Side Effects May Vary

  I unwound my scarf from my neck and handed it to her to wipe her face.

  “Thanks,” she said, and rested her head on my shoulder.

  Debora scooted back a little and watched the patch of trees beside us that led out to Lake Quasipi.

  “We should go home,” I said.

  Alice sat up. “No,” she said. “No, I want to stay.”

  So we did. We found Dennis not far from the teacups at a row of water fountains. Thankfully, the water was on, so Alice splashed her face a few times and took a few sips of water.

  We ran out to the docks and played on the pedal boats until the chill of the water became too much. Then we went to the mini mine train and used the hand pumps to go through the tunnels.

  When we were done, it was too late to drive back, so we spent the night in The Tunnel of Love, which was nothing but a really small indoor roller coaster with plywood cutouts of kissing couples. It was really dark, but it was warmer than it would have been outside. The coaster cars were these oversized love seats with red, sparkly plastic upholstery and purple piping.

  Dennis and Debora fell asleep first, but I couldn’t sleep and neither could Alice. She crept over to my car, with her finger to her lips. Her breath smelled like spearmint chewing gum.

  I opened my mouth to talk—to ask her if she was okay—but she covered my lips with her fingers and shook her head no.

  Dennis’s snores echoed down the tunnel from the back cart, and I could hear Debora a couple cars back, her breaths heavy and measured.

  Alice left her fingers on my lips and leaned forward into my shoulder. She pulled the collar of my T-shirt aside, kissing my neck. I breathed into her fingers and kissed her fingerprints, hoping the proof of her would always stay there on my lips.

  I let my hands work up her arms until my fingers found her neck, her face, pulling her to me.

  And then we kissed. It was deep and slow, like a first kiss should be. Her mouth melting against mine. I had to stop my head from working because all it was doing was thinking about this moment—Alice is kissing me. Alice is kissing me. I’m kissing Alice. I’m kissing Alice.—and not living in this moment. And I couldn’t let myself ever forget this.

  Alice slid down low in the cart, so I followed. She yanked her jacket off and mine too without ever pulling away from me.

  I held her hips and waited for her to push my hands away as they ran up the back of her shirt and over the straps of her bra.

  Her hands swept over my chest and down my stomach, while kissing my neck all the way up to my ear. The feel of her hands against my skin. And the thought of where those hands might go. I gasped.

  “Shh,” she whispered. “Just kissing tonight.”

  I fell asleep, with her curled into my chest and my chin resting on top of her head, scared for tomorrow because this was too perfect to last.

  When I woke up in the morning, Alice sat in her own cart, wrapping her scarf around her neck.

  “I’m starved,” yelled Dennis, his voice muffled, from the back of the tunnel.

  Debora yawned. “Me too.”

  The park looked different under the sunlight, a little bit sadder than it had the night before. Chipped paint, splintered wood, cracked sidewalks.

  We piled up in the car and Alice insisted that Dennis take the front seat.

  Every time I looked for Alice in the rearview mirror, she flicked her eyes off to the road and instead it was Debora whose gaze caught mine. We stopped for breakfast outside of town. There were few words, lots of yawns, and no regrets.

  Alice.

  Then

  I didn’t expect for it to feel so good, to see Luke humiliate himself like that in front of all those people. But it did, and I wasn’t done yet. I hadn’t given Harvey any details—mainly because I wasn’t so sure of them myself, but he agreed when I asked him to take me to the Nifty-Thrifty one Sunday afternoon.

  Harvey gripped the handle of the shopping cart and pushed me down the aisles of abandoned goods, sneezing into his sleeve. I’d been kidding when I told him to push me around, but when he offered, I was relieved. I didn’t know how long I could last walking up and down the aisles of this place. The spring musical was at the beginning of April, and I had a plan, giving me a few weeks to nail everything down and gather some supplies.

  Between now and then, I had another chemo session to go, even though it still wasn’t doing any good. I’d taken some painkillers this morning, but it felt like my body was getting used to them and now all I felt were the side effects and none of the benefits.

