Dessert First (20 page)

• • •

At lunch, where we always met outside, Evan took one look and gave me a hug. “Toby told me about Algebra.”

“They're calling me Bald Ho Monroe.”

Evan clenched his jaw at that, which was sweet.

I sat on the gray concrete steps, chipped from skateboard grinds. “The secret is breathing,” I said. “If you put your head down on the desk, and concentrate on breathing, your shoulders don't shake when you cry, so people don't know.”

“Oh, Kat. It's my fault . . .” He put his arm around me.

“Don't,” I said, and started crying. What I meant to say was
Don't blame yourself
, but I couldn't get the words out. He pulled back his arm, which made me cry harder, because I wanted his arm there and was misunderstood. I finally managed, “Don't blame you. It's not your fault. You're a nice guy. A great guy. You don't understand how mean other people are.”

“I thought if you didn't wear the hat, they wouldn't go after—”

“Yeah.” That might have been right, if I could have carried it off. But there were too many of them, and somehow I couldn't pretend it didn't bother me. “It was Tracie and Ashley. They organized the whole humiliation. Planned it in first period.” What if Evan ever got back together with Tracie? I put my head in my hands. “Don't ever let them get you to stop being my friend.” Dr. Anne says you only need one friend. Just one person on your side. Then you can hold out against the rest of the world.

Even if Evan was just a pity friend, I would take that over not having him at all.

“I won't. Ever.” He offered to get my former hat out of his locker, but I shook my head. I was taking the afternoon off. I hadn't studied for the Biology test, and had enough humiliation for one day, so I went home. I sent Mom a text explaining I wasn't feeling well—which was true, given the emotional carnage—and was bailing on school.

Of course, now that we're in the enlightened digital age, abuse can follow you home, wherever there's phone service or an Internet connection.

By that evening, I had emails and messages that I'd been tagged in pictures and posts. When I clicked on them, I discovered a fun online group activity: Various gross pictures (winners of ugly dog contests, animals with tumors, people with facial sores and genetic disorders) were tagged “Kat Monroe” and forwarded to me. Maybe it wasn't so smart, whacking one of the popular girls with a volleyball.

There are limits on what you can put on Facebook and Instagram, but other ways to forward disgusting images. Text or email it. Send a link to where it exists online. Or put it up on YouTube, like userloser69 did, a whole slide show titled “Things not as Ugly as Kat Monroe's Hair.” Gosh, that comment section was fun. (“Q: What's the difference between Kat's house and a cathouse? A: At Kat's house, she'll pay
you
to do
her
.” Below that, someone responded “Ho ho ho Monroe.”)

The emails were especially nice, because by the time they got to me, thoughtfully forwarded by a concerned “friend” (thanks, Amber), I could see who'd forwarded them before and the “funny” comments those classmates had added, maybe not realizing it would eventually get to me. There was one nice reply to all buried in the middle, from Evan, saying “Stop being mean and awful,” followed by one—surprisingly—from Elizabeth, saying “Yeah, stop. This is mean,” but otherwise it was like looking at a horrible accident on the side of the freeway—sick, but I couldn't look away. Except that my reputation and I were in the twisted wreckage I was watching.

My stomach hurt. For the first time ever, I thought high school should give more homework. Some of my classmates have too much time on their hands. Also, there are lots of ugly pictures on the Internet.

Most of them probably didn't know my brother had died of cancer. Some hardly knew me at all, except as the girl with the weird hair they heard was a slut. The one you could make fun of, to get points with the Tracie-wannabes.

Evan called. I was surprised, since I was mostly getting email notifications that I'd been tagged in a post.

“So, uh, what are you doing?” He sounded worried.

“Reading emails,” I said. “With pretty pictures. Pretty bizarre, anyway.”

“Oh, no. Those got forwarded to you?”

“That's the point, Evan. It has to hurt.” And make me wonder how much else I didn't see.

It was quiet on the line for a long time. “I'm so sorry . . .”

A shot of pure terror went through me. Had he at some point
contributed
?

“. . . about the hat,” he finished. Oh. Blaming himself for the hat thing. Which seemed like a million years ago.

