Side Effects May Vary Read online

  Bernie’s family lived on the other side of the country, and as far as I knew, Bernie didn’t mind. She hung up the phone and a few minutes later she and Alice’s dad, Martin, flicked the hallway lights on and off, talking loudly about going to bed. A little show to let me know it was time to head home even though they would never come in and actually tell me to leave.

  I swung my feet off the bed and tied the dirty laces on my sneakers. I got up and immediately sat back down and did something I had never done before. I woke up Alice to say good-bye because these bad nights reminded me that we only had so many nights left. When I squeezed her bony shoulder, she moaned in protest. Her lips were dry and cracked, the sound barely escaping her mouth. I dipped my head down next to her ear, my cheek pressed against her bare skull.

  “Alice,” I breathed. The buzzing TV cast a blue light over her. “Alice, don’t leave, okay? I’ll come here every day, just don’t leave.” A single tear cut a path down my cheek, and I wiped it away before it felt real. This seemed like good-bye, not good night.

  But then she opened her eyes. “Hi.”

  I tried to smile.

  “That movie sucked.”

  I laughed. “Yeah. It sort of did.”

  Her eyes crinkled a little and her lips curved upward, like she’d remembered something funny from a time that wasn’t now. “I’ll miss you most, Harvey.” She sat up on her elbows. “I don’t know what it will feel like after, but I know I’ll miss you most.”

  We’d gone through so much shit together, but this was the first time she’d ever told me that I was important. And that I mattered to her. I wanted this. I wanted to keep it forever. But you don’t ever get what you want how you want it.

  I cleared my throat. “Alice, I—”

  “Don’t.” She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “Save that for someone who’s not about to bite it.”

  I nodded. I loved Alice. It was so obvious that I didn’t even need to say so out loud. I stood and opened her bedroom door.

  “Harvey,” she said.

  I turned.

  “Me too.”

  Alice.

  Now

  Before I could stop myself, I reached for my hair, my fingers smoothing over my naked scalp. Gone, it was all gone. Even now, over a year later, it still came as a shock. I did this several times a day, like clockwork. It was a phantom limb, my hair.

  My oncologist for the last year or so, Dr. Meredith, bustled into his office. Noise from the hallway bled through for a moment before the door shut behind him, sealing us in. My mom drummed her fingers on her leg, a nervous habit. Dad reached over and took her hand in his, absorbing her tension.

  Dr. Meredith was a large, robust man, and jolly too, with rosy cheeks and this perpetual baby-powder smell. I always thought he would be better suited as a Santa Claus at the Green Oaks Mall rather than a doctor charged with the duty of delivering earth-shattering news. Maybe his appearance was supposed to soften the blow. The bad news is you have cancer. The good news is Santa Claus is your doctor. Peppermint stick for your trouble?

  I almost laughed out loud, remembering that stupid Christmas movie I’d watched with Harvey last night. Well, he watched it and I slept through it. But that wasn’t all that happened. I always knew how he felt about me, and I finally told him that I felt the same. Telling him that seemed like my final task—well, almost. There was one item left on my list. From where I stood, it was likely to remain my only unfinished business.

  My dad spoke up first. “What is it, Dr. Meredith?” Then, a little quieter, almost to himself, he said, “I thought we’d heard the worst of it.”

  Dr. Meredith squeezed behind his desk, sweat gathering at his brow, huffing between labored breaths. My parents occupied the two chairs directly in front of his desk. I sat in the middle of the small loveseat in the corner of the office; stacks of folders and papers sat on either side of me. Dr. Meredith had been my specialist for over a year and neither of these stacks had moved an inch. The couch was stiff and, I suspected, rarely used. It was one of those deceptive couches that looked like it should be much more comfortable than it really was. Typical doctor’s office furniture, something I was all too familiar with.

  Dr. Meredith looked at me directly while I stretched my long legs out in front of me, pointing my toes hard, like I would in my pointe shoes. (Now stuffed away in the back of my closet along with some old recital costumes.) Long out of practice, the backs of my calves stung.

