After Ever After (9780545292788) (13 page)

That was when I looked down at my own hand, and realized I was still holding my calculator. I swear, I must be the lamest rioter in history.

“Take care of my little brother”? What the heck did he think I'd been doing all year, playing with matches and smoking crack? Plus, what was up with the melodrama? “I still don't know whether I've
found what I was looking for, but I do know I miss what I left behind” had to be the cheesiest sentence I'd ever read in my life. It was a cheesy cheeseball, covered with Cheez Whiz and served on a bed of Cheez-Its. With a side of
queso
.

And had he really been asking my mom about me all year? If so, why hadn't he just asked me himself? I understood the part about needing space to decide whether to, like, bond for life with Annette. But I was his brother. Did he really need to be off-limits for a year to figure out whether to be related to me or not?

The sad part was, I was completely thrilled that he was coming home.

The rest of the statewides weren't as dramatic as the first day. On Tuesday, when we walked into the testing room, the principal, both assistant principals, and the superintendent were all there waiting for us. You knew right away this was a big deal, because the principal never came out of his office for anything less major than a terrorist attack.

Or a student revolt.

I was standing next to Tad and Lindsey. Boy, were we popular! Pretty much everyone we knew came up and slapped Tad on the back, or gave Lindsey a high five, or patted my shoulder and said, “Good luck, man.” Tad and Lindsey were the heroes of the day. I was back to being the poster child. But it was OK, because when I looked at Tad that morning, I didn't see his puffy eyes or his constant wincing from the cramps. For a little while, Tad was his full-on angry self again. It was nice to have him back.

The second our butts hit the seats, the superintendent started lecturing us. I won't bore you with the details — and I admit I missed some parts because I was distracted by the violent flopping of his hideous toupee — but basically he told us that the science test was “postponed indefinitely.” He also said that if anyone did anything to mess up the rest of the testing, he was going to call 911 personally.

Yeah, like that wouldn't make it into the nightly news again: WHEELCHAIR-BOUND CANCER PATIENT ARRESTED FOR FREE SPEECH.

Then the principal tried a softer touch. He never raised his voice, and his “hair” actually stayed in place. He said he “admired our courage” but didn't want to see us do anything to “damage our promising futures.” He felt “proud as an American” that we had “exercised our right to peaceful free expression.” But if we did it again, he didn't “know what action the state board of education might take against individual students.”

Translation:
You've had your fun. Now sit down, shut up, and take the freakin' test. Or else.
Did these bozos think that vague threats were the best way to prepare our brains for three more days of testing? I mean, if they had threatened to make us wear their dreadful hairpieces for a day,
then
maybe you would have seen some seriously motivated students. But otherwise, threats just make kids mad.

I have to admit, though, nobody tried anything for the rest of the week.

After each day of the math section, Tad came zipping up to me and tried to go over every single problem. Of course, I couldn't even remember the
questions, much less the answers I had put down, but that didn't stop him from grilling me in detail. I couldn't blame him. He had put more time into helping me with my math than I had ever spent on another human being in my life.

On Thursday, when the entire testing ordeal was over, the principal came into the gym and — right in front of everybody — took Tad away to in-school suspension. I couldn't believe it. First of all, that made twice in one week that the guy had ventured forth from his hidden lair, and second, he still hadn't figured out that Tad was a bad enemy to have.

He probably figured it out the next day, after Lindsey had called all the local newspapers, the TV station, and the state education department. Or after my mom and Tad's mom drove down to the district office and threatened to sue if anything about this went on Tad's permanent record. Tad was back in class by second period on Friday. Going into the weekend, it appeared that Tad had won the free-speech battle. Of course, we didn't know whether the test scores would still be used to fail
kids for the year, or what my scores would turn out to be.

But wow, Tad knew how to make a beau geste when it counted. Cyrano de Bergerac would have been impressed. Probably not as impressed as Miss Palma and Brianna Slack, though. Our English class on Friday was one giant Tad lovefest. Miss Palma said Tad was “at one with the Spirit of Liberty,” and Brianna called him a hero. He muttered, “Oh, please,” but I noticed he was blushing.
Tad
blushing? It was definitely a week for miracles.

