Quality or Quantity

            The door swung and a middle aged doctor walked in. They had been waiting for almost eight hours. Their nerves hung in the air, a presence with the blinding intensity of a thousand lights blaring on and off. He strode toward them, sneakers making no noise on the carpet. His hands kept trying to wash themselves, as if the soap he had used wasn’t enough. Looking around, he spotted the father of the young girl he had just performed surgery on. The pure faith and hope on this face was too much for him to handle, so he instead focused on a girl who looked at him as if she already knew what he was going to say.

            Bentley sat in her chair. She knew it was a comfortable chair, but it seemed as if everything in this room was trying to rub her the wrong way. The colors were off just a bit, the lighting a little too bright, and the coffee stale. She waited; knowing the doctor would tell her Natalie was going to die. The baseball-sized ball of tissue in Nat’s brain just had to be a malignant tumor, the kind that someone can’t get better from.

The doctor started off with the same old routine, saying the surgery went well, blah blah blah. Get to the important s**t. Bentley’s eyes avoided the blue uniform he wore along with the cap containing his hair neatly out of his way. Instead, she looked at the shoes he wore. Right away she realized this was a mistake. A couple of red drops littered each side of the sneakers, or were they running shoes? She found herself wondering if it was Nat’s blood, then tried to subdue images of blood splashing from her friend to litter the shoes red. In order to distract herself she focused on the doctor, hoping to get this over with.

He droned on about the logistics of the surgery. Explaining that what he found was indeed cancer, he moved on to describe his removal of 70% of the tumor. Finally he reached the point where he told them about the chemo wafers he lodged in her brain to encapsulate what cancer was left. All of this was explained in great detail with focus placed on whether or not Natalie would be the same person after the surgery. She had lost a lot of brain tissue. Bentley wished the doctor would just get to the point. She wanted a timeline. Would it be three months? Six? A few weeks? She hadn’t skipped work, even when she had no replacement, to have this doctor waste her time.

            “The important thing to consider here is longevity or quality of life,” he said.

            Someone asked if that meant Natalie wasn’t going to make it. Bentley wanted to bawl that this was obvious (remembering his use of the word terminal), but instead held it in. The only good this did was to burst all of that emotion into her eyes. Suddenly, tears flowed like a fire hydrant someone had just crashed into. She sat throughout the remainder of the summary of Nat’s new life jerking her feet with a need to run out into the hall. F**k the hall, she needed to go outside, where she wouldn’t have to look at the hope in everyone’s faces and wish she could share it.

            When the doctor was done he had barely turned before Bentley was in the hall. She punched the button for the elevator with a passive glance. Her mind was focused on the heartbeat of the pack of cigarettes offering her an escape in her pocket. She made her way through the hospital, pulling her keys out, and plopping into her car with an unexaggerated sigh.

            Bentley sat in the car because the hospital was a smoke free campus, avoiding cigarettes even past the normal twenty feet mark asked for in other places. Her fingers were steady, but her eyes couldn’t find the cigarette she held in her fingers when she tried to light it. With a jerk she smashed the cigarette against the steering wheel, bits of tobacco flopping out like fishes cut from a net. Her hands flew to her phone, knowing she needed to call. She needed to call those who would need to know. And they didn’t need to be toyed with; Natalie was going to die.

            After the calls were made she left. The drive home was a couple hours through barren land, even uglier after the snow had just melted away. At first, music was her only escape. She found her situation was like those depicted in TV shows. It seemed like anything she listened to reminded her that her best friend was dying.

*

            Natalie and Bentley had known each other since they were kids. At first, they only hung out because their parents were friends. Natalie was older than Bentley, and Bentley thought that she was “the bomb”. Natalie didn’t cry when picked on, studied hard, and wanted to spend time with Bentley in a way that Bentley’s sister never had.