  All the news Dr. Meredith had given us had been delivered to my parents. I’d always been in the room, but not really, not to them. It must have been easier for him to say those things to my mom and dad. It removed me from the situation. But whatever it was he had to say this time, it was me he wanted to say it to. He’d called us early this morning and told us we needed to come in as soon as possible. In my experience, phone calls made outside of office hours never led to anything good.

  Flipping through my charts, Dr. Meredith said, “I see your temperature’s a little high.”

  Instinctively, my hand flew to my forehead. Still clammy, but not as bad as last night when Harvey had come over. I’d gotten so used to being ill that now I had trouble telling the difference between being sick and being Sick.

  My dad cleared his throat, loudly.

  Dr. Meredith took a deep breath. “Alice.” His brown eyes found mine, and it was only me and him. He exhaled. “You’re in remission.”

  For a moment, it was quiet and everything felt okay. But then my mother began to sob, her entire body shaking in response. It was a horrible noise that made the room feel too small. Dad coughed, trying to bite back his emotions. He pinched the bridge of his nose, like his fingers might absorb his tears, but instead they rolled down his hand and into the cuff of his jacket.

  Oh shit.

  This, I did not expect. This was not on my list.

  Harvey.

  Now

  My eyelids hung heavy from staying too late at Alice’s last night, again. I jogged down Aisle 9 (soup, canned vegetables, and dressing) toward the employee break room, with the Christmas Muzak crackling over the speakers. Pushing the door open with my back, I called to Dennis as he restocked the prepackaged lunchmeats. “I’m out early, man. Heading to Alice’s. We’re watching your favorite, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou!” One of Dennis’s life goals was not to be like Bill Murray, but to be Bill Murray.

  A couple nights ago we’d watched Jaws, and afterward Alice said movies about the ocean were “lame,” but I promised The Life Aquatic would be different. Even if she would never say it, she had always been scared of the ocean or any other unchlorinated body of water. It was the one thing I ever knew Alice to be scared of, and not even she realized that I knew.

  “Restock Aisle Six for me?” I didn’t wait for him to agree. “I owe you!” He waved me on and said something under his breath.

  I slid my time card into the clock and punched out. Only an hour and a half today. Shit. These short after-school shifts were killing me. Normally, I worked five to six hours, four days a week after school. Lately I had been leaving early and sometimes not even coming in at all.

  Grocery Emporium was the last family-owned grocery store in Hughley. They had a strong local following, but in order to keep the big supergrocery stores at bay there were some modern conveniences we went without—like a new time clock. And vending machines, digital produce scales, working barcode scanners . . . You know, all the things necessary to actually run a modern grocery store. I couldn’t complain. They worked with my fucked-up schedule, and given all that was going on with Alice, they’d been cutting me a lot of slack lately.

  Alice. She would miss me. She said she would. And now it was all I could think about. And she loved me. At least, I thought she did. She didn’t really say so. The whole thing gave me these bursts of stupid happy, which were always followed by guilt because it didn’t feel right to be happy.

  I was thirteen years old when it changed.

  Alice�
��s birthday was in eleven days, making it the middle of January.

  I remembered playing some Chopin for the inter­mediate class at my mom’s dance studio. All Mom’s studio rooms had these old beat-up stereos, but the main studio where the intermediate class usually met had a piano. We’d bought it off one of my piano teacher’s friends a long time ago. Mom had always hated dancing or instructing to anything but a live accompaniment. So, a piano-playing son had been no accident.

  I never knew who my dad was, but I always thought he must have been a piano player since pianos were the only thing my mom loved more than ballet.

  Warm-ups had wrapped, and each student took turns with a forty-five-second solo in preparation for spring auditions. My mother was handing out a ballet solo, which Celeste and Alice were the top contenders for. The tension between them had always been a continuous competitive cycle that only escalated with age.

