Side Effects May Vary (5 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers

Harvey.

Then.

I
watched Alice from across the cafeteria as she walked to the trash line to dump her leftovers. It'd been a few days since telling my mom I wanted to quit piano. I wondered what Alice would have to say about that, if anything at all. It didn't matter, though, because we never really talked much anymore, not since starting high school. I saw her every once in a while when my mom dragged me over to Bernie and Martin's. The three of them would sit around the table drinking wine while Alice and I would sat on the couch watching TV in silence—and not the comfortable kind. There was none of the easy laughter we'd grown up on. Lately, though, I'd started making excuses. Homework, plans with Dennis, job interviews—all reasons why I couldn't go.

Noise bounced off the linoleum floors, traveling, as the fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. I'd heard about her and Luke breaking up. It took a few days for the news to trickle down the social totem pole to Dennis and me. I wasn't sure exactly what had happened, but I did know that Celeste now occupied Alice's seat next to Luke with Mindi at her other side. Mindi had always taken dance classes at my mom's studio, but she'd never been very serious about it. She was there for Celeste and because she needed a talent for all the pageants her mom entered her in.

Since she didn't sit with Luke anymore, Alice sat at a table by herself. But, every day, people sat with her. She hadn't really talked to any of them, but they all sort of talked around her, waiting for Luke's ex-girlfriend to make her next big social move.

The last time I really talked to Alice was the week before high school. Bernie had made partner at her law office, so Martin threw a party for her. The attendees were basically old fat men wearing khaki pants and dress shoes without socks and accompanied by their wives. The backyard smelled like barbecue, cigars, and beer.

Alice had reached this point in the night where she'd stopped verbally responding to all the old people trying to ask her questions about school and ballet—especially since she'd just quit.

The old guys who'd managed to leave their wives at home flocked to my mom in her usual all-black attire with her hair done up in a bun.

Alice's eye caught mine from where she stood next to the dessert table. She mouthed to me,
Driveway
.
Question game.

I nodded, unable to stop myself from smiling.

I may have been a mediocre piano player, a horrible dancer, and a little too easygoing, but I had always been a supreme lip reader.

I sat in the grass waiting for Alice since the driveway was full of cars.

She plopped down next to me and handed me a beer.

“How'd you swing this?” I asked. Bernie was careful to separate the beer cooler from the soda cooler so she could police us. Alice's parents may have been cool with swearing and stuff, but drinking was not on the okay list.

She shrugged. “Old guys love me.”

“Gross!” But it was probably true.

“Not like that,” she said. “Okay, well, maybe like that. But who gives a shit?”

She wore cutoff denim shorts and this really tight navy blue tank top with little flowers. I wanted to kiss her so bad. I wanted to know what it would feel like to lie in the grass with her on top of me and nothing but clothes between us.

She held her bottle up to mine. “Cheers!”

It wasn't the first time I'd ever had a beer, but it tasted as sour as I remembered.

“Question game,” said Alice.

The question game was a game we played growing up. Well, really, I guess it wasn't a game, just a conversation. But when you're a kid, everything's more fun if you can call it a game. My mom used to call cleaning the clean-up game. Alice and I would race to see who could clean up their mess of toys or construction paper first. We never won anything. Well, except gloating rights—which, to Alice, was the only thing worth winning.

Alice asked first. “If you had to choose to sleep on your back or your stomach for the rest of your life, which would you choose?”

“What about my side?” I asked.

“Not an option.”

I took a sip of beer. “My stomach.”

“Me too.”

“My turn,” I said. I wanted to ask her why she quit ballet, but Alice quitting ballet felt a lot like me not knowing who my dad was. We tiptoed around it. “If you had to choose a brand-new first name right now, what it would be?”

“Joey,” she said without pause.

“That's a guy's name.”

She stretched her legs out on the grass. “I think it's sexy when girls have boy names.”

