“Why?” I asked, but I thought I knew part of the answer. Who wants to sit around feeling like shit when you can do something to make yourself forget?
“I want to get out of this death house. Plus, they’re auditioning for the fall play.”
“Becca, are you seriously going to try out? What if you can’t—”
“I’m not an idiot. I’m just going to watch.” She looked angry. I didn’t know what to say.
“Do you have any other sordid Leo tales to tell me? Helen’s not in the room.”
I smiled. “Sorry, no. Just me and my hand. And I’m not telling you about that.”
“Speaking of hands, Caleb has huge ones.”
“Caleb? Homeschool boy?” I confirmed.
“I had Helen roll my bed near the window, so I could watch him mow the lawn. He looks a lot like Chris Hemsworth, I think. Sans the Thor lady hair.”
“Maybe you can do a number eleven on yourself then.”
“I’m being watched too closely to play with myself. Speak of the devil. Helen just walked in with my med cocktail. Gotta go.”
“So I’ll see you tomorrow?” I asked.
“Hopefully.” She signed off.
I hadn’t thought of Becca back at school so soon. Would the school year veer into semi-standard territory? It was hard to remember a time when life felt anything but abnormal.
*
I spent the following morning at school looking over my shoulder for Becca. I saw Leo once, and he gave me a smileless wave, not unfriendly but on his way to somewhere. He caught me on my way to lunch. “You feel like … hanging out?” At that point, it was unclear if “hanging out” meant just hanging out or taking each other’s clothes off while surrounded by books.
“I can’t today. Becca said she might come to school, so I want to stay visible.” I guess I answered my own question as to where we’d end up.
“Is Becca well enough to come to school?” Leo asked, concerned.
“I have no idea. She seems to think so.”
“Oh.” Leo remembered something and dug into his front pocket. “Here.” He handed me a key, similar to the one he used to open the book closet door. “I got you one.” I turned the key over in my hand, wondering what exactly it meant. My face must have revealed something because Leo said, “Damn, it’s not an engagement ring. I just thought maybe you’d like a key in case you wanted to go in there when I’m not around. No need to get all disturbed.”
“I’m not disturbed.”
“You kind of are,” Leo pushed.
“Don’t you have a class to go to?”
“Not really. But I’ll find one to get away from you.” He was messing with me, but he still walked away.
“Thanks for the key,” I called after him.
“Sure,” he called back.
Becca arrived while I sat at the lunch table with Damien, Eliza, and Brandon. She had on a striped winter hat, covering up her bald head. She walked slowly toward the table, and already I thought she looked thinner. Maybe it was her coloring. As she walked, a myriad of people came up to her to chat. I watched with a protective glare. Who were they to talk to my best friend before I did? I stood up and pushed past several of her fans. I grabbed her arm, then let my grip go soft when I realized how frail she seemed. We walked together to the lunch table, and Becca said, “I feel like a celebrity. Now I know I have to get famous someday.” It was nice to hear her talk about the future as if she’d be alive.
Damien, Eliza, and Brandon bombarded Becca with hugs and questions, and I let her soak in the attention. At least it was people I liked and knew, not just cancer groupies.
At the end of lunch, Becca asked if I would walk her to the drama room so she could talk to Ms. Richards. She held my arm and waved with her free hand to her adoring audience. I almost punched Jenna in the face when she stopped us to squeal at Becca’s presence. I pushed to keep moving, and Jenna faded into the hallway crowd. Before we managed to make it to the drama room, Becca’s legs gave out. I held her up as best as I could, but my size wasn’t helping me. In an instant, I felt her weight lift off me, and there Leo was holding up her other side.
“Are you okay?” I asked. I felt like I was always asking that.
“Can you take me to the nurse? I need to lie down for a minute.” She sounded panicked. Then she puked, not a ton, but a dribble down the front of her shirt. I waited for Leo to make a grossed-out comment, but he just carried her along as though nothing happened.
“Sorry.” Becca coughed.
