I am teaching eighth grade English to four students at a local summer school. They are all boys. Every day I come in with my books and my attendance sheet and my red pen and tell them to sit down, to be quiet, to hand in their homework.

They make fun of each other often. A lot of their jokes center around the bathroom, their respective mothers. At first I worried they’d make fun of me too. So I tried to be cool, to win them over.

We went around the room on the first day and introduced ourselves. We said our names, our grades and something we liked. When it was my turn I said I liked horses and that I was in graduate school. One of the boys said, What do you do in graduate school? And I told him, Learn to write books.

He has, each day since then, asked me what my book will be about.

I have, each day since then, successfully avoided the question.

***

Mondays are vocabulary days and on this one the boys sit down and pull out their workbooks and open them up to lesson four, An Apple a Day, which is all about medical words. Do these pages on your own, I say, and then we’ll review them together. They all look down. Pick up their pencils. Drop them. Pick them up again. Settle.

It is quiet for two minutes. What is tumor? Someone asks. It’s cancer, someone answers. What is malignancy? It means you’re going to die, the same boy says. What is consolation? It’s what people say to you when they feel sorry for you but can’t do anything to help.

A little while later the boy with all the questions raises his hand and tells me he is finished. Why don’t you start to read tonight’s homework? I say and he says Ok then asks me if the section from Huck Finn he has opened to is a short story and I tell him no, it is an excerpt. Like from a book? He asks and I nod yes. Like your book? He asks and I tell him, longer, better. What’s your book about, anyways, he asks . I ignore him as I always do, but this time without the pretense of listening to another student, or reprimanding him for speaking when he should be reading, or asking him to focus on the work at hand.

So what’s it about? He asks again. Consolation, I say.

***

In between classes I go to Starbucks for a green tea and a pee break. I am standing in line for the lu. The woman ahead of me walks with a cane and one hand on her lower back and lurches slowly into the single stall bathroom. I sigh, prepare myself for a wait, and turn to a nearby bulletin board, covered with colored flyers. Bake sales, babysitting, real estate and such. 

Emily’s Take, A Texas Hold’em and Bingo Tournament Event catches my eye because the shottily drawn pair of dice and playing cards that line its edges contrasts considerably with a small photograph of a bald girl wearing glasses and a tentative smile. I lean in closer.

Emily was a typical college student, it says, before the pain started. Doctors were at a loss and a laparoscopic surgery was scheduled for late summer. But by May the pain was excruciating and immediate surgery was performed. When Emily awoke from that surgery she was given the diagnosis of PNET or Ewing’s Sarcoma, a rare cancer. With an overwhelming chemotherapy regimen every three weeks, Emily and her family are doing everything they can to fight and get her life back. Please help us help them during this unimaginable, difficult time.

The door to the bathroom opens. The woman hobbles out and I enter, thinking about Emily, about who she might be behind the flyer.

An hour later, climbing the stairs to my yoga studio, I see the flyer again. And at the end of practice, the teacher makes an announcement. There are raffle tickets for sale at the front desk, she says, To  benefit one of the staff member’s sisters who is sick with cancer.

***

Emily’s sister is blonde and tan and always behind the Yogaworks desk. She checks people in. She smiles. She says, Enjoy your practice and Namaste. She is seventeen at the most. When I approach the front desk after class she is talking to a woman who has come to candle flow every Monday night for six months. When this woman started, in December, she was bald and wore a patterned scarf knotted over her head. She sometimes wears it now, but over dull patches of short brown hair. Emily’s sister is nodding to what this woman says about having cancer and getting chemo and how hard it is and how strong her sister is and I am standing behind them with my wallet out, ready to buy a ticket and thinking I might pipe in and say Yes it is so hard and this is how I know, but decide against it, slip a ten dollar bill in the donation box and leave.

***

For weeks after that I will think about walking up to Emily’s sister, placing a hand on her arm and conveying, with a sort of holy delicacy, the depth of my understanding.

I will build up this saintly act of esprit de corps in my mind, oscillating between thinking it self indulgent – the symptom of some cancer victim closeness complex – and supportive. I will wander out of class and eye Emily’s sister and then leave, over and again until I finally find the courage to approach the front desk and linger after class. When I do, I will feel awkward. Everyone else will have left and I will be standing there, pretending to read a flyer on intensive teacher training before breaking the silence and saying, how is your sister doing? She will look up like she didn’t know I was there. She will tell me that Emily is good, thanks for asking. That she came down with a slight cold after her last chemo treatment. I will nod and say, that sometimes happens and I will then ask, how are you doing? And she will look surprised because maybe nobody asks her that. But she will recover quickly and rattle off a series of well rehearsed lines about how supportive her family has been and the community of course and I will nod along with a compassionate look on my face. I will say I understand and I’ll place a hand on her arm and add, if you ever need anything. I will do this despite the fact that in so doing I am making Emily’s sister different somehow. Turning a spotlight on her suffering. Still, and maybe because I need to for some egocentric reason, I will offer consolation.