After Ever After (9780545292788) (3 page)

“What?”

“Walk me to my next class. That way, I can use
the new-student excuse, and you can be my new-student escort. Nobody ever gets marked late if they're showing the new girl around.” She grabbed her stuff and headed out the door. I was still kind of paralyzed by this whole conversation. Partly, it was the slow-processing thing. But mostly, it was the Lindsey Effect.

When she hit the hall, Lindsey turned to me and said, “Come
on
, Jeff! Unless you think a more IM-worthy
babe
is going to stroll along any minute.” As I scrambled to catch up to her without tripping over my weak right foot, she punched me in the arm. “By the way,” she said, “there are two things you really ought to know. First of all, classroom windows are very reflective. If you're not careful, someone sitting across from you might be able to look at them and read your computer screen.”

Oh, geez. “What's the other thing?”

“You're cute when you blush.”

Sometimes it's hard to know whether I should curl up in a ball and die of embarrassment, or give myself a hearty high five.

That day when I got home and saw the mail, I did something really stupid. I mean, ultra-intensely, radioactively idiotic. But before I tell you what it was, I have to tell you a little bit about my dad and me. And math. Otherwise, you won't understand WHY I did it.

First of all, you should know that my dad is an accountant. He loves numbers. I mean, when we go to a minor-league Yankees game at this stadium near our house, Dad always buys a program. So far, that's not so weird, right? You're probably thinking,
What's the big deal? My dad always buys the program at games, too.
But my dad always, always fills out the scorecard for the game as it goes along. He never leaves his seat or misses a play, because then he might not get every single bit of info on the card perfectly. I know, I know. Your dad keeps score, too, right? But my dad prints out every player's stats at home before the game and brings them with him, along with a
pen. Then, as the game goes along, he recomputes each player's stats in real time. So if a player is batting .317 after a hundred and forty at bats, and then strikes out, my dad will be sitting there, filling out his card at top speed while mumbling,
“a hundred and forty-one at bats now, with an additional out … carry the three … HEY, JEFFREY, FEENEY'S AVERAGE JUST DROPPED TO THREE-SIXTEEN! Well, actually, three-fifteen point eight three repeating, but …”
Usually, that's when I go get some peanuts and Cracker Jacks. And unlike my father, I don't care if I never get back.

As for me, I don't love math. In fact, I am tremendously awful at it. The trouble started when I was in fourth grade, which was my first full year back in school after my cancer treatment ended. My teacher started noticing that I didn't pay attention, that I lost my homework sheets pretty often, and that I didn't know my math facts. Now, the weird thing is that when I was little, my dad used to call me his little math expert. I knew all of my addition and subtraction stuff before kindergarten.

And then I didn't know it anymore. Blame it on the methotrexate, I guess. The doctors did. The social workers and child life specialists at the hospital did. My mother did. But Dad blamed me. I remember he made me about a million different kinds of flash cards. There were flash cards with little pictures. Flash cards cut into different shapes. Different-size ones. Color-coded ones. But nothing ever really helped. A lot of times, he'd make me prove I totally knew my stuff before he'd let me go to bed. Then in the morning, he'd ruffle my hair and send me off to school to take a math test. When the test would hit my desk, I'd realize — BAM! — the facts were all gone from my head.

Dad worked with me all through that year, but I could tell he was getting madder and madder at me. Then in fifth grade, even though nobody said anything to me about it, all of a sudden my mom and Steven took over as my homework helpers. Dad just sat in the living room and complained about my grades, my wandering attention, and my lack of effort. Whenever I brought home a test, he'd say,
“Why don't you just try a little harder, Jeffrey?” Mom would try to shush him, but it never quite worked.

He never understood that I
was
trying. To this day, I don't think he can comprehend that a child of his could just totally bite at math. But I do. No matter how hard I concentrate, or how many hours I spend trying to memorize facts and patterns, whenever the test comes along, everything starts swimming around in my head until I'm drowning in an evil math whirlpool.

