Side Effects May Vary

I stood and pushed back on his shoulders. I wouldn’t let him know about this. No one could know about this. “It’s no one. Just some cleaning people that come once a month. Let’s go. What about your house?”

“My mom doesn’t work, remember?” He dug his car keys out of his front pocket. “What about Craven’s Park?”

I felt sick, like physically sick. “Can you take me back to school?”

He sighed. “Fine. Let’s go.”

I followed Luke down the sidewalk back to his car, maintaining the distance between us. I wanted to feel bad for leading him on and letting him think that we might finally do it. But now, all I could think of was my mom smiling, happy. Broken families were such a commonality, almost to the point of being cliché. I think I went to school with more kids who had stepmoms and stepdads than I did with kids whose biological parents were still married. Infidelity. Divorce. That was the new normal. But just because it was normal didn’t make the cut any less deep.

Luke stopped a few steps ahead of me. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Did something happen back there?”

“I’m good. Just can’t get in without my key.” I stood at his passenger side door. “Let’s go park somewhere.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “We don’t have to.”

In a way, he seemed almost relieved.

“You’re sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Come on. But I’m not doing it with you in the back of your car, just so you know.”

I expected him to laugh, but he didn’t.

There was no way I could go back to school and sit in a goddamn classroom, not while this silent avalanche slid down on my world. In the back of Luke’s car, I closed my eyes and let his hands roam as I wished for a problem—a distraction—so big it would blanket me and my parents and everyone I loved most in an all-consuming darkness.

About a month later, I got the big distraction I’d hoped for. I was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. Cancer. I had fucking cancer.

Harvey. Now.

“Why can’t we watch one of those reality shows about cat-hoarding old ladies?” mumbled Alice.

I laughed. “You’ve never even seen this movie and it’s only the opening credits. Give it a chance, Al.”

She lay next to me on her bed with her head propped up on a mountain of pillows. Her eyes were closed, her skin warm and clammy, but still her lips smiled a little.

Tonight we decided to watch A Christmas Story, the movie with the leg lamp and the Christmas dinner at a Chinese food restaurant—the movie that everyone else in the world, except Alice, had seen a million times. I didn’t know how that was even possible since it played on TV every Christmas for twenty-four hours straight. Christmas wasn’t for another two weeks, and if there was one thing Alice wasn’t guaranteed, it was another two weeks. It’d been a little over a year since she’d been diagnosed. I didn’t know what I expected one year later to look like, but it wasn’t this. It wasn’t Alice lying in her bed, waiting for the cancer to eat up whatever was left, while I half-assed my way through eleventh grade, trying to pretend that stupid things like homework and my lame minimum-wage job mattered.

She hadn’t been able to leave the house much for the last couple of weeks, so we started working our way through my best friend Dennis’s collection of must-see movies. Dennis loved movies, pop culture, and video games, but he was smart too, like future Rhodes Scholar smart. His whole family was like that. His twin sister, Debora, was this political mastermind. When we were kids, she used to make us play Congress. It was miserable.

A Christmas Story had been at the top of Dennis’s list, and we’d tried to watch it a few times, but Al always said she hated Christmas stuff. Really, I thought Alice got off on hating all the things others were so quick to love.

In fifth grade, she came with me and Mom to pick out a small Christmas tree for the apartment. It was a warm Christmas, but it snowed a little that night. I followed the tree guy up and down the aisles with my mom behind me and Alice behind her. I found the perfect tree. I was sure I had. Alice didn’t say so, but I knew she thought so too because as I circled the tree, pretending to inspect every limb, she swayed a little and hummed to herself as Noel played over the crackling loudspeakers and the snow melted on her cheeks.

Other than the glow of the television, her whole room was dark. We were quiet for a few minutes, so I watched the movie as Alice’s breathing evened out and her body slumped against mine. She sounded sicker than normal, like she had a respiratory infection or something. When people like her—people with cancer—got sick like this, a common cold could be the thing that ended it all. It didn’t seem fair. She had cancer, but it was the flu that did her in.