Side Effects May Vary

  After having been out of school for months, I started my first day back with Luke in first period. Since he was a senior, we shouldn’t have shared any classes, but he’d always been horrible with dates and names, so I wasn’t surprised to find him in my eleventh-grade history class. I sat in the only seat available, which was about midway to the back of the room. When our teacher, Mrs. Morrison, told us to break into groups for a project, I excused myself to avoid the risk of ending up in a group with Luke. I needed some serious air anyway. In the hallway, I dug around in my pocket for the tiny slip of paper with my locker number and combo.

  After some trial and error, my locker sprang open, and I realized I didn’t have anything to put inside of it. All I had brought with me to school was a single pencil. I laid my pencil down in the locker and spun it between my two fingers. College. It’d been gnawing at me since last night. College could take me away. Far, far away. But college meant making plans. And plans meant hoping for something. Unless medical science had been magically revolutionized and remission was now synonymous with cured, I was wary of plans and all the goddamn hopes that came with them. I sighed, tucking my pencil back behind my ear, and slammed the locker door shut.

  “Never thought I’d see you again,” said a voice.

  I turned around to see Luke.

  “Get the hell away from me,” I said coolly, even though I was fully aware of how alone I was, here in this hallway with Luke. I’d never been conscious of things like that, but I’d never had good reason to be.

  He laid his hand on my shoulder. “Hey, now, Alice, I’m just the beginning of the welcome wagon.” I slapped his hand away.

  He stepped back. “You’ll be seeing me around. I haven’t forgotten,” he said, “and I don’t think Celeste has either.”

  This was Luke’s senior year, so if I could survive until May, I’d be fine. If the cancer didn’t come back, I’d be here next year with Celeste and I could handle her. I wondered if Celeste got her wish and finally got to do Luke. Luke didn’t really have standards anyway.

  Of Celeste and Mindi, only Mindi was in any of the classes I’d attended. I saw Celeste for a brief moment, though, sneering at me from the doorway of my classroom. The scene with Margaret Schmidt had been the same version of scenes in my first- and second-period classes. The questions, the few well-wishes—authentic and not. It all made me feel like someone else, someone I’d never wanted to be, someone fragile and lonely, who went home to scrawl all her feelings in her fucking journal.

  After second-period algebra with Mindi and Harvey, my school day was o-v-e-r. Well, not technically. I skipped out on the rest of the day, including my little meeting with Mr. Slaton.

  On my way to anywhere that wasn’t class, I stopped by the bathroom. As I washed my hands, the door swung open.

  “I thought that was you.”

  From the mirror, I watched Celeste. She stood with her arms crossed and her little designer wristlet dangling from her wrist.

  “You know, I’d already bought a dress in case you didn’t make it. I mean, it was such a steal, and who doesn’t need one more little black dress?”

  “You’re sick.”

  “I wore it for New Year’s instead. Luke took me to Three Forks off I-9.”

  I laughed. “Oh, so that little charade is still going? Do you guys like to do it with the lights on? We never got that far, but I always wondered.”

  She didn’t answer my question, but her lip twitched for a second, making me think that Celeste’s dreamboat might not be such a dream after all. I blinked and her vicious smile was back. “How’s your mom doing?”

  I turned around and crossed my arms, mirroring her, as I leaned up against the sink. I wanted to say something equally low, like how it must be really nice for Luke to be dating someone his own size. But I didn’t and it was Harvey’s fault. He was the closest thing I had to a damn conscience. “What do you want, Celeste?”

  “All I want is for you to feel welcome. It’s cute how people are so excited to have you back.” She took two steps closer to me. “They don’t know what I know. The cancer might be gone, but the bitch isn’t.”

  I’d met Eric under the bleachers in the gym after my run-in with Celeste. I’d never seen him before. He looked as though he hadn’t been to class in weeks, if not months. A few copies of SPIN magazine sat piled up beside him, like he’d set up a little home there. He was playing a game of solitaire and chewing on sunflower seeds, spitting the shells on the floor for the janitors to clean up.