  “Jesus, Al, this place is killing my sinuses. Can you at least tell me what we’re looking for?”

  “I’ll know it when I see it,” I mumbled.

  “I still don’t get why we’re here.”

  “The list.”

  “Oh yeah, Al, that explains everything.”

  I smiled. We zigzagged up and down aisles of used goods, Harvey pushing the cart with me in it, my knees tucked into my chest. Row after row of crying children, appeasing parents, and none-too-happy employees in red vests.

  Again, we paused for a moment as Harvey sneezed into the crook of his elbow. Okay, so maybe the local Nifty-Thrifty was a little bit dusty.

  A woman twice as wide as our shopping cart stood in front of us, blocking our path. She wore a faded Nifty-Thrifty vest with Gwenda stitched onto the left breast pocket. Her pudgy hands made fists and pressed into the bulge that was supposed to be her waist. She eyed me in the cart, with Harvey at the helm. Two teenagers screwing around. She was not amused.

  But neither was I. “Beep-beep,” I said, my voice monotone.

  Gwenda didn’t budge.

  Harvey started to back up, pulling me with him.

  I looked over my shoulder. “Wait. What are you doing?” I pursed my lips and sighed through my nose. “We weren’t doing anything wrong!”

  He rolled his neck from side to side. “Alice, there wasn’t anything good down that aisle anyway.”

  I settled back against the metal grates. “You didn’t even know what I was looking for.” We continued to roll down the aisle of children’s clothing. In the bins above the racks were random pots and pans and toys. It was depressing. We turned another corner. “It’s like you’ve got to win everything,” he said, not letting it go. He was a little bit right; I did have to win everything because this was my last shot, and I wasn’t going down without the last word.

  “Even when there’s nothing to win,” he continued. “I mean, she works at the Nifty-Thrifty. I’m pretty sure she’s not winning. Not everything is about—”

  “Stop,” I said a little too quietly. Something had caught my attention.

  “You know, it’s okay to be nice sometimes. It won’t—”

  “Harvey, stop!”

  The cart stopped with a jolt, sliding me forward against the metal grates. I squatted on my haunches. “Push me closer,” I said.

  So he did.

  The aisle we were in now was lined with tall racks full of dresses. When I was within reach, I stood up right in the cart, my head bobbing above the racks—giving me a view of the entire store, including Gwenda.

  I sifted through the dresses methodically. Nothing was sized and most everything was of the plaid jumper variety.

  “So we’re looking for a dress,” Harvey concluded. “What do you need a dress for? You have plenty of dresses.”

  I continued to search, not bothering to reply.

  “You don’t even like to shop, Al.”

  “The list, I told you. It’s for the list.”

  The hangers scraped against the metal bars as I pushed aside dress after dress, waiting for the perfect one to reveal itself. Each dress was a story, a life. Funerals, birthdays, dates.

  Harvey kept his foot on the bar beneath the cart, to steady me. He reached his hand into the pool of fabric and pulled, coming up with something chiffon and delicate looking. He rubbed the material between his fingers. It was the perfect shade of pink. Ballet slipper p
ink, so light it was almost white. I raked aside dozens of dresses to reach it.

  “That one.”

  He dropped the fabric, like he was scared he might stain it.

  I pulled the dress to me. “Take me to the fitting rooms.”

  “Do people even try on clothes here?”

  I rolled my eyes and pointed to the ALL SALES FINAL sign hanging from the ceiling.

  The fitting room smelled like feet. I wouldn’t have even bothered trying it on, but the dress in question was twenty-three bucks, and the list was being funded by old birthday money, so I would need to spend wisely.

  I stripped out of my T-shirt but left my jeans on. The dress was comprised of layer upon layer of chiffon with thin straps and a neckline that dipped down in the front, making my bra visible. I would have to go bra-less, not that it mattered much anyway. My boobs weren’t very big to begin with. The fabric gathered beneath the bustline, flowing out around me. I felt ethereal in it, like this dress could change me.