Now back to the letter. It was in the mail when I got home, addressed from the superintendent of the school district to the
PARENTS OF JEFFREY ALPER, GRADE EIGHT
. Both of my parents were at work, and Steven was already wandering around Africa with a pair of bongos strapped to his back, so there was nobody to stop me from opening the letter. I couldn't figure out what I had done to get in trouble so early in the year, but you can believe I was dying to know. I debated for about twelve seconds, but of course I gave in and ripped that sucker open like a
raging rodeo bull going after a slow cowboy. I mean, I'd never gotten a letter from the superintendent before.

I should have waited. It was a boring letter anyway, with all these super-awkward phrases like “educational equity” and “assessment regime” and “holistic integrity of the K-12 system.” Plus, it wasn't just for my parents. Every family in the district got a copy. And truthfully, it took me about five tries before I could even understand what the guy was saying: That from now on, no kid could get promoted from grade four, eight, or eleven unless he passed the huge, horrifying state standardized tests in April.

I was screwed. I knew my dad would have a cow, and that as soon as he saw it, he'd start pushing math on me so hard that every time I sneezed, fractions would fly out of my nose. Fortunately for me, my father never thinks to look for the mail by taking apart the garbage disposal, so that's where the letter went.

When my parents got home, I didn't say anything
about the letter. There was a lot to talk about anyway, because of course my mom wanted to know every detail in the world about my teachers, my schedule, and my “classmates.” I swear, she actually used the word “classmates.” It scares me sometimes when I stop to consider the fact that she's a high school teacher. Thankfully, she teaches over the border in Pennsylvania, so we don't have to run into her students wherever we go. I don't think I'd be able to stand the embarrassment of listening to her using her corny lingo on them.

As you might imagine, I didn't tell her about my beloved new classmate. I did mention Miss Palma, though, and Mom got all misty-eyed: “Oh, honey! Your brother loved her! I just know you will, too. And he wrote the most wonderful journals in her class.”

“Really?” I hadn't heard about this. “What were they about?”

My parents exchanged a Significant Glance Across the Table. Aha! Apparently, Steven's journals had been about me. “Well,” Dad said, “Steven had a dif
ficult eighth-grade year. That was the year we found out about your …”

He stopped midsentence. Even now, he just can't bring himself to say the word. “My cancer, Dad?”

He nodded.

Mom said, “I wonder what ever happened to Steven's old journal. It might be interesting for you to go back and see what your brother was thinking when he was your age. Hmm … that was the year he and Annette got close. And before that, he had the biggest, sweetest crush on Renee Albert. You know, from around the corner?”

Oh, I remembered Renee Albert. She was so pretty that I even knew it when I was a little kid. But it was incredibly weird to picture my brother liking anyone but Annette. I mean, up until the summer before my eighth-grade year, Steven and Annette had been, like, eternal soul mates or something. But that was before Steven flipped out, dropped out, and headed off to Africa.

Well, whatever. It would be pretty interesting to see Steven's journals from back then, but it's not like
I was going to start digging for them in his room, or the Steven Alper Slept Here Shrine, as I call it. I supposed I could have asked him for permission, if he even still had them, but he was only checking e-mail once every couple of weeks in Africa. Apparently, he was spending most of his time at an old safari camp outside of Nairobi, where drummers from all over the world come to teach one another their native rhythms.

Long story.

After the dinner/interrogation, I needed to get out of the house. I told my parents I was going out for some physical therapy, and headed for the garage. See, thanks to a drug called vincristine, I have nerve damage in my right foot that makes it drag when I try to lift it. If you're sitting in a chair as you read this, put your right foot flat on the floor. Now, without lifting the rest of your leg, lift the front of your foot up so your toes are off the ground.

Congratulations. You just did something I will never, ever do again.