  When I saw him there, I almost told him to leave because I intended to stay there until May. But before I did, he sprang up from his spot on the floor. He wore jeans tucked into combat boots and a black T-shirt. He looked older than most students, and I wondered if he was even a student at all. On the floor next to his pile of magazines were an olive green army jacket and a bright red scarf.

  “Hey,” he said after looking me over, like he was trying to figure out if I posed a threat. He must have decided he was more interested than threatened because then he spread his arms out, displaying his little area. “Looking for a place to hide?”

  “Yeah, I really am.” I pulled my red knit beret off my sparsely haired scalp as a warning: damaged goods approaching.

  He didn’t flinch. I liked that.

  After I sat down, I expected him to ask me about my wisps of hair, but he just offered a handful of sunflower seeds.

  “I like to suck the salt off of them and that’s it. They’d be a waste on me,” I said.

  He was unperturbed. “So suck the salt off and give them to me. I just care about the seeds.”

  Normally, this would gross me out, but I had a feeling we’d be sharing germs before long anyway. Eric rolled over on his stomach, holding his face up by his knuckles, like a little boy watching Saturday-morning cartoons.

  “First day of school?” he asked.

  I thought for a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, it is. You?”

  “Nah. Started two weeks ago.”

  And for the first time ever, I was the new kid. I didn’t ask any more questions and neither did he because I don’t think either of us was all that interested in answers.

  We hung out for the rest of the day, under the bleachers. At lunchtime he treated me to a vending-machine buffet. My beret stayed on the floor all day, and when I shivered, he tossed me his jacket, which was big enough to use as a blanket. Without asking to, he put on my bright red beret, like we were even, and we continued our game of Go Fish. By the end of the day, Eric must have thought we were at the point in our relationship where we would trade “Daddy doesn’t love me” stories, because he asked me out of the blue, “Who are you hiding from, little girl?”

  “The boogeyman. Go fish.”

  Alice.

  Then

  After Christmas, I started school a week later than everyone else because of my second round of chemo. It felt pointless to keep going, but my parents didn’t seem to think so. Besides teachers and administration, no one had known I was sick. But when I came back to school without a head of hair, my health was no longer a private matter. There were whispers and questions, which at first I’d ignored, but then I figured the fastest way to stop the whispers was to answer the questions.

  Within a week, I was Hughley High’s poster child for cancer. People offering to stand in line for me at lunch or carry my bag to and from classes became a regular occurrence. I usually declined, unless it was Harvey doing the offering.

  I didn’t know how to explain it, and only the doctors seemed to understand, but my body always ached, and for the pain I was prescribed Tramadol. I wasn’t allowed to carry it on school grounds, so Miss Shelly, the school nurse, always held my stash for me and let me hang out in her office for as long as it took to shake off the dizziness brought on by the meds.

  Today, I skipped out on English lit in favor of the nurse’s office because I couldn’t take the echoing sting my body felt every time I moved. Miss Shelly doled out my meds and set me up
on the cot farthest from the door with the curtain pulled shut in front of me.

  “Do you need anything else for now?” asked Miss Shelly.

  I shook my head, my eyes closed.

  “There’s a cup of water and some crackers on the counter if you need them.” The curtain rings scraped against the metal rod. “I’m going to run down to the teachers’ lounge for lunch and a slice of Mr. Welston’s birthday cake. I won’t be long.”

  My brain told my head to nod, but I didn’t feel the motion of it. Drifting, my mind went places I wished my body could follow.

  “Hurry, come on,” said a voice, interrupting my pharmaceutically induced sleep. “She just went to the teachers’ lounge.”

  “I don’t want to do it,” said another voice. “I don’t want to know.”

  “Oh,” said the first voice, “and you’d rather wait and find out when your clothes don’t fit in six months and you can’t see your freaking toes?”

  From the other side of the curtain I heard a whimper.

  “Come on,” said the first voice again. “You’re probably not even pregnant.”

