Dessert First (2 page)

“Really?” Brian was Rachel's latest boyfriend, as of a whole two months, nearly Rachel-record time before a guy bored her into dumping him. Rachel's boyfriend-of-the-month club somehow drove Mom insane (well, more insane than her anxiety-spiking usual) even when Rachel wasn't dating some college frat boy. “
Tonight
you have to go Brian-snuggling? Your hickey collection isn't already complete?” As soon as that was out of my mouth, I knew it was the wrong thing to say, but it was already out there annoying her like a buzzing wasp.

She pressed her lips into a tight white line. “Since you put it that way, yeah.” She grabbed her phone, which killed the “music” and then she started texting furiously, jabbing at it with her thumbs. “Less painful than hanging out with you. But don't you dare tell Mom.”

The oven buzzer went off. Rachel sneezed and gave herself another hand-sanitizer self-massage, so I pulled out our alleged dinner.

After two pizza slices, Rachel pocketed her phone and shoved her plate in the dishwasher. “Sure you don't want me to stay?”

Her back was still angry stiff, though, and she'd already half turned away, with her purse on her shoulder. It wasn't a serious offer. Besides, we'd had a semi-peaceful dinner. Better to quit before we snarked on each other even more. “Nah, I got this.” I'd get Beep's stuff together and take it to the hospital. “Have . . . fun.”

She frowned, as if that was a dig, spun on a heel, and muttered on her way out. The door slam echoed in the empty house. I walked to the front window. Down at the bottom of the steps, Rachel slid into Brian's blue Nissan. Before dinner, being in the same room was bearable—our shared misery had squashed the fight out of us for half an hour. Maybe someday we could work out a longer truce.

• • •

After Rachel disappeared with Brian, I jammed my plate into the dishwasher, rattling the glassware when I slammed it shut. Rachel had left me alone to deal with Beep's cancer. But if I had a boyfriend or even multiple friends, I'd probably hang out with them too.

Mom had stayed at UCSF hospital all day with Beep, while the docs put in the Broviac line. Dad was supposed to go there from his work, which was also in San Francisco. After a quick call with Mom, which I had to cut off before the list expanded forever, I emptied my backpack and filled it with Beep's essentials:

1. A toothbrush.
   
2. His pajama bottoms with pictures of NFL football helmets on them, and some underwear.
   
3. His Xbox game console, controllers, cables, and a game headset, together with dozens of shooter videogames, their discs in plastic sleeves. Also
   FIFA World Cup Soccer
   , which unlike the rest isn't bad. The only shooting is shots on goal.
   
4. His old stuffed animal Ted E. Bear, tan, worn, and with a drooping eye, who I fetched from the top shelf in Beep's closet where he was hidden behind Beep's baseball glove. T.E. Bear came to every hospital stay. By now, he'd seen better days. “Me too,” I told him, setting him on top of the videogames.
   

I bustled down to Mom's room, passing my open door and glimpsing my Fender Stratocaster, sitting mournfully in its stand. Since I'd stopped writing songs with Evan, I hadn't played much guitar. Not the time to think about that now. I grabbed Mom's pajamas out of her dresser and the family iPad off the top of it, and fetched the Xanax and Valium for her out of the medicine cabinet in her and Dad's bathroom.

Then, after I walked Skippy, I pedaled my bike to the El Cerrito Plaza BART station. My backpack bulged with enough pajamas and gaming equipment to impersonate a boy headed to a slumber party. But instead I was taking the train in to San Francisco, to catch the N-Judah streetcar to UCSF hospital again, through falling darkness.

• • •

When I transferred to the N-Judah, I got the last seat, flopping down next to an old guy with curly white eyebrows so tangled they looked like shoots migrating to re-seed his scalp. To make space for me to sit, he had to move a plastic bag of take-out cartons reeking of garlic. Beep was back in that awful hospital bed. And here I was again, in a streetcar full of strangers, a box of moving light headed through a dark tunnel toward the hospital, in Muni garlic stink-o-vision.

My phone dinged. I unlocked it to see Evan's post, a picture of a piece of paper reading “Good Thoughts.”
Sending these to my friend Kat and her brother Beep,
he'd posted.
Get well soon, Beep
. A sweet thing to send, but I gave it a long exhale.

