Dessert First (12 page)

So I punched the chain link fence instead. Evan winced. I shook my hand out. Dang. “Everyone's scared, indie-boy. Just don't get scared
away
.”

“So I can be scared of you, just not away.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That would be great.”

“For the record, you were the one who ran away. Again.”

“I told you. I have allergies. Also.” I flung out a hand theatrically, and put the other one to my forehead, movie-star-doing-an-interview style. “This is a very emotional time for me.”

“Do you know what my best songs are?”

Oh good. We were back to talking about the important thing—Evan's music. “No. The suspense is killing me.”

“The five I wrote with you. Last year. They're still the best.”

“We only wrote four.” Although one of them, “Front Singer with a Tambourine,” is the funniest and most awesome song ever.

“I used your lyrics for the bridge of ‘Hang On.'”

“After you changed them.”

“To fit the changed rhythm. You're better with lyrics.” He looked down at his hands. “Better with words, period.”

“I'm
terrible
with words, Evan. I use them like sharp sticks, jabbing people. And I don't know how to stop.”

“You wake people up.” He looked at me earnestly.

“That's an upgrade from ‘frustrating'?”

“It's a compliment.”

“And you claim other people have a better way with words.”

“See?” he said. “That's exactly what I mean.”

“No. That's exactly how
I'm
mean.”

“I wish . . .” He trailed off.

“Wish what?”

“You fill it in.” He shook his head, tossing that cute, fine hair. “You're good with words.”

“I wish Beep would get all better.”

“Hear, hear.”

“We should go back to our alleged friends.” I looked over at them, the little clot of three girls, looking our way. Calley Rose was standing, and it looked like she'd taken a step in our direction. “On the way, let's come up with some explanation for my apparent psychotic break.”

“Nah,” he said. “Leave 'em with a sense of mystery.” We started walking over. “Would you write songs with me again?”

“Sure. As soon as you've completed your friend probation.”

“When is that?”

“Depends,” I said. “On how much credit you earn for good behavior. Somewhere between weeks and years.”

“Great. Your plan to end loneliness is to drive
me
crazy.”

• • •

For my other assignment from Beep I got help from the Berkeley Public Library. They had a pile of books about near-death experiences. (Even one called
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Near-Death Experiences
, which—with the bone-headed things I did this year—was pitched right for me.) The same thing, it turned out, happens to lots of people when their hearts stop: They leave their bodies and go through a tunnel to a ball of light. There were arguments over whether these are real glimpses of an afterlife or just a hallucination caused by lack of oxygen and expiring brain chemicals. But the only people who knew for sure weren't telling—at least until any zombie apocalypse.

I dumped the books onto the coffee table in front of Mom.

“What're those?” She scooted her chair back when she saw
Toward the Light
on top.

“Books, Mom. Did Beep tell you about what he saw when his heart stopped?”

“I don't want to discuss—”

“You don't have to. Just listen.” And I launched into what Beep told me, powering right through her three attempted interruptions.

“Honey,” she finally said. “I really do need to get ready for a call, with a couple who want to buy a home—”

“Nope. The I-have-a-work-thing excuse is taken. It's Dad's. Did you spill your purse? While I was in with Beep during the code?”

“Yes.” It was like I pulled the word out of her. “And Rachel did get the quarter. That rolled into the corner.”

Somehow, that was a huge relief. “Great.” I pushed all the books at her.

“Why?”

“Set a good example.” I picked up my empty backpack. “Like you always tell me: Even if you can't do the homework, at least do the reading.”

“I can't believe you're ineligible for soccer,” Mom said, yet again. We were standing outside the closed door to the counselors' offices after school, and Mom was fussing with the buttons on her jacket like they were worry beads. From around the corner, someone slammed a locker, and the noise echoed in the empty, tiled halls.

“You
need
soccer,” Mom went on. “It's an outlet for your anger.”