  Celeste stood with her arms spread and a smug expression on her face, waiting for some kind of praise. Ever since we were kids, she would show up to dance with her port­folio of sheet music and monologues tucked beneath her arm, ready for voice and acting class too. For Celeste, dance was one piece of the puzzle. She wanted to be famous, and I’m not even sure that she cared what for.

  My mother, Miss Natalie to her pupils, clapped to the beat and said, “To appear effortless requires much effort! Alice, next!” There was no way to tell if that was meant as a compliment or a criticism of Celeste’s form. Knowing my mother, silence would have been more positive feedback.

  Like Celeste, Alice wasn’t en pointe that night. Being the youngest in the class, the two of them didn’t always practice with their stiff-toed ballet shoes for the sake of preserving their still-growing feet. I always preferred to watch Alice when she wasn’t en pointe anyway.

  On a typical day, she wore her hair slicked back into a bun, an impeccable ballet bun. But Friday had become my favorite day of the week, because it was the only school day Alice didn’t have dance classes, which meant she wore her hair down. With our last names so close in the alphabet—hers, Richardson, and mine, Poppovicci—we always sat near each other in class. When Alice’s light brown, wavy hair hung loose, it hit the middle of her back, the place where her leotard usually met her ivory skin. She almost never wore it down, but when she did, it was the single thing about her that ever looked out of control. It would swish between her shoulder blades, calling to me. And I would have followed her too, anywhere. On Fridays, during class, she would constantly massage her scalp, and more than once I had to stop myself from running my fingers through her hair.

  She was tall and slender, with just a whisper of curves. We were the same height, and I hoped I’d be able to keep up. Her nose was small and sloped a little too far out, squaring off at the tip. Her pale blue eyes, they always swallowed me whole. They were my road map. Alice’s lips were full and pouty and she rarely smiled, but when she did it was worth all the eye rolls, bossy demands, and sharp words combined. It was worth it because her smile was genuine, and if you made Alice smile, then you’d earned it. Everything with Alice was earned. But her scowls were more easily earned than anything else. I’d learned the language of each of her expressions.

  Still, I thought she was perfect in every way, but en pointe her perfection was a blinding sun. If I stared at her long enough, the piano keys would play themselves, fueled by her. En pointe she was a force, a tornado: safe to look at from a distance, but in close proximity, you risked being just another piece of her debris. Some days I thought I could only be so lucky.

  Her toes bent at the balls of her feet as she rose nearer to the ceiling. She wore lyrical dance shoes in black. They reminded me of gladiator sandals. Thin leather straps wrapped around her feet. Her unpolished toes were red and bulbous; her feet calloused. Most people would say they were ugly, even disgusting. But she wore them proudly, like a badge, a display of her hard work. Without her stiff satin pointe shoes with their stubby toes, she was closer to earth. Closer to me, a little more in reach.

  She was in a class of fourteen other students, all by herself.

  I’d known her my whole life. Other girls didn’t exist for me in the same way she did. They had been there all along, these feelings; the only thing that had changed was my understanding of them. My whole body finally connected the dots, and I realized that even if we were never together, she’d ruined me and I’d never feel that way about anyone again.

  On that cold night in January it all slipped into place for me and she became my everything and my everyone. My music, my sun, my words, my hope, my logic, my confusion, my flaw.

  I was thirteen years old, and she was all these things to me.

  And I was her friend.

  Alice.

  Now

  Mom and Dad cried freely now, and rightly so. I wasn’t dying.

  I wasn’t dying. Not actively, anyway.

  “You’re sure?” I asked in a quiet voice.

  Somehow Dr. Meredith heard me over my parents’ celebratory tears. His glasses had slid down to the tip of his nose. He flipped through the stacks of papers in my thick file. “I’m positive, Alice. Your white blood cells are regulating, and in your most recent bone marrow sample, there was no trace of cancerous cells. I had the lab techs double-check and triple-check. Remission is constituted by shrinking or lack of growth, so there you are. Of course you’ll still be going in for scans and blood work on a weekly basis. We’ll be keeping a very close eye on you. It can always come back stronger, so it’s always best to be aware and prepared.” He closed the file sitting in front of him—my file.