What was I going to do about Evan? Since the blowup late last school year, I hadn't exchanged texts or even online messages with him, except in my alternate Cipher identity, which no one knew was me. There was no way I could go back to writing songs with Evan. He's an amazing musician, and I mostly do the lyrics. Eventually, if we wrote more songs, we'd do one about crushes or heartbreak, and Evan had been both of those to me, even if he didn't completely know it. With Beep's cancer back, there was already enough to deal with, without prying open an artery in front of Evan.

Responding to Evan—even online—scared me. Still, I hit “like.” I appreciated the borrowed good thoughts. Then I texted Calley Rose about being on my way to the hospital to see Beep and asked her to text back. I checked my email—nothing—then checked the email for my alternate online identity, [email protected].

Waiting in Cipher's inbox was an email from Drowningirl. I hadn't heard from her in weeks. Drowningirl is another cancer sib—sibling of a cancer kid—like me. I'd met her on the blood cancer Facebook page when I was logged in as Cipher. We'd started an online friendship, because she's the only person with a life twice as miserable as mine.

She only emailed me (well, Cipher) when things got overwhelming. I'd hoped that when her brother went into remission months ago, she'd gone on to become happy. But here was an email. She sent a poem, in haiku form. She emailed them sometimes, little torn pieces of her heart.

She ended her email,
Sorry to be a bummer. Be well.

The Muni streetcar was getting close to UCSF, so I didn't have time to send her a long message. And I wasn't about to bum her out more with my news about my brother.

She always finished her emails to me with “Be well.” I finished mine to her the way I always do, with the prevention hotline numbers.
1-800-SUICIDE (784-2433) 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

UCSF is a fifteen-story hospital in San Francisco. Beep was just on their regular kids' floor, not yet in their intensive care unit, called the PICU. (“Pee, I see you,” which Beep says makes sense, what with the bedpans.) He didn't have to share his room with anyone, though. With his immune system on blood cancer vacation, they weren't sticking another kid in there to cough on him.

I stood at the door. Beep was watching TV, so he didn't notice me. Beep looked even smaller than usual, propped up in the big hospital bed. He had short hair, and his ears and eyes were slightly too big, like he was still growing into them. He was pale underneath his spray of freckles, and the white bendy tube of a Broviac line stuck out of the gauze dressing on his chest, like he'd been harpooned with a giant drinking straw. A drip was going in through the Broviac, but it wasn't chemo. The bag was dark red, blood products—because Beep's cancer-mutated cells otherwise weren't so good with the basics, like carrying oxygen and clotting. Weirdly, the visitor's chair was empty—no Mom or Dad. Was Dad still at
work
?

“Hey, Beepster.”

“Oh, hey.” He flicked off the TV.

“Brought your stuff from home. Where are the parent units?”

“Dinner.” Beep frowned. “Dad just got here. I said I wanted to be alone.”

That was probably code for having a sore neck from watching Mom bounce off walls. It didn't apply to me. Anyway, I had Beep's videogames. “Is Mom freaked?”

“Naaah,” he stretched it out, deadpan, earning a smile from me. “But she tried to get them to move me because a kid was coughing—two doors down. And she made them refill the hand sanitizer, because it was more than half empty.”

The hand sanitizer on the wall was full now. He probably wasn't making that up. “No holes in the ceiling, though,” I said, glancing at it. “So Mom didn't actually hit the roof.” I put my backpack in the visitor's chair and hugged Beep, careful not to mash the tube in his chest, collecting a nice Beep hug back while he sat up in bed. He still had his regular-person Beep smell, the warm yeasty smell of person, not the faint chemo-sweat stink of hot metal. “I'm so sorry.”

“Me too.” We hugged for ten seconds, then he let go. I kept my part of the hug going, rubbing his small back for another couple of seconds.

I turned away and dabbed at my eyes where he couldn't see. I cleared my throat. “Brought your Xbox.” Beep has gone so many times from the pediatric floor to the PICU to the step-down unit at UCSF, then to George Mark Children's House, to home, to the emergency room, and back, bouncing between hospitals like a little bald Ping-Pong ball. So I'm the only girl in the universe who can set up an Xbox and have the controllers and headset working in sixty seconds.

