After Ever After (9780545292788) (7 page)

Over the next few weeks, Lindsey and I spent every spare moment talking. Or texting. Or IM'ing. Basically, we did everything but connect our houses with two cans and a string. I found out so much amazing stuff about her that I don't even know where to begin. I guess a list makes as much sense as anything else, so here goes.

AMAZING STUFF ABOUT LINDSEY

• Moved from California because of her dad's job. He's a digital effects designer, and Lindsey knows how to make movies on a computer. Her name was even in the credits of a movie once.
  
• Her supposed BFF from California started out e-mailing her every day, but now they're running out of things to talk about, and the messages have slowed down to maybe one or two a week. (Who could run out of things to talk about
  with Lindsey? I told L. that her “friend” must be an idiot.)
  
• Misses Cali oranges the most; insists that Florida ones aren't as sweet. Promised to let me do a taste test someday.
  
• Loves baseball, is a huge Angels fan. When I told her I love the Yankees, she went into a whole speech about their lame payroll-to-wins ratio. Really knows the sport. Favorite color: red. Looks hot in Angels jersey, but I will never admit it.
  
• Has one older brother named David, who's away at college. Actually
  likes
  having both parents to herself.
  
• Says I'm different from other guys because when I met her, I didn't check out her body. Or as she put it, “You actually looked at my face. I
  love
  that.” I changed the subject before my truth-telling compulsion could burst her bubble.
  
• Knows how to surf and ski. Has never shoveled snow.
  
• Thinks Tad is “sweet, deep down inside.” I was like, “Dude, I think you'd have to be doing some
  serious
  exploratory drilling before you found Tad's sweet spot.” But I am glad she likes him OK.
  

Speaking of Tad, he was doing a great job of helping me with my math, plus I was up to three sets of curls with ten-pound weights by Thanksgiving. AND I got an eighty-six on my first report card in math. I know that probably doesn't sound so high to you, but for me it was a total world record. My father practically wet himself.

In other news, Tad walked across the entire exercise room the day before Thanksgiving. He could barely breathe when he sat down on the weight bench afterward, but he was smiling from ear to ear as he gasped, “Twenty-two steps!” Again, not such a Guinness moment for most people, but in Tad-steps, that's like a mile and a half.

So everything was going great, which is why I should have known we were in trouble. But I let my guard down, and BOOM!

Before I tell you what happened, I have to tell you something about me. A couple of years ago, we got a phone call. In the middle of mowing his lawn, our Grampa Pete had slumped over the mower and died of a heart attack. Steven went into hysterics. I mean
serious
hysterics — like, he couldn't even breathe. I think I probably cried some — I really loved Grampa Pete — but I didn't lose my mind like Steven did.

When Steven got calmed down, he looked at me and said, “What? Aren't you even upset?”

I was like, “Of course I'm upset. I'm just not
surprised
.” That's yet another thing about cancer. See, most kids who haven't had it think that their normal, everyday lives are safe, that their parents' jobs are secure, their grandparents won't die without a warning, the stock market won't crash. Their mom and dad won't get divorced. Their family pets won't run out in the street and go SPLAT. Most kids, even though they don't realize it, believe they live in a plastic bubble.

But most of my earliest memories are of spinal taps, throwing up for two hours straight on my birthday, watching my own hair fall out while my friends were worried about learning how to write their names in crayon. And I guess Steven has had a lot of those shocks, too, through being my brother. But that's still not the same as being me. I
remember this other time, Steven came down to the hospital in Philadelphia with me, and found out that another leukemia patient had died. Her name was Samantha, and I don't remember much about her, except that she used to play Go Fish with me. Anyway, Steven went absolutely ballistic. I think they might have even had to give him tranquilizers. I was sad and all, but even at the age of five, I was also a little bit like,
Duh! What do you think happens on the cancer ward when you're not here? It ain't all snow cones and Ping-Pong tournaments.

Wow, it never occurred to me until just now that maybe I'm a bit more grown-up than my brother is. He still thinks life is supposed to make sense. I mean, I know it's not easy to be like Tad, who constantly thinks the whole planet is zooming toward some kind of gigantic cosmic toilet. But skipping around being all jolly is just asking the world to smack you upside the head with a tennis racket.

Which is what happened to me the day after Thanksgiving break.

Can you believe it all started with a candy heart?

