Side Effects May Vary

  “I guess you didn’t hear,” she said after a moment.

  Still on my stomach, I studied myself in the mirror, panting, tired from a simple exercise.

  “Luke and I broke up.”

  Took long enough. “Who did the breaking?”

  A few seconds passed before she said, “He did, actually. Said he didn’t want to start college with a girlfriend.”

  Or maybe he didn’t want a girlfriend in general. “He probably would have cheated on you anyway. If he hadn’t already.”

  “I guess you would know from experience.” Each word felt like it was meant to sting, but only fell short one right after the other. She inspected her manicure and ran a fingertip along the edge of each of her nails. “You know,” she said, her voice quiet, “I have some ideas for Luke. In case maybe you’re interested.”

  I sat up, still watching her in the mirror. She was right. Together, we could destroy Luke. And she didn’t even know about the picture of him stowed away in my room. But the idea of revenge no longer gave me the satisfaction it once had. In a way, part of me felt strangely empty, but it was a good kind of empty. Spring-cleaning empty. The kind that left room for better things.

  I would never like Celeste, but I could see now that we were only the result of my own making. I didn’t care anymore about who’d started what. I only cared that I was the one to say no more. I could make this second chance at life whatever I wanted it to be, and I didn’t want to waste any more time on Luke, Celeste, or Mindi. Shaking my head, I said, “Thanks for the offer, but I’m out on all the games.”

  “Huh.” She studied me for another long moment. “Surprising.” Then she turned and walked away.

  For me to have surprised someone—especially Celeste, who always expected the absolute worst of me—meant that I was doing something right.

  I slid on my worn ballet flats and moved to the barre to start on the basics. I swooped down low, reaching to the floor, and then stood upright, my muscles beginning to warm with each movement. I concentrated on my breathing, counting through each motion.

  “Shoulders back. Posture’s all off.”

  Natalie walked up behind me and placed one hand on my back, the other on my stomach, and pressed in. Beneath her touch my entire body fell into place, my core aligning. “There.”

  I nodded.

  She sat on the floor with the soles of her feet touching and her legs in a butterfly stretch. She pushed down on her knees and sat up alarmingly straight. Besides asking her for the studio space, we hadn’t spoken since spring break. Natalie had never held anything against me—not even when I quit ballet—but I’d crossed a line, and I didn’t know if she could just let it go this time.

  “What prompted this?” she asked.

  “Excuse me?” I asked, my feet in fourth position and my arm extended in front of me.

  “Lift your arm a little, parallel with the center of your breastbone,” she said pointedly. “Why are you here?”

  “Dr. Meredith said I should be staying active.” I’d had an appointment with him the Tuesday after spring break, and he said my body would adjust quicker if I was somehow more active. My dad nagged me for a few days before I called Natalie about some studio time.

  “This studio space is available from seven thirty to nine o’clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays.” She stood from her spot on the floor in one graceful movement. “I’m closing up soon after nine. I’ll give you a ride home then.”

  “Okay.” It sounded more like a question.

  She left, and I continued working through each position over and over again. The empty room left me nothing but my thoughts, and those always seemed to drift toward Harvey. I had walked out onto the deck of the beach house fully prepared to tell him that I loved him. But when the time came, the words stuck to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter. It was the last piece that I didn’t know how to let go of. All I could think of was all the ways that love had failed. Standing in front of a mirror, in my room by myself, I could say it. I could say I loved Harvey. But when it was to him, the words sat trapped inside of me because we were in high school and we wouldn’t last, and because nothing—not even my parents—ever seemed to last, and because when someone loved you, you had power over them, and because love made people do really dumb shit. And that was why I couldn’t say it.

  The few times I’d seen Harvey since spring break had been at school and he avoided me every time. I’d walked past him in the halls a few times, my hand lifting involuntarily, about to wave, before remembering he had no reason to wave back. Dennis and Debora were always there with him too. And of the three of them, Debora was the only one who ever acknowledged me with a wave or a nod, like we shared some kind of secret. And the weird thing was that we sort of did. She and Harvey had stopped holding hands. I didn’t want to take pleasure in that, but I did. I so did.

  Since both Harvey and Eric were noticeably absent from my life, I spent most of my time at home. My mom didn’t really talk to me, only my dad. When we got home from our trip, I went straight to my room and only left it for food until I went back to school the next morning. Almost all communication had gone through my dad since the pan-meets-glass incident.

  After my mom got home from work that first Monday night after spring break, she came into my room without knocking and said, “I’m angry. And I don’t think we should talk while either one of us still feels this way, but your father and I worked out our issues after you were diagnosed. I just needed you to know. And that little fit you threw was way out of line.” She stopped and took a deep breath, reining herself in. “As soon as you’re well enough to get a part-time job, you’ll be paying us back for that glass door. That’s all I’m going to say for now.”

  Beyond a few yeses and noes, we hadn’t spoken since then.

  At the end of my studio time, I felt like cooked spaghetti—completely limp. It didn’t hurt so much while I was moving, but the minute my body had time to catch up, my muscles were sorely displeased. As promised, Natalie drove me home.