As we walked through the halls, the same people who fawned over Becca minutes ago were now gawking at her like she had a disease. Which she did, although nothing they could catch. In fact, the crowd of people and their hordes of germs were much more dangerous to Becca than she could ever be to them.
When we got to the nurse’s office, Leo carried Becca over to a plastic bed. The nurse called Becca’s mom, and I pulled some tissues from a box and helped Becca clean off her face and chin.
“Thank you,” she said. “My hero. And this is Leo?” So Becca—even when she’s wiping puke from her chin, she’s thinking about me and a guy.
“Yeah. Becca, Leo. Leo, Becca,” I introduced them.
“Nice to meet you,” Leo said formally. “I’ll let you two have a moment.” He backed out of the nurse’s office.
“Well, that sucked,” Becca said when Leo was gone.
“It wasn’t that bad. You could have projectile-vomited.”
“All over Jenna’s face,” Becca said dreamily.
“So it could’ve been better is what you’re saying.”
The nurse came back into the room. “Becca, your mom will be here shortly. Can I get you anything?”
“No thank you.” Becca spoke with a sickeningly sweet baby voice reserved for doted-on patients.
“Do you need a pass, Alex?” Mrs. Kafcas knew me well from the era during freshman year when I had strep three times. She was nice and helpful and generous with the passes.
“Sure,” I answered.
She ripped a pass off her pad and scribbled her signature. “You fill out the time when Becca’s mom arrives.”
Becca closed her eyes, and her breathing became even.
“Why don’t you let her get some rest?” Mrs. Kafcas whispered. I could’ve sat there with sleeping Becca until her mom came, but that meant talking to her mom again. I wasn’t up for the sad parent. I walked out and closed the door to the nurse’s office quietly. Leaning against the wall nearby was Leo.
“She going to be okay?” he asked. I shrugged.
“Can we go somewhere?” I pressed, and he knew exactly where I meant.
When we arrived in the book closet, Leo sat down on a desk. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“That’s the exact opposite of what I want. I just want to feel good.” I looked at Leo. He walked over to me, put his hands around my back, and made sure of just that.
CHAPTER
19
BECCA AND I SKYPED the minute I got home from school. She sat engulfed in her pillow mound looking far less green than when I last saw her. “So that was—” she started.
“Putrescent,” I finished.
“Thank you for sugarcoating things.”
“You know you can count on me for that,” I joked. “How are you feeling?”
“I wish you didn’t have to keep asking me that.”
“Sorry. But you did throw up, and my gallant guy-dude-friend-thing did have to help carry you through the halls.”
“You still won’t call him your boyfriend? What’s that about? And did he think I was gross?”
“He didn’t mention your grossness, at least not to me.”
“Again, I feel so much better. And what about the boyfriend factor?” she prodded. While her words were on the normal side, her face looked pained.
“Who has time for a boyfriend? All that pathetic sexting and going on dates and meeting parents and proms and shit. I’m too busy taking care of you. Speaking of, is He
lga in the room with you?”
“Helen. And, no, her knitting needles were driving me crazy.”
“Careful what you say. Knitting needles make for excellent murder weapons.”
“Always looking on the bright side, you are. Oh! Speaking of bright sides, I saw Caleb as I was coming home from school today.”
“Was he naked?” I asked.
“I’ll ask the pervy questions around here,” she noted. Why wasn’t she using more ChapStick?
“So was he?”
“I wish. He was taking out the garbage. Our eyes met as my mom pulled into the driveway. He smiled.”
“Did you?”
“Barely. I was afraid I still had puke chunks in my teeth.”
“That is quite possibly the grossest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“From you, I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“I thought that was obvious. So when do you flash him next?”
“Try never. I look so gross now. Holes in my arms and on my chest, no hair. Did I tell you my eyelashes are starting to fall out?”
I shook my head. “Maybe we can write Caleb an anonymous note, and he can flash you back. We could add it to the Fuck-It List.”
“How’s that going, by the way?” Becca tried to adjust her position on the bed, and every movement looked strained.