Thanksgiving Day was pretty odd, because it was the first year Steven hadn't been around. Come to think of it, it was the first time Annette hadn't been over for at least part of the time. Mom made her usual huge turkey-with-every-single-side-dish-in-the-universe meal, and Dad and I ate as much as we possibly could. But without Steven's bottomless-pit stomach around, we barely made a dent in the mounds of food.

There's no sadder sight than Mom's homemade pumpkin pie with only three pieces missing.

Steven called after dinner, but the connection was really bad. He had stayed up until three
AM
so he could call us during dessert, which was sort of nice, at least. It was only the third or fourth time I had talked to him since September, so there was a ton I wished I could say. But with my parents standing there, and my memory of that horrible convo he had had with them floating around in my head, I didn't say much of anything. Most of the call was just him blabbing on and on about all the amazing drum
skills he was learning, and how cool all the drummers from around the world were.

Oh, and apparently he saw some zebras.

I couldn't imagine ditching Lindsey and my family for a bunch of stripey horses and some bongos, but whatever.

The day after that, Mom went shopping and Dad worked. I rode my bike over to Tad's and we hung out for a while playing violent video games. I'm more of a race car–game guy, but Tad loves to blow things up. Shocker, right? Then Tad's mom made leftover turkey sandwiches for me, Tad, and the E.R.C. That's what Tad calls his eight-year-old sister, Yvonne. It stands for “Emergency Replacement Child.” She was born less than a year after Tad was first diagnosed, so he insists his parents only had her in case he didn't survive.

After lunch, just so he would give me credit for trying hard, I asked Tad if he thought maybe we should do some math. He said I deserved the weekend off. So I told him in that case maybe I'd ride on
over to Lindsey's. Then he got all mad and said he wasn't just some kind of twenty-four-hour on-call math service. I told him I knew that, and pointed out that I had just spent the morning machine-gunning random pretend mercenaries with him, but when I left he was still sulking.

When I got to Lindsey's, nobody was even home. I stood on her porch like an idiot, ringing her bell every minute or so, until I remembered she and her dad were going for the weekend to visit her brother at college. I know, I know. How could I forget something that big?

Can you say “methotrexate”?

So I rode my bike for miles and miles, then spent the rest of the day bored out of my skull at home. I repeated the whole ugly cycle for the next two days — the only difference was that the turkey in the sandwiches kept getting older and drier. If there hadn't been any school on Monday, I think I would have been eating green turkey jerky, and died of food poisoning.

But no, there was the whole candy heart thing to contend with instead. When I got to homeroom, my teacher told me to report to the guidance office and see Dr. Galley. She's new this year, or at least sort of new. She was around when my brother was in middle school, but then took the last couple of years off to get an advanced degree. I knew all this because, believe it or not, Steven stayed in touch with her by e-mail. Which is more than he did with me.

I hadn't seen her since the first year of my treatment. All I remembered was that she had soft, blond hair that didn't quite match her tough-sounding voice. Plus, I knew Steven had an old in-joke with her: He always said that if she offered him a candy heart, he would run away in terror. Apparently she only busted out with the candy hearts right when she was about to tell you some horrible news. I knew Steven thought she was awesome, but truthfully, as I walked into her office I was kind of scared.

I sat down in the hard plastic chair next to her desk, and she swiveled to face me. The blond hair had gone partly white, but other than that, she looked very much the same. She smiled at me and said, “Would you like a candy heart?”

Yikes.

“Uh, no, thank you.”

She smiled warmly, like a happy grandmother. “So. Jeffrey Alper. I can't believe how grown-up you are. I'm Dr. Galley. I don't know whether you remember me, but I could never forget you. I can't believe you're that same little boy with the baseball cap from your brother's All-City jazz band concert.” At this point, her eyes got all misty, and I almost got myself ready to hand her a tissue, but then she recovered. “I've kept meaning to call you down just to say hello, but with four hundred students on my caseload and all this testing to deal with …” She swept her hand in a circle to indicate the huge piles of official-looking boxes all around the little room. What perfect decor for a counselor's office — noth
ing says
Relax
like a million standardized test booklets.

“Anyway, I'm really happy to see you again, looking so big, strong, and healthy. How is your eighth-grade year going so far?”

She sat there perfectly still, smiling and waiting for my answer. It was unnerving. If genetic scientists ever cross an elderly homemaker and a praying mantis, the result will look a whole lot like Dr. Galley. Oh, boy. This woman knew something. But what?

“Oh, fine, fine. Thanks for asking.” I looked down into my lap and folded my hands.

“That's great to hear. I've been looking over your five-oh-four plan, and I see that you have faced some academic challenges in the past. But your first marking period grades look good. I haven't heard any complaints from your teachers, either.”

