Dessert First (10 page)

I thought about that. He was cute, and funny, and he really liked my jokes. In a way, a crush on Hunter was less scary than a crush on Evan.

Kat:
As soon as I'm taking applications, I'll let you know.

Hunter:
Don't wait too long. I'm funnier and more charming while I'm still alive.

Okay, maybe Hunter wasn't completely ideal, either.

The next Tuesday, Mom picked me up in the middle of school, to drag me to my weekly depression session with Dr. Anne. It's mortifying, skipping English class once a week to get whisked away by Mom during the passing period, when everyone else is walking to class. They can all see me standing at the curb waiting. About the time Evan got together with Tracie last year, the word got out that the reason I'm not in class this hour every week is that I'm at an I-must-be-a-crazy-person appointment. So, as usual, I rode the whole way in Mom's car in grumpy silence, with my arms crossed over my chest.

Mom and Dad have basically contracted out to Dr. Anne the job of having any idea what's really going on with me, which I guess is good, because they and I have no clue, and
someone
should figure it out.

Dr. Anne's office is in Kensington Circle, upstairs in a two-story building. She sits in a leather chair, behind her big frame glasses and little notebook, surrounded by so many ferns and plants it's practically a forest. She has an actual couch, like shrinks do in cartoons, but I just sit on it, I don't lie down. I start talking about something, and then we sort of blunder our way into other topics. By the end, I'm supposed to have more of a clue about what's going on in my head, to partly make up for the weekly humiliation.

I wanted Dr. Anne to explain the reason that I couldn't get any of the homework done, but, as usual, it didn't work that way. Instead, she asked me questions—like I'm supposed to explain it to her—and we went off on tangents. About halfway through, she asked, “How does Beep's having cancer again make you feel?”

I gave her a look. For this, Mom pays the woman one hundred and twenty dollars an
hour
? Which Dr. Anne always ends ten minutes early, so she can do shrink-yoga between patients. “I'm going with ‘bad.'”

She waited, perched there behind her glasses and notebook, until the silence got so big I had to fill it with something. “I'm afraid. For Beep. Worried. He nearly died. I want him to get well. I want to
save
him, with my bone marrow. But everything in our family just orbits around his cancer and his blood tests. It's like cancer is the sun, and we're all just little separate planets being pulled around. Except Dad. He's the comet that whooshes into our family solar system and then goes back out, into work-space.”

“Which planet do you feel like?”

“Mars. The angry little red one way out in the cold. Alone.” I picked at the couch. Familiar, but alien and lonely. “Mad.”

“Besides Beep's cancer, what makes you mad?”

“I used to get along with Rachel, but now she hates me.” I swallowed and stopped talking for a while. Mom's anxiety used to be something that united Rachel with me, against a common enemy. “Mom used to burp out some wacky new rule, like we had to wear sweaters when we went outside in a breeze, and I'd take Mom on, arguing with her insane grownup logic, while Rachel snuck out without a sweater. And Rachel helped explain Mom to me. And explain Dad, who's kind of removed. We had a good team thing going until Beep got sick. Now Rachel hates on me full-time. And I get pissy with her.”

“Pissy?”

“Sarcastic.”

“Really?” Dr. Anne smiled.

“Hey.
I'm
the sarcastic one. Also, I have almost no friends anymore, and I'm mad at my ex-friends for abandoning me last time Beep was sick.” When I needed them. I looked down at her tangled vine-design carpet, in greens and gold.

“Do you want to reconnect with them?”

“Yeah,” I said. But then wasn't completely sure. “Except that I already apologized. For my jokes about them.
They
should apologize for abandoning
me
. What if they do that again?”

“So you want to connect, but you're afraid, and you haven't forgiven them.”

We sat in silence for a while. The clock said we still had over ten minutes. “You make it sound like it's my fault.”

“Not necessarily. But if you keep finding yourself in situations you don't like, could you do anything to change that?”

“Beep has cancer—not my fault. Mom is crazy, crazy—probably not my fault. Rachel is boy-crazy—definitely not my fault, and I have no idea why she hates me so much.”

