Side Effects May Vary

I opened the picture on Alice’s phone again. “And you’re sure this is real?”

“One hundred percent,” she replied.

Alice sat in the passenger seat of my car with a quilt wrapped around her legs, the hot air from the vents blowing stale as we idled in the school parking lot. She’d finished her most recent round of chemo a week ago, and this time she wasn’t so quick to recover. Before, she had looked okay—not good, but okay. Now, the disease was tattooed all over her. She was always shivering and nauseous. There was nothing I could do about the nausea, but I had started to keep blankets in my backseat for her.

I couldn’t make sense of it all. The chemo was supposed to help. The chemo was supposed to use the disease to kill the disease, but it felt like Alice had become the disease. Her doctors told her to consider homeschooling as an option, and everyone tried to act like that wasn’t bad news.

“Alice,” I said, turning to face her, “are you sure you want to do this? I don’t know that this is entirely ethical.” I wasn’t sure of Alice’s entire plan, but I knew it involved a picture of Luke kissing a boy. The boy was sort of hard to identify, unless you knew it was Tyson, but anyone would recognize Luke.

“Luke’s never been nice to you, or anyone else for that matter. He doesn’t deserve to have secrets, Harvey.”

Alice had given me the play-by-play of everything that had happened with Tyson, including his unfortunate bruises. I’ll admit it, I had always hated Luke. He had never abided by any type of moral code, and even Alice had a line. “You’re sure Tyson’s okay with this?”

“He’s completely on board with this. You know that.”

The only concrete detail I knew of Alice’s plan was that we’d gone to Alice’s dad’s print shop last night to upload the photo and make it as clear as possible with his high-end photo-editing software and that we’d transferred the photo to a disc. Three copies existed: one in my backpack, one beneath Alice’s bed, and one in my closet.

I felt kind of bad about sneaking into Martin’s shop. I hated going behind his back. He’d always been so good to me. When Alice and I were in second grade and in different classes, we had career day. As soon as I told my mom, she asked Bernie if Martin would talk to my class for her. I was never ashamed of my mom, but she knew that her coming to career day as a ballet teacher would only get me bullied on the playground. Bernie spoke with Alice’s class about being a lawyer, and Martin spoke with my class about running a print shop. He brought free slap bracelets for the whole class. The week that followed was the closest I’d ever been to popular, until Mindi and Celeste told everyone that Martin wasn’t even my real dad, and I got bumped back down the social ladder.

Not having my dad around was the type of thing that didn’t matter to me until I figured out that it should. The more anyone tried to compensate for it, the more I realized that I might have something to miss. I’m sure there would have been ways to find him, but since he never tried to find us, I thought maybe he didn’t want to be found. When I was younger, we got a few sporadic child support checks, but those stopped coming in the mail around the time I stopped believing in Santa Claus—which was pretty early on, thanks to Alice. It hadn’t bothered me so much when I was a kid, but in the last few years I had started to wonder again. It’s not that I had this hole in my life that needed to be filled. I had a family. For me—Alice, my mom, Bernie, and Martin—we were our own family. But I wondered sometimes, the way your mind asks those big questions, like whether or not there’s a god or how a girl can think she’s ugly one day and pretty the next.

I sat in the car with Alice as other