Suite Scarlett Read Online Free PDF

to her eyelashes. She grabbed her shower basket and stumbled out into the hall, half-blinded.
    The bathroom door opened just a sliver, and the smell of burning hair slithered through the crack. Spencer was long gone, and Lola’s blonde locks were so fragile that she never used any heating devices on them. That left one person.
    “Marlene?” she asked the crack. “Are you on fire?”
    The door was foomped shut as hard as it could be, which wasn’t very hard. The door was a little crooked and didn’t shut completely.
    “Just tell me if there are actual flames coming off your head,” Scarlett said, patiently leaning against the wall.
    “Shut up.”
    Scarlett nodded. Marlene couldn’t be on fire and telling her off at the same time. Well, maybe she could…but she couldn’t be a complete fireball, and that was what mattered.
    “I’m going to need the shower, too,” she said.
    “I’m busy.”
    It didn’t sound like Marlene knew about the switch yet. She wouldn’t have been talking to Scarlett at all if that were the case.
    “Can I just…”
    Foomp. The door stuck shut this time. Marlene must have hit it hard.
    It was a complicated thing having a cancer survivor for a little sister.
    There was a time—thought it seemed like a long time ago—when Scarlett remembered liking being an older sister. She took Marlene on the carousel in Central Park. She took her for ice cream down the block (as long as Spencer or Lola walked with them long enough to help them cross Second Avenue). And then, one day when Scarlett was eleven and Marlene was seven, Marlene got cranky. A few days later, they first saw the little bluish lump on Marlene’s neck. A week later, it hadn’t gone away, and it was joined by another bluish lump under her arm. She went to the doctor’s office one afternoon and didn’t come home that night.
    That was the beginning of it all. The disease entered all of their lives.
    Marlene was in and out of the hospital for seven months. What leukemia really was…what it really meant…Scarlett didn’t really get the details. She understood more from watching how the rest of the family reacted. Her parents stopped paying as much attention to the hotel. They did what they needed to, but they reserved most of their energy for the hospital. They closed doors more often, physically huddled together more.
    Lola, at thirteen, was already very responsible, very popular, very perfect. She could easily have become a queen of her class, but shesoftened her ambitions to spend as much time with Marlene as she could. She started doing things around the hotel without being asked.
    Spencer, at fifteen, still messed around—but Scarlett noticed that he started to make much more deliberate efforts not to get hurt. He went to the hospital regularly to entertain Marlene, covered up his excesses carefully (and there were plenty), and picked up all the slack when it came to Scarlett. While everyone else was busy, they cemented their already strong bond.
    And so, the pairs were set, and they had never altered. It was Lola and Marlene, Spencer and Scarlett from then on.
    The Powerkids were Marlene’s “class”—part of a charity surrounding the group of kids in her unit. Even though she had been in remission for two years, the Powerkids were still the center of her life. The Powerkids gave Marlene a social calendar that easily rivaled Lola’s. She went to basketball games at Madison Square Garden and baseball games at Yankee Stadium. She saw the Rockettes every Christmas. She went on special tours of the Bronx Zoo where they let you feed the monkeys. She had met the mayor, at least a dozen major league sports players, and a handful of TV stars. She had also gotten to switch on the lights on top of the Empire State Building one night.
    It had definitely crossed Scarlett’s mind once or twice that having cancer was a serious boost to your social life.
    She went back to the Orchid Suite and sat on her bed. A fat pigeon landed