  My eyes flew open, my mind suddenly registering that this wasn’t a dream.

  “Okay.” It was the second voice. “But you’ll keep an eye out, right?” The voice was panicked, but familiar.

  “Mindi, yes. Of course I will.” Mindi. It was Celeste and Mindi. I held my breath, trying my best not to make a sound. Holy shit. Mindi might be pregnant. Quietly, I let my chest fall.

  “You’re the one who didn’t want to take the test in one of the main bathrooms.”

  “I can’t pee in public bathrooms like that,” said Mindi. “I have a shy bladder. You know that.”

  I heard a zipper and papers rustling. “Here.”

  “Do I just pee on it?” asked Mindi.

  “I think you can use a cup if you want.” A cabinet door creaked open. I closed my eyes and could practically see them standing right there outside Miss Shelly’s bathroom, next to the cabinets full of supplies. “Pee in this if you want.”

  “How much was the test?”

  “I didn’t pay for it,” said Celeste.

  “You stole it?”

  “Uh, yeah, I did. I wasn’t about to be seen buying that thing. Hurry up.”

  The door to the bathroom closed and opened again a few minutes later.

  “I used the cup,” said Mindi.

  “Now we let it sit for ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes? Are you serious? I can video chat someone in Russia in real time, and it takes ten minutes for a stick to tell me if I’m pregnant?”

  “Like five minutes ago you didn’t even want to know,” said Celeste. “Come on. Sit down.”

  Mindi sighed as one of Miss Shelly’s stools creaked, and they sat in silence for a few minutes.

  I hadn’t pegged Celeste as the type to risk stealing a pregnancy test for a friend in need. I never really had a girl friend like that, though. Growing up, I was always sort of friendly with Celeste because we went to school together and spent so much time together in dance class, but as we got older, the competitive tension between us swelled. A month before freshman year and a few weeks before quitting ballet, Mindi invited all the girls from dance class to a slumber party for her birthday. After her parents had gone to bed, we piled up on the couch with liters of soda and bags of jawbreakers. We flipped through channels until we found Carrie. For the most part, we laughed and made fun of the clothes, until the prom scene at the end where those skanks drop the pig’s blood on Carrie. We watched, our jaws slack, as the high school gym went up in flames and Carrie turned everyone else’s joke into their nightmare.

  After the movie, I found Celeste in the kitchen, tears spilling down her cheeks as she held her phone to her ear. When I asked her who she was calling, she told me she was asking her mom to pick her up. The movie had freaked her out and she wanted to go home. I told her that if she left, none of the girls would ever let her live it down. After a few seconds, she nodded and hung up the phone. And that was it.

  I was the first to fall asleep. And when I woke up the next morning, I was covered in shaving cream and permanent marker. Celeste had been the ringleader. I guess she was ashamed of how I’d found her in the kitchen. It took me hours to rinse off the permanent marker so that my parents wouldn’t see what had happened. That day changed everything for me. I would never make the mistake of trusting Celeste again.

  It had been at least three minutes before Mindi began to cry. “How am I supposed to tell Drew? And what about my mom?”

  “Hey,” said Celeste, her voice dropping an octave, and I had to strain to hear. “It’s going to be fine. You’re on the pill. You’re probably just late, and it’s not like your parents will make you keep it anyway. Drew’s nowhere near ready to have a baby. He goes to a freaking community college.”

  “It’s just . . .” Mindi paused, and when she spoke again her voice shook. “I really liked him, and now . . .” She paused. “I’m going to get huge. And I’ll have stretch marks and my boobs will get gross. And he won’t stay with me. I wouldn’t want to stay with me. And I’ll have to do, like, night college—”

  “Okay, stop. No more crying. In four minutes you’re going to feel so ridiculous when you find out you’re not pregnant.”

  Mindi laughed a little.

  “You’re totally wrecking your pretty makeup,” said Celeste.

  It was so weird to hear Celeste like that, being a friend.