  I reached around, trying to search for the zipper, but couldn’t quite grasp it. “Harvey, come in here.” Beneath the fitting-room door, I could see the wheels of the cart rolling back and then come to an abrupt halt.

  “You want me to go in there? With you?”

  “Yes, and hurry.”

  From beneath the door, his dirty sneakers shifted around outside. I slid back the bar lock to let him in.

  “Uh, okay. I’m coming in.” A smile tugged at my lips and I gave in to it, laughing to no one but myself.

  The door creaked open, and Harvey squeezed in, trying to be discreet. The room was barely big enough for one person to stand upright, never mind two.

  I turned so that Harvey stood at my back. “Zip me.”

  He pulled the zipper to the top without any hiccups, and then studied our reflection in the dirty mirror. “You look so pretty.” He said it simply. Not hot, not gorgeous. Pretty, I looked pretty.

  My chest swelled.

  “When are you going to wear it?” he asked.

  “Soon.”

  Harvey didn’t know the whole plan, not yet, and if my answer confused him, he didn’t say so. I think he was as lost in this moment as I was. I could have said, To the moon, Harvey. I’m wearing this dress to the moon. And his eyes would have stayed steady on me, unchanging.

  He could probably hear my heart beating against my ribs. All I could think was This hurts. This hurts so much worse than I thought it would. I knew Harvey would never hurt me, but he was crushing my heart because I was feeling these things for him that I didn’t want to name. This feeling that the world was so pleased to call love destroyed people every day, and it would do that to me too. It would disappoint and deceive and manipulate. But then, the part of me that was dying thought, What would it matter? If I wasn’t going to live long enough to have to worry about the aftermath of it all, what did it matter?

  I leaned back against him, still undecided but pushing my limits. He sighed, his breath brushing the bare skin of my back, and then dipped his head, practically pressing his lips against my shoulder. The sensation traveled down my spine, causing me to shiver.

  I watched our reflection, and wondered if this was really happening or if it was the mirror playing a trick on me. We hadn’t kissed since that night at Lake Quasipi, and I could almost talk myself into believing nothing had really happened. I closed my eyes, and I was falling, tripping into an abyss of unknown.

  A violent banging shocked my eyes open. I caught a glance of Harvey in the mirror, wide-eyed, like he had been woken from a hypnotic trance.

  The door shook.

  “Only one person per fitting room!” Gwenda called out.

  Harvey backed up what little the fitting room allowed. “I’ll be right out here if you need me.”

  “The zipper,” I breathed.

  “Oh, right. Yeah. Sorry.”

  He unzipped the dress and left in a hurry.

  I wondered if this moment felt the same for him.

  I stood, studying myself in the mirror, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. The straps of the dress began to slip down my shoulders and across the smattering of small red spots accumulating there, little broken blood vessels—a reminder of my leukemia. I blinked, trying to wash away my feelings, but it didn’t work—it would never work. Then, through the fitting-room door, I called, “Harvey, we’ve got some serious planning to do.”

  Harvey.

  Then

  “Are you sure I can be here?” I asked, my eyes scanning the treatment clinic. It wasn’t very full, and no one had said anything to me when I sat down next to Alice with an IV in her arm, but it still felt like some hushed private place where visitors shouldn’t be allowed.

  She leaned her head back against the recliner. “Yeah. Nobody cares.”

  I watched an old bald guy covered in age spots come in by himself with nothing but the daily sports section in his hand. A lady, about the same age as our moms, sat down across from Alice as a nurse rolled over a tray full of utensils.

  “Does this place weird you out?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” Death was everywhere. So much so that I wondered if just her being here made her more dead than alive. More one of them than one of us.

  “Me too. It smells weird. Like, too clean.”

  I laughed. “Would you rather it didn’t?”

  She tilted her head back again and shrugged.

  A few minutes passed, and I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep until she said, “There’s a notebook and a pen in my bag. We need to make a to-do list, but first grab me one of those blankets at the front.”

