Side Effects May Vary

He ran down the steps to his mom’s car, not waiting for me to say it back. “I’m going to warm it up,” he called to her, the keys dangling from his fingers.

I slammed the front door behind me, my parents still outside. I ran upstairs and, in my room, I melted into my desk chair. I had Harvey, and I had him for good. Hadn’t that been all I wanted? To make those perfect moments last? But now I felt trapped, like a homeless person who’d been given their dream home only to suffer from intense wanderlust because we always want something until we have it.

I thought about something I could control—my hair. Or lack thereof.

Since my treatment was suspended months ago, my brows had grown back and my hair was on the mend too. I’d kept shaving my head, though. I would have rather died bald than with some random wisps of hair. After finding out I was in remission, I’d stopped shaving my head. Although it was sporadic and splotchy, my hair had now started to grow in..

I dug through my closet until I found a red beret that must have once belonged to my mom. Not that it would do much good. I was the girl who had cancer. That shit’s sort of hard to hide.

After Harvey and Natalie left and my parents had turned off all the lights, there was a quiet knock on my bedroom door. I slumped down in my bed and pretended to be asleep. I developed that little gem of a habit while I was sick. People love to talk to sleeping sick people. It’s like talking to a dead person, but a breathing dead person, so it’s not so bad.

From the sound of the footsteps, I knew it was my dad. My bed creaked beneath him as he perched on the edge. He took my cold fingers, enveloping them in his, and I wished I hadn’t pretended I was asleep.

“Alice Elizabeth, you fooled us all.” For a second I thought he’d caught me, but I realized he wasn’t talking about my sleeping act. “If anyone could beat it, it would be you,” he said, his voice slow with wine. “You’re tough as nails, Al. Tough as fucking nails.” The springs in my mattress squeaked as he stood.

Both my mom and dad had never tried to censor themselves around me. That included everything from curse words to financial woes. My mom, especially, believed that hiding things made them that much more illicit. She was right, in a way, but my mom always thought everything to the extreme. And maybe feeling illicit was why Mom hadn’t told us about her affair. Maybe she liked having a secret.

All of the honesty I’d become so accustomed to made being sick that much harder, because suddenly I was a damn egg with a flimsy shell. I stopped getting in trouble—well, not really—I still got into trouble, but I was never punished for anything. I never heard a peep about hospital bills. And my mom stopped arguing with me, when usually every morning was a contest to see who could pick a fight first.

Now everything felt wrong, and nothing was the same. My parents and school. Harvey and us. Natalie and ballet. All these plans and all I had to work with was a big, fat question mark. Even though cancer was the hulking monster in the closet, it wasn’t a relapse I was concerned about. Lying there in the dark with the creaking sounds of my house settling, I saw what only ever haunted me in those moments when my body was asleep and my head was still wide awake. The unknown. It consumed me.

Harvey. Then.

Alice sat on the foot of my bed. It was the first time I’d seen her since she passed out that day in the cafeteria. Seeing her so alive, right there in front of me, eased every muscle in my body. I’d asked my mom every day since then if she’d found out what happened to Alice, but she only told me that they were still running tests. All I could think of was the paramedics asking me over and over again if we were related. Then today, after school, Alice found me at my locker and asked what time I got off work. She said her dad was going to drop her off for a little while later that night. My mouth had stopped working, so I’d nodded.

I had spent the hours between then and now wondering what had changed and why she was coming over. Since we’d started high school, I’d get these urges to go up and talk to her, but anytime I came close she was with Luke. And even when she wasn’t with Luke anymore, I couldn’t think of anything worth breaking the silence for. I kept thinking that if I was going to say something to her, it’d have to be a little more groundbreaking than Hi.

That night Alice let herself into my room with her hand covering her eyes and said, “You have five seconds to hide your porn.”

“You’re going to have to give me more than five minutes,” I said, trying to play along.

She didn’t laugh, but plopped down on my bed.

“Do you remember when we were kids and your mom was watching me and she had to take you to a doctor’s appointment, so she took me too?”

I didn’t answer. Things like that had happened all the time when we were little.