Nothing ruins a family relationship faster than envy. Juno is the middle child, and mostly went unnoticed throughout childhood. Between bailing Ciel out of trouble and spoiling Aspen rotten, Juno's parents never really had much time for her. When she fell ill a year ago, nobody else mattered, and Aspen took this badly. Family can be bitter and competitive, and nobody cares about you until you're dead. When Juno first began feeling sick, she was seventeen years old and preparing for her high school graduation. It's uncommon for a healthy teenager to become hostile overnight, or to collapse in the middle of class. Juno lost her hair very quickly after beginning treatment. When she moved out of her parents' home, it wasn't without a lot of prior planning.

Ciel is rarely home. When he isn't working, he's out with friends or at the cemetery. Juno doesn't particularly like living with her brother. She knows her parents would never have allowed her to live on her own. Home doesn't feel like home, but it never really did.

University is nothing like high school. Juno attends with Ivo, though he doesn't speak to her in public. She used to take this personally. At school, she's free to do what she wants, and struggles with schoolwork due to memory issues. Recently, Juno's mother bought her a new wig: blonde, making her look like her sister. Juno doesn't like wigs. They're itchy, and hot, and she came to terms with her baldness a long time ago. Anika is a woman whose personality changes depending on who she's interacting with. She's doting and protective toward Aspen, and exasperated and impatient toward Ciel. It's always easy to tell who a parent's favorite child is - and although Anika would swear she loves all of her children equally, even a child could see this isn't true. She's the middle of three, and married a man old enough to be her father. Anika says she's blessed to have married a man who never struggled to support her financially. Anika is forty seven years old and has never worked a day in her life.

Juno's nauseous. In the hallway outside her first class, she has a seizure. This happens a lot, and it never gets any less uncomfortable. She's dying. People are uncomfortable about this, and don't speak about it. Ciel. who has many issues of his own, tries too hard to pretend Juno is normal. Aspen, who hasn't spoken to Juno since before her diagnosis, seems to blame Juno for the shift in their parents' attention. There's no use hiding it. Anika never gave two shits about her middle child.

A week into her first year of university, Juno is already known as the dying girl. It's not the most preferable of nicknames, but she's heard worse. An older student approaches from the foyer, having separated himself from a group of very doting girls.

"Hey, are you okay?"

It never matters. When Juno isn't seizing or showing symptoms, she's invisible to everyone. The student has dark skin and long hair, and plays left wing on the university hockey team. Everybody knows Rio. Even if you're not a sports fan, he's loud and well-liked, and fits in with almost every type of person. He doesn't know her name, but her face feels hot when he speaks to her, and this is rather embarrassing. "I'm fine." Juno isn't stoic. Even if she keeps her feelings inside, her face always gives it away. When she fell to the floor, her backpack fell onto a tile beside her, and now lies open, with its contents spilling out. Falling has become a regular occurrence. It's uncommon for anyone to go out of their way to help. Juno's such a cliche: a timid, well-meaning girl always crushing on the popular boys. She's a tragedy, really.

The boy holds out his hand, helping Juno up. He has a firm and strong grip, unlike her. She's embarrassed: both to have been noticed, and also to have fallen in the first place. He grabs her backpack without a word, and hands it to her before glancing back at the group of girls who seem to flock to him. "See you around." He has a lot of face piercings, which fascinates Juno. It's kind of pathetic. She always melts in the presence of an attractive, older boy. He winks, turns and jogs off before Juno has a chance to thank him. Boys don't notice her. They never have. She's gullible and timid; Ivo makes fun of her for this. One day, he used to say, you're going to trust the wrong person and end up dead. It's funny now. She's going to end up dead anyway.

"Your parents only care about you now because you're dying. Everybody will forget about you once you're gone."

When they were kids, Aspen and Juno fought a lot. At fifteen, Aspen is far more naive than she realizes, and argues this if it's pointed out to her. It seems to be an innate job of a sibling to pick at your flaws, and Aspen has perfected this. The last time the sisters spoke, they argued about Aspen's boyfriend, who really isn't much of a boyfriend at all. You can tell Aspen anything you'd like. She never believes it unless it's something she wants to hear.

