Read After Ever After (9780545292788) Online
Authors: Jordan Sonnenblick
After Ever After (9780545292788) (8 page)
“Whatever, Tad. You know what would be a really
beau
thing for us to do right now? We could study mathematics, the beautiful and fascinating science of numbers.”
So we got to work. But I should have realized that once Tad gets an idea in his head, he's on it like a pit bull with a bad case of lockjaw.
Between then and Christmas vacation, school was crazy. Tad was staying on the exercise bike a little longer each day, and I was pumping iron and doing word problems. Meanwhile, the classwork was piling on. Every teacher made some huge project due the last week, even though half the kids were missing tons of class time because of holiday concert practice. We also took a gigantic pretest for the statewides, which came as a surprise. The teachers all said not to worry too much, that they had purposely given us no advance warning because they wanted to see what we really knew without a whole flurry of test preparation.
Yeah, I never find it stressful when I suddenly have to drop everything and spend twelve hours taking a surprise exam.
As soon as I saw the actual cartons of booklets being wheeled into my homeroom, I realized,
Oh, those are the boxes from Dr. Galley's office
. And then I
thought,
Hey! She totally knew this was coming, and THAT is why she checked in with my parents. But none of them told me.
So you can imagine my mood by the time I was finishing the math portion, which took most of the second day. Then we had some nutty rearranged schedule that sent me to English class. Because I get extra time on tests to help make up for my “educational challenges,” I walked in late. An extremely popular preppy girl was just reading the class the last sentence of her journal entry.
The assignment on the board was: Cyrano de Bergerac faces tremendous challenges and pressures but refuses to compromise. Write about a time when you had to face a challenge head-on.
Apparently, the popular girl's answer to this question hadn't sat well with Tad. A few minutes later, Miss Palma called on him, and he started reading:
“Hi, everybody. Thank you for listening to my journal about challenges. I have faced some terrible ones, but I have always, like, totally come through. I am really exceptionally awesome.
“Like this one time, my friend Muffy was planning a big sleepover party on a Friday night, but she wasn't going to invite my other friend, Madison. Naturally, this put me in a bad place. I thought and thought about what to do. I mean, Muffy throws really amazing parties, so I didn't want to miss it. But on the other hand, I knew that if Madison found out I had gone, I would be so dead the next time I saw her. So what I did was, I pretended I had leprosy for the weekend, but then it got better. On the Friday night, my mom and I went shopping in this mall an hour away instead!
“On Monday, everybody felt so sorry for me being a temporary leper and all. Plus, I got this amazing Kate Spade purse.
“And another time, I was supposed to have swimming in gym, but it was the day of a dance, and I had gotten my hair all done already. I was all,
What am I going to do? Chlorine is, like, the kryptonite of hair. But being unprepared for gym is, like, the kryptonite of my grade point average.
There was only one thing to do:
I went up to Mr. McGrath and told him I couldn't go in the water because I was having my â”
“That's ENOUGH, Mr. Ibsen!” Miss Palma roared. Wow, I hadn't even known she could roar. From the look on Tad's face, neither had he. “Look, Tad, I know you've faced some, um, unusually challenging situations, but that doesn't give you the right to mock other people's journal entries. Just because you have suffered doesn't mean that your fellow students haven't. This room is supposed to be a safe place for sharing thoughts and feelings. But then you go and make a mockery of other students' pain. Why?”
Tad didn't say anything. Which was kind of a first.
Miss Palma continued. “Never mind. Tad, from this point on, you are not allowed to share anything you've written until you show it to me first. And I will allow you to read your words out loud only if they add to the class discussion, if they don't make fun of anybody else, AND if they are an honest reflection of your thoughts and feelings.”
Tad nodded. “Fine,” he muttered. Then even more quietly, he mouthed, “
Be
that way.”
“Oh, and one more thing: Please redo this entry and have it on my desk tomorrow morning, first thing.” She turned her back on Tad, and tried to smile at the rest of the group. But you could still see that her teeth were all clenched up. “All right, now. Does anybody else feel like sharing?”
