For classmates fighting cancer, life isn't over — just different

Three 12-year-old girls stand in the hallway outside their seventh-grade classroom. They slouch against the wall like James Dean in triplicate, playing with their plastic jewelry and rolling their eyes. They pretend to be all grown up, but their guileless, hiccuping laughter betrays them: They're all still kids. They're all preteen girls. They're also all cancer patients.

The three are in the same seventh-grade class at the Seattle Girls' School, a private middle school south of Seattle's Central Area. The causes of their cancers are unrelated. It wasn't anything at the Girls' School. The probability of these numbers — cancer in three of 40 students — is minuscule. It's coincidence, but that seems too playful a word when little girls are fighting for their lives. Over the course of the past year — spanning sixth and now seventh grade — these girls have lived a lifetime. Two have been diagnosed with cancer; the other has been forced to relive a previous diagnosis. All three have seen devastating illness and despair, witnessed the injustices of life and read the very real worry in their parents' eyes.

But it hasn't broken them. It's just changed them, forever.

If you listen closely — between their chirping gossip about MySpace or comic books or Friday night's dance — you'll hear that they're incredibly thoughtful, strong and grateful. That sometimes, for just moments at a time, they're improbably wise.

Meet the girls.

The first is Eloise Evans, 12, a jockette and a ringleader in the seventh-grade social scene. Just before her 4th birthday, she was diagnosed with acute parameningeal embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma, which is impossible medical-speak for a tennis-ball-size tumor in the back of her throat. Eight years ago, Eloise withstood 10 months of chemotherapy and six weeks of radiation to her brain.

Now she's cancer-free, but she still must endure the persistent side effects of her illness and its harrowing treatment. Her nose runs and her ears leak sometimes and, every day after school, she has to get a shot of hormones in her belly to counteract the effects of chemotherapy and radiation on a child's ability to grow. Because of the radiation, her hair doesn't fully cover her scalp and forehead.

She remembers when she first began to realize that she looks a little different from everybody else. She was at summer camp and someone asked her, "Why do you have such a big head and such thin hair?"

"Hel-lo," she'd answered, her big blue eyes flashing. "It's called having cancer. Ever heard of it?"

Next is Emma Krause, 12, a brassy spitfire with a wit that can get her in trouble. Last Thanksgiving — exactly a year ago today — she was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. She was given around a 75 percent chance of beating this thing, which, her dad will point out, is great odds if you're playing the lottery, but not when you're talking about your little girl's life.

And finally there's Valentina Cole, 12 — or Vava, as she's called — the loudest shy kid you'll ever meet.

Last March, eight months ago, doctors found a tumor the size of a phone book in Vava's chest. Her left lung, heart and trachea had been squeezed out of the way. She was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma a month after she threw a dance party with a strobe light and a DJ (no boys allowed) for her 12th birthday. Vava was given an 85 percent chance of surviving through high school.

This past year, these three girls have learned a lot about life. Emma and Vava have seen the inside of a radiation chamber, and watched as chemotherapy chemicals drained into their chests. Eloise has touched her own scars and tried to remember how it felt when she underwent those same treatments eight years ago. All three have overcome some challenges already, and brace themselves for the battles they have yet to fight. All three know what it is to be resilient.

Rewind eight years. This story begins in 1999, two months before Eloise's 4th birthday.

She doesn't remember much about her diagnosis, or the 10 months of intensive treatment that ensued. She doesn't remember the doctors telling her parents, Dan and Celia Evans, that if they'd delayed coming to the doctor by a few days, she probably would have died. And she doesn't remember being the little girl in the family photo album — that impossibly small, bald-headed little creature, her skin almost gray, smiling toothily.

She has only the scars that crawl up her belly and into that delicate space beside her collar bone — her daily shots, her rootless teeth, her hair — to prove it.

Seven years later, it was September 2006, the beginning of sixth grade. The girls were 11 years old.

Eloise, Emma and Vava weren't close friends, but since they'd all gone to fifth grade together at the Girls' School, they knew each other pretty well.

Emma was the fastest kid in class. Her best friend, Mariah Eastman, used to wish she'd be able to beat Emma when they'd race from telephone pole to telephone pole on their way to Powell Barnett Playground nearby. Mariah never thought her wish would come true.

Early on in the school year, Eloise made an announcement to a group of her classmates, some of whom hadn't been there in the fifth grade and didn't know her well.

"I had cancer. Don't ask," she'd said. "It just is because it is."

At the time, Eloise's announcement didn't pack a punch. Cancer was a red-letter word, sure, but it was intangible. Something scary that older people got. Something Mariah's dog had died from.