What I really needed was an outlet for depression, but this meeting would probably depress me more. My first quarter's grades were an ugly puddle of Ds and Fs, except for English and P.E. And apparently the consequences of completely whiffing on homework were worse than being ineligible for soccer. So bad that Mom and I were summoned to a meeting about them.

Mr. Brillson opened the door and ushered us in.

The conference room was small for five people. Vice Principal Janey Fitzgerald, Mr. Brillson, and my counselor, Sheila Martin, sat across a table from Mom and me. Behind them, the white board had “Goals” and “Action Steps” lettered in smudged green marker.

After greetings, Vice Principal Fitzgerald leaned forward, with a grim expression on her lined face. She had gray hair that's so curly the kids in school call her “the Fritz,” but she radiated so much no-nonsense seriousness, I couldn't imagine anyone calling her that to her face.

“If the situation does not improve,” she said, “you will not pass your classes, Kat. You will have to retake most of them next year, and you will not graduate on schedule.”

I sat stunned in the long silence that followed.

Counselor Sheila opened a folder in front of her. She was a small, nervous-looking woman whose dark hair swung as she bobbed her head, looking between the notes in her folder and my mom. She rattled off a bunch of “requirements to advance and graduate.” I couldn't take Chemistry next year without getting at least a C in Biology. Without a passing grade in Biology, I wouldn't graduate. I couldn't take the next installment of French, unless I got at least a B– in my current French class. Unless I got at least a C in Algebra 2 this year, I couldn't take pre-calculus or any of the higher math classes for the rest of high school. And I needed a passing grade in World History to graduate. Which I currently didn't have.

I sat in a stunned fog, having trouble hanging on to the specifics, even after Mom asked questions about graduation.

The bottom line was that unless I got my grades up, next year I'd have to repeat almost every class I was in. I'd have to sit through them again while a bunch of former freshman gazed at me in pity and disgust, knowing I was S-L-O-W. If I did ever apply to college after that, they might as well stamp my high school transcript LOSER before sending it off.

I tuned back in to the end of Mom's wide-eyed rejection of several alternatives.

“No,” she said. “If Kat can't finish her homework, independent study—doing her homework outside school and handing it in once a week—won't work either.”

No kidding.

Mr. Brillson cleared his throat. “I've spoken with Ms. Tang and Mrs. Miller, Kat's teachers in Biology and World History. They and I are willing to accept papers about her brother's cancer in place of assigned homework. Kat would still have to take and pass tests and quizzes, but she could hand in short papers along the way, with a much longer paper at the end.”

We all looked at him. Especially me, because he was outlining what might be the only escape plan from a horrible fate.

“Kat writes well,” he said. “And I've seen her cancer blog. The writing on it she did this quarter was more than I would expect of a student in three classes.”

After that, we worked out the details of my plea bargain, a massive make-up paper, delivered in installments, to avoid one-year re-incarceration in all my classes.

I'd better not screw that up.

“I don't think growing up is such a big deal,” Beep said, a few weeks later, near the end of his last pre-transplant stay in the hospital. He was playing Xbox in his room, and I was watching him, to avoid having to work on my make-up paper, which was starting to look harder than the homework it replaced. How was I going to finish it if I couldn't even do one-page assignments?

“That's what kids here are supposed to do.” Beep shrugged a general reference to the PICU, without taking his thumbs off the controller, which he was using to kill endless numbers of battle droids in
Star Wars Battlefront
Roman-numeral-something-way-too-much. “Get well. Become
grownups.
” He said it with scorn.

“So?”

“Grownups are messed up. And unhappy. Look at Mom.”

“Mom's a special case.” I'm good with understatements. I got a tight feeling in my stomach, though, over where this conversation was headed.

“Then look at Dad—he makes enough money to buy an Xbox, a Kinect, a Wii game system, a
beast
gaming computer, a PlayStation, and every cool game ever made, but he doesn't.”

“Maybe he doesn't want those things. Or have time to play them.”

“Exactly.” With a thumb jab to the controller, Beep slashed a robot tank into exploding scraps. “Something wrecks grownups' brains. They don't even
want
to have fun anymore.” He sounded certain, like he'd worked it out over time.