The whole rest of the class just sat there like they were auditioning for roles in
Night of the Eighth-Grade Zombies
. Finally, Miss Palma announced that we would have the rest of the period for silent reading and reflection, which she always called “R&R.”
I opened the file on my computer that has all my social studies notes, and tried to study. Tad kept IM'ing me, though. After a day of high-pressure math, and his ugly scene with my favorite teacher, I really wasn't in the mood. But then an e-mail message popped up and I realized he was sending me his new answer to the journal question:
Â
SO, you want to hear about a challenge? Maybe I should write about the challenge of being a seven-year-old with a brain tumor, although if you don't mind having your head sawed open, that's not really so bad. I will admit that the challenge of being a nine-year-old with a recurrent brain tumor is harder, because then the sawing isn't enough. On the other hand, if you don't mind projectile vomiting for weeks on end or glowing in the dark a little, then maybe you won't think chemotherapy or radiation is so tough, either.
Ooh, I know one. How about coming home from the hospital with a giant hole in your skull, and finding that your own parents have replaced you with a cute little healthy baby while you were under the knife? Because, you know, they didn't
think
they would lose you, but better safe than sorry.
Not that any of those things can compare with coming back to school for sixth grade, after years of being absent all the time, and finding out that everybody is scared to be friends with you.
That's right, scared. Maybe they're afraid that what
you have is contagious, and if they share their pretzels with you on the bus, a gigantic glistening lump o' death will start growing into the side of their brain. Or maybe they're worried that other kids will think they're freaks if they're seen hanging out with a kid who can't even walk right.
Or maybe my mom is right, and their biggest fear is that they will get close to you again, and you'll go and drop dead. So they'll have to totally rearrange their lunchroom seating plans again.
Which is
such
a hassle.
Â
Geez. I had a weird feeling that this wasn't exactly the tone Miss P. was expecting. On the other hand, he was completely right. When you're actually in treatment, you're like the town mascot. Everybody is rooting for you, and helping out with a million fund-raisers for your treatment, and sending you class sets of get-well cards with cute little crayon illustrations for your hospital-room wall. But kids don't have the greatest attention spans. I mean, come on â
people
don't have the greatest
attention spans. So they can only sit around worrying about you for so long. Then, gradually, your illness becomes old news, until all you are is an empty seat.
Thinking about it made me feel sorry for Tad, almost. On the other hand, nobody owes you their friendship, either. Even though I knew it wouldn't help my headache, I IM'ed Tad:
Dangerous_pie: | Yeah, you're right. But you can earn your way back into the circle. |
Tadditude: | Thanks, Yoda. Then a Jedi will I be? |
Dangerous_pie: | Oh, stop. You were trying to come up with a grand gesture, right? I've got a grand gesture for you: Be nice. |
Tadditude: | I'm nice to you. |
Dangerous_pie: | Meh. |
Tadditude: | I can be nice, you snapperhead. Watch me. I'll be so sweet your teeth will hurt. |
That's when the real challenge began. On the way out of the room, Tad apologized to Miss Palma, then turned to shoot me a blazing glare. In the hallway, he held the door for a sixth grader. Going down the wheelchair ramp in front of the building, he got hit in the stomach with a Frisbee. He winced, but instead of getting all hissy like he normally would, he flicked the disk to the nearest player. With a smile.
“Nice one,” I said.
“Bite me,” Tad replied.
That night was supposed to be my last tutoring session before the holiday. When Tad arrived at my house, I almost died of shock. There was a steaming platter of chocolate chip cookies in his lap, and he was struggling to hold on to a container of eggnog while using both hands to roll himself along. My mom grabbed the cookies, and Tad smiled up at her like a Christmas angel.
“You know, Mrs. Alper, I suddenly realized today that I've never really thanked you for all the kindness you've shown me. And I also want to thank you for raising my best friend.”
Make me puke
, I thought. Mom looked rather startled, but she's pretty smooth socially, so she said, “Why, thank you, Thaddeus. Come on into the house and we'll get down some mugs for this.” She shouted for my dad to come downstairs, and he got the exact same treatment from Tad. But knowing how phony the whole charade was, I didn't even want to take the stupid eggnog.
