The Last Inning

The fluorescent lights of the oncology wing hummed with a sound that reminded David of summer evenings—cicadas, or perhaps just the ringing in his own ears. He carried a paper bag containing a single orange, its waxy skin already giving slightly under his thumb.

Marcus sat in the same vinyl chair where they'd first met three months ago, during David's own rounds of chemotherapy. Now their positions had reversed. Marcus was thinner, the architecture of his face more pronounced, but his eyes still held that familiar sharp intelligence.

"You brought one," Marcus said, nodding at the bag.

"From that stand on 5th Street. The old guy with the cardboard sign said they were sweet this time of year."

David peeled the orange, the citrus scent cutting through the sterile smell of antiseptic and recycled air. He sectioned it and placed half on the shared tray table between their chairs.

"Remember our senior year?" Marcus asked, picking up a segment. "When we stole those baseball bats from the gym equipment shed?"

"We didn't steal them," David corrected automatically. "We borrowed them indefinitely."

Marcus laughed, then coughed into a tissue. The sound was wet and wrong. "We drove to that field at midnight and hit rocks into the darkness until my hands bled. You kept saying we'd hear them land."

"I still think we did."

"You always were a romantic about everything." Marcus studied the orange segment in his hand. "Even this. Even dying."

The word hung between them, sudden and terrible in its specificity. They had danced around it for weeks—using euphemisms about treatment plans and next steps and quality of time.

"I'm not being romantic," David said quietly. "I'm being your friend. That's the one thing I can still do right."

Marcus popped the orange into his mouth, chewed slowly, swallowed. "It is sweet," he said. "The old guy wasn't lying."

They sat together as the afternoon light shifted through the window, casting long shadows across the floor. Somewhere in the distance, David could hear the distinctive crack of a bat hitting a ball—a neighborhood game, children playing, the world continuing its ordinary business of being alive.

He thought about how friendship wasn't a single game but a whole season, full of losses and small victories and the quiet courage of showing up, inning after inning, even when you knew how it would end.