“How are you?” I got one question in before I pulled out the packet of game disks and he could disappear into videogame gunfire.

“Okay. I was getting tired of having hair anyway.” He didn't even pick up the Xbox controller. “Can you find out what's wrong? Mom got weird. Something with the blood tests. It's—” He frowned. “Bad. Cancer again but mutated or something—they didn't explain well.”

A hot pang of fear shot through me. “Sure.” I sat down on his oversized bed. What was to explain? He'd relapsed, which meant his ALL—acute lymphocytic leukemia—was back, and he'd spit and hurl his way through another treatment plan to get rid of it. Ninety-five percent of the time, the docs get kids with ALL into remission.

“And Mom.” He shook his head. Mom's freak-out meter is useless in signaling between Bad, Really Bad, and OMG.

“Kat.” Mom's voice came from the doorway behind me, and I jumped. “Have you eaten?”

“Just some cardboard with Rachel.”

“The cafeteria here is still safe,” Beep said. “They're not recycling my barf. Yet.”

Gross.

“Can I talk to you, honey?” Mom used her forced cheerful voice. “Maybe get a bite?”

I nodded. Beep raised his eyebrows.
You'll find out for me?
I winked and picked up my backpack, which was lighter without Beep's stuff.

“Hi, Kat,” Dad said, then “Hey—Xbox,” actually recognizing the controller appendage next to Beep. Dad set a bowl of quivering gelatin cubes for Beep on the bedside tray. “I'll play you, Beepster.” That was great, because Beep would mop the screen with Dad, which would be good for Beep's morale.

I wandered off with Mom to complete my spy mission.

On our way down, Mom sputtered about Rachel. “I've called her ten times in the last hour.” Impressive. “She's not picking up. Something's wrong.”

Right. Only if neck hickeys are really wrong. I wouldn't know. “I'm sure she's fine.”

“
Something
happened.”

Like, she happened to be ignoring Mom. “Rachel turns her ringer off when she can't deal. Can you think of any new reason she's having trouble with that tonight?” I waved my arm around at the hospital cafeteria and vaguely up toward Beep's room. “Send her a text.” I grabbed an orange tray and peered down the counter to find the least gross cafeteria choice. Hospitals serve cruddy food, like school lunch, but for dinner. If they make the food bad enough, they figure patients will get well to escape it. The little sign claimed mine was “beef bourguignon,”
but it was just brown sludge with gray meat and mushy carrots. It almost made Rachel's vegan pizza seem appealing. Almost.

At the table, Mom texted Rachel some version of the Inquisition, then finally looked up. “Your Dad can give you a ride back to BART.”

“Not all the way home?” It was already almost eight and dark. Mom was, no doubt, staying at the hospital overnight.

“He's going back to work.” She pressed her lips into a tight frown. “He has a filing tomorrow.” A filing means turning some long legal pleading paper in to the judge. Like lawyer homework, but I guess you can't get an extension because of a little thing like your kid has a cancer relapse.

“Great.” I stabbed a carrot with my fork, to underline how not great. “What's with Beep?”

Mom crinkled her mouth into a worried frown. “It's terrible. He's also got AML.”

My stomach tensed. AML—acute myeloid leukemia—is bad, period, which I knew from the blood cancer Facebook page and from my online flirt-buddy Hunter Lange, who had it. It's a different kind of blood cancer you can sometimes get as a side effect of the chemo and radiation. Survival odds were worse.

“If they can't get Beep into remission,” Mom said, “we might need you to donate bone marrow.”

“Of course.” Rachel and I had both been tested after Beep's prior relapse. Neither of us was a perfect match, but I was closer.

Mom blew out a long breath. “They're still figuring out how bad it is. So don't tell Beep about the AML. I don't want to worry him.”

I gritted my teeth. Beep would worry way more if no one told him what was wrong.

“Can I have the iPad?” Mom asked. “We should check for clinical trials.”

Clinical trials test new things that are more effective than the standard treatment. Beep was in one in his first two go-arounds with the ALL to get him into remission, so we got all his expensive cancer drugs for free—a good thing, because Mom had joked that otherwise we would have had to sell our house to pay for them. I'm not sure it was a joke. I frowned at Mom. “If UCSF has clinical trials, they'll tell you about it.”