Except I really like eggnog. Tad knows it, too, the rat.
When we finally got around to work, I raised an eyebrow in his direction. “What?” he said. “Can't a guy be appreciative?”
I snorted.
“No, I'm serious. You inspired me today with your totally rude and unsympathetic remarks. From now on, I am going to be kind to everybody â
that's
my beau geste. And if the people around me keep acting like total snapperheads anyway, I am going to harden my heart and be bitter until the day I die. Now, turn your workbook to page twelve.
Please
.”
TO:
[email protected]
FROM:
[email protected]
Hi Steven â
I hope you're staying warm over there. Or cool, if it's hot in the Africa hemisphere. Whatever. I just mean it's weird to celebrate Christmas without you. Tonight Uncle Neil did all his famous impressions, but they didn't feel as funny without you doing the little
ba-dump-bump
drum thing on the table after the punch lines.
I scored big with the presents, but you know I've never really been into presents. Remember that first Christmas after my diagnosis, when everybody gave me mounds of toys and video games for the hospital? But my favorite part was playing snowball fights with our cousins and then you carrying me to bed.
No snow this year.
I have a ton to tell you again, if you ever stop banging on hollow logs long enough to read your mail â not that
I'll ever send this anyway. Things are crazy here. I have a girlfriend. A girlfriend! Remember that girl Lindsey that Mom was teasing me about during that one phone call, but then you had to go because of the monsoon or whatever you call it? Well, she likes me. And I like her. Can you believe we gave each other presents today? Mom and Dad made her come here because of the whole grounding issue (long story), but at least they let us take a walk to the park so we could get a break from Mom chasing us around with hot cocoa and a video camera. Speaking of cameras, Lindsey had been taking pictures of me all week at school, but wouldn't tell me why.
So we exchanged gifts. I got her a box of oranges in a cool crate that says
IMPORTED FROM CALIFORNIA
on the side. Long story, but she made me share one with her right there in the empty gazebo. It's pretty messy eating an orange with ski gloves on, but we had fun. I had given her my usual speech about how presents don't mean much, and she shouldn't go to any trouble, blah, blah, blah. She didn't listen. First, she whipped out a rectangular gift about the size of a lunch box. There were little reindeer riding bikes on the wrapping paper, which I thought was cool.
I felt like Lindsey really understood me, you know?
But then I opened the box, and there it was: a Hello Kitty bicycle horn, bright pink. It was ghastly. Lindsey said, “Do you like it? I saw it and thought of you because of the whole bike ⦠you know ⦠uh, Jeff? Say something?”
So she gave me these puppy-dog eyes, and I forced myself to smile and say, “Uh, it's perfect! Thanks, Linds. I'll get this onto my bike, um, right away!”
Then she busted out laughing. “I'm kidding, silly! It's just a joke. I would never make you put that on your bike. But here's for being a good sport!” And she fed me a chunk of orange. Juice got all over my face, but then Lindsey wiped it off with her mitten. I know it sounds strange, but it was definitely â I don't know â a moment.
She had a real present for me: a whole album of photos of me and her, somehow digitally edited together with funny things. One had her face on Cinderella, and mine on Donald Duck. Another had her as the Little Mermaid, and me as Goofy. She really went with the whole Disney theme (another long story).
But the last photo was just me with a heart around it. I was kind of mortified. I mean, if Tad ever sees this thing, I'll
be hearing about it until forever. Still, the whole thing is strangely cool: Lindsey sees me as a guy in a heart.
We finally had to go back to the house before A. Mom sent out a search-and-rescue team, or B. The orange juice all over our faces and gloves froze us to death. Then something happened that made everything else seem even better. You know how I don't like walking in front of someone because of the whole limp problem? So I kind of waited around for Lindsey to walk first. She was waiting for me, though. Then she asked if anything was wrong, and I actually TOLD her why I get embarrassed about walking. My heart was pounding. I mean, like, going-up-a-mile-long-hill pounding. I didn't know what she would do or say. Tad told me a story a few weeks ago about how a girl he liked called him out about his limp in sixth grade, and then he stopped even trying to get out of his wheelchair at school.