“You feel powerless?”

I didn't say anything.

“Why do you say your mom is crazy?”

“Fine. She has ‘anxiety disorder.'” Beep's bruises turning out to be life-threatening cancer wasn't the best thing for Mom's anxiety. “Beep's cancer coming back is hard on everyone. It even interferes with Dad's
work schedule
. He almost had to give me a ride home from the hospital one night.”

“Why do you think he's always at work?”

“Because they pay him?” His old law firm went out of business and into bankruptcy. He only got his job now because he brought over this big patent case, and that meant he could get his whole “trial team” jobs with his new firm. “We get our health insurance through Dad's work, which is pretty key.”

“Umm hmm.” Dr. Anne made that sound like therapist-code for horse droppings. “Do you think he might have trouble being present? Because of Beep's illness?”

I frowned at her and crinkled my eyebrows. “Mom's in charge of being crazy, in our family. Don't get people's roles confused. Dad's just in charge of work.”

“What's your role?”

I was the smart, funny one. The soccer player. But that had changed since Beep got sick and I went on academic probation. “I'm the one who can deal. Maybe the only.”

“Deal?”

“Yeah. Mom totally can't deal.” It was hard to explain. “I can just sit with Beep. In the hospital. Hang out. Talk if he wants to, or not if he doesn't. Mom endlessly futzes with him, trying to make him more
comfortable
, until he rolls his eyes into a please-jab-that-woman-with-a-syringe look, and I have to lunge in with a sarcasm strike to get her to stop. Or Dad, who can play videogames—but can't just
be
. Or even Rachel, who wants Beep to be there for her, when she graces his room with her surgical-mask-over-snotdrip self.”

“So you can deal, in the hospital. But have trouble dealing with homework.”

I'm getting treated for depression, but Dr. Anne always brings us back to the most depressing topics. At school things weren't getting much better. It looked like I was sliding down the porcelain passageway toward flunking out. “I can't even do the easy assignments. I don't know why.”

“Maybe you don't want to be the person who always deals?”

I shook my head. “Maybe I'm not wild about being me, period.”

• • •

Evan was waiting curb-side, with his lunch, when Mom dropped me off after the end of the Doctor Anne session.

“Hey,” he said. We fell into step, headed toward our usual lunch spot over by the tennis courts. “You gonna make it to my show at the Gilman tomorrow night?”

The Gilman is a local club, where Green Day got its start. Evan, playing solo, was on the bill with a couple of other bands and some super-secret awesome guest appearance. “No.” I looked down at gum on the sidewalk. “I'm really sorry.” I was supposed to stay with Beep. Rachel couldn't, because her nose was still a running snot hose. “Wish I could.”

“Me too,” Evan's voice was glum. “How was your, uh, meeting?” Someday we'll run out of euphemisms for my weekly shrink-rap. But not yet.

“Weird. Apparently, I discussed being from Mars with my therapist.”

“I thought boys were from Mars and girls were from Venus.”

“You were
so
asleep in health class when they explained
that
process. ‘When a mommy and a daddy like each other very much . . .' Thought you got a refresher course, though, last year with Tracie.”

Evan's ears pinked. “I try to forget my worst mistakes.”

“Good thing you're not me. Life would be like having amnesia.”

“What mistakes have you ever made?” he asked.

“Missing your show, tomorrow. Opening my mouth, constantly. Being born, almost sixteen years ago, but if my bone marrow gets used, I might make up for that one.”

Evan scuffed the ground with his running shoe. “Why do you say stuff like that?”

“Because if we get the kind of life we deserve, I must be horrible.”

“You don't like having lunch with me?”

I approximately loved having lunch with Evan. So much it scared me. What if that stopped again? “You're a bright spot, indie-boy. So I'm lucky you're not on a PET scan, because then you'd be a massive tumor.”

“I love it when you compare me to having cancer. It makes me feel all—” He looked up, then shook his head. “Not great.”

“Then hang out with me more,” I said. “Life vaporizes my self-esteem. Inhale some.”

