Side Effects May Vary

“Your mom went to the bathroom for a minute while we waited in the examination room. You sat in the chair, and I walked around looking at everything, sticking my hands in the cotton balls. You kept telling me to sit down.” She turned to me. “Do you know what time I’m talking about now?”

I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “You told me the rubber doorstop on the wall behind the door was a nose-cleaner. And then you kept saying, ‘What’s that on your nose, Harvey?’, so I knelt down in front of the doorstop and rubbed my nose around inside.”

“And then the nurse came in and hit you with the door. Oh my God, and then your mom came in!” She pressed the tips of her fingers to her smiling lips. “She was so pissed.”

I sat down next to her. “Yeah. I didn’t figure out that you were making it up till I was, like, ten.” I wanted to ask her why she was here, but I didn’t want this moment to end.

She had probably said fewer than twenty words to me since the beginning of freshman year. I was trying hard not to count her words now. One hundred and thirteen.

“You don’t even like playing the piano, do you?” she asked, changing the subject.

I like creating the rhythm of your body. That’s what I wanted to say. If I was suave I would say shit like that, the kind of stuff that made girls’ clothes fall off. I wanted her to keep talking so I told the truth. “I don’t know. I quit.”

“That’s dumb.”

I needed her to say it. Whatever it was she came to say. Because after a year of silence, why else would she be here? “Alice—”

“I have leukemia, Harvey.”

Your life changes sometimes and it only takes a few words to bridge the gap between now and then. My first instinct was shock. It didn’t make sense. She didn’t look sick. “I’m sorry.” It was all I could think of to say.

“Yeah,” said Alice, “because I must have caught it from you.” She slid in closer to me. “Don’t be sorry.”

I nodded. “So, is this, like, the type of cancer they just cut out of you and then it’s all ‘Hey, everybody, remember that one time I had cancer?’ Or is this, like, the bad kind?” The type of cancer that decimates you and everyone you know.

She didn’t answer, and because she didn’t say so, I assumed it to be the latter. If it were okay, if she thought she would be all right, she would have said something like but it’s not serious. I tried to talk, but the words stuck to the back of my throat. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

“Acute lymphocytic leukemia. I’m starting the first round of chemotherapy next week.”

“How do you feel?” Words, sounds I didn’t know I was making.

“The same, I guess. I don’t know. I can’t tell if I’ve felt like this for so long that I can’t tell or if I genuinely don’t feel any different. Does that make sense?”

One hundred and ninety-six words. All those words in a matter of minutes but only four words that mattered. Only four words played on repeat in my head.

I have leukemia, Harvey. I have leukemia, Harvey. I have leukemia, Harvey.

I wonder if she practiced how she was going to say it. Harvey, I have leukemia. Leukemia have I, Harvey. Maybe she tried different inflections of each word. I would have. I have leukemia, Harvey. I thought about all the other people she might have told before me—the list was short— and I hoped that, besides her parents, I was the first to know. It was selfish, but I wanted to know I came first even if it was only when shit was falling apart.

I ignored her question because I wasn’t sure if what she said did make sense and, too, I thought maybe it was the type of question you didn’t answer. “Is it bad?” There should have been an online course that covered appropriate questions to ask when someone tells you they’re terminally ill, but nothing could have ever prepared me for the hole that was growing inside of me. The absence I was already feeling at the thought of losing her.

“It’s not good.” She licked her chapped lips and even now, when she was trying to tell me that some disease was eating away at her, my fucking hormones took over.

I thought about my mom because if anything could extinguish my sex drive, it was her.

I wondered if my mom knew. Bernie probably figured out a way to time it so that we both found out at the same time. That would be fair, and Bernie was nothing if not fair.

“They said the younger you are, the higher your chances are for recovery. But, I dunno. The doctor said it can be dicey. Dicey,” she repeated to herself. “All the good shit is supposed to happen when you get older. Driver’s licenses, concerts, sex. So that’s really fucking ironic,” she whispered.

“Did they do, like, a bunch of tests?”