That makes running, jumping, even walking, pretty hard. But because of some other cancer complications, I tend to turn into a fat whale if I don't exercise a ton. It's bad enough that I'm a short kid with big, round glasses — the last thing I need is to get porked out again like I used to be back in sixth grade, when Tad announced that I looked like a cross between Ben Franklin and a Franklin stove. So it's crucial for me to stay in shape. That's why I have a hobby: I ride my bike, like, sixty miles a week all summer. During the school year, when I'm excused from all team sports in gym, I ride the exercise bike instead. And every May for the last few years, I've pedaled twenty-five miles in The Moving On Bike-a-Thon, a bike ride for cancer survivors, to raise money for leukemia research and treatment.

I can't walk too well, but when I'm on my bike, I can fly.

Five minutes later, I was zooming down a long, long hill to the edge of the Delaware River where there's a bike path that runs for miles and miles. I love going downhill so fast that I can feel the wind
vibrating against my helmet, although believe it or not, my favorite thing is going up a long hill. Anybody can fly down a hill, but it takes a serious bike guy to fly
up
a hill.

I'm a serious bike guy.

My mind wanders when I ride, and that day it wandered out over the oceans until it reached my big brother. Steven had always been my hero. He was like the rock that the rest of my life leaned on. During my cancer treatment, he used to make me laugh when nobody else could, and he was the one person who had never, ever cried in front of me about my cancer.

The only time I can ever remember Steven crying over any of it was after my treatment, when I tried to use my foot on his bass drum pedal, and we realized I could never play a drum set.

Anyway, after my treatment ended, Steven was still the person who kept me calm. The beginning of third grade was the first time I was healthy enough to attend the first day of a school year since kindergarten, and I was totally nervous about it. I didn't
know whether any of my friends would be in my class, or what the teacher would be like. I prayed she would be patient with me when I didn't know something everyone else had learned already, or when I spaced out. Plus, I always worried about recess: Would anybody pick me for their team even though I couldn't really run or catch? If not, would any other boy be doing anything besides playing ball? Or — worst-case scenario — would I have to hang out with the
girls
? So when I woke up scared in the middle of the night, Steven heard me and followed me downstairs to the kitchen. Even though it was the night before the first day of his junior year of high school — and Dad had probably told him a billion times that
junior year is the year the colleges really look at
— Steven stayed up and listened to me cry and whine.

When I was all worried out, Steven picked me up and carried me back to bed. He even tucked me in, and before he left my room, he whispered, “If they don't let you be on a team, tell me. I'll drive over there and kick their little third-grader butts.”
My last thought before sleep was a picture of my big brother crashing his car through the playground fence, jumping out, and chasing all the kids who got picked before me up a tree.

By the time Steven left for New York University two years after that, he was my tutoring lifeline, too. I freaked out in his room while he was packing, and he swore to me that I could text him or send an e-mail anytime I needed to. So even when he was in another state, I never felt like he was
really
gone.

Then all of a sudden last spring he had some kind of meltdown in the middle of wrapping up his third year of college, and decided to take a leave of absence from school. And from Annette. And from pretty much all contact with me — I mean, when he told us he wouldn't have e-mail or cell phone access in Africa, I felt like I'd been smacked with a two-by-four. Was I shocked? Oh, yeah.

Remember a few years ago, when scientists announced that Pluto wasn't a planet anymore? All of a sudden, that was the main story in the news for, like, a week and a half. I remember being all worried
for some reason I could never name, and I think that happened to a lot of people. It's not like the planet-hood status of Pluto was a major factor in anybody's conscious life before that, but when Pluto suddenly stopped being a planet, the whole world was unnerved. Like, if they can take away Pluto,
what's next
? What if the sun isn't —
a sun
? What if I'm really adopted? What if everyone in my town was secretly whisked away in the middle of the night and
replaced by exact replica aliens
?

OK, you can see why creative writing is my only good subject. But my point is, Steven's relationship with Annette — and with me and Mom and Dad — was like Pluto being a planet. Until it wasn't. One day in May, Steven showed up at home unexpectedly and announced to my parents that he was finished with school. He had to go out into the world and find himself. And he needed to do it —
alone
.

Basically, my hero woke up one day and quit the world.