At lunch, while we were celebrating with ice cream pops, Lindsey told Tad and me that her dad was going to let her help him edit a commercial in the summer. He had been so impressed with her work on the Me-tube clip that he was even going to pay her for her time. She was pretty psyched. When Tad congratulated her, she caught him wincing. “What's wrong?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing. It's just, you know, a side effect of the Gleevec.”

“What's that, again?”

“It's the drug that's supposed to be stopping the cancerous blood cells from multiplying insanely fast in my bone marrow.”

Lindsey looked stricken. “Oh, it's no big deal,” Tad said. “Your boyfriend here has been through way worse. Like methotrexate, for example. Methotrexate makes Gleevec look like Children's Tylenol. I'm serious. You can ask Jeff.”

Lindsey looked at me. I nodded. “But you don't have to take that one?” she asked.

“Not yet. They're saving it for the three days before the bone marrow transplant. That's when they have to completely kill off any cancer cells that are left, along with my entire immune system. Then the doctors just have to drip some cells from my sister's bone marrow into my veins and hope the new cells save me.” Just then, the warning bell rang, and Tad pushed back from the table. “Oh, gotta go. Toodles, kids!”

And he was gone. Lindsey turned to me and said, “How can he be so calm about this? He's going into the hospital next
week
. Shouldn't he be freaking?”

I thought about this for a minute, then responded. “Would a
normal
person be freaking? Sure. But when you're going through treatment, you don't think that way. You can't, or you'd die. I mean, my treatment was, like, a millionth of what Tad's been through, and you know what it's done to me. But I know I didn't really flip out while it was happening. There's nothing you can do about it, so you go, and they stick you, and you get sick, and that's it. Freaking out just makes the whole ordeal harder for your mom.”

“Is this some kind of macho guy thing?”

“No, it really isn't. I'm not saying Tad isn't brave — he's super-brave. But I've seen three-year-old girls playing Barbies and telling their parents not to cry while they were getting needles inserted in their chest for three hours of high-dosage chemo.”

Lindsey said something softly just as the passing bell rang. “What?” I asked.

She put a hand on my shoulder, leaned in, and put her head so close to my ear that I felt the warmth of her breath as she said, “You're brave, too, Jeff.”

I didn't tell her this, but I didn't feel brave. Truthfully, I was scared out of my mind for Tad. I had survived cancer once, which was risky enough. Surviving twice was pretty rare, and three times? Let's just say if this were the Kentucky Derby, Tad would be a long shot.

The week after the statewides was pretty odd. First of all, it was Tad's last week of school. The teachers arranged for him to get his yearbook early, and that Friday was like his own personal Senior Week. Seriously, there was a line at our lunch table of people who desperately wanted to sign Tad's book. When everybody was finally gone, Lindsey said, “Wow, Tad, people are really going to miss you! I mean, until September.”

Tad laughed. “Yeah, it's amazing what a little fame and a fatal disease will do for a guy's popularity rating.”

Well, at least the glory wasn't giving him a swelled head.

Another strange thing was that I suddenly had some free time. After months of extra math classes, tutoring, and being grounded, I almost didn't know what to do with myself. I rode my bike a lot, of
course. I had told so many people about my big ride that I needed to make sure I'd actually be able to go that far without having a heart attack, and with two weeks to go, it was crunch time. I did twenty-five miles a day on the weekend, then alternated between doing ten fast miles and twenty slower miles every other weekday. But even averaging over an hour a day on my bike still left a lot of time.

I felt like I was going crazy. I was all excited about Steven coming home, but every nerve in my body was screaming with alarm about Tad's transplant. So on Tuesday I did what any red-blooded American boy would do: I did my training miles really fast, took a shower, put on a collared shirt, and biked over to Lindsey's house.

She answered the door, looking beautiful in her Angels jersey. Sadly, her team was in first place, but my beloved Yankees were off to a slow start — and she was having fun rubbing it in. “Hi,” she said. “I'm just enjoying the thrill of a victorious new season. And what are you up to?”

“Well,” I said, “the testing is over.”

She gave me a puzzled look.

“And I'm not grounded anymore.”

She still just looked at me.

All of a sudden, my heart was pounding and my palms were practically dripping. Amazing how I could ride a bike twenty miles without getting out of breath, but a little old talk with this girl practically put me in the intensive care unit. “And you said you were only breaking up with me until after the tests, right?”