  Mindi took a few deep breaths. “Okay, I’m good. I’m good. I didn’t even ask you—how did you feel about the Oklahoma! auditions?”

  The school musical. Of course Celeste had auditioned.

  “I’ve totally got it. I mean, the only person who can even compete with me is Tyson, and as much as he’d love to play Laurey, it’s not going to happen. And then there’s the ballet number. I’m without a doubt the most qualified. There’s no way Mr. Achron doesn’t see that.”

  “What if you don’t get it?” asked Mindi.

  “Not going to happen. I won’t let it. And neither will my parents. They’re sponsoring the play, and I don’t think they’d be too willing to keep their commitment if I’m just some chorus member. Worst case scenario: I make up a story about Achron inappropriately touching my leg or some bull and threaten to take it to the school board.”

  “No,” gasped Mindi. “You would not.”

  “Someday this is going to be my career, and I’m not about to let some washed-up theater teacher jeopardize it.” If I didn’t hate her so much, I would admire Celeste’s ruthless drive. “I don’t think it’ll come to that, but I’m prepared to do whatever it takes. Musical theater programs need to see me as a leading lady. I’m not doing all this shit to play someone’s dopey best friend.”

  “Yeah,” said Mindi. “How much longer?”

  “Two minutes,” replied Celeste. “So, Luke’s been a little weird lately. I feel like—” She stopped herself. “It’s nothing.”

  “Come on,” said Mindi. “I spilled my freaking guts to you.”

  “It’s, like, when we were hooking up before we were together, it was so hot. He would call me while I was at dance and be like, ‘Meet me in the parking lot. I need you.’ He’d do stuff like that and it was such a turn-on. But now we sit around his house and watch movies and it’s— Wait. Oh my God, wait. Get the box! What does one line mean?”

  Shoes squeaked against the linoleum floor. “Pregnant,” said Mindi, her voice hollow. “No, hang on. No! Not pregnant! I’m not pregnant!”

  Their words turned into incoherent squeals.

  Mindi let out a heavy sigh. “I am so relieved. Shit. I didn’t even realize how tense my whole body was until it relaxed.”

  “God, do you realize how over your life would have been?” asked Celeste.

  Mindi laughed. “Bitch.”

  “Whatever, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Wait,” said Mindi. “What were you going to say? Before the test r
esults showed up.”

  Celeste sighed. “We haven’t really hooked up since he broke up with her.”

  I smiled. They deserved each other.

  “Oh my God,” said Mindi, “can you believe it? She has cancer.”

  “That’s what my mom said. So freaking crazy. It’s sad, in a way.” She paused. I waited for her to say something about my mom. “And I’m not a bad person for saying this, because you know what I mean, but karma’s a bitch.”

  Mindi laughed. “That is so messed up.”

  “Oh, come on, you were thinking the same thing.”

  She was right. Karma was a bitch, but so was I.

  Alice.

  Then

  Over the last few weeks, and between sporadic vomiting and spells of nosebleeds, I’d become very well acquainted with the various girls’ bathrooms and their locations.

  I’d never been the type to stop and ask someone what was wrong when they were visibly upset. I am, however, the type to wear emotional blinders and mind my own damn business, which is exactly what I planned on doing the day I found Tyson Chapman bawling his eyes out in the girls’ bathroom. Tyson and I had taken ballet together in first grade, but eventually he’d found his niche with theater.

  Most girls might be alarmed to find a boy crying in the girls’ bathroom, but finding Tyson there on the floor was no surprise. You didn’t want to be the guy crying in the bathroom, but you especially didn’t want to be the gay guy crying in the guys’ bathroom. Tyson had come out of the closet the summer before freshman year, and he’d been getting shit for it ever since.

  After spending ten minutes kneeling in front of the toilet bowl, I realized there was nothing inside my stomach to throw up and that I would just have to live with the nausea. And, thanks to the chemo, I had puffy chipmunk cheeks, another chemo pamphlet bullet point. Seriously, my cheeks looked like they were storing three gum balls apiece.