After school, Ciel sometimes picks Juno up. She has a car, but it's hard to drive with a near-constant headache. Eight months ago, Anika, tired of Ciel's mourning, persuaded him to let Juno move into the home he used to share with his ex-wife. Juno prefers not to live alone, anyway. Ciel is good company sometimes. He has bright pink hair, nodding at Juno when she gets in the car. In the back seat, there's a booster seat that hasn't been used in months, and that Ciel refuses to get rid of. "Sup, Juno? I'm Marcus Toews today."

He has a strange way of coping with pain. His car smells like cigarettes. Juno's head pounds; she frowns. "Where are you getting all these identities? Do you steal them? Am I surrounded by criminals?" Usually, Juno plays along. Lately, she's not in the mood to deal with dishonesty. Life is too short, some would say, live a little. That's the problem, though. Juno wants to live, and life makes it very hard. It's chilly outside. Juno's always chilly now, even in the summer. She holds her backpack on her lap, watching out the window as Ciel pulls out of the paid parking lot.

No one really knows what causes glioblastoma. Juno was diagnosed after many tests and many days of acting quite unlike herself. Ten months ago, she received brain surgery, and then underwent her first rounds of chemotherapy. It's hard to explain, as a cancer patient, what being sick feels like to those who are healthy. People take their health for granted. Juno used to, as well. Some days, she can get along and get things done as though she isn't ill. Other days, it's hard to get out of bed without collapsing.

Ciel smokes while he drives. The smell bothers Juno, but she never says anything. "Where do you think I get them? I invent them." He says it as though it should be commonplace for a man in his twenties to live under fake identities. Juno never understands what her siblings are thinking.

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"Why?"

"Because," Ciel shrugs, his bright hair flapping in the wind. "It's better than being me."

It's like Juno's mother says. We all deal with pain in different ways. Juno cries in her room and becomes overly attached to her loved ones. Aspen becomes silent, isolating herself. Ciel, evidently, pretends to be somebody else. Maybe people find it comforting sometimes to escape reality when they're mourning. "Who's Marcus Toews?" Ciel should be a writer. He comes up with names and backstories for every new identity he invents. Sometimes, after meeting somebody new, he uses their life stories as inspiration for his own. Juno is tired, and rests her head on the window.

She wonders where Ciel has been. He works as a tattoo artist, but nearly got fired after the accident. It's a shame, really, that things happen the way they do. It's not as if he'll admit it, but Juno knows he still blames himself. Things go wrong. "He's a lawyer." Ciel taps his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel while waiting in traffic. "With a wife and children. He has the perfect life."

"Nobody has the perfect life." Juno sighs, shutting her eyes. Before she got sick, she used to enjoy street racing and cliff diving - but activity is too much energy nowadays. It almost doesn't feel worth it to live if life can't be lived to the fullest. It's hard to decide, sometimes, if it would be better to live with a low quality of life, or to not live at all. "Were you at the cemetery today?"

When Ciel finishes a cigarette, he throws it on the ground. Juno hates this. She isn't the confrontational type. "I was going to go after I take you home." He needs to spend less time there. Juno has learned that dwelling on the past doesn't help with healing. Juno sometimes does it, too. Childhood seemed so hard at the time, but when you grow up, you realize it was the easiest and shortest part of your entire life. Ciel would tell her not to be dramatic; she hasn't lived like he has. Maybe that's true. He's seen more loss in the past six months than Juno has in her entire life. Still, it's just like Ivo says. Everybody dies, and nobody remembers you once you're gone.

"You don't really believe that, do you?" she'd asked her cousin once, on a particularly bleak day. "That life means nothing, and we'll be forgotten someday?"

Juno was raised in a religious household, and went to mass regularly before moving out. She was raised to believe in a Heaven and a Hell, and an afterlife that depended on your actions during your time on Earth. Still, as Juno gets older and experiences different things, she becomes more and more conflicted on what she believes in. She thinks about death a lot. It's frightening to think of yourself ceasing to exist, even if you've already lived a full life. For nearly four months after the accident, Ciel refused to get behind the wheel of a car. His home is still filled with toys and clothing, and Juno suspects it makes things worse. "Can I come?"

