Side Effects May Vary Page 9

  I walked out of the stall nonchalantly, like I didn’t just have my fingers down my throat. Tyson still sat there in the same spot on the floor. I did a good job of ignoring him as I studied my scalp in the mirror. After two rounds of treatment, I’d made no progress, living up to my grim prognosis. We’d recently found out that I wasn’t a bone marrow transplant candidate, but Dr. Meredith had suspected that from the beginning. Since the start, chemo had felt more like a participation grade, except without the gold stars. Now, faced with the decision of our next step, my parents asked me to continue treatment. I didn’t know how to say no to them. My time was running out, though, and I had things to do.

  I shook my hands dry, then pushed the swinging door open with my back when Tyson said, “I thought the day you broke up with him was the best day of my life.”

  I took a step back inside. “What?”

  “When you broke up with Luke. I saw it all happen in the hallway. He called me a homo, remember?”

  I nodded. “You’ve got my attention,” I said, and dropped to the damp floor next to him. It smelled like mildew covered in bleach, and I tried not to think about it. I already felt queasy enough.

  “Okay. So, this last weekend I was at this house party out in Alton. I guess he had been at some other party, because he was plastered. Anyways, he kind of wandered in all by himself. I swear to God, I thought it was a sign.” He scooted closer to me. “Alice, I’ve been in love with him since the third grade.” He said it like it hurt, and I bet it did. Tears pooled at the corners of his eyes, making me feel uncomfortable, like I shouldn’t be seeing this.

  I knew what house party Tyson was talking about. It was a weekly thing at this old drag queen’s house. You didn’t go there without knowing what you were getting into.

  “My friend Courtney has always known how much I loved him, so she went over to him and dragged him onto the dance floor. Well, the center of the living room, but you know what I mean. She danced with him for a little while, but made sure I was right by her side the whole time. There were people, like, everywhere, so he didn’t notice when Courtney left him in my very capable hands.” Tyson leaned even closer to me. “I was kind of freaked out, but he was dancing with me so I kept going along. It was like he was still dancing the way he would’ve with Courtney, but he was dancing with me. There was no way he didn’t know I was a guy. We were, like, grinding and—”

  I shook my head. “No further explanation necessary, thanks.”

  “Anyways,” he said, rolling his bloodshot eyes, “I went to go get a drink from the keg outside and he followed me. We didn’t really talk. It was just us back there. I was crazy nervous. I was about to ask him why he was there when he sort of leaned in and kissed me.”

  I waited for some kind of an explanation. This was the guy who had practically begged to get into my pants. He even slept around with other girls. “Hang on,” I said, holding my palm up. “Luke sort of kissed you?”

  “Yes, and it was earth-shattering. Everything I had dreamed of since third grade. Okay, well, I didn’t realize people used their tongues to kiss when I was in third grade, but you get the idea. After that he kind of freaked out and took off.”

  I recalled all those times Luke and I had kissed, and it was okay enough, but nothing I could ever imagine someone dreaming of or hoping for. The thought actually made me want to gag, and I wondered if Tyson and I were even talking about the same guy.

  Luke had kissed a boy. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t understand how I didn’t see it. A girlfriend would have known something like that.

  “Courtney couldn’t believe it either, so she snapped a picture with her cell from inside the house.”

  The wheels in my brain began to spin. “Does it look like him?” I asked.

  Tyson’s head cocked to the side, and his brows furrowed in confusion.

  “The picture,” I said, “can you tell it’s him?”

  “I can,” he said cautiously, as he pulled out his smartphone. My breath caught in my throat as he showed me the picture. It was a little blurry, having been taken with drunk goggles, but, oh God—it was definitely him. He even wore his letter jacket with the unmistakable MVP varsity soccer patch emblazoned on his bicep.

  “So what happened next?” I asked, handing the phone back reluctantly.