I didn't know if my hormones could survive her bare legs and the word
sexy
all in one moment.

“What would your name be?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “Something like Mike. Something normal and not old.”

She laughed and her hand brushed mine. “I love your name.” Sounding out both syllables, she said, “Harvey.”

If she kept saying my name like that, I might not mind it so much.

“If you could take a test right now and skip all four years of high school, would you?”

“That's a good one,” I said, feeling the bubble of beer in my chest. I thought for a second. “I would . . . not. It's going to suck so hard. That's all anyone tells us, but I think maybe there's some stuff that might be worth it, and I don't want to miss out just in case. What about you?”

“In a freaking heartbeat,” she said. “I wish I could wake up tomorrow and be on the other side of graduation.”

I didn't know what to say back to that. “It'll be okay.”

“Alice,” called Bernie from the side of the house. “There's someone who wants to meet you.”

“Oh, shit. Dump these.” Alice handed me her half-empty beer and ran off to the backyard.

That was the last conversation we had. It all made me wonder if maybe the Great Alice and Harvey in my head was a distorted version of reality—reality being that we were two kids, forced to hang out with each other because our moms had become best friends, but now we weren't even that.

 

Dennis sat across from me, rehashing some stand-up act he'd watched online last night. I nodded my head along, but didn't really catch what he was saying. Alice, her lips pressed together in a thin line, rolled her eyes at something one of the girls behind her said, and then I lost sight of her. I tried focusing my attention back on Dennis, doing my best to push her out of my thoughts. It was one of those stupid moments where nothing at all is really happening, but you'll always remember every detail because you're trying to hold on to all that was solid in your life before it exploded. It was being in an awful car accident and remembering every lyric to the song you were singing before the crash. That's what that moment was for me, my last memory of Alice pre-cancer.

Then the scream—an earth-shattering scream, followed by multiple shrill screams. I stood, trying to get a better look at whatever was going on. My chair clattered to the floor behind me.

It was quiet for a second before the tidal wave of gossip began to roll through the cafeteria.

“She, like, passed out!” one girl said.

Some guy yelled, “Someone get the nurse!”

“Call 911!” shouted another panicked voice, prompting an army of technology-armed teenagers to reach for their cell phones.

I searched for Alice's crown of hair, but nothing.

I don't know how I knew it was her, but I did. Like I could recognize her absence as much as her presence. I pushed through hordes of kids to get to her. People yelled at me and pushed back, but I didn't care. I saw familiar faces, like Celeste and Mindi, but I shoved my way relentlessly to the front of the crowd. Everything went dead quiet, and all I could hear was the pumping of my blood in my ears.

I pulled up short, in front of her body splayed out on the ground. It looked unnatural, with her knee bent all weird. Her bottle of water had spilled all over her stomach and now rolled around at her side back and forth, water dribbling from the open top. I wanted to clean it up. Her skirt was flipped up, revealing more than I wanted anyone to see. I threw my jacket over her lower half and sat there on the floor next to her until the paramedics came, like me sitting there would change something.

When the paramedics arrived, they enlisted a couple of guys from the wrestling team to pull me back, which said a lot because I wasn't ripped or anything. The paramedics kept asking if we were related.

“We grew up together,” I said over and over again.

“You her brother?” the youngest paramedic asked as he held open the cafeteria door for the gurney carrying Alice.

“She was my friend. She's my . . .” I didn't know
what
Alice was. The guy shook his head and let the door swing shut behind him.

I should have lied. I should have said I was her brother, but I didn't. It was one of those stupid mistakes that plays over and over in your mind for days.

The next week, she came back to school and didn't even look at me. She acted like nothing had happened, and I began to wonder if I had imagined the whole thing. It was an earthquake, one that only I seemed to feel.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers

Alice.

Now.

I
still
felt
sick.

I knew I would, but I couldn't separate the act of
being
sick from the act of
feeling
sick. It didn't make any sense to me. When would my body stop dying and start living? Or did it even work like that?

