Side Effects May Vary

  I looked over my shoulder to see Tyson—one of the few openly gay students at our school—rushing off in the other direction. I rolled my eyes. “You’re such an ass.”

  Luke slammed his hand against the locker, catching my eye for a second before glancing over my shoulder once more. “Is it some other guy?”

  I wanted to scream at him and tell him of course there weren’t any other guys, but all I could think of was Celeste saying Rough stuff. The cheating hurt, but him telling Celeste about my mom was unforgiveable. “Oh, Luke,” I said, “there are plenty of other guys.”

  I turned around and walked down the hallway with the eyes of the entire school on me. Without turning back, I lifted my hand and gave a little wave. Good-bye, Luke.

  Harvey.

  Then

  The roads were a little slick, but they were nothing I couldn’t handle. I’d always been a good driver. My mom had hated driving for as long as I could remember. I don’t think she ever had to do a lot of driving until she had me.

  Mom flipped the radio over to some easy-rock station and leaned back into the passenger seat, closing her eyes. Not normal behavior for a mother while her fifteen-year-old son sat behind the wheel of the family car.

  Every night after we closed down the studio, I would say, “Hey, Mom, I’ll drive home tonight.”

  “Ha-ha, Harvey. Get in,” she would reply.

  But one night when I was fourteen years old and about halfway through eighth grade, she tossed me the keys and said, “Back roads only. Don’t forget, gas is right; brake is left.”

  This became our nightly ritual four days a week. Before then, my mom had let me skid around parking lots, but this was the first time I was ever allowed to drive on real streets.

  Every night after that, her body seemed to melt into the passenger seat. Once I had a solid handle on the drive to and from the studio, she got in the habit of tilting her head up and closing her eyes the whole way home. Sometimes she was sleeping, other times just relaxing. I think my mom had been waiting a long time for me to be old enough to drive because by driving us home every night, I was fulfilling one of her needs. It wasn’t the first time I had felt like that. We’d had this partnership. It was hard not to share responsibilities when it was only the two of us. She didn’t talk much about her life before me. It’s weird to think that your parents had this whole world and you had nothing to do with it.

  When I was four years old, my mom decided it was time for me to learn her craft. This was fine with me; it was. I wasn’t like most boys. I had grown up with ballet and even my four-year-old self knew that both boys and girls could be dancers. The problem being: I was horrible at ballet.

  Sure, every four-year-old is horrible at ballet, but I was exceptionally tragic. I begged my mom to let me quit. I never took an issue with ballet; it was the me-being-horrible-at-it part that made it unbearable.

  A few weeks after my fifth birthday, my mother took me to Mrs. Ferguson’s house for my first piano lesson. It wasn’t love at first sight, but it wasn’t as gruesome as ballet had been. By the time I was eight years old, I was playing piano for a few of the intermediate classes, and most of my after-school time on Tuesdays and Thursdays was spent at Mrs. Ferguson’s house. At the age of twelve, my lessons were limited to Sunday mornings, and I spent Monday through Thursday playing the piano for most of my mother’s classes. She had always loathed the bulky black stereos usually found in the corners of dance studios, but hiring a pianist would slice right through her budget. My playing the piano for her was sort of like that night when I was fourteen years old and she tossed me the keys. She was waiting for me to be ready.

  With just the two of us, we had no other option except to be resourceful, but sometimes I wondered what it would be like to go home after school and watch TV or play video games with Dennis.

  “Can I talk to you, Mom?” I asked as we rolled out of the parking lot and toward home. With my driving test coming up in one month at the end of October, I was careful to use my blinkers and look both ways.

  “Harvey, you don’t have to ask me if we can talk.” She paused. “Of course we can.”

  “I’m thinking that maybe when I turn sixteen, I’m going to get an after-school job. I could pay for my car insurance and gas, you know?” I tried my best to sound casual, like it didn’t matter either way. But it did matter. Big-time.

  “Harvey, you don’t really have time for that. I appreciate you wanting to help out, but it’s not necessary. We’re doing okay. What about piano?” The minute the question left her mouth, she seemed to have answered it herself. “Oh.”

  We drove in silence for several minutes before either of us uttered a word.

  “I don’t really enjoy it, Mom.” I idled at a stoplight, waiting for it to turn green.

  “And you’ve always felt this way?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I want a break.” The older I got, the more aware I became of time and how I was wasting mine. I didn’t want to fill my time with a new hobby—at least not right away. I wanted to fill my time with something that fifteen-year-old Harvey chose to do, not something five-year-old Harvey did because his mother told him to.

  I was a pretty decent pianist. I had these long, slender fingers, perfect for playing, and it came naturally to me, but I wasn’t a prodigy or anything. If you’re going to dedicate your life to something like music, it had to be an all-consuming thing. It had to be the reason your body got out of bed every morning. Maybe it would have been different if I had stumbled upon piano on my own; I didn’t know.

  I knew this would be hard for her to accept. Mom had always known she would be a ballerina. I wondered if this whole thing would be easier for her if I said I was quitting piano in favor of theater or art or something like that. Maybe she just wanted a talented son, but my talent for the arts was mediocre. Maybe I wanted the chance to find the thing I loved, like she had with ballet. And, yeah, I didn’t want to be that guy in high school who hung out at the ballet studio every day after school.

  My mom thought for a moment, then said, “You’ll get a job when you turn sixteen and have passed the state driving exam. Until then you’ll continue playing the piano for classes. I’ll cancel your lessons with Mrs. Ferguson.”

  I was a little shocked that she had agreed to this so easily. “Thanks, Mom.”

  “I’m not your captor, Harvey. We’re not a traveling circus. If you’re not happy with the piano, then there’s no point in you doing it.” I pulled into the parking lot of our apartment complex and she added quietly, “But it would really mean a lot if you continued to help out at recitals.”

  I placed my hand on her knee. “Yeah, Mom. I can do that. No problem.”

  She was sad, I could tell.

  Piano had always tied me to her, almost in the same way ballet tied my mom to Alice. When Alice quit ballet the summer before freshman year, my mom was heartbroken. Dancers had this secret language that you couldn’t understand unless you were a dancer too. But playing the piano for my mom and Alice let me in on their secret, if only for a moment. The two of them were alike in so many ways. When I played piano for them it felt like I was in on it. Like, for a few minutes, I could be a part of this world that was outside of mine. In that world, though, where I was only a guest, I was their accompaniment. And I was tired of being everyone’s damn accessory.

  It tied me to my dad too. I couldn’t picture what he looked like, but I could picture his fingers—close-trimmed nails, with knobby knuckles, dry with use—and I thought if all I got out of piano was having it in common with my dad, then it was worth it. But he’d left us, so I shouldn’t have to stay for him.

  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 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. 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, “Har-vey.”

  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 at lunch, 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 when 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 w
restling 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.

  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 push 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 sides.