  “Well, today I went up to him in the locker room before gym. Everyone had cleared out but us. When I asked him if he was okay, he said, ‘Okay with you being a faggot?’” Tyson choked out a sob.

  I hated that word.

  Tyson sniffed and continued. “Then I reminded him that he kissed me in the first place. He told me to keep my mouth shut, and then this happened,” he said, lifting his shirt to reveal a long, colorful bruise that stretched the entire length of his left side and seemed to continue well past the waistband of his jeans. The bruise yellowed at the edges, getting darker and angrier toward the middle.

  “Wow. Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah. A little sore, but okay.”

  “So, you still think you’re in love with him?”

  “Probably.” His face was severe and now free of tears.

  Sometimes love is so intense that it turns into this gray area that borders on hate. That’s what happens when the people you love have that type of power over you.

  “I’m sorry, you know,” he said, motioning to my scalp.

  I nodded. “Can you send me the picture?”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “Why? What do you want with it?”

  “Oh, I want to ruin that asshole.” I felt bad for Tyson and even for Luke, but that didn’t change what he had done to me.

  He chewed on his lip for a second, thinking. “Yeah, you can have it. Let me know before it goes public, okay?”

  I stood. “I will.”

  He nodded. “Hey, isn’t your birthday this week?”

  “Next Monday, sweet sixteen.” I’d be spending my sixteenth birthday at the treatment center. “Sorry about the bruises, Tyson.”

  “It’s okay. Suddenly, the pain is starting to fade.”

  “Yeah, revenge does that.”

  Harvey.

  Then

  I opened the picture on Alice’s phone again. “And you’re sure this is real?”

  “One hundred percent,” she replied.

  Alice sat in the passenger seat of my car with a quilt wrapped around her legs, the hot air from the vents blowing stale as we idled in the school parking lot. She’d finished her most recent round of chemo a week ago, and this time she wasn’t so quick to recover. Before, she had looked okay—not good, but okay. Now, the disease was tattooed all over her. She was always shivering and nauseous. There was nothing I could do about the nausea, but I had started to keep blankets in my backseat for her.

  I couldn’t make sense of it all. The chemo was supposed to help. The chemo was supposed to kill the disease, but it felt like Alice had become her disease. Her doctors told her to consider homeschooling as an option, and everyone tried to act like that wasn’t bad news.

  “Alice,” I said, turning to face her, “are you sure you want to do this? I don’t know that this is entirely ethical.” I wasn’t sure of Alice’s entire plan, but I knew it involved a picture of Luke kissing a boy. The boy was sort of hard to identify, unless you knew it was Tyson, but anyone would recognize Luke.

  “Luke’s never been nice to you, or anyone else for that matter. He doesn’t deserve to have secrets, Harvey.”

  Alice had given me the play-by-play of everything that had happened with Tyson, including his unfortunate bruises. I’ll admit it, I had always hated Luke. He had never abided by any type of moral code, and even Alice had a line. “You’re sure Tyson’s okay with this?”

  “He’s completely on board with this. You know that.”

  The only concrete detail I knew of Alice’s plan was that we’d gone to Alice’s dad’s print shop last night to upload the photo and make it as clear as possible with his high-end photo-editing software an
d that we’d transferred the photo to a disc. Three copies existed: one in my backpack, one beneath Alice’s bed, and one in my closet.

  I felt kind of bad about sneaking into Martin’s shop. I hated going behind his back. He’d always been so good to me. When Alice and I were in second grade and in different classes, we had career day. As soon as I told my mom, she asked Bernie if Martin would talk to my class for her. I was never ashamed of my mom, but she knew that her coming to career day as a ballet teacher would only get me bullied on the playground. Bernie spoke with Alice’s class about being a lawyer, and Martin spoke with my class about running a print shop. He brought free slap bracelets for the whole class. The week that followed was the closest I’d ever been to popular, until Mindi and Celeste told everyone that Martin wasn’t even my real dad, and I got bumped back down the social ladder.