  Alice had brought her own blanket from home, but I’d heard chemo made you really cold. I went for a second one up at the front where they had water coolers and blanket warmers full of blue hospital blankets. In Alice’s bag, I found the notebook and pen.

  “Okay,” she said, with her eyes still shut and the second blanket spread out across her lap. Maybe it was the fluorescent lights, but her skin was too yellow, her eyes more sunken in than I remembered. “We got Luke, but we’re not done. Celeste is going down.”

  “Seriously, Al? Don’t you want to do something good, like, I don’t know, hold a canned food drive?”

  She smiled and the irony of it against her sallow skin made my chest hurt.

  “Fine,” I said. Of course Alice would want to have the final word with Celeste.

  “Write this down,” she said. “We need a DVD of Oklahoma! the musical, and we have to find a recipe for fake blood.”

  “What?”

  A nurse hushed me from across the room.

  “What?” I whispered.

  “Hear me out, okay?”

  I huffed.

  “Okay, so Celeste is the lead in Oklahoma! and their last showing is a few days after this round is over. But I need someone to videotape a dress rehearsal for the ballet scene at the end of the second act. Write that down too.”

  None of this could mean anything good.

  “We also need a third person who isn’t afraid of heights.”

  “For what exactly?”

  “To sit in the rafters.”

  “You’re not kidding?” I laughed because all this was so damn absurd. Only Alice would plot someone’s social demise while undergoing chemotherapy.

  “Of course not. Do you know anyone on the inside? I don’t want to get Tyson involved. I need, like, a tech person. Someone who can get us in and out of the backstage area.”

  Rubbing my eyes, I took an inventory of everyone I knew well enough to ask for help who also had a hand in the school musical. “I don’t know anyone,” I said. “But I know someone who might.”

  Her eyes opened again. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Call them.”

  I stepped into the hallway with my phone to my ear. “Hey,” I said. “You got a minute?”

  “I’m eating leftover onion rings and trying to hack the new parental controls on our TV. I think my m
om figured out about the after-hours soft-core porn on the movie channels,” said Dennis.

  “Sounds really intense over there.”

  The TV cut off in the background. “Yeah, well, you dumped me today for everyone’s favorite cancer patient.”

  “This is true,” I said. “Hey, you know any guys in the theater department?”

  So here’s the thing: popular people may have status, but the rest of us have power in numbers and, because of that, we have resources. Dennis especially. I guess you could call it, like, the nerd mafia, but Dennis knows someone everywhere—water boys, teacher’s aides, theater tech gurus.

  “A few,” he said. “Why?”

  “It’s for Alice.”

  “Of course it is.” I could picture his smug smile. “You’re my best friend, which means I’m obligated to tell you that she’s using you.”

  “No shit.” I didn’t know what was worse: the fact that everyone could see that she was using me or that I could so readily admit it. “They need to be trustworthy.”

  “I know a guy,” he said. “But I’m going to need details.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t have those yet.”

  He laughed.

  “Whatever. I’ll call you later.” I went to hang up but pulled the phone back to my ear. “Hey, wait. You still there?”

  “Here,” said Dennis.

  “How do you feel about heights?”

  “I’m in.”

  When I walked back into the treatment room, Alice really was asleep. I watched her for a few minutes, thinking about what Dennis had said. She was using me, and I should have been pissed about it, but didn’t I know that from the very beginning? Honestly, though, she could use me for the rest of her life if these were the last days I’d spend with her. I wish I had the resolve to say no, but I couldn’t. Not if saying no meant saying good-bye.

  At the end of Alice’s session, a girl about our age came in with her mom. The girl’s hair was shoulder length and thick. Most everyone in the room watched her in flickering glances as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and her mother squeezed her shoulder. I turned to see Alice with the nurse at her side applying a bandage over the spot where her IV had been. She sat with her mouth open, watching the girl, living in a world I didn’t know how to be a part of.