Side Effects May Vary

What did I think? I thought that sounded great and horrible all in the same breath. “I don’t care.”

My mother pursed her lips. She probably wanted to tell me to stop acting like a brat, but she didn’t. “We’ll play it by ear.” With her still sitting there and her cocoa barely touched, I got up to go to my room. But my mother wasn’t done. “Do you have any homework?”

“I guess,” I called over my shoulder. Instead of replying with an equally biting remark, she let me walk right out of the kitchen without a word left between us.

I wanted her to yell at me. I wanted to hear the truth. The lack of truth—that’s how I knew she was still having an affair. And today, with her getting stuck in court, I couldn’t believe it. No matter how true it might have been, I would always be suspicious. Because if she’d ended it, she would have told my dad, and then they would have told me. Working in criminal law, my mom saw the fruit of lies every day, and she wouldn’t tolerate it at home. Growing up, she would say, “Inside our home, we always tell the truth. Even when it does more harm than good.”

In my room, I checked my cell phone and found three missed calls from the same unknown numbers, presumably my newest acquaintance, Eric. Funny, I hadn’t taken him for eager.

After having been out of school for months, I started my first day back with Luke in first period. Since he was a senior, we shouldn’t have shared any classes, but he’d always been horrible with dates and names, so I wasn’t surprised to find him in my eleventh-grade history class. I sat in the only seat available, which was about midway to the back of the room. When our teacher, Mrs. Morrison, told us to break into groups for a project, I excused myself to avoid the risk of ending up in a group with Luke. I needed some serious air anyway. In the hallway, I dug around my pocket for the tiny slip of paper with my locker number and combo.

After some trial and error, my locker sprang open, and I realized I didn’t have anything to put inside of it. All I had brought with me to school was a single pencil. I laid my pencil down in the locker and spun it between my two fingers. College. It’d been gnawing at me since last night. College could take me away. Far, far away. But college meant making plans. And plans meant hoping for something. Unless medical science had been magically revolutionized and remission was now synonymous with cured, I was wary of plans and all the goddamn hopes that came with them. I sighed, tucking my pencil back behind my ear, and slammed the locker door shut.

“Never thought I’d see you again,” said a voice.

I turned around to see Luke.

“Get the hell away from me,” I said coolly, even though I was fully aware of how alone I was, here in this hallway with Luke. I’d never been conscious of things like that, but I’d never had good reason to be.

He laid his hand on my shoulder. “Hey, now, Alice, I’m just the beginning of the welcome wagon.” I slapped his hand away.

He stepped back. “You’ll be seeing me around. I haven’t forgotten,” he said, “and I don’t think Celeste has either.”

This was Luke’s senior year, so if I could survive until May, I’d be fine. If the cancer didn’t come back, I’d be here next year with Celeste and I could handle her. I wondered if Celeste got her wish and finally got to do Luke. Luke didn’t really have standards anyway.

Of Celeste and Mindi, only Mindi was in any of the classes I’d attended. I saw Celeste for a brief moment, though, sneering at me from the doorway of my classroom. The scene with Margaret Schmidt had been the same version of scenes in my first- and second-period classes. The questions, the few well-wishes—authentic and not. It all made me feel like someone else, someone I’d never wanted to be, someone fragile and lonely, who went home to scrawl all her feelings in her fucking journal.

After second-period algebra with Mindi and Harvey, my school day was o-v-e-r. Well, not technically. I skipped out on the rest of the day, including my little meeting with Mr. Slaton.

On my way to anywhere that wasn’t class, I stopped by the bathroom. As I washed my hands, the door swung open.

“I thought that was you.”

From the mirror, I watched Celeste. She stood with her arms crossed and her little designer wristlet dangling from her wrist.

“You know, I’d already bought a dress in case you didn’t make it. I mean, it was such a steal, and who doesn’t need one more little black dress?”

“You’re sick.”

“I wore it for New Year’s instead. Luke took me to Three Forks off I-9.”

I laughed. “Oh, so that little charade is still going? Do you guys like to do it with the lights on? We never got that far, but I always wondered.”

She didn’t answer my question, but her lip twitched for a second, making me think that Celeste’s dreamboat might not be such a dream after all. I blinked and her vicious smile was back. “How’s your mom doing?”