He leaned toward me and put his face right in my neck.
Was he going to kiss me?
Evan made a big show of breathing in, like he was smelling perfume. I could feel the air pulled along my skin. My knees felt weak.

“Wow,” he said. “You're right. I suddenly feel awesome.”

I was feeling all woogly from him sniffing my neck and from thinking he'd kiss me. “Good. One of us should model that. Go, indie-boy, you rock.” I was just babbling. “But indie-style, not with mainstream predictability.”

“If I liked it predictable, instead of weird, how could we have conversations?”

“On that subject—” My session with Dr. Anne had actually worried me. Mom saw some kind of psychiatrist once in a while, but I was the only person in my family doing every-week shrink sessions, I couldn't do homework, and I couldn't even control myself enough to stop spraying Kayla and the Tracies with sarcasm. Or to stop arguing with Mrs. Miller, digging myself in deeper. “Do you think I'm not just bummed out and cranky—that I'm crazy, crazy?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Being from my family hasn't super-prepared me for recognizing
not
crazy. They're all crazy, except Beep, and we're having him chemically poisoned. So—am I? Crazy?”

“Uh,” Evan paused. “No, I wouldn't say that.” But it took him so long, that pretty much meant yes.

“Least convincing ‘No' in history.”

“Well, you're strung kind of tight.”

“Strung tight?

“Yeah. Strung so tight, if I patted your butt, dogs would howl.”

“Cute. For now, Evan, please stick to actual stringed instruments and keyboards.”

“We'll also need a drummer,” he said. “For our future indie band.”

“Not who drums on my butt. We don't want dogs howling over our great vocals. What do you mean, ‘strung tight'?”

“You don't let things go. And you always say the funny thing, to block stuff that hurts. You work so hard.” He looked down at his feet. “To keep things from getting to you.”

I just sat there. For once, I had absolutely nothing to say.

“But—” He looked over, guilty. “Not
crazy
crazy.”

The next night—during Evan's gig at the Gilman—I was back to my by-then-usual schedule of spending Wednesdays in Beep's hospital room, on the visitor's chair that turns into a foldout bed. Mom spent most other nights there, except for Saturdays, when Dad spent the overnights so she could prep for her Sunday open houses.

Mom would only get rest at home if someone else in our family slept in Beep's room, poised to wrestle the angel of death away.

I tried to get out of it, because of Evan's show—he was even playing the four songs we wrote together last year. But Rachel was still under quarantine with continuing post-nasal drip that made her cough. When Rachel did make her five-minute visits, Mom made her put on hospital gloves and wear a surgical germ-mask across her face, so Rachel looked like some hot young doctor from a daytime TV show who had stopped by to replace a kidney. And Dad was out of town because of some “expert deposition,” so no dice. When this cancer thing was finally over and Beep was well, my family was seriously going to owe me.

“Want some apple juice?” Beep asked, pointing to the little pitcher of his urine sample. “It's recycled.”

I rolled my eyes. He'd also recycled that joke. Because of the chemo, the pitcher was marked with the curving six-horned symbol for bio-hazardous waste. Beep wasn't even allowed to pour his pee, with its poisonous chemical leftovers, into the toilet. “Save it for Rachel. Yellow goes with her hair.”

“Nah. Rachel's like Dad. Doesn't come around enough.”

“When she does, notice her more,” I said. “With her looks, she's used to getting attention, so it's weird to her that you just keep playing videogames.”

Beep grimaced, and pushed around some of the hospital “food” on his tray, left from dinner. “Something's wrong with Rachel.”

“No kidding. She's stuck-up, but unlike blood cancer, that's not curable.”

“It's not that. Last time she was here, she spent half the time out in the hall, crying, on her phone with her boyfriend.”

I rolled my eyes. “Boyfriend problems.”

“Nah,” Beep shook his head. “Something serious. Can you find out?”

An uneasy thought nagged at me, just out of reach. It had to do with her boyfriend. Then worry. Something
was
wrong with Rachel. Didn't she know, though, with Beep sick, the rule for the rest of us was don't create any more family drama? “I'll ask, but Rachel doesn't really talk to me anymore.”