"It was like someone getting up and saying, 'I almost got eaten by bears, and then I didn't,' " says one sixth-grader. "It was like, 'Oh, OK, whatever.' "

But over the course of the next few months, the bears would come back to ambush two of their classmates. Watching those bear attacks up close would make cancer real for the whole class. For Eloise, too. More real even than her own scars.

On Nov. 23, 2006 — three days before Thanksgiving — the fastest girl in class went home sick. The next day, her dad, John Krause, took her to a doctor. It was probably nothing, he and his wife, Lisa Fusch Krause, told each other.

A couple of hours later, John called Lisa from Swedish Medical Center. Lisa, it's me. You should come down here.

Ambushed.

Two days later, Emma began treatment for acute lymphocytic leukemia.

Here's Emma: "So you're this normal kid and then you get sick and then you're not normal anymore. You just have to realize that everything in your life, even how long your life is going to be, is not up to you. You just have to say, OK, what's next?

"The whole 'Why me?' thing doesn't really make sense. It's no one's fault. Someone up there just shook up a big cage and all the bingo balls come rolling out and my number lined up."

Two weeks after Emma's diagnosis, the whole sixth grade filed into one classroom. No one had seen Emma since she'd gone home sick, and rumors were flying. I heard she's moving. I heard she got paralyzed. I heard she's dead.

Principal Marja Brandon sat on the armrest of a blue-striped couch. One of the sixth-grade teachers, J. Juelis, stood in the front of the room, his back to a whiteboard of neat green writing. He did the talking:

Emma has cancer, he said. A kind of leukemia.

Silence. No one knew what to do. It seemed like a freak accident. Some of the girls felt guilty. Emma hadn't gotten along with some of them, but had they been mean to her? Can you take back wishes?

Eloise felt guilty, too, but for a different reason. "I didn't feel like I was responsible to save her — that's the doctors' job — but I still felt like now I had to protect her," she said a few months later. "But I guess you just have to realize, you can't keep someone safe. ... Life doesn't really work like that."

Vava remembers feeling glad it wasn't her. As if she'd dodged a bullet.

Three months later, Vava started feeling sick. An X-ray showed an inky black splotch on the left side of her chest, as if the film had been exposed to light. The doctor said it was probably a bad case of pneumonia, and sent Vava and her mom, Ki Gottberg, to Children's Hospital & Regional Medical Center for the night.

Vava's dad, Marty Cole, met them there so Ki could go home and get some sleep. Marty slept in a cot by Vava's bed. Just after 4 a.m., two doctors woke him to tell him that his daughter had a tumor in her chest — a form of lymphoma. The blackness had a name.

They had it wrong, he thought, angry. The tests got messed up. You've got the wrong kid.

Two months later, in May, his daughter would ask him: "Why did you think they had the wrong kid?" Her blue eyes are exactly like his. Same almond shape. Same eyelashes.

"Because," he'd say, his voice a whisper now. "I'm supposed to keep you safe. I'm the dad. That's my job." His eyes filled up.

The second sixth-grade meeting started just like the first: same classroom with the blue-striped couch, same neat green writing on the board.

Principal Marja Brandon's hair, which she'd shaved in solidarity with Emma, was beginning to grow back. She would shave it again for Vava in a few days. So would Indigo Maybee, a 12 year-old classmate, and Kara Wentworth, a sixth-grade teacher. Wentworth did the talking:

Vava has cancer, she said. They think it's Hodgkin's lymphoma.

This time, there wasn't silence. Some of the girls burst into tears. It was "the sixth-grade curse," someone whispered, it was some sort of voodoo. Three is too many.

The sixth-grade class had spent the winter studying diseases in science class. They knew — they knew — cancer wasn't contagious and that these cancers weren't caused by anything at their school.

But if it was just coincidence — unhappy serendipity, as their teachers said — then who was to say there wouldn't be a fourth?

That night, Emma's friend Mariah went home and cried. "What if there was only room enough to pray for one of them?"

Emma, Vava and their families spent most of last spring at Children's Hospital. Besides the food "totally sucking" and chemo being "gross and smelly," it wasn't so bad, Vava says.

The girls were sometimes at the hospital at the same time, but because of their different treatment schedules they didn't see each other there. The nurses would pass messages between them. It was like a game of "telephone" between sixth-graders in a cancer ward.

Weeks ran into months. Vava drew dragons in her sketchbook, and Emma named the equipment. Harvey the infusion machine. Agatha the IV stand. They learned the nurses' names, which rooms were the "good" rooms, that Emma's doctor, Dr. Doug Hawkins, had once been Eloise's.