The plan was to start more chemo this summer, as long as my “condition” stayed consistent, which it had so far. Dr. Meredith told my parents that it would be in my best interest to get back into some sort of routine as soon as possible. I'd been dragging my feet for weeks, hoping I could get at least another two weeks out of my parents. And today was my seventeenth birthday, a day I had never imagined living to see.

My body may have been in this great state of in between—neither healthy nor sick—but my mom had definitely moved beyond me being sick. She was ready to move forward. We never really talked about the whole remission thing, which I guess was another issue, but her totally out of character “handle Alice with care” haze had begun to fade. Even so, yesterday when she came home with a manila envelope from the principal's office, I felt betrayed. She held it out to me and said, “They're expecting you back on January eighteenth.”

I stood with my hands in tight fists at my side.

She sighed. “Let's concentrate on getting you back on track. If you do summer school, you might be able to graduate on time. And then there's college, too. You're not that far behind. Still lots of viable options available.”

I crossed my arms over my chest.
College
. I hadn't thought too much about college except for the fact that I wouldn't be going. All of a sudden I had this future and everyone seemed to know what to do with it, except for me. I didn't have to talk to Harvey to know what he expected from us. He would want permanence. I'd even promised him that—when it hadn't been mine to promise. And now my parents with school.

When it became clear I had no intention of taking the envelope from my mom, she dropped it on the counter and turned to walk down the hallway toward her room. From outside her door, she called to me, “There's no hiding from life, Alice Elizabeth. It always finds you.”

Then why hasn't it found you? Why do you still get to live a lie?

I took the envelope to my room. According to the papers from the principal's office, I would pick up mid-junior year. I had been homeschooled the last few months of sophomore year, and over the summer I'd rot in summer school while I made up the first half of junior year. It all sounded so easy, like nothing had ever happened. Between chemo and summer school, my vacation was already shaping up to be top-notch bullshit. But then again, the cancer could always come back. In a deep corner of myself that scared even me, I thought that maybe if the cancer did come back it might not be so bad. I knew how to die. It was the living that scared me.

But right now I was faced with two hurdles. Tonight, the “Alice's-Seventeenth-Birthday/ Not-Dying-Anymore Party,” and in the morning I would have to face school. And with school came Luke and Celeste and Mindi. Suddenly, life was at my doorstep, waiting to be answered, but all I had were questions. It's a hard thing to explain unless you'd ever gone through something so life altering as toeing the line between life and death.

I still couldn't wrap my mind around it, being in remission. I'd been going to doctors' appointments biweekly, and everyone there treated me like a bubble that might burst at any moment.

The doorbell rang and I heard the sounds of Natalie and Harvey letting themselves in, slipping off their boots at the door, and locking the thumb lock behind them. I didn't really know why I was so stressed about this party thing. It wasn't even a party. It was only me, Mom, Dad, Natalie, Harvey, and some ice-cream cake. Minutes passed, and I thought maybe they had forgotten me back here in my room. Relief as true as a lie settled in my chest as someone rapped on my bedroom door.

“Come on, Al,” said my mom. She stuck her head into my room, her wavy blond hair bouncing around her chin. It was starting to grow out. She had cut her long, untamed locks into a bob when I lost my hair. I bet people at work assumed she'd cut it for the sake of solidarity with me and my bald head. But I was pretty sure it had to do with her boyfriend or whatever the hell he was. Her eyes crinkled as she bit her lip, studying me.

I sighed and looked down at my jeans. I'd had them since I was thirteen. A little short, but they fit in the waist. I had put on about three pounds since going into remission, but most food still made me queasy. After sliding on my slippers, I followed my mom out the door and down the hallway. I couldn't look at her without seeing him. That man. In our house. Now that I wasn't waiting for the end, I would have to live with this.