“Rules.” That was my theory. “Once you follow a thousand pointless rules, your brain shuts off.”

“Maybe, but it doesn't happen to everyone. Not pro snowboarders or people who make videogames. Some escape.” Beep paused for a couple of seconds, to get through a packed crowd of fighting robots. “It's like the zombie virus in
Left 4 Dead
.” A videogame series. His voice went quiet. “I might not be around to catch the grownup virus.”

I swallowed. A lump in my throat kept me from talking. That week we got back the report that the cancer wasn't gone. His blast count just wouldn't shrink to zero.

“They don't even eat dessert first,” Beep's eyes were still on the screen. “Grownups can do whatever they want, but still don't eat dessert first. Ever.”

“Tragic,” I agreed. “Think of all the people who choke to death every year on food. Their last taste is the Brussels sprouts blocking their airway. They never got to the good stuff. Their parents can't even say, ‘Well, at least she ate that great strawberry pie before the end.'”

“I think if you eat dessert first, it
prevents
grownup brain damage.” Beep blew up another robot tank for emphasis. He was the one who'd been to the ball of light. For all I knew, they really did pass out secret dietary knowledge up there. Beep froze the game. “I'm worried about
you
, Kat.” He put down the controller and turned to me in the visitor's chair. “Promise me you won't get grownup brain lock. For real. Promise you'll always have fun and eat dessert first.”

So I raised my hand, like a Boy Scout. “I promise not to let my brain turn into gray grownup jelly. And to eat dessert first.”

“Excellent.” Beep nodded seriously, then broke into a smile, like he'd accomplished something huge, and went back to blasting droids on the Xbox.

• • •

The next morning as I was getting dropped off at school, Mom called, anxious because she had a meeting with homebuyers and wouldn't be at the hospital to get Beep's latest blood count.

“Have Beep text them.” Whether or not Mom got them instantly, the results would be the same. “Remind him, though, it's not the kind of thing he should joke about.” Beep got bored, but messing with Mom over blood counts for the recreational value was a bad idea.

“Does he know how to text?”

“Yeah, Mom. Really well. He's not over forty.”

Evan was waiting patiently for me, to walk into school together. While I was trying to talk Mom into joining the rest of us in the rational universe, I wandered to the right, so I could watch Evan's cute butt in his snug jeans during the conversation, making it less painful.

“Sorry,” I apologized to Evan after hanging up. “It must be hard for you to understand my life, since your parents aren't insane.”

“You'd be surprised.”

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Because you don't have parents who are even more insane than usual, because they have a son sick enough he might die.”

“Guess again.”

“What?” A jolt of terror went through me. Was there something wrong with Evan? Potentially fatal? He was an only child. “Are you sick?”

“I'm fine.” At my expression, he laughed. “It's not that. I'll tell you someday, though.”

“Tell me what?”

The bell rang, he shrugged, and we strode off to our separate first-period classes. Maybe everyone's family was a little weird.

• • •

The next Saturday, our neighbor Mrs. Umbriss ambushed Mom and me during our weekly shopping in Andronico's market. We'd just innocently turned the corner from frozen foods to the deli counter, and there she was, lurking under piled-up hair in a muumuu dress.

“How is Beemer?” she asked, leaning forward.

“Beep,” I said into my hand, like I was coughing.
He's not a car
.

“We're preparing for a bone marrow transplant,” Mom said. Because they couldn't get him into remission.

“That's great.” Mrs. Umbriss beamed, like a transplant was one-stop shopping for perfect health. She lowered her voice dramatically. “We're praying for you.”

My face froze into an expression I hoped resembled a smile. When Beep had first been diagnosed, Mrs. Umbriss had said the most awful, clueless things. I wasn't a fan. And prayers are good, but almost everyone else on the block was also providing periodic casseroles, even through compassion fatigue. I was still even going to Tyler's once a week, to get fed dinner by his parents, and Evan was putting in study time with me there, to resuscitate my French and Algebra 2 grades.