Once, Emma reacted poorly to a round of chemotherapy. The doctors pumped her so full of antibiotics and morphine, they couldn't tell if she was still conscious.

A nurse began asking questions of the limp little body, curled up, its eyes shut tight. So much smaller now than it had been.

What year is it? she asked softly. What's your mom's name? How old are you?

The little body responded. Emma's voice was still there, deep down. Weak, but clear.

Who's the president of the United States?

Machines hummed. John and Lisa Krause waited by the bed. Wishing they could take her sickness and put it in themselves, wishing they could do anything besides wait.

And then, the little body stirred and, ever so faintly, seemed to smile.

"George Bush," she said. "Unfortunately." And then fell back asleep.

Back at school, Eloise — eight years removed from a similar hell she barely remembered — struggled to make sense of it all. It all seemed so unfair, so arbitrary. Life was so uncertain. If Emma and Vava, who were healthy just six months before, could get sick so quickly, what would stop the bears from ambushing her again, too?

"I started thinking, what if my cancer's not all the way gone?" Eloise said quietly, as if afraid that saying it aloud would make it real. "Can you be totally, completely sure, like, no possibility whatsoever, it'll ever come back?"

Death seemed closer, clearer, than it ever should to a 12-year-old kid.

Emma came back to school for the first time last January. She wore a white beanie with cat ears and a little red pom-pom on top. When she walked in, the girls crowded around.

"It was nice to see people cared so much," Emma says softly. She had never been the kind of girl the other girls hugged too much.

But every day was a fight. Her treatment had destroyed her reflexes, so the fastest girl in class now walked with a jolting, flat-footed lope. ("It's the Frankenstein walk!" one of the nurses had said, and Emma had laughed.) Sometimes, she'd fall down in the middle of class, her palms slapping the gray linoleum floor.

At the end of sixth grade, Mariah could run faster than Emma. She knew it wasn't because her wish had come true. Still, she wished she hadn't wished it.

Vava came back a few months after Emma. She wore bright-pink sweat pants and a blue sweat shirt, with the hood up, because she was afraid her bald head made her look like a boy. ("But a cute boy, who maybe I'd have a crush on," she wrote in her family's blog.)

For the first month back at school, she went home early a lot, too tired and dizzy to make it to recess. She knew she was supposed to be too old to be homesick, but sometimes she missed her mom.

"Do you ever miss me, Mom? Right in the middle of the day?" she'd asked her once. Her mom had looked at her, then nodded and started to cry.

This past September, Emma, Vava and Eloise started seventh grade, taller and a little curvier now, each leaning toward womanhood in that chasm of adolescence.

But for now, they still look like 12-year-old girls. They still talk like 12-year-old girls and slouch — flipping their retainers, rolling their eyes — like 12-year-old girls. But in some ways, they're different.

They hang out a little more now than they did before. They look out for one another in class, and chat about how it is to get radiation ("You get to wear this crazy mask!" Emma tells Vava) and, sometimes, they goof around and compete over whose treatment was worse.

In the hallway outside algebra class, the girls eventually get to talking about the past 12 months.

Vava says she's more grateful for her family now than she used to be. Grateful for her mom and dad, who slept beside her every night in her hospital room. For her cousins, who, after a while, forgot to treat her like she was sick, laughing and rubbing her bald head.

Last month, Vava's doctors declared her "cancer-free." While that doesn't mean she's out of the woods yet — she's undergoing a month of radiation right now — it means that a biopsy indicated her tumor was gone.

But Vava shrugs at the news, stepping on one black ballet flat and then the other, her scalp fuzzy now, like a duckling in spring. Later, she explains that she didn't want to talk about it in front of Emma. She didn't want to make her feel bad.

Emma still has a year and a half of treatment to go. Her parents hope she'll be done by eighth-grade graduation. Emma hopes she'll be able to run faster than Mariah by then.

Eloise is still trying to figure out what it means to be a cancer survivor. She'll keep getting shots in her belly every day until she graduates from high school, and her hair probably won't ever grow back all the way. She digs her thumbs into her gold sparkly belt, consults the ceiling and shrugs.

"You know, I don't think about cancer all the time, not like in the front of my mind. It's just that it's always there," she says. She looks at Emma and Vava, leaning against the wall beside her.

"Cancer's just a reminder that you can't go around like, 'La la la, no big deal,' because it really is a big deal, you know, being alive."

Haley Edwards: hedwards@seattletimes.com or 206-464-2745.

Erika Schultz: eschultz@seattletimes.com or 206-464-8145.