She smiled. “So what are you trying to say?”

I made myself look right into Lindsey's eyes. “So I'm wondering if you still have that mistletoe lying around somewhere.”

She didn't, but we made do without it.

 

The week went by. Tad had his last day of celebrity, and then it was the weekend before Tad's hospitalization would begin. He was under strict orders to stay in his house, and he couldn't see anyone except his parents and his sister. If he got sick it would be a disaster, so I understood the deal. We
IM'ed a lot, which had always been Tad's favorite form of communication anyway. But I felt weird not talking to him before the transplant, so when Sunday night rolled around, I called him on the phone.

“Dude,” I said.

“Dude.”

“Uh, how are you?”

“I'm feeling rather cancerous today, thanks. And how are you, Jeff? Ready for the big ride next weekend?”

“I think so. You know it's N.B.D., right? All I have to do is climb on and keep pedaling.”

“I know. But just in case you need some inspiration, I'll be mailing you a package this week. Just promise me you won't open it until the day of the race, OK?”

“OK. Uh, what's in it?”

“Well, D.A., would I make you promise not to open it if I wanted you to know ahead of time?”

“Oh, good point. Listen, Tad, I just wanted to tell you I —”

“Oh, good lord, Jeff. Don't go getting all emotional on me. I've been getting it from my mom, my dad, my sister, the freaking
mailman
— I don't need it from you, too. All I ask is that you promise me one thing.”

“What?”

“Just water the plants for me while I'm gone, all right?”

“You don't have plants, Tad.”

“I know. I just always wanted to say that.”

“Isn't there anything I can really do?”

“Well, you could check on Yvonne when she gets home from the hospital. Maybe play a game with her — she likes Pretty Pretty Princess. Oh, and you could promise me you'll kick butt in high school.”

“Tad, what are you talking about? You'll be there when I get to high school. We're gonna go up there and kick butt togeth —”

“You asked what you could do for me, right? So I told you. IF, for some odd reason, I don't
happen
to be around, just do what I asked, all right?”

I swallowed. My throat felt two sizes too small. “All right.”

“Good. Now I have to go get some beauty sleep — wouldn't want to scare the radiologists or anything. Peace out, Cub Scout.”

“Tad, I —” I stopped talking when I realized I was speaking to the dial tone.

On Tuesday, Tad's package arrived. It was about the size of a box of tissues, and when I shook it, it felt kind of fluffy. I was dying to know what was in there, but I knew that if I peeked, Tad would ask me about it later and I'd tell him the truth. So I waited. Somehow, the week passed. I tried not to picture what was going on during Tad's three days of high-intensity chemo and radiation, or what was going through Yvonne's head as the doctors prepared to stick needles into her hip bones and take out more than a quart of marrow. I couldn't imagine what it would feel like to be asked to save your brother's life
twice
.

On Saturday, the actual day of the surgery, I prayed all day. I wished I could burn off some of the nervous
energy by going biking, but I never get on my bike the day before the big ride. My parents tried to distract me, and Lindsey even called to ask if I wanted to go to a movie or something, but it seemed wrong to go around having fun while Tad was in the middle of getting his bone marrow transplant. I knew he probably would have said, “Go party, Jeff. Listen, if you were the one in the hospital, I wouldn't be sitting around moping in the window like an abandoned puppy. I'd be out in the streets, living large with my entourage.”

But I also knew he would have been lying.

On the morning of the ride, I showered, ate breakfast, and rushed through a long series of stretching exercises my physical therapist gave me when I was in sixth grade. Then my dad wished me luck as I pumped up my tires, checked for my cell phone and emergency money, snapped my water bottle filled with Gatorade into place, and put my bike on the rack behind our minivan.

Just as my mom came out to the garage to spray me with about a gallon of sunscreen and drive me to
the starting line, I realized I hadn't opened the package. I zoomed back upstairs, ripped into the bubble mailer, and pulled out — an iPod and a pair of Pull-Ups, like the ones toddlers wear during potty training. There was a Post-it note, written in Tad's nearly unreadable scrawl, on the front of the Pull-Ups:

 

ALL RIGHT, JEFFY. HERE ARE SOME BIG-BOY PANTS.
PUT 'EM ON AND CRANK OUT FIFTY MILES FOR ME.
BY THE WAY, THE IPOD ONLY HAS ONE PLAYLIST
ON IT. PRESS PLAY WHEN YOU LEAVE
THE STARTING LINE, OK?