  Not having my dad around was the type of thing that didn’t matter to me until I figured out that it should. The more anyone tried to compensate for it, the more I realized that I might have something to miss. I’m sure there would have been ways to find him, but since he never tried to find us, I thought maybe he didn’t want to be found. When I was younger, we got a few sporadic child support checks, but those stopped coming in the mail around the time I stopped believing in Santa Claus—which was pretty early on, thanks to Alice. It hadn’t bothered me so much when I was a kid, but in the last few years I had started to wonder again. It’s not that I had this hole in my life that needed to be filled. I had a family. For me—Alice, my mom, Bernie, and Martin—we were our own family. But I wondered sometimes, the way your mind asks those big questions, like whether or not there’s a god or how a girl can think she’s ugly one day and pretty the next.

  I sat in the car with Alice as other cars began to trickle through the school parking lot. Today was the yearly drunk-driving seminar where the student government and the booster club teamed up with local police officers to do a cautionary skit and presentation in the gymnasium. All that really meant was that everyone got out of at least one class today.

  I turned off the car. “We better get inside.”

  Alice threw the blanket into the backseat while I grabbed her notebook and my backpack from the trunk.

  “Al, what if someone gets hurt?”

  “No one is going to get hurt.”

  My feet stopped, anxiety bearing down in my chest.

  Alice turned around and sighed, doubling back to me. “What is it?”

  “What about Tyson? He has to live with this too.”

  She took the last step between us and held my face in her chilly hands. “I swear to you, Harvey, no one will get hurt. The only person who will have to live with what happens today will be Luke.”

  I didn’t know how she could promise me that. Of course someone would get hurt. I shouldn’t have given in so easily, but it was her touch that convinced me. All I could think about was her breath on my lips and her skin against mine. “Okay,” I said.

  We went our separate ways for first and second periods but met back up for third period, like she’d told me to. Because of the all-day seminar, the student body was on a rotating schedule so that not everyone missed class all at once. My and Alice’s classes were scheduled for some time in the afternoon, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Luke had third-period weight training.

  Alice and I met outside the gymnasium door. When she walked up, her skin was a little yellow and her breathing ragged.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  She nodded and tried breathing through her nose.

  Alice slid a key from her back pocket and unlocked the windowless door in front of us. I followed her up the back stairs to the gymnasium sound booth, which was set up so that we entered through the hallway outside the gym and took a steep set of stairs to the box above the bleachers. We couldn’t see the presentations since the booth sat behind the makeshift stage, but it was the same thing every year. Four students—usually seniors—would stand in blue jeans and white T-shirts with fake blood and bruises all over their faces, pretending to be dead drunk drivers. It was dark, except for a few emergency lights. Each student held their own flashlight and flicked it on, holding it beneath their chin, when it was their turn to speak. Above the students onstage hung a large projector screen, flashing images of totaled cars. On the desk in front of Alice and me sat the laptop controlling the pictures on the screen. If it wasn’t for the nerves, I would have felt like God.

  Each of the four students said the same things but with different words. I should have known better. One drink wasn’t worth it. I killed myself and my girlfriend. There was a whole family in the other car, and it wasn’t their fault I was drunk, but it’s my fault that they’re dead. I should have listened. I should have stayed.

  I guess if I hadn’t heard the exact same thing at the seminar last year, the whole thing would have been a little more impactful. But the scare tactics didn’t really work on the student body, and the faculty usually spent the entire time milling through the bleachers, threatening students with detention if they didn’t shut up.

  “You have the disc?” asked Alice, with her hand out.

  I unzipped the front pocket of my backpack and handed it over. Alice hit the button on the side of the computer and the CD-ROM tray slid open. Looping her finger through the center of the disc, she used her other hand to pull out her phone and dialed a number she knew by heart. Hitting the speaker button, she said, “Here we go.”