I tried to remain composed. “Okay. I haven’t done anything monumental. I’m saving some things for us to do together. Like the sleep on a beach one.”
“That’s meant to be romantic, Alex.”
“Then how do you expect me to do it?”
“How about hop a train like a hobo?”
“Admittedly, that’s one of my favorites. But, alas, no. Am I failing you?”
“Not at all! You did way more on it than I ever did, and it’s my list.” Becca started coughing but managed to calm herself before Helen arrived. “What about the last number on the list? Have you done that yet? I know it hasn’t been that long, but I thought maybe you and Leo…”
I pulled the list from my pocket and reread number 23: Have sex with someone I’m in love with and who’s in love with me.
“No. We haven’t had sex yet. And we’re not in love.”
“Yet,” Becca added.
“I’ll let you believe that because you have cancer.”
“You could totally love him, Alex. He’s completely your type: big, weird, a criminal.”
“He’s not a criminal.”
“Whatever. Fall in love with him soon, please, and have sex so you can tell me all about it.” She yawned.
“Maybe I’ll just fall in love with Caleb instead so you can watch us have sex from your window. That way I won’t accidentally leave out any details.”
“You better not. He’s my homeschool boy.”
“You’ve already branded him with your boobs. There’s nothing I could do anyway.”
We both laughed, and Becca’s laugh turned into a cough again. Helen’s big butt resurfaced. When the camera was free, Becca’s newly scratchy voice said, “I have to go. Keep me posted on number twenty-three. I’m counting on you.”
“And Caleb’s counting on you. Sweet dreams.”
“If only.” She hung up.
From downstairs, I heard the garage door close and my brothers’ clumsy footsteps fill the house with life. I didn’t want to be alone, a rarity, so I headed downstairs and spent two hours splayed across the couch watching AJ and CJ destroy zombies. It wasn’t quite as good as a movie, but their aggressive banter helped me temporarily erase the vision of Becca puking that was on repeat in my head. I must have been pretty fucked up to watch horror movie after horror movie, not to mention my brothers ripping intestines out of realistic dead humans, and only be disturbed by a little puke. Forgetting about that day, and so many others, felt like a constant goal. I hoped there would come a day I would want to remember.
CHAPTER
20
TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY were regular school days in the sense that I went to class, nobody threw up near me, and Leo and I didn’t spend any time in the book closet. His creative writing teacher was annoyingly holding him accountable for whatever it was he was working on, so I ate with my lunch friends listening to them talk about stage crew and trying to win me back.
“We miss you, Alex. The catwalk isn’t nearly as creepy without you,” Brandon told me.
“Yeah, and you already own enough black to blend in,” Eliza said.
“You’re really selling it, but I have an actual job and actual, you know, stuff I have to do with my evenings.”
“Watching Dead Hags 7 isn’t ‘actual stuff,’” Brandon air-quoted.
“If only that were a real movie,” I mused.
I spent both nights working at Cellar and cramming in homework when I wasn’t filling bread with assorted meats and cheeses. I liked the busyness, the mechanical yet artful nature of building a sandwich and delivering it to a hungry person. Sometimes I felt like the patron saint of subs. There probably already was one, from what I’ve read about saints, which wasn’t much. Except that there’s one for practically everything. I could totally fill out a pair of black wings. Do saints have wings?
Near the end of my Wednesday shift, Doug called back to me in the kitchen. “Alex, you have a visitor! Clean the bathroom first.”
“I’ll get right on that, Sir Subs-a-lot.” Nobody tells the Patron Saint of Subs what to do.
I wiped my hands on my grungy jeans and stepped out to find Leo waiting for me behind the counter.
“Hey,” he smiled.
“Hey,” I repeated, not matching him in enthusiasm. I didn’t want to get razzed by the college crew.
I stayed behind the ledge where we placed the subs ready for consumption. Leo leaned on the counter with his elbows, bringing his face closer to mine. The low lighting emphasized the freckles that seemed mismatched with the rest of his tougher exterior.
