Side Effects May Vary (6 page)

Finally, at a quarter to eleven, Harvey dug the keys out of his mom's purse and escorted her to the car. On the porch, both my parents and Natalie wore rosy cheeks and drooping smiles as they said good night. Harvey hung back with me in the doorway.

The January cold tinged his cheeks and nose red as he rubbed his hands together. “We can sit together at lunch tomorrow. And I was thinking we could do something this weekend. Dennis is going to ask out Lacy from work—she graduated last year, so I doubt it'll happen. But if she says yes, I thought we could go with them. I guess, like, a double date or whatever. Make it less awkward for them.”

I sucked in a breath and turned my gaze to our parents, still laughing, not quite ready to say good-bye. “It's cold out. Take this,” I said, pulling off his jacket.

“Keep it till tomorrow.”

I shook my head. “I'm fine.”

His jacket draped over his arm, he took a step forward and kissed the spot where my lips met my cheeks. “Happy birthday.” He paused. “I love you.”

His words sucked the air out of my lungs. My heart pounded, echoing to every crevice of my body.

He ran down the steps to his mom's car, not waiting for me to say it back. “I'm going to warm it up,” he called to her, the keys dangling from his fingers.

I slammed the front door behind me, my parents still outside. I ran upstairs and, in my room, I melted into my desk chair. I had Harvey, and I had him for good. Hadn't that been all I wanted? To make those perfect moments last? But now I felt trapped, like a homeless person who'd been given their dream home only to suffer from intense wanderlust because we always want something until we have it.

 

I thought about something I could control—my hair. Or lack thereof.

Since my treatment was suspended months ago, my brows had grown back and my hair was on the mend too. I'd kept shaving my head, though. I would have rather died bald than with some random wisps of hair. After finding out I was in remission, I'd stopped shaving my head. Although it was sporadic and splotchy, my hair had now started to grow in..

I dug through my closet until I found a red beret that must have once belonged to my mom. Not that it would do much good. I was the girl who had cancer. That shit's sort of hard to hide.

After Harvey and Natalie left and my parents had turned off all the lights, there was a quiet knock on my bedroom door. I slumped down in my bed and pretended to be asleep. I developed that little gem of a habit while I was sick. People love to talk to sleeping sick people. It's like talking to a dead person, but a breathing dead person, so it's not so bad.

From the sound of the footsteps, I knew it was my dad. My bed creaked beneath him as he perched on the edge. He took my cold fingers, enveloping them in his, and I wished I hadn't pretended I was asleep.

“Alice Elizabeth, you fooled us all.” For a second I thought he'd caught me, but I realized he wasn't talking about my sleeping act. “If anyone could beat it, it
would
be you,” he said, his voice slow with wine. “You're tough as nails, Al. Tough as fucking nails.” The springs in my mattress squeaked as he stood.

Both my mom and dad had never tried to censor themselves around me. That included everything from curse words to financial woes. My mom, especially, believed that hiding things made them that much more illicit. She was right, in a way, but my mom always thought everything to the extreme. And maybe feeling illicit was why Mom hadn't told us about her affair. Maybe she liked having a secret.

All of the honesty I'd become so accustomed to made being sick that much harder, because suddenly I was a damn egg with a flimsy shell. I stopped getting in trouble—well, not really—I still got into trouble, but I was never punished for anything. I never heard a peep about hospital bills. And my mom stopped arguing with me, when usually every morning was a contest to see who could pick a fight first.

Now everything felt wrong, and nothing was the same. My parents and school. Harvey and us. Natalie and ballet. All these plans and all I had to work with was a big, fat question mark. Even though cancer was the hulking monster in the closet, it wasn't a relapse I was concerned about. Lying there in the dark with the creaking sounds of my house settling, I saw what only ever haunted me in those moments when my body was asleep and my head was still wide awake. The unknown. It consumed me.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers

Harvey.

Then.

A
lice sat on the foot of my bed. It was the first time I'd seen her since she passed out that day in the cafeteria. Seeing her so alive, right there in front of me, eased every muscle in my body. I'd asked my mom every day since then if she'd found out what happened to Alice, but she only told me that they were still running tests. All I could think of was the paramedics asking me over and over again if we were related. Then today, after school, Alice found me at my locker and asked what time I got off work. She said her dad was going to drop her off for a little while later that night. My mouth had stopped working, so I'd nodded.