She stared. I twiddled my thumbs. She stared some more. When I couldn't take it anymore, I grabbed my backpack, started to stand up, and said, “OK, then, since everything's going so well, I guess
I'll just head on back upstairs. It was really great seeing you again, but I have science first period, and I wouldn't want to miss any —”

“Jeffrey, I just got off the phone with your mother.”

Wham! My butt hit that chair again so hard my teeth rattled. I suddenly remembered this time in sixth grade when Jimmy Blasingame got called downstairs, and the counselor told him his father had been in a car accident. “Is everything all right? Is Steven OK? What happened?”

It was weird — even though I've been mad at my brother for months, he was the very first person I worried about. I guess even if your idol drops you like a radioactive hot potato, that doesn't mean you want them to get squashed by a charging rhino. Or mauled by a lion. Or even bitten by the deadly green mamba snake. Unless those are in South America, not Africa.

I shook my head to clear it, and Dr. Galley said, “Everybody in your family is fine. I was just calling up the parents of all my students with five-oh-four plans to discuss the upcoming testing, and I sur
prised your mother a bit. Do you want to guess what she and I figured out?”

Surprised my mother a bit?
What did she — oh, geez. “Uh, the square root of negative one?”

“Try again, Jeff.”

I felt the breath leave me in a
whoosh
. I swallowed, then said, “Does it have to do with the new promotion requirement?”

“Bingo!” she said, and pushed the candy hearts across the desk again. This time, I took one.

That Dr. Galley is wasting her talents as a school counselor. Really, she should be an interrogator for the army. I tried to resist, but at the first sign of pressure, I spilled like a waterlogged piñata. Then she called my mom. By the time I got home from school, I was almost surprised there wasn't a
WANTED: JEFFREY ALPER
poster plastered across the front door.

As it turned out, that was only because my parents weren't home yet. Mom got there first, right when I was in the middle of making oatmeal. She started in on me right away, and wouldn't even give me a one-minute cease-fire to finish the crucial sweetening procedure. As a result, I rushed the tasting part, and ended up burning the roof of my mouth to shreds. “Jeffrey Alper,” she screeched, “how
could
you? Did you think you'd be able to hide this from us forever, just by getting rid of the letter? Did you ever think about what would happen when you failed the state test?”

Ooh, that made me mad. Unfortunately, my singed palate took away some of the power of my argument. “Gak's not gair! Goo gon't know I'n gonna kail ga kest! Why gon't goo hag any kaith in me?”

The weird thing is, Mom understood what I said anyway. “It
is
fair, Jeff. I
do
have faith in you — usually. But how am I supposed to react when you deliberately deceive your parents? Plus, I'm sorry to say this, but there is a chance you might fail that test.”

I swished some water around my mouth until I could talk again. Then I replied, “But I fixed the whole situation. Tad has been doing a great job tutoring me. Come on — you know I got an eighty-six in math this marking period. I'll be fine.”

“Maybe, Jeffrey. But I've been teaching for a long time, and I've seen plenty of kids pass my class and still fail the state test. Those tests don't always match up with what kids learn in their courses.”

“So what do you want me to do about it? If the test doesn't measure what I'm learning in school, what's the point?”

She sighed. “Jeff, don't get me started on the testing system. This is not the time to make me even more irritated; plus, it's irrelevant. You have to pass that test, and we have to come up with a real plan for making that happen. Do you understand me?”

I played with my oatmeal. Mom hates that.

“I said, do you understand me?”

I played some more. Did you know that if you stir hot cereal really fast in a circle, you can make a little steam tornado?

Mom grabbed my wrist. “Jeffrey —”

“Do we have to tell Dad?”

“What do you mean? Of course we have to tell Dad. Why on earth wouldn't I —”

“Mom, he's the whole reason I stuffed that stupid letter down the disposal in the first place.”

“You stuffed it down the disposal? It was recyclable!”

“Uh, Mom, can you please focus? I stuffed the letter down the disposal because Dad already hates me enough without
this
hanging over everything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Mom, you're kidding, right? Haven't you ever noticed how mad your husband gets whenever your son has trouble with math? I knew if he saw the letter, he'd, like, chain me to a desk and make me do worksheets twelve hours a night. AND he'd run out and get me some super-expensive tutor. Then he'd spend the whole year making critical comments about how
Jeffrey's condition will send us to the poor-house yet!
whenever you guys think I can't hear. Plus, he'd still insist on ‘helping' me with the math himself. And he'd explode at me every fifteen seconds about how lazy and unmotivated I am.”