Nearly a month after Christmas and our house was still decorated. The dust had settled on the ornaments and garland. The out-of-season décor was a longstanding tradition in my house. My parents always waited to take down everything until after my birthday, saying it added to the festivities. I thought they were just lazy, but still, a birthday without Christmas lights would feel flat-out offensive.

Since being told I was in remission, I'd been poked and prodded more than I had when the cancer in my blood was actually detectable. Between doctors' appointments and feigning tiredness, I'd been able to just miss Harvey. I avoided him for nearly a month, although he called every day. I wanted to see him, but I didn't want to talk to him, like any words might break us. I saw him on Christmas. It was weird this year. There had been so many presents, more than any other year, and I wondered if my parents had gone overboard before or after Dr. Meredith's news.

Harvey's face lifted the second he saw me. “I missed you,” he said and hugged me tight. Over his shoulder, I could see tears streaming down Natalie's ivory face. Harvey held his arms so closely around me that I felt the weight of his forearms overlapping across my back. It made me feel paper thin, breakable.

When he finally let go, it was Natalie's turn. I hadn't seen her for over a month, and I had assumed I might never see her again. She curled her long, lean arms around my shoulders and placed her chin atop my head. She was a gazelle of a woman, standing at least a few inches taller than my five foot nine inches. “Welcome back,” she whispered into my hair.

Everyone in my life was ready for this except me.

“Happy birthday to you . . . ,” my dad began to sing, as he approached us from behind. His voice was a little unsure at first, but rose in volume when everyone else joined.

I turned to him. He held out a huge strawberry-ice-cream cake, my childhood birthday party staple. Natalie squeezed my shoulder, telling me to make my wish. Heat warmed my face, and the countless candles made everything and everyone look fuzzy. I closed my eyes and pretended to make a wish, but I didn't, not really. I had nothing left to wish for, and even if I did, I wouldn't wish for it; I would
do
it.

My eyes must have been closed for too long because my mother cleared her throat. My eyes sprang open. They all stared at me, waiting. It took me three puffs to blow out all the candles but one. Without missing a beat, Harvey swiped his tongue over his thumb and pointer finger, using them to snuff out the last stubborn flame.

Next, we opened presents. My parents gave me cash, which was what I asked for every year. From Natalie and Harvey, I received a generic Happy Birthday card and a rectangular box wrapped in champagne-colored wrapping paper. I knew what it was before I opened it, but I still went through the motions. Tucked into a small brown box and shrouded in white tissue paper was a pair of brand-new pointe shoes.

The minute I opened the box, Natalie tried to explain herself. “I know.” She stopped, collecting her thoughts. “I know that you don't dance anymore, but I read somewhere that your body would recuperate more quickly if you exercised.”

Natalie was never verbally confrontational. In fact, she might even come across as shy at times, but she let her feelings show in her actions. So while this seemed like a nice gesture, it was also Natalie's way of saying,
It's time to get back to the studio.
I picked up the shoes, the silk smooth against my fingers and the leather soles blemish-free. My throat went dry and my fingertips numb. Anxiety sank deep into my abdomen like a set of hooks. One more expectation I didn't know how to live up to. At least this one could live in a box beneath my bed.

I wanted to be that person for all of them—the person they'd painted into their memory, the memorialized version of Alice—but that girl wasn't me. And that scared me. As it turned out, my greatest fear in life had become expectations.

Natalie looked back and forth between my parents. Dad patted her back. And Mom looked at me with anticipation. My forehead knotted in confusion, not sure what she wanted me to say. She raised her brows and tilted her head to Natalie.

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

Like an old friend, I wanted to keep ballet within reach, but this was too close. With this defunct body, I wasn't all that interested in testing my limits. I slid the shoes back in the box, and gave Natalie and Harvey a stiff-lipped smile.