 

I took the iPod and went back downstairs. Mom and I didn't talk in the car. I mean, she tried, but I just wasn't in the mood. I have to say, Mom's always been pretty good at knowing when not to say anything. Of course, once we got to the park where the starting point was, she
did
hug me, and make me promise I'd call her after the first lap, and kiss me on the hair
just below my helmet, behind my left ear. But I looked around really fast, and I didn't think anybody had seen.

So that was kind of all right.

I said hi to the various people I recognized from past rides. When I'd started doing this event in sixth grade, Mom had made a couple of old guys promise they'd watch me, but this year at the starting line she just made a little call-me sign with one hand and sat down to watch me go.

The other two times I'd done this, when I was doing only one lap, I'd gone zipping out of the gate at top speed. But I knew if I was going to do the loop twice, it would be smarter to pace myself. I eased my way up through the gears until I slipped into a comfortable cadence. Then I started the iPod. The very first song was an oldie from Eric Clapton called “Tears in Heaven”:

I knew immediately what Tad was doing to me: It was classic Tad. He had always collected morbidly depressing songs, and obviously he thought it would be funny to make me listen to them during the ride. The next one, as I rode in the middle of the pack through town, was by My Chemical Romance. The song was called “Cancer”:

Tad and I had laughed at the drama of that song a million times, but it put a lump in my throat now. I kept pedaling and got through the song. Track three started just as I started the long down-
hill ride to cross over the free bridge into Easton, Pennsylvania. It was another oldie, Queen's “Bohemian Rhapsody”:

Oh, geez. As I turned with the pack to go over the bridge, I could actually feel tears welling up in my eyes. Then, to my complete horror, I realized there was a pack of girls waving to me from the middle of the bridge. I wiped my eyes frantically on the front of my high-tech moisture-wicking shiny bike shirt, and saw that Brianna Slack was one of them. So was Lindsey. They waved, and cheered me on, and held up a big sign that read,
GO, JEFF! MAKE IT FIFTY FOR TAD!

I passed them just as the next song came on:

Freakin' Tad.

We rode through Easton, and along an old railroad right-of-way by the Delaware, for about an hour before looping back around. At the end of the first lap, I noticed that the music had ended. I also noticed that my legs were starting to cramp up, so I drank some Gatorade. That helped, but it also made me realize I was starving, so I pulled over, called my mom to tell her I was fine, and got a hot dog at this stand by the side of the highway. That made me fall pretty far behind the pack, but I knew I'd catch them on the downhill back to the river.

I jumped back on my bike and steered with one hand as I wolfed down the hot dog in about three bites. I forced myself to chew each one really well — I didn't want to ruin the ride by choking to death. Then I cranked up to full speed, and got caught up over the next two miles or so. As I crossed the free bridge, I was relieved to see that the girls weren't
there anymore. It was my favorite part of a long ride: when you're already tired and crampy, but you're more than halfway done. And it would be so easy to tumble off your bike into the grass and quit, but you know you won't.

I wish I could remember now what I was thinking during those next two hours, because they were the last good hours I was going to have for a long time. But nobody ever tells you in advance when you should concentrate on the good times — that's why you're supposed to try to do it every day. I know, I know: Tad would barf. But it's true anyway.

By the time we made the last big, sweeping turn into the hill that leads to the end of the route, I was in a great mood. The sun was shining, the breeze was great, and I felt like I had really done something important and visible to support Tad. My legs weren't even hurting anymore; I almost felt like I could go around again if I wanted to. I cranked through the gears, and really poured on the speed as the end came into sight.

I looked around to see whether anyone was wait
ing for me. At first, I could just make out our minivan in the shade of a tree. Then I saw the outline of my mother, leaning against the driver's-side door. I think she saw me just as I saw her, because she stood up straight, stepped out of the shadows, and started walking over to the finish line.

Maybe twenty feet before I crossed the line, I realized she was crying.