You know what Lindsey did? She asked me a million questions about my leg: how it feels, when it started, whether it will ever get better, why it doesn't bother me when I'm on my bike. Then she said, “Thanks for talking with me about it. I was afraid to ask. I didn't want you to
think I was shallow, but I wanted to know. I want to know everything about you.”
I can't believe how this girl is always three steps more mature than me, in every single possible way. Did you ever feel like that with Annette? That somehow, while you'd been learning how to incinerate bugs with a magnifying glass and make fart noises with your armpit, she'd taken some secret girl class that made her an expert on guys? I mean, I could never think Lindsey was shallow. Seriously, if I'm a puddle, she's the Pacific Ocean. But I didn't say that to her. All I could get out was, “Uh, no problem.”
She looked at me like I was a cute kitten that had somehow wound up lost in her sock drawer, got up from the bench again, and held her hand out to me. We held hands â I mean, through mittens and gloves, but still â all the way home.
Thank God I'm not sending this, by the way. I could never actually tell you all this stuff, but I have to at least write it out. Obviously, I couldn't tell Tad, because I'd be getting all dorky and misty-eyed about Lindsey, and he'd be all, “Get ⦠me ⦠a ⦠bucket! Must ⦠spew!”
So who else is there? Mom? Yeah, that would be a comfortable and useful chat. Or Dad? Can you imagine? “Uh, Dad, did you ever feel like you and Mom were, like, destined to meet?” “Well, son, there are a lot of variables that determine who we meet. For example, where we were born. If there are, say, thirty thousand towns in America alone, and each has, on average, five thousand adolescents of each gender ⦠but wait â you have to factor in that the vast majority marry partners who are within just a few years of their age. Hmm ⦠and then some percentage of the population moves at least once every few years. Tell you what, Jeff â I can write an equation for this, if you'd like. Does that sound like fun?”
Nah, I'd rather go flatten my tongue with a steam iron.
Anyway, that was Christmas with Lindsey. Meanwhile, Tad has still been completely strange. Usually, he's slightly nice to me, but horrible to everyone else. This week, after he got in trouble with Miss Palma (remember â the only freaking person you ever e-mail?), he decided that he is going to be kind to everyone.
Except me. And I have no idea what I did wrong.
Meanwhile, I haven't mentioned the worst thing of all. We took a pretest for the statewide math test right before vacation, and I'm pretty sure I failed it. Tad asked me how I did, and I gave him a little thumbs-up sign. Lindsey asked, too, and I changed the subject. Mom and Dad asked, and I screamed and yelled at them to trust me, for a change. Truthfully, I felt like I was being kind of harsh, but I'd rather get in trouble for having an attitude than for having brain damage (long story).
So over this whole break, even while I was opening presents, or all cozied up with Lindsey, the pretest has been rattling around in the pit of my stomach. If I did fail this thing, all H-E-double-hockey-sticks is going to break loose.
Usually when I write one of these pretend letters to you, my big hope is that you'll come home and we can be brothers again. But right now, I'd be kind of cool with just fleeing to Africa to hang out with you for a while. I'd miss Lindsey, but hey â maybe she could visit me and we could ride a llama together or something.
Or a yak. Does either one of those live in Africa?
All right, gotta go read for English. When you had Miss Palma, was she totally in love with a really hard play called
Cyrano de Bergerac
? Don't tell anybody, but it's kind of good.
Your brother,
Jeff
So that was my holiday week. The only part I didn't put in there was all the stuff about how stupid and helpless Mom thinks I am, or how Dad thinks I could just shrug off my math problem if I tried a little harder. Oh, I also left out all the times I begged them to let me go to Lindsey's house or meet her somewhere. We talked on the phone for millions of hours, but that's not the same as being together.
Can you believe I was psyched to get back to school?
