Dessert First (31 page)

So we mostly concentrated on teachers, and juniors and seniors who were at least 17. To help with that, Rachel came over from Berkeley High on her lunch hour to be our gorgeous drop-in spokesmodel, to stand by my sign, attracting smitten seniors. Which, with her wearing a short sundress the first day, totally worked.

“You're only allowed to talk to the lovely Rachel if you first sign up to donate,” I explained to the guys who drifted over. “Be sure to put your cell phone number on the form, though, to get a personal thank-you text from her.”

“I'm using your phone for that, Kat,” Rachel said in a short break in the crowd. “There's no way I'm giving my phone number to, like, two hundred guys by texting them.”

“Use my phone,” Evan said. “No way should those senior guys get Kat's number, either.” He was holding my good hand at the time. I liked it.

Rachel drew a crowd of the most confident senior and junior boys, and that, in turn, drew a crowd of the senior and junior girls, like antibodies swarming to protect the male half of the student body from a powerful intruder.

Mrs. Miller, my World History teacher, tried to sneak by our table, but I called her out. “Donate! Standing in line at work to get stabbed is like having the even more exciting job of gladiator.”

She waved me off, but did smile.

When Coach Paulsen went by, I said, “Donate blood! The only exception to always-give-a-hundred-and-ten-percent.”

Evan brought his acoustic twelve-string, and when things got slow, he played and we sang Jonathan Coulton's song about corporate zombies, “Re: Your Brains,” but with changed lyrics:

Rachel joined in, harmonizing on the chorus. That girl can sing.

“For the record,” I said to Evan at the end of the song. “Rachel's musical influences totally do not overlap with yours.”

He squeezed my good hand. “Don't worry. As soon as you're out of that cast, you're in our band, and there won't be room for another front singer.”

Tyler was hooked in with the male jock crowd, and got them into mass testosterone competitive frenzy, where they dared each other to donate as a macho thing, and that took off. Almost the whole girls' varsity soccer team signed up too, which I didn't expect, because Tracie was on the team. Elizabeth and Amber and Calley Rose wandered around with clipboards, buttonholing the juniors and seniors who didn't come to our table.

“If I get twenty more sign-ups in the next ten minutes,” I announced with ten minutes left in the period, “our blood donation spokesmodel Rachel here will unbutton another button on her dress.”

“Unbutton your own top!”

“C'mon. This is a good cause. We're saving lives here. They're donating blood. The least you could do is offer a glimpse of perfect skin.”

“I'm bringing Brian with me tomorrow,” Rachel said. “To keep you in line, so you don't start offering to take pictures of me in the shower for donor guys.”

“Great idea. Have Brian wear that tight tee shirt of his and bring his soulful look. I'll tell all the girls he's a sparkly vampire from Berkeley High they're keeping alive.”

Rachel shook her head at that, but she was texting Brian at the time, to make sure he'd show up the next day. I turned to Evan. “She's in total denial over the supernaturally good-looking guy that sucks on her neck.”

“Should I wear a tight shirt too?” Evan asked.

“That'd be overkill. With you and Rachel and Brian here, we'll already have enough eye-candy to put a diabetic in a coma.”

Near the end of the period, even the Tracies came over. As soon as I saw that approaching pack of human hyenas, I turned to Evan. “Get them to sign donor forms before they start talking you into crushing my heart.”

“I won't crush your heart.”

“Good. Don't. Especially not before Friday, when I have to give blood.”

Evan got all five of them to fill out and sign donor forms and gave them parent permission slips. They laughed and flirted with him. I gritted my teeth into something I hoped resembled a smile. Good cause and all. At the end, while they were still hovering, he reached over and took my hand again. Then I gave the Tracies a real smile.

The last day of the blood drive—the actual donation one—Evan's mom helped us pull the poster of Beep and the blood donation poster out of the trunk for the last time. Evan grabbed them, because I had the box of sign-up forms. As he staggered up the steps with them and his guitar, I yelled, “Catch up with you at lunch.” Then I turned to his mom.

“Mrs. Ford?”

“Yes?” she said, in that distracted grownup way, as if worried about getting her car out of the loading zone.

“They just did a ceremony, at the George Mark Children's House, for the kids who died in the last month. They put the memory stones in the fountain with their names on them.”

She looked at me blankly. I went on, and explained how at the GMCH, after a child dies who ever stayed there—like Beep had stayed, for transitional care the first couple of times he was sick—you engrave their name onto a smooth memory stone, about the size of your fist, and it goes in the fountain, as another way to remember them.

Evan's mom's eyebrows were wrinkled in confusion, and she tapped the clasp of her purse, as if I was doing some fundraising thing, and if she pushed folded money at me, I'd go away.

You wish.
“Some of the kids at the George Mark House, with birth defects, lived only for a couple of days, but they were still special, worth remembering.” Like Evan's brother. I looked off to the side, so I wouldn't be distracted by her shocked reaction. This was hard. “I was thinking you could do that.”

“Do what?”

“Figure out some ceremony or something. To remember your baby boy who died. Evan's little brother.”

She took a step back, and her eyes were wide, as if I'd bashed her with my cast and was threatening to do it again.

