallows in her hot chocolate for the time they remain in the hospital.
He wouldn’t have it any other way.