I had spent the hours between then and now wondering what had changed and why she was coming over. Since we'd started high school, I'd get these urges to go up and talk to her, but anytime I came close she was with Luke. And even when she wasn't with Luke anymore, I couldn't think of anything worth breaking the silence for. I kept thinking that if I was going to say something to her, it'd have to be a little more groundbreaking than
Hi
.

That night Alice let herself into my room with her hand covering her eyes and said, “You have five seconds to hide your porn.”

“You're going to have to give me more than five minutes,” I said, trying to play along.

She didn't laugh, but plopped down on my bed.

“Do you remember when we were kids and your mom was watching me and she had to take you to a doctor's appointment, so she took me too?”

I didn't answer. Things like that had happened all the time when we were little.

“Your mom went to the bathroom for a minute while we waited in the examination room. You sat in the chair, and I walked around looking at everything, sticking my hands in the cotton balls. You kept telling me to sit down.” She turned to me. “Do you know what time I'm talking about now?”

I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “You told me the rubber doorstop on the wall behind the door was a nose-cleaner. And then you kept saying, ‘What's that on your nose, Harvey?', so I knelt down in front of the doorstop and rubbed my nose around inside.”

“And then the nurse came in and hit you with the door. Oh my God, and then your mom came in!” She pressed the tips of her fingers to her smiling lips. “She was so pissed.”

I sat down next to her. “Yeah. I didn't figure out that you were making it up till I was, like, ten.” I wanted to ask her why she was here, but I didn't want this moment to end.

She had probably said fewer than twenty words to me since the beginning of freshman year. I was trying hard not to count her words now.
One hundred and thirteen.

“You don't even like playing the piano, do you?” she asked, changing the subject.

I like creating the rhythm of your body
. That's what I wanted to say. If I was suave I would say shit like that, the kind of stuff that made girls' clothes fall off. I wanted her to keep talking so I told the truth. “I don't know. I quit.”

“That's dumb.”

I needed her to say it. Whatever it was she came to say. Because after a year of silence, why else would she be here? “Alice—”

“I have leukemia, Harvey.”

Your life changes sometimes and it only takes a few words to bridge the gap between now and then. My first instinct was shock. It didn't make sense. She didn't
look
sick. “I'm sorry.” It was all I could think of to say.

“Yeah,” said Alice, “because I must have caught it from you.” She slid in closer to me. “Don't be sorry.”

I nodded. “So, is this, like, the type of cancer they just cut out of you and then it's all ‘Hey, everybody, remember that one time I had cancer?' Or is this, like, the bad kind?” The type of cancer that decimates you and everyone you know.

She didn't answer, and because she didn't say so, I assumed it to be the latter. If it were okay, if she thought she would be all right, she would have said something like
but it's not serious
. I tried to talk, but the words stuck to the back of my throat. This wasn't supposed to happen.

“Acute lymphocytic leukemia. I'm starting the first round of chemotherapy next week.”

“How do you feel?” Words, sounds I didn't know I was making.

“The same, I guess. I don't know. I can't tell if I've felt like this for so long that I can't tell or if I genuinely don't feel any different. Does that make sense?”

One hundred and ninety-six words
. All those words in a matter of minutes but only four words that mattered. Only four words played on repeat in my head.

I have leukemia, Harvey. I have leukemia, Harvey. I have leukemia, Harvey.

I wonder if she practiced how she was going to say it.
Harvey, I have leukemia. Leukemia have I, Harvey.
Maybe she tried different inflections of each word. I would have.
I have leukemia, Harvey.
I thought about all the other people she might have told before me—the list was short— and I hoped that, besides her parents, I was the first to know. It was selfish, but I wanted to know I came first even if it was only when shit was falling apart.

I ignored her question because I wasn't sure if what she said
did
make sense and, too, I thought maybe it was the type of question you didn't answer. “Is it bad?” There should have been an online course that covered appropriate questions to ask when someone tells you they're terminally ill, but nothing could have ever prepared me for the hole that was growing inside of me. The absence I was already feeling at the thought of losing her.

“It's not good.” She licked her chapped lips and even now, when she was trying to tell me that some disease was eating away at her, my fucking hormones took over.

I thought about my mom because if anything could extinguish my sex drive, it was her.