“It's not your fault. It's not even the stupid haircut. I don't fit in. I never will.”

“You don't have to. You shouldn't, not with awful people.” His voice got quiet. “What can I do?”

My heart was still hammering from the adrenaline surge. “Be my friend. Please. Don't let them get to you. Or if they do, for God's sake, don't send me pictures.”

After I hung up with Evan, I changed my privacy setting on Facebook so no one but actual Facebook friends could post on my wall. I stared forlornly at my email in box and emailed Hunter, with my stomach in a tight knot of hurt.

K:
Why are people so cruel and unfair?

H:
Because life is
.

That quick answer should teach me to whine about mere teasing, to a boy who might actually be dying. I gave him some of the details anyway, and then he emailed back.

H:
That's awful.
Even though they probably just thought they were “being funny.”

That left me feeling worse. I might have said something mean, once or twice, while being funny.

K:
I'm going offline for a while
.

H:
Don't
.

But I logged off. Which didn't do much good, because I couldn't sleep anyway. I was too damp, curled up in my own pool of misery.

The morning after my Internet-memification wasn't a carpool day. Evan came by anyway, to walk me to school, and he brought a little bunch of cut purple flowers from his back yard. Which meant . . . what? Probably just trying to make me feel less horrible, which it did, a little. The flowers people gave us after Beep died were long-wilted and tossed, as dried up as the Tracies' hearts.

“Thought you could use cheering up,” he said, looking nervous, handing them to me.

“Thanks.” I didn't know what else to say, so I reached for a joke. “You want to take a picture of them with me? You could email it to everyone labeled ‘Kat Monroe sniffs the sex organs of another species.'”

Evan didn't laugh or even smile, so, as usual, I'd gone with the wrong impulse. He looked down. “What everybody did was awful. I disown the rest of my species.”

I put the flowers on the table near the door and gave him a hug. “Thanks, Evan. You're the best.” After a surprised pause, he hugged me back.

After I broke the clinch, he reached into his jacket pocket. “Brought your hat.”

“Keep it. It's yours.” I looked in the front room cabinet for a vase for my flowers. “I'm just going with the bad hair. Turns out my new hair isn't nearly as awful as some things. By comparison. Those pictures cheered me up.”

“They did?”

“No, Evan. But that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Beep went through chemo. I can take this.” Or at least try.

• • •

In first period, Curtis greeted me, “Yo, Bald Ho.”

“You wish.” I said. “Even if I was, there's not enough money on earth to do you. Not that it's an issue. You'd just fall on your face.”

His cheeks went pink.

In second period, Ashley tried to pass me a note. I raised my hand. “Ms. Clarke?” I said. “Ashley has a note she's throwing away in the trash now.” Ashley did.

In third-period P.E., I worked a deal with Coach Paulsen—she let me run laps instead of playing volleyball, so we could keep the body count down.

And everywhere I went, all day, the looks followed. Two “Yo ho” greetings. Three “Saw your pictures yesterday.” One “Wow, fugly hair, girl.” With attitude.

It was nothing, compared to cancer. Nothing, compared to chemo. Nothing.

After school that day, I wandered into Beep's room.

Mom still hadn't cleared it out. His bed was made, with Ted E. Bear tucked in, and everything was in place. Beep didn't have time to mess it up when he was in the bone marrow isolation room or the hospice care rented hospital bed downstairs. It was still set up like he'd be back any day, from some long school field trip to New Zealand.

I ran my hand along the spines of the books on his bookshelf and over the collection of his
Star Wars
–themed Legos from the various sets he'd almost lived long enough to outgrow. I picked up his baseball glove. It was barely broken in.

I pulled open the upper middle drawer of his dresser. His tee shirts were folded neatly. I took the one on top, a maroon one with a picture of a taped-up duck on it, lettered DUCK TAPE. I sniffed it, hoping for a scent, somehow, of Beep. It smelled like folded laundry, a ghost whiff of detergent, designed by some chemist to remind humans of “fresh.” Fresh loss. I put the shirt back and closed the drawer, then sat down on Beep's bed. I curled up on it and tried to smell him on his pillow. The pillow only smelled faintly of dust. I sniffed Ted E. Bear. He just smelled like cotton out of the dryer and the same faint detergent smell. Nothing like Beep at all.