“Did you want something to eat?” I asked.
“Nah. Already ate. Thanks, though. Just stopped by to say hi.”
“Picking up your comics?”
“Yeah. New Buffy and Walking Dead are out.”
“Buffy comics any good?” I asked. “I liked the show.”
“They’re really good. Most of the time. They had this totally weird plot where Angel and Buffy had sex in space. I didn’t quite get it.”
I nodded as though agreeing with something. I wasn’t sure how to respond to Buffy space sex.
“I guess I’ll let you get back to work,” Leo said as he drummed a little tune on the counter.
“Thanks, I guess,” I said. “See you tomorrow, maybe?” The question felt awkward, like what I was really saying was “Will you be sticking your hand down my pants in the book closet?” But curious minds wanted to know.
“I have to meet with my teacher every day this week for my independent study, so I won’t be able to, you know, hang out.” He had some unbuttoning on his mind, too.
“Okay.” I shrugged. No big deal.
“What about Friday night?” he asked.
“What about it?” I couldn’t remember if we had talked about something, and I forgot again.
“Do you want to hang out? Maybe watch a movie? You know I’ve never seen Basket Case 2 or 3.”
“That’s right!” The thought of schooling a horror fan on the blinding brilliance of Basket Case had me jazzed. “So much different from Basket Case the First.”
“Basket Case the First? Is that really what it’s called?”
“No. But it makes it sound fancy. As fancy as someone with a mutant twin brother that used to be attached to his side can sound.”
He laughed and shook his head. “Want to come to my house? My parents are going to a play. We can watch on the massive screen my dad installed in the family room.”
Massive screen didn’t resonate nearly as much as his parents going to a play. Potential book closet times ten.
“Yeah, okay. Sounds fun.” We both smiled this time. ?
??Speaking of fun, I have to go pretend to clean the bathroom, so…”
“Maybe I’ll see you in the halls. Definitely on Friday.”
“Bye.” I waved. The anticipation of Basket Case and a parent-free house made heat rise to my cheeks. Maybe we’d just watch the movies, like we did with Army of Darkness. But that was in a movie theater.
I punished my overactive imagination by actually cleaning the bathroom. I don’t know how clean it got because I didn’t technically touch anything, just sprayed all the surfaces with a disinfectant cleaner. The next person to use the toilet would get a wet awakening on her ass. Serves any freak right for not squatting above the pot in this place. I threw a new urinal cake in the men’s room and grossed myself out at the name. What sick bastard would call something you piss on a “cake”? Then my brain went into horror mode, at some psychopath’s birthday party where the birthday cake was a stack of frosted urinal cakes with a candle on top. As I left the men’s room, I laughed at myself.
“Someone’s got a boyfriend,” Ila sang.
“I was thinking about urinal birthday cakes, if you must know,” I scolded.
I didn’t have a boyfriend. I had someone to watch horror movies with while my best friend was too sick with cancer. Who somehow got me hot and bothered enough to clean a bathroom. Not a boyfriend at all.
CHAPTER
21
BECCA AND I TEXTED on Thursday whenever I could get to my phone without it being confiscated.
Becca: Are u sick?
Me: No
Becca: Can u come over after school?
Me: Fuck yeah
I had only Skyped with Becca since she started her treatment, and the only time I saw her in person was for her vomitous half hour at school. She said as long as I didn’t bring any germs into her house I could come over and watch Battlestar Galactica with her. This would be my fourth time watching the series, Becca’s fourteenth. She was obsessed with the actor who played Lee “Apollo” Adama, the son of the Galactica’s admiral and number 21 on her Fuck-It List: Touch Jamie Bamber’s butt. That was one of my particular favorite numbers because of the sheer impossibility of it. I thought that’s what a bucket list was supposed to be filled with: things one could only dream of doing. Lucky for me, I guess, Becca had a more attainable list that I could help her with. Except for number 21. And maybe the one about the hobo.