  My stomach twisted. This should have felt good, but it didn’t.

  “You’ll need to start intensification therapy followed by maintenance therapy, but not until we know what triggered the remission. We’re at the peak of the mountain, folks, but let’s not relax yet. Thankful, but mindful. That’s going to be our mantra these next few months.”

  My parents sobered up at that and turned in their chairs to face me. They looked at me, really looked at me like they hadn’t seen me for a year, and I guess in a way they hadn’t.

  After I got sick, I wondered if they tried to stop loving me a little bit. Not on purpose, but maybe in the interest of them surviving this thing. I mean, my parents loved me. But wouldn’t anyone try to distance themselves from something they knew they were about to lose entirely? I was their only child, but my life had never consumed theirs. Then I got sick, and for the last fourteen months, my disease had become the axis of their world. They’d gotten to this point where they started looking through me, rather than at me. It wasn’t anything I fully realized until this very moment, this moment when they were really looking at me again, their daughter. It made me want to be anywhere but here. With a handful of words my life had fallen off the rails.

  I’d wondered what would happen to them after I died. Would my mom have left my dad for that guy? But, now, what would happen now? Would she tell us that she’d been having an affair? Would she leave us after we’d weathered this storm together?

  I opened my mouth to speak, but swallowed my words when I realized I had no idea what to say. My body was being stretched in every direction, begging to be felt. The list—my final to-do list—had fixed almost everything. But nothing could fix this.

  My vision blurred, and all I saw was everything I’d done over the last year. Everything I’d said. Harvey. I didn’t know how to live with the weight of what I’d told him last night, what I’d said without words.

  “That being said,” the doctor continued, “in all my years I have never . . . I’ve never seen anything like it. My profession frowns upon this word, but, Alice, it appears to be what some call a miracle. You hear about these things from time to time, circumstances that defy science. It seems that after we had decided to suspend your chemotherapy treatment, your body began to fight back. I could go on for days with theories and possibilities, which I will do next week during our official appointment. And I do apolo
gize for the last-minute call, especially right before the holidays. I wanted you all to know the moment we were sure.”

  After we had decided to suspend your chemotherapy treatment. The day we stopped, none of us had said we were giving up, not out loud. But we did, I did. I had given up the day I was diagnosed. The chemotherapy was horrible and, in my eyes, made the act of dying that much more degrading. After almost a year of chemo, I had to put my foot down.

  All of a sudden, the room and everything it contained rushed to meet me. I emerged from underwater, hitting the surface after having been submerged, and the sound of nurses in the hallway and the smell of disinfectant clogged my senses. Everything had been muffled and blurred, but now it was all too sharp and overenunciated.

  I’ll miss you most. I didn’t know how to be with Harvey now. Not without ruining us. What if I already had? We had nowhere else to go.

  “Motherfucker,” I mumbled.

  My mom heard me and turned back around. My name formed in her mouth like an old habit as her lips parted. But she stopped herself. I could even hear it. Alice Elizabeth, she would say in a vicious whisper that I could hear even in my sleep. But no, instead my mother was utterly confused, like I was an equation with no answer. It wasn’t the cursing that bothered her; it was me saying it here in my doctor’s office after he’d told me I was some Lifetime miracle. Yell at me, I wanted to say. Make this normal.

  After wiping his tearstained eyes in the crook of his elbow, Dad stood up to shake Dr. Meredith’s hand. “Thank you so much, Dr. Meredith, we’re so . . .” He reached out for my mother’s hand and she was at his side in an instant. “We can’t believe it,” he finished.

  Over the last year, I’d watched my parents transform into magnets defined by the length of space between them, letting this tragedy hold them together. But no matter how dependent upon each other they seemed to be, all I saw was the truth that had become the lie my mother lived. It was the truth I’d never been able to tell my dad, even if he deserved to know.