“Do you really think your father would do all that?”

“Have you
met
my father, Mom?”

“Oh, Jeffrey. I know it's hard for you to understand, but your father loves you more than you will ever know. He just sometimes has a hard time showing it. And he gets so
frustrated
when you have so much trouble. But he's not frustrated at
you
.”

I snorted.

“Jeff, do you remember the first meeting we had with your fourth-grade teacher, when she told us you were falling behind in math?”

“Uh, I believe the actual phrase was
hopelessly
behind.”

“Yeah, well … after you went to bed that night, and after Steven was safely locked away in his room, do you know what your father did?”

“Um, try to sell me on eBay?”

“No, he did
not
try to sell you on eBay! He cried, Jeffrey. He cried.”

“
Dad
cried? About me?”

“Oh, buddy. Your father adores you. He just worries about you so much. You have to understand: No parent ever wants to see his child struggle. And it's even harder for Dad to see you struggle with math, because that's always come so easy to him.” She sighed again. “Jeff, do you know how Steven always gets really impatient with us when he tries to explain some drumming concept and we don't get it right away? That's how your dad is about math. It's so natural for him that he just can't see why it
wouldn't be that easy for everyone. And he wants it to be easy for
you
— not because he thinks you're stupid, or lazy, or anything else. Just because he wants his son to succeed. For your father, numbers have always been the path to success. He wants you to have that, too.”

“So you don't think he's going to, like, ground me until I'm thirty?”

“Nope,” Mom said. “
I
am.”

 

The next day at lunch, I tried to fill Tad in on the whole fiasco. “Your mom grounded you until the test?”

I nodded.

“And then she said WHAT?” he practically shouted.

“Shhh,” I whispered. “It's embarrassing!”

“But she really called you retar —”

“Yes, Tad, my mother called me ‘retarded.' Are you happy now?”

“In those exact words?”

“Pretty much.”

“Tell me the whole thing from the beginning.”

“Well, I already told you everything that happened when I got home. And then my father came in the front door, so I went up to my room. I listened from my closet, and they had this big argument.”

“And your mom was just all, like, ‘
Honey, the boy's a retard
'?”

“Kind of. My mom told him about the test, and the letter, and he said, ‘Jeffrey
will
pass that exam.' So she said, ‘I don't know. Something like a quarter of my students failed their math statewides last year.' Then my dad goes, ‘I'm telling you, Jeffrey isn't a quarter of your students. He's Jeffrey Alper, and he is NOT going to get held back in eighth grade.'”

“So she thought you
might
fail. That's not the same as —”

“Would you let me finish? Then my mom goes, ‘No matter how hard you try, you can't just wish Jeffrey into passing this thing.' So my dad said something I didn't quite hear, and then my mom kind of shouted, ‘No, YOU listen! I'm going right up to that school tomorrow, and I'm going to tell them to
appeal this all the way to the state. In his three years there, Jeffrey has never failed ANYTHING. So how can they hold him back on the basis of one day of testing? It's not right.' So my father goes, ‘You can't do that. Jeffrey has to stand on his own two feet in this world. If he can't pass the test, then maybe he doesn't belong in high school.' I could hear my mom pacing the floor, smacking her hands together, and then she said, ‘Honey, I know you've never believed in Jeffrey's disability —' and he said, ‘That's not the point. Disability or not, he still needs to —' and she said, ‘It IS the point! They can't use this test to ruin my child's future. For God's sake, he has brain damage! The counselor said the only students who would be exempt from this new rule are the developmentally disabled kids, but I don't see what the difference is. How can they hold a child responsible for having a brain injury?'”

“Whoa, Jeff. Then what happened?”

“I don't know. The phone rang, and it was Steven. So my parents pretended nothing was wrong, and by the time they got done talking with him it was
dinnertime. I didn't say anything to either of them the whole meal, and neither of them was talking too much, either. Then, as soon as I could, I went for a long bike ride.”

“Dude, it was, like, twelve degrees out last night.”

“Well, I'd rather freeze to death than sit in my house and listen to my parents talking about how stupid I am. Plus, it was thirty-eight. And I wore a hat. And anyway, my grounding starts today, so I figured it was my last chance to ride for a while.”

“Big difference. Anyway, your mom didn't say you were a retarded kid. She just said your situation wasn't that different from theirs.”

“OK, that's fine, then. Tad, you're not the ugliest kid in the world. You just look like him.”