  I began to sweat. From everywhere. My hands, my back, my head.

  The phone rang so many times I thought he might not—

  Luke picked up. “I think you have the wrong number.”

  “Oh, no,” said Alice. “I most definitely do not.”

  I looked out over the gymnasium; it sounded like this part of the presentation was almost done.

  “Whatever, psycho,” he said. “I’m hanging up now.”

  Alice smirked.

  My stomach turned.

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea, Luke. Now listen to me very carefully.” She stood.

  He said nothing, but I could hear him breathing into the receiver.

  “I’ve come across quite the interesting picture of you swapping spit with someone of the same sex.”

  Silence.

  “Now, Luke, I have no problem with this. But I happen to know that your small mind does and that you’ve fucked over one too many people for this to end neatly for you.” Alice paced back and forth. “Still listening?”

  He grunted. “You’re lying. There is no picture. I’d never kiss a dude. That’s disgusting.”

  “You have—” She glanced at the clock on the computer. “Three minutes to get to the gymnasium and stop this picture from going public.”

  “What the fuck is your problem, you crazy bitch?” His voice was low with urgency and terror. He sounded like I felt.

  This was wrong. I shouldn’t have agreed to this.

  “Well, I’m dying, so that seems to be a problem. But the pressing issue here would be the bruises you gave Tyson Chapman. These pictures of cars are getting awfully tedious. I think it’s time we spice things—”

  The phone went dead. Luke knew the picture was real.

  I bit down hard on my lip, the taste of copper in my mouth, and shook my head. “How do you know he won’t come up here?”

  Alice slid her phone into her pocket and sat down next to me. “He’s not that smart.” Touching her hand to my leg, she said, “Harvey, trust me. For two minutes, trust me.”

  We watched from the booth. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The lights were dimmed so no one saw him, and we could only make out the outline of him, but Luke hauled ass out of the locker room and ran for the ladder to the projector, which ran up the back of the bleachers opposite us. To Alice’s absolute delight, he wore nothing but a towel. She bounced up and down and clapped her hands, giggling.

  When the lights came on he would be positioned above the bleachers
where everyone could see him. Luke continued to climb, checking the towel at his waist every few seconds. I craned my neck to watch him.

  Alice spun the disc around her finger.

  I couldn’t take it. “Al, you don’t have to do this. He’s already about to humiliate himself. And isn’t that what you want anyway?”

  Doubt flickered across her pale face, but was erased by a thunder of obligatory applause from the students and faculty.

  The large overhead fluorescent lights began to buzz to life, taking a few minutes to turn on.

  Luke’s entire body tensed as he took the next rung.

  For a second, no one noticed anything as all their eyes adjusted to the light and the officer who would speak for a few minutes took the stage.

  The ladder creaked as Luke froze.

  In unison, everyone turned, looking up to see him. The laughter was instantaneous.

  I stood and took Alice’s hand, hoping my touch impacted her in a fraction of the way hers did me. “Come on.”

  Luke yelled unintelligible curses as he took a few more steps in earnest. When he was within reach, he stretched for the power cord, his other arm curled around the ladder. It was hard to tell exactly what it was through the glass, but his towel caught on something. Maybe a loose nail or a sliver of wood. Just out of grasp, Luke leaned forward a little farther and his towel began to slip. He wasn’t fast enough to catch it. We all watched as the white piece of fabric drifted slowly down to the bleachers below, leaving him in nothing but his skin.

  I could imagine the rush of hands to pockets as students searched for cell phones to memorialize this moment. My cheeks burned. I’d always hated watching others be humiliated, even if they deserved it.

  One of the police officers helping with the presentation started yelling up the ladder for Luke to come down.

  Alice watched the computer, the disc hovering in her hands.

  “Al, come on.” My voice was desperate.

  Shutting the tray with a push of her finger, she said, “Let’s go.” She led me to an empty classroom where she took out her cell phone and called Luke again.