  “School’s done in six weeks,” she said as we pulled out of the parking lot.

  “Yeah. Six weeks too long.”

  “Your mom said you’ll be doing more treatments over the summer.”

  I nodded, twisting the strap of my dance bag in my hands.

  “Maybe you’ll want to work for me part-time when all that’s over.” Her voice was quiet, but not at all tentative.

  “That would be good,” I said. I’d always said that I’d rather not dance than have to teach. Especially in a small-town studio like Natalie’s where most people only signed their kids up for the tutus and not the ballet, but being inside a studio had made me feel a little more like the me I wanted to be.

  When we pulled into my driveway, she put the car in park and said, “When you’re ready to go back on pointe, there’s a rosin box in the far corner of that studio you were in tonight.”

  I nodded. “I remember.” I loved rosin boxes. The way they smelled. The way the powder from the rosin crystals left a trail behind me, giving my toes traction on the slippery wood floor.

  We said good night and she waited for my dad to answer the door before reversing out into the street.

  Alice.

  Now

  I watched the clock as the minute hand fell on the two. Four thirty-two.

  My mom would be home by five. She rarely used her home office except to store important papers. My dad had left for the grocery store forty-five minutes before, and I’d already been hunting through files for the past half hour. Nothing had pointed me in the right direction.

  The silence between me and my mom was going on three weeks.

  Since I’d sworn off the scheming and manipulating, life had been quiet and lonely. And not at all rewarding. So now I was scheming in a new way. Scheming for redemption. And this scheme required a great deal of snooping, which I’d been doing for the last week.

  The front door creaked open. I whirled around and fell into my mom’s c
hair, in front of her computer. My mom shuffled through the mail, with her phone cradled in the bend of her shoulder. “What?” She sighed. “No, we’re going to have to file an appeal.” She looked up and saw me there at her desk.

  “Paper due tomorrow,” I lied. “My laptop was moving slow.”

  She nodded. “I’ll have your dad take a look.” She turned and left me with the sound of her bedroom door opening and closing. I went upstairs to get ready for ballet.

  Natalie was sick. She never got sick. Even her immune system knew better than to fail her.

  Simone, the jazz teacher, had subbed all of her evening classes, and because Natalie was not here and it was a Thursday night, I had no ride home.

  I called home and left a message on the voice mail. Now it was just a toss-up between who would pick me up. My bet was on Dad, seeing as my mom had relegated everything involving me to him. She was still pissed about the whole iron-skillet thing.

  At two minutes to nine my mom’s car pulled into the parking lot.

  I sat down in the passenger seat and pulled the seat belt across my chest. It was completely quiet—no radio, just the low hum of the engine. She sat there with her arms crossed and her lips pressed together in a straight line.

  I knew that eventually one of us would have to crack and break this silence, but I never expected it to be me. “Mom?”

  She put the car in park and took her foot off the brake, then rolled down her window. “Your dad asked me to pick you up.”

  “Oh. Was he not home?”

  “Oh, no. Your father was home.”

  More silence.

  Her eyes seemed to be focused on the rain-slick pavement in front of us. “He said that we need to talk.”

  I wasn’t surprised to learn that my dad had finally lost his patience. “So, what now?”

  She shrugged.

  Her indifference pushed me from annoyed to infuriated. “Fine, Mom. Let’s pretend. Let’s pretend that I didn’t see you with some man and that this friction between us is nothing but a little mother-daughter tension. Is that what you want? If this remission is the real deal, then it’ll only be one more year and then I’ll be off at school or wherever. We can pretend for one year, right? And then you can leave him and everything will be broken, but at least we’ll have been honest. Because that’s what counts.”

  Then she did something I rarely saw my mother do. She cried. Laying her head against the steering wheel, her whole body curved into a hunch.

  No matter how angry I was with my mother, I didn’t know how to watch her cry. So I said what people always say when someone cries. “It’s okay, Mom.”

  “It didn’t last for long,” she said through her tears. “He was an old law school professor. I told your dad about it right after you were diagnosed.” My diagnosis. It would always be a landmark in our lives. There would always be before and after. “I wanted to be honest with you, Alice. But then you got sick. I couldn’t do that to you. I couldn’t tell you that truth and expect you to deal with my lies on top of everything else.”

  “He knew? This whole time Dad knew?”

  She nodded.

  Maybe I should have been mad, but I was relieved to know that my dad already knew and it wasn’t because he had heard it from me. Still, that day had been this domino in my life, and she wanted to brush it aside because for her it had been over this whole time. Finished business. But I’d lived with this and carried it like my own secret. I wondered what life would have looked like if I’d stayed at school that day or if my mom had left five minutes earlier. “Why?” I asked. “Why’d you do it?”

  “Getting old is a bitch.” She laughed a little. “Life starts happening, and you begin to realize that every decision in your life only eats away at the control you have over everything else until there’s nothing left. You get married; decision made. That chapter of your life is closed. Kids, college, jobs. It’s easy to let all those decisions take away the unpredictability and excitement even when they don’t. Choosing to—” She paused. “Choosing to be with someone else gave me some of the control back.” Her tears splattered down her face. “And then you got sick, and I realized life was going to do whatever the hell it wanted and the control we think we have is a facade.” She paused again. “In the last year, life stopped being about what and started being about how. I’m proud of my choices—you, your dad, the law—and now I want to be proud of how I live those choices.” She took a second to catch her breath. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry. I’m not going anywhere. I love your dad. And I love you,” she said, wiping her face even though there were no more tears. “I want to work on us.”