            As the years went on, each of them found best friends in their respective grades. Various fights led to some friendships breaking, others staying the same. Their families continued to meet, even through divorce, and later death. Natalie and Bentley always spent these moments, fair or fortunate, in each other’s company. Bentley admired how even through everything, Natalie kept a brave face on. She may be honest with Bentley about her angry feelings towards whatever God or fate there was out there, but she held herself together overall.

When they ended up at the same high school, Nat and Ley (as many had taken to calling her) developed better inside jokes than they had with many of their other friends. Even though Bentley was wild, and Natalie more focused, they retained a bond. Not a female bond like those of traveling pants and Jane Austen families, but they knew each other. They knew that they weren’t perfect, weren’t perfect towards each other, but their imperfections were real.

            A year after Natalie’s father died, she told Bentley that she considered them best friends. Bentley had stuck by her, helping her through her grief, even after many others had told her to start moving on. Where many in their local society dictated she had a short timeline for showing her grief in daily life, Bentley said instead, “Screw those heartless b******s. They have no idea what you’re going through or what kind of person your dad was.”

 

*

            A loud, off-key voice called to the rooftops, “Sweet Caroline!” followed by a resounding “Bum!Bum!Bum!” from the crowd. Bentley could hear this, a song she normally sang along to in a tone louder than she would in most public place. It was as if she was hearing it through walls; Thick walls, with pillows stuffed in the middle. The ashtray in front of her was stacked with a mound of butts smashed into various positions. Some had been put out with a light hand, while others were ground into the tray. In her fingers she held another one with only slight pressure. It trailed smoke that tried to reach the ceiling before being blown about.

            “Ley, do you want another drink?” Clayton asked.

            A growl rose in Bentley’s throat but couldn’t be heard over the dim of the crowd cheering the end of the song. As the karaoke jockey called out for applause for the singer (a second applause because the group had cheered too early), Bentley saw Clayton’s face and remembered he had driven her. He was responsible for her tonight. She nodded, and before she could give him more money he left. Another mini pitcher, only three bucks that night, was what he knew she wanted. She already had three. Three times three equals nine. How many beers does it take?

            The next song was another bar favorite, and the song Bentley was always requested to sing, “Don’t Stop Believin’”. When the piano introduction started she felt as if the keys were bouncing up and down on her stomach. She ignored the singer (who was actually the karaoke jockey). He was looking in her direction with a sheepish smile and trying to catch her attention. Earlier that night he came up to her and asked her what she wanted to sing this time. On a normal night, she would have smirked and told him one of her usual ballads, or even chose something fresh that she had never done before. Tonight, she had glowered at him over her beer glass before draining it and declaring it wasn’t a night for singing.

Ducking out of her seat, Bentley found her way outside. As she passed a dyed-blonde girl frolicking with the bartender, Bentley’s cigarette burnt the girl’s arm. Blondie-Without-Big-B***s went to chase after her, but someone pulled her back. Their conversation wasn’t heard, but B.W.B.B.’s face went from fury to pity. It was pity, not empathy, sympathy or sadness.

           

            The air outside stung her lungs. It was still far too cold to stand out here with smoke billowing out of her nostrils and no jacket on. Bentley burped, the remnants of her last beer teasing across her tongue. Her eyes rose to the streetlight next to her. It kept flickering, on and off, until finally dying. Somewhere she remembered hearing that a flickering light signaled a shift, probably in the spiritual realm. She thought, “I’ve got to stop watching movies like The Craft, it makes s**t weird.” She stood there in the dark until the cigarette, still in her fingers, burned her in-between her middle and forefinger.

Shaking the butt and ashes away, she carried herself back in to the bar. Around her mating rituals of college students and older bachelors and bachelorettes played on. The song being sung was one of jubilance. Bartenders swung bottles in Cocktail-esque magnetism. She went back to her chair, maneuvering around these spectacles. The night was filled with shots, beer chugging, and Irish-Car-Bomb races. The people of the bar cheered her on, patted her on her back, and announced to her what a great time they were having as if she shared it with them.