“It's better to be remembered than forgotten, even if you're only here for a little while, like my brother Beep. Anyway—think about it.” I bounced off to class while the bell was ringing, signaling I was late. I looked back before I went in the doors. Evan's mom was still standing by her car in the loading zone, her mouth open.

• • •

That night, after we had set the East Bay record for a high school blood drive, Evan called. We'd already gotten to talking for over an hour every night.

“Kat, are you sitting down?”

I was.

“My mom talked to me tonight about my dead baby brother. We're going to visit him in the cemetery. He's at the one nearby, on Colusa.”

“Wow,” I said.

“She said you talked to her about it.”

I went silent. Was that a bad thing?

“Thanks.” There was a long pause. “Kat.” His voice quavered with stress. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” I had for a long time, really.

After we hung up, I hugged my pillow, pretending it was Evan. I am totally going to borrow one of his tee shirts, to remind me of his smell, the little bits of time he's not around.

For the longest time after Beep died, I didn't have dreams about him. But a couple of weeks before the end of the school year, just before I woke up (the only time I ever remember dreams from) I dreamed I was at a picnic with Beep, except his hair had grown back, and he was healthy, and he even looked older, my age. Plates of cupcakes and little bowls of quivering red Jell-O cubes were spread out on a blue-checkered tablecloth on the grass. Beep had a huge smile. In the dream I was worried that I'd have to break it to him that he was dead and that would spoil everything.

As I was trying to figure out how to tell him, he reached over and squeezed my arm. “I know,” he said. “It's okay. I
cleared the level!
” As if he'd won in a videogame.

There was something so electric about how happy he was, I woke up half an hour before the alarm. A great feeling filled the whole room, like the sunlight just coming in or the smell of baking brownies. It was so nice, I tried to go right back to sleep to finish the picnic, but of course it doesn't work that way.

Things are better now. I still see Dr. Anne and sit through the weekly depression sessions, but I'm used to it, so it's mostly okay.

Rachel and I gradually went from a one-way truce into getting along. Her helping with the blood drive, and me hanging out there with her and Brian and Evan almost like a double date, somehow put us on the same side again. She's happier, looking forward to going away to college, as if it's escaping from a cage. Which for her, it probably is. She's even started to believe in her Kat-sarcasm immunity pass.

She and Cipher are still online buddies. I never told her I'm Cipher. Somehow, even I know that would ruin things. Everyone needs a friend who's not her annoying little sister.

Over the summer, I won't have to deal with the Tracies. But even before the end of the school year, they tapered off their hating. After the Kayla Southerland smash down, maybe they got nervous that I'd beat them into a group coma. Or after I bailed on my DBF, maybe I became evil enough to be accepted by them, which would be even more depressing, so I don't think about it. I'm over the Tracies—you know, finally, as Hunter might have said. They'll never be my friends. I'll never be their friend. That's okay.

For the rest of life, I'll always be the girl who donated her hair to Locks of Love after her brother died. They'll be the girls who made fun of me for that.

I'll always be the girl who, after she screwed up so badly, tried hard to make it as right as she could, even if it wasn't easy. The Tracies, not so much.

I still wear Hunter's ring around my neck, at the end of a thin chain. It's like carrying part of him, so he'll never be completely gone. It's near my heart, to remind me that because Hunter and his mom forgave me, maybe I can forgive myself.

I don't post on the blood cancer Facebook page anymore or the cancer forums or my cancer blog. Even I have had enough words about cancer for a while. Life is so great when I'm around Evan, I'm trying the healthy non-online world for a change.

Every free minute of every day when I'm not working on my make-up paper, Evan comes over, or I go to his house, and we watch a movie or play music or hang out, or take Skippy for a walk holding hands. Now that my cast is off, I'm playing guitar again, and when we find a drummer and somebody ignorant enough to play bass, we're forming a band. In the meantime, it's fun to goof around. We wrote four more songs together. Evan says our latest, “Eat Dessert First,” is his best, ever.

I don't really know if Evan and I are best friends who are also a couple, or boyfriend-girlfriend who are also best friends, getting better. I do know it's slow and great and it makes me happy. Evan makes me laugh. I make him laugh, and when I'm around him that's what I want to do. We are so obviously massively together, though, Mom has imposed all kinds of door-must-always-be-open-and-a-grownup-must-be-home-when-Evan-is-over rules, which are mostly unnecessary. Mostly. (*Kat sighs happily.*)

His friends are turning into my friends too, so I got a bunch of friends to go with the awesome boyfriend. They don't even seem to mind my weird hair.

It turns out Evan was ninety percent sure I was Cipher, all along. After both Cipher and I went offline for the long week when I went snow camping, he was ninety-five percent sure. Apparently, I sound like me, even when I'm pretending to be someone else. That stress I had about Evan flirting with Cipher while he was friends with me was mistaken: He's had a crush on me. For about forever. Ahhh.

And although I screwed up the entire school year, I've got this possibility of not having to repeat all my classes, in the form of my finished make-up paper, poised right here in my computer, next to Fate Almost Worse Than Death.

When I think about being done and getting to hang out with Evan even more, I get a strange feeling I haven't had for about three years. It's weird, but nice. I think it's happiness.