Hurry Up and Live: The Nick Sears Story

"I'll have to think about it for like a half hour," Nick says. He decides to get his GED anyway. Then he decides to quit chemotherapy and switch to a naturopathic treatment. He doesn't want to spend any more of his free time feeling as sick as he knows he is.

Nick has been concentrating on his fledgling business, spending his days buying and selling items online for profit. When it comes to fiscal matters, his auntie is able to speak to him in a constructive and harshly realistic way: Your expensive bike that gave you that scrape on your knee shaped like Africa may not be the best choice in spending; don't assume your 6,000 Pokémon cards are worth thousands until you've actually sold them; your attempt at going door to door trying to earn money by raking leaves, while mentioning that you're a cancer victim, is sketchy.

Tim Willis

Dressed to the nines, as always, Nick Sears faces the world from his family’s front stoop.

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More About

• Sanjaya Malakar
• Alan Merrihew
• Garfield High School
• Medicine
• Cancer

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I've been asking Nick questions for nine months now. He is now a self-proclaimed "hopeless romantic." He tells me about the girls he's known. First there's Sarah, who became overwhelmed by his illness and needed to focus on her schoolwork. Then there's Lauren, a girl he met at Children's Hospital. "She broke my heart, buried it, dug it back up, burned it, and then buried it again," he says.

Then there's another girl, the one who only talks to him because he's sick. The girl he tells everything to, but knows nothing about. The girl who insists upon scheduling him into her planner, when he hopes they'll naturally spend time together, like friends.

"I'm sick," says Nick. "So are you a writer, or are you my friend?"

I drop my pen. The girl is me.

news@seattleweekly.com

Bianca Giaever is a senior at Garfield High School. A version of this article that originally appeared in The Garfield Messenger was recently named Feature Story of the Year by the National Scholastic Press Association.