“Hey,” Rachel said from the door behind me, and I bonked my head on the headboard, startled. This was getting to be a habit.

“I was trying to smell Beep.” I sat up, still holding the stuffed bear. “I can't.”

“Mom washed Ted E. Bear last week,” she said. “The smell was long gone anyway.”

“What's
wrong
with her?” I tucked Ted E. Bear back in. “Why doesn't someone explain to parents that if your brother
dies
, they have to keep a shirt that he perspired in so for at least a month after, you can still smell him.”

“His hat,” Rachel said.

“What?”

“His hat. I have his baseball hat. In my room. You can still smell him.”

“No way.” Rachel must be teasing me.

“Way.” She nodded. “I kept his little league baseball hat. In a ziplock. The old one he wore all the time. I stole it before Mom could wash it.”

“Thank you.” And I couldn't say anything more.

“You'd better blow your nose first,” Rachel said. “Or you won't be able to smell anything.”

I stopped by the bathroom and blew my nose twice, then followed Rachel into the sanctuary of her room. She brought her desk chair over to her closet, stood on it, reached behind a powder-blue sports bag and a stored rotating fan on the high shelf, and pulled out a gallon-sized sealed Ziploc plastic bag with Beep's little league hat sealed inside it. The hat was black with an orange “Giants” written across the front. Beep had been good at baseball—fast, and with a little strike zone, so he batted leadoff, except when he was out because of cancer.

She pulled out the cap and unfolded it, then passed it to me. “Sniff the hatband. There's just enough left. You can fill in the rest by imagination.”

There was a first smell of plastic, and then Beepness. The faint scent of hair and perspiration and the yeasty warm smell of person. “Oh. Oh. Oh.” I sniffed for a long time.

Rachel gently pulled the hat back. Then she sniffed the liner, a long complete inhale, like she would snort the fabric all the way into her lungs. She folded it, put it back in the Ziploc, pushed all the air out of the bag and pressed the seal closed. “When Beep was a baby, he had his own baby smell. Milk and baby powder and Johnson's Baby Shampoo.”

“I don't remember back that far.” We both sat on her bed, Rachel holding the plastic bag with the last smell of Beep, me with my hands in my lap. “I wish we could go back to how things used to be.”

Rachel's eyes were as empty as Beep's room. “Yeah.”

Hunter and I both had birthdays the same week in February. Hunter turned eighteen and I turned sixteen. On Hunter's Facebook page, lots of girls from his school posted “Love You!” with their happy birthday greetings, but they didn't put an “I” in front of love, which meant it was friend-love, not Big Romance Love. Several of them used three or more exclamation points, which just meant they need meds.

For his birthday, I sent Hunter a little bit of California: a red-and-gold baseball-style cap with the 49er logo. Early in the morning, when I logged on to Skype, he was wearing it over a big grin.

“Nice look,” I told him. “After eighteen years on the East Coast, if you can come over to the light side and become a 49er fan, anything is possible. Even beating cancer.”

“Ha. I'm only wearing it to impress my California girlfriend. If I ever root for the Niners, it'll mean tumors reached my brain. Go Ravens!”

“You're confused. You must be old. Have some cake and ice cream, while you can still chew.”

He smiled. It looked like I caught him on a good morning. “I wish I could taste ice cream. Everything tastes weird now.”

“Close your eyes. Really.” I waited until he closed his eyes, there on the computer screen. When he did, I went on, “I'm sending you the taste of ice cream. Now. Keep your eyes closed. Just listen. And taste. It's sweet. Cold. Creamy. Vanilla, queen of the flavors. Keep your eyes closed! Because it's cold, even though it's the most wonderful thing there is, you can't rush. Break the rules. Mash it with a spoon until it's creamy. And always eat it first. Before every meal.”

“Wow.” He kept his eyes closed, looking blissed out. “I can taste it. Awesome.”