“Ha-ha. Don't be bitter, Jeff. That's my job.”

Just then, Lindsey came over and sat down next to me. “Hi, Tad!” she said. “Hi, Jeff! Hey, I'm not interrupting anything, am I?”

“Uh, no,” I said. “We were just … I mean, Tad was … uh, nope.”

“So what were you guys talking about?”

“Well,” I said, “it's very complicated. We were discussing … umm … hats. You know, hats. Like, the head kind.”

“There's another kind?” Lindsey asked.

“Hey, Jeff?” Tad said. “If your mom needs any evidence to prove that you're retarded, let me know. I'd be glad to record you talking to Lindsey. I'm pretty sure that would do the trick.”

 

In English that day, we started a new unit on drama and “the world of the theatre.” I know that in America, it's spelled “theater,” but somehow you could just hear the “-re” at the end of the word when Miss Palma said it. Miss Palma got so excited telling us about the first play we were going to read that I thought she might pass out right in the middle of our warm-up activity. She said it was her favorite literary work of all time. Then she put the back of her hand against her brow and said, “Oh, I'm sorry, Mister Shakespeare!” She went on to tell us that this play,
Cyrano de Bergerac
, was about a French knight dude with a huge nose who falls in love with
an impossible-to-get beautiful girl named Roxanne. Of course, Roxanne's in love with a really good-looking dumb guy named Christian, because let's face it, why would she be into the guy with the schnoz? Well, when he's not busy being a hero, Cyrano is also a famous poet. So he makes a deal that he will pretend to be Christian and write a bunch of love letters to Roxanne.

I know you'll be shocked to hear that it all ends badly.

Anyway, all the other guys in the class were complaining that we had to read a love story, but a lot of them calmed down when Miss Palma told them the play had a sword duel and a war in it, with cannons and everything. Plus, she promised that at least one character would die a painful, violent death, which sounded promising.

At our tutoring session that night (of course, my parents said I could still slave away over math even while I was grounded from everything else in the world), Tad was all worked up about
Cyrano
. “Jeff,” he said, “did you hear what she said about how the
ugly guy gets the girl by pretending to be the stud-master? I can totally do that. I'll just get a girlfriend online!”

“And what good would that do you, exactly?”

“I don't know, maybe she'd fall so madly in love with my personality that she wouldn't get all freaked out later on when we met in person and I was all gimped out.”

“Uh, Tad, I don't mean to be all, like, ego-deflating, but A. I'm not sure your personality is a massive tourist attraction, and B. It's not like you're having some genius news flash.
Everybody
lies online. It's expected. In fact, if I were a girl in some chat room and you told me you were some kind of chick-magnet, I'd automatically think the opposite of what you said. Like, you'd go, ‘I'm a six-foot-tall football player with stormy blue eyes,' and she'd go, ‘Aha, a mousy-brown midget.' Or you'd tell her, ‘In my spare time, I enjoy helping out poor South American orphans by building them sturdy wooden tree-dwellings,' and she'd think, ‘Swell, yet another computer geek who's
never left his room, much less the continental United States.'

“And eventually, you'd have to meet in person. So you'd be all nervous about the wheelchair, until she walked in and you found out she was actually a Siamese twin with only half a head or something.”

“You're probably right,” Tad said. “And she'd go, ‘Tad? I've had my eye on you for a long time, but now I've got half a mind to just leave you here.'”

I groaned. “Dude, that's terrible!”

“Well anyway, I still think I could learn a lot from this Cyrano guy. Like, what about the whole beau geste thing?”

“Uh, what are you talking about? What's a ‘bow zhest'?”

“Didn't you pay attention during the unit vocab definitions? A beau geste is a beautiful gesture — like throwing your coat down over a puddle so a fair damsel can walk on it and keep her feet dry.”

“OK, so this is important why?”

“Well, haven't you ever wished that, just once, you could do something completely magnificent?”

“Dude, mostly I just hope I won't forget to zip my pants in the morning. Or trip and fall down the front steps of the school.”

“Oh, come on, Jeff. Don't you ever want to do something grand to impress — I don't know — Lindsey?”

“I guess. Maybe. I don't know. It's kind of hard to do anything really impressive when you're chubby, brain-damaged, and grounded forever. Why?”

“I'm just saying, I think it would be awesome to do something larger than life, something people would talk about for a long time.” Tad was staring out the window of my family room into space, and I shuddered to think of what insane stunts he could come up with if I didn't get him off the subject.