 

The summer before freshman year, I'd told my mom that I wanted to quit ballet. She agreed as long as I told Natalie myself. On the surface, I think I wanted to start high school fresh. I was done being the girl who had to go to ballet class every day. We lived in a small town and, yeah, I was considered good here. But in comparison to whom? I couldn't be like Natalie, teaching pupil after pupil, hoping something might stick. If ballet was going to be my life, I'd only be happy living it on a stage. I preferred to accept the disappointment now rather than waste more years in a studio and have a casting director or an admissions board tell me I wasn't good enough.

On that day, I ran through the front door of the studio and into the changing room, bobby pins slipping from my bun as I changed out of my denim shorts and tank top and into my black leotard. I slid my black convertible tights on over my leotard and threw my backpack beneath Natalie's desk.

“Alice, get back here with that nest of hair,” called Natalie.

Without a word, she rolled her office chair out for me and I sat down. She placed her hands on my shoulders and squeezed some tension from my sore muscles. Gently, she took out all of my bobby pins, and my head screamed with relief. Taking down a ballet bun is sort of like a brain freeze, causing a brief but intense headache. I held out my hand for her to place the discarded bobby pins in. When my hair was completely loose around my shoulders, she massaged my scalp for a minute, and I couldn't stop the sigh that slipped from my lips. Instead of putting my hair back into a tight bun, Natalie placed a straight part in the middle of my head and gave me two long braids on either side. When she was through braiding, she took a couple bobby pins from my open palm and wove the braids together at the base of my scalp.

That night after class, and after all the other students had gone home, I sat with Natalie on the floor of the largest studio while Harvey waited in the car. I told her I wouldn't be back for classes in the fall. I sat up straight and enunciated my words, but inside they were a whisper.

She didn't say much of anything until we were standing in the dark with our bags in tow, getting ready to set the studio alarm.

“You can have until Monday to change your mind. I'll hold your place until then.” The room around us was pitch black, so like most things people hear in the dark, I pretended not to hear anything at all.

 

Ever since I was a kid we'd always had cake before the meal at any of my birthday gatherings. One year I'd begged my mom to have cake first. She'd caved and it had been a tradition ever since. Besides, I'd always hated the idea of saving the best for last.

After eating cake, Harvey sat right next to me with two plates of pizza—one for each of us. He wolfed down his slices and went for seconds while I still picked at my first helping. Our parents huddled around in a circle, conversing in hushed whispers while every couple minutes my dad glanced over his shoulder at me and Harvey.

After his trip for seconds, Harvey ducked beneath the low-hanging light dangling above the kitchen table, and asked, “Do you want me to pick you up for school tomorrow?”

“I think my mom wants to take me because it's my first day back,” I lied, rubbing my hands up and down my arms trying to warm myself. I wasn't ready to be alone with him yet.

With a slice of pizza hanging from his mouth, he shrugged out of his zip-up hoodie and draped it around my shoulders. I resisted rolling my shoulders back and letting the jacket slip to the ground. Instead, I pulled the fabric tight around myself. It smelled like Harvey. Like spilled gasoline and produce and boy deodorant.

Tonight, I was cold. Tomorrow, I would deal with Harvey.

“Are you nervous?” he asked.

“Why would I be nervous?”

He scooted his chair a little closer to me and took my hands from where they sat in my lap. Beneath the table, he held my fingers, warming them, and said, “I won't let them near you. Not Celeste. Not Luke.”

“Don't. Just don't.” I pulled my hands away and pushed my plate to the side and rested my cheek against the table, turning away from him. All that lay ahead of me tomorrow weighed on my shoulders and I could barely pick my head up. Beneath the table, he squeezed my knee. I jerked away. Harvey did too, doubling the gap between us. It hadn't been so long ago that Harvey's touch had been the only cure I'd wanted.

Still, he sat silently by my side all night, reaching beneath the table for my fingers every so often. I wavered between hot and cold. Between wanting to lean into him and wanting to shoo him away. Our parents stayed huddled in the kitchen, their voices growing louder and more boisterous as the wine disappeared from their glasses.