At least until I got there. On the first day back, Dr. Galley called me downstairs again. There was a girl walking out of her office in tears, holding a fistful of candy hearts, which didn't seem like a good omen.
When I got in there, Dr. Galley was refilling her little glass dish from a huge industrial-size bag of hearts â also not a sign of good fortune. She started me off with small talk about my Christmas, but before I could even finish pretending to be excited about my presents, she shoved the little dish my way.
The pretest scores were back. I had failed, big-time. Now I would have to attend a special extra math class on Tuesdays and Wednesdays after school. I asked her whether the school was really allowed to do this. I mean, I was passing all of my classes, and the length of the school day was supposed to be the same for everyone, right? She took off her bifocals and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Then she told me I had a point, but that it wasn't up to her to decide what the district could or couldn't do. “If I were a student, and I had a legitimate problem with a district policy,” she said, “I would tell my parents all about the situation and let them fight it out with the superintendent's office.”
“So you think I have a legitimate complaint?”
She hesitated, then nodded.
“And do you think my parents have a shot at getting me out of this class?”
“Would you like another candy heart, Jeff?”
Â
I was totally bummed about this. Wouldn't you be? I couldn't believe I was busting my butt, and getting better grades than ever before, but I was in danger of getting held back in eighth grade AND now I had to go to these stupid remedial math classes. What were they going to teach us after school that we couldn't learn during the day? I figured all I was going to get out of this course was some extra reasons to hate math â not that I needed any.
To top it all off, Tad was absent. In fact, he was out all week, and he wasn't answering IMs or e-mail. His cell phone wasn't even turned on. The message said he was out of town, and when I finally broke down and called his home number, his dad told me he was down in Philadelphia for tests. My heart skipped for a minute, but then Tad's father went on to say that everything was fine, they were just monitoring Tad's
med dosages, checking his bone density, blah, blah, blah. This had happened a bunch of times before, so that seemed pretty normal.
Tad usually told me before these little trips, though.
At lunch on Wednesday that week, Lindsey asked me if I wanted to come to her house and hang out after dinner. I said I couldn't, because I was still grounded. If anything, I was even more grounded now that my parents knew about the pretest. The school had mailed a letter home, and called, AND given every student who'd failed a sign-up form that the parents had to fill out by the end of the week. It was amazing: I was almost surprised they hadn't sent singing telegrams or smoke signals.
I had never seen the school having such a major cow about anything before.
Anyway, Lindsey said, “So you still aren't allowed to go anywhere, huh? That's too bad, because my mom and my big brother are going to be out shopping for hours, and my dad's editing a film on
deadline, so he won't be leaving his office in the basement all night. I'm going to be so lonely! Can't you ask?”
“There's just no way. I'm only allowed to go to Tad's.”
Wait a minute
, I thought.
I'm only allowed to go to Tad's. But Mom doesn't know Tad's in Philadelphia.
“Pretty please?” Lindsey asked. “For me?”
I remember once, when I was in my last year of treatment, I saw a poster in the bookstore that said,
LIVE EVERY DAY AS THOUGH IT WERE YOUR LAST
. That became sort of my unofficial motto. I mean, there was a pretty good chance I was going to die at that point, so why not live it up a little? The problem was, there isn't that much a seven-year-old can do to live it up. Fortunately, as an eighth grader with a girlfriend, my situation was a little different.
Plus, my parents were expecting me to go out to Tad's that night anyway. I wouldn't even have to lie, exactly â just take my bike and go. In the words of Miss Palma,
carpe diem
. Or,
hakuna matata
. I always get those two confused.
I smiled at Lindsey. “I'll see what I can do,” I said.
What I did was flee my house after dinner like it was on fire and I was wearing a backpack full of propane. My mom asked me if I was going to Tad's, and I nodded a little. She smiled and said, “Learn a lot, OK?”
I smiled back, even though my lips suddenly felt like they were made of rubber, and I was on my bike before she could make me lie even more. I told myself it wasn't totally lying, but that was a lie, too.
It was enough to make my head hurt, but by the time I got to Lindsey's, I felt fine. Almost.