  “I don’t know how to talk about this,” I said. And it was true. “But I don’t think either of us is in the habit of talking about our feelings.” Telling Harvey how I felt that morning hadn’t been easy, but I did it. With my mom, this felt different. I didn’t know how to tell her that I understood. That when it came to me making commitments, I felt cornered too.

  “I’m going to make an effort to change that, Al.”

  What really bothered me about our argument at the beach house was that as soon as I had my mom’s undivided attention, I ended up saying all the wrong things. Maybe this would be my opportunity to say the right ones. “Mom, I’m sorry too. I’m sorry for what happened at the beach house.” I sucked in a breath. “And for everything before that. I’ve been so shitty to all you guys for a while now. I’m sorry.” I didn’t think I could live like this with my mom anymore. I couldn’t see us changing; we were both so stubborn. But we had to try because living without each other sounded pretty miserable too.

  We sat in the parking lot and talked for a long time. It wasn’t easy at all. It was strained and uneven. But it was a start. A beginning.

  When we got back home, my dad was waiting for us on the front porch. “All better?”

  “We’re on our way there,” said my mom.

  My dad turned to me and hugged me, really hugged me. “I love you, Alice Elizabeth,” he whispered. Over his shoulder, I saw my mom, her lips curved into a faint smile.

  The sweetness of it all made my teeth hurt, but it was true.

  Harvey.

  Now

  Finals had wrapped last week. It was officially summer. I didn’t make As or anything, but I’d passed eleventh grade, so I called it an academic success.

  Miss P’s yearly recital was in a week, and now that school was out, my mom asked me to come in and play for the classes whenever I had time so the students could practice with a live accompaniment. When I got off work at five, I drove straight to my mom’s studio.

  By the time I arrived, the intermediate class was almost through their warm-up. I had a few minutes so I waved to my mom, pointed to the bathroom, and jogged down the hallway.

  All the other classrooms were dark except for a small echo of light coming from the last studio. Passing the bathroom door, I walked to the end of the hallway. A piece from The Sleeping Beauty played loud enough for me to hear when I stood close. It was one of my mom’s favorite ballets.

  Alice sat on the floor next to the rosin box in a black long-sleeve leotard with a low scooping back and light pink tights. Using white cloth tape, she taped her toes quickly, like the routine of it had come back to her without any trouble. My mom had told me about this. That Alice was dancing again. I tried to feel indifferent about that.

  After sliding her feet into her shoes and tying her ribbons—Alice never did use any toe cushions—she stood and tapped the box of her shoe in the rosin box, dust flying up around her.

  Without waiting for a break in the music, Alice began to dance, like she was trying to pick up where she’d left off. Every joint in her body all the way down to her fingers communicated back and forth, her movements falling into a rhythm. But this time when she danced, I didn’t have that same feeling as when we were younger. That feeling that said she was too good for me and that I would never speak her language. I’d always known Alice, but in the last year a
nd a half I’d seen every piece of her under a magnifying glass. Her flaws, her strengths, her vulnerabilities. She spun, spotting herself in the mirror, as she kicked her leg out and gained momentum with each turn. I loved her because I didn’t know how to stop, but she wasn’t on this pedestal anymore.

  And then she fell, her legs slipping out from beneath her.

  When I finished playing for my mom’s class, I found Alice sitting on the floor of the lobby with her legs stretched out and piles of papers in front of her.

  I turned my back to her and tried walking past her without being noticed.

  “Hey.” Her voice was soft, but I knew she was talking to me.

  Only a few feet from the door, I turned. “Oh. Hi.” It was one thing to see her, but to have to talk to her and pretend like all that I felt for her had disappeared wasn’t something I was capable of.

  She pulled all her papers into one big stack. “I’m waiting for your mom to finish so she can take me home.”

  I nodded, taking a step toward the door.

  “Unless you can drop me off?”

  It would have been easy to say yes, but I couldn’t go back now. I shook my head. “I’m supposed to go to Dennis’s,” I lied.

  “Oh, okay.” Her lips curled into a sad smile. “Have a good night.”

  I walked out before she could say another word. I didn’t know if my will could take it.

  Harvey.

  Now

  Except for a few slips and falls, my mom’s yearly recital was a success. I dropped the last box of props into the back of my car and let out a sigh. I’d had to wear a suit that was two years too small, and my ass hurt from spending my entire Sunday afternoon on a piano bench. Alice had been backstage the whole time, helping the younger classes get lined up while I was in the orchestra pit by myself.

  Checking my pockets to make sure I had my keys, I reached up and slammed the hatchback door shut.

  “This is for you.”

  I turned to find Alice standing in front of me, holding out a stack of folded-up pieces of paper wrapped in twine. She wore a black leotard with a little black dance skirt—the kind you could see through—and black tights.