He's not a bad driver. Sometimes, unfavorable things just happen. "You want to come to the cemetery with me?" Juno remembers when it happened. It was half a year ago, when she was undergoing her second round of chemotherapy. Ciel had shown up at her parents' house, covered in snow and blood, his speech fast and almost incomprehensible. It was very late at night, and Juno was meant to be going to bed. They're gone, Ciel said, deflating down onto the floor, dripping water into the carpet. It's all my fault.

Juno shrugs, swallowing a wave of nausea. She's been to a cemetery before, to meditate. There's something grounding about being surrounded by death and quiet. "I figured you might want some company." Juno doesn't talk to fill the silence. She's better company than most. Ciel says nothing, but drives past their home without stopping, and heads toward the back road which leads to the cemetery.

If it weren't for Maria's pregnancy, Ciel likely would have never gotten married at all. He's offended by bastard children, which is funny, because Anika was unmarried when Ciel was born. He never acknowledges this, even though it's not a secret. He has a controversial past, but never speaks of it. After the accident, he lost large sums of money to gambling and cigarettes, forcing him to take out loans in order to manage his mortgage. At the very back corner of Ciel's house, Calypso's bedroom remains untouched and uncleaned, even though he's in there almost every day. Sometimes, Juno thinks he should go through Calypso's things: purge as a way of healing. This has been suggested before, and Ciel always reacts badly.

One day, a few months after moving in with Juno, Ivo came home with a handbag filled with money. They were bills: folded, fastened with a rubber band, varying in values. If Juno had to guess, she would have said eleven, maybe twelve hundred dollars. Ivo threw the bag down onto the table, straight-faced, unamused as always, and said nothing about the cash he'd gotten from wherever he'd gotten it. He said nothing, in fact, just sipped from an iced coffee while rummaging through his backpack.

"Uh." Juno knew about his kleptomaniac tendencies, but it was so much different actually living with him. "Where did you get all this money?" She sifted through it, feeling uncomfortable, but Ivo didn't seem bothered, and drank his iced drink without a single care. Juno spoke up. "Where did you get this money, Ivo?"

"Ugh." He'd rolled his eyes, setting the drink noisily down onto the table. "Who are you, my mother? Shut the fuck up." With this, he'd scooped up the bag, thrown his key down on a place-mat, and strode with his shoulders hunched down the hallway and out to the shed.

Juno has a text from her mother. Nobody else ever texts her. After Juno moved into Ciel's home, she spent months looking for Ivo. She still doesn't quite know why - it's not as if they were ever particularly close or anything. There's a part of Juno that aims to please even the most ungrateful strangers, and this part of her can't be changed. You're a rare type of person, Ciel tells her sometimes, you actually care about the well-being of other people. It seems like a waste of time now, putting so much effort into finding a boy who tried to stay hidden. Ivo has bad manners. Ivo openly despises things that don't benefit him.

On the way to the cemetery, Ciel stops at a flower shop. It's kind of morbid. People receive more flowers in death than they ever do during their lives. At the cemetery, there's already a plot for Juno. It's strange and kind of scary to think about. Maria and Calypso have a double depth plot, which Juno's mother paid for before the funeral. Each time Ciel visits, he cleans off their headstones and leaves a space for fresh flowers, as the previous ones have usually died. Juno isn't sure how much time is healthy to spend dwelling on loss. Sometimes she wonders if she should just fake her death and move on somewhere new.

Ciel sits on the ground, cross-legged, placing the flowers neatly beside the stone. Colder weather will arrive soon. Juno enjoys a warm day. Ivo won't leave the house if it's more than fifty degrees.

"She wouldn't have blamed you, you know." Juno kneels in the dirt, her hands at her sides. "Maria. She'd want you to forgive yourself."

She doesn't get a response. She hadn't expected to.