Side Effects May Vary

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, 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 where 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 wrestling 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 move 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 side.

She sighed. “Let’s concentrate on getting you back on track. If you do summer school, you might be able to graduate on time. And then there’s college, too. You’re not that far behind. Still lots of viable options available.”