I wondered if my mom knew. Bernie probably figured out a way to time it so that we both found out at the same time. That would be fair, and Bernie was nothing if not fair.

“They said the younger you are, the higher your chances are for recovery. But, I dunno. The doctor said it can be dicey. Dicey,” she repeated to herself. “All the good shit is supposed to happen when you get older. Driver's licenses, concerts, sex. So that's really fucking ironic,” she whispered.

“Did they do, like, a bunch of tests?”

She flexed and unflexed her feet. “Yeah. They kept saying things like ‘inconclusive' and this ‘warrants further testing.' They did a bone marrow biopsy and finally came up with something.”

It sounded painful. “Did it hurt?”

“They gave me stuff for while they were doing it, but now it's just sore.”

I wanted to have an answer to that, a way to fix everything. “What do we do now?”
We.
It sounded presumptuous, but it'd just come out. And even though I knew it shouldn't have been the case, the last year felt inconsequential—minuscule in comparison to the weight of her confession.

“Let's turn off the lights and look at the glow-in-the-dark stars on your ceiling.”

It wasn't the answer I was looking for, but I wanted to do it all the same. “Okay.”

I turned off the lights and navigated my way back to my bed by moonlight. Alice lay on my bed and patted the empty space next to her. Didn't have to ask me twice.

“Are you scared?” It was the question game, but this time I was asking all of the questions.

“I don't want to be.” I heard the words she didn't say.

“I am.”

“Good,” she said, her voice a whisper.

“Are you staying in school?”

“My parents haven't said otherwise.” We were quiet for a moment. “Do I tell people at school? How does that work?” She hadn't told anyone else.

“The booster club is going to have a field day with this.”

“Oh God,”
she groaned, rubbing her eyes, and when she did, her T-shirt shifted, revealing a sliver of cream skin in the moonlight. I slid my hands beneath my back.
Look, but don't touch
.

“I think I'm going to die.” There was an eerie calm to her voice that terrified me more intensely than any cancer.

“Don't say that, Alice.”

“We all die. We
are
dying. I'm just in the fast lane, I guess, dying faster than the rest of you slugs.”

My knowledge of leukemia was limited. I knew that leukemia involved blood and that there were two major types of leukemia—chronic and acute. And I also knew that Katie Cureri's little sister Emma had leukemia when we were in fifth grade and she was in third. The elementary hosted a ton of events and fund-raisers for her and her family. The more money they raised, the better Emma got and now she was fine.

Money was the cure to cancer.

I wished I was rich.

I couldn't think of anything that would piss off Alice more than a charity event in her name. I cracked a smile and laughed.

“What?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said. “Do you think you'll be eligible for handicapped parking?”

“You're kidding, right?” Without giving me a second to respond, she continued. “That would be incredible.” She paused. “I don't drive yet, though.”

“Yeah, but I bet your parents could get one.”

“Yeah.” She agreed, and then after a moment, “I could, like, sell it online.”

“I don't think it works like that.”

She sighed.

I wanted to ask her if whatever was going on right now, between us, would end when we turned the lights on and she walked out of my room.

“I have something I want to talk to you about.” Her voice filled my dark bedroom.

My stomach flipped in anticipation. “Okay.”

“I've got some research to do first.” She shimmied down to the edge of my bed and made large steps over piles of clothes and books, ranging in height and mass. She headed for the door, and I wished there was a dead bolt on the other side so she could never leave. So we could never leave.

“Good night, Harvey. I'll be in touch,” she said, like she was the godfather of cancer. She flicked the light back on and slunk out of the room. Did girls with cancer even slink? Alice did.

This felt like a dream. Tonight had been the best and worst night of my life, and the only logical explanation was that it had been a dream. I stretched out my limbs like a starfish with my feet hanging off the edge of my bed, staring at my plastic stars, their colors muted and dull beneath the bright lights. My room was too small for everything inside of me.

After a while, my mom came in my room without knocking. Normally, I would have made some smart-ass remark about things teenage boys did behind closed doors, but not tonight.

She sat on the edge of the bed, right where Alice had been only a little while ago.

With her eyes glued to the empty space ahead of her, my mother wiped a tear from each cheek. She squeezed my hand once, stood up, and left without a word. On her way out the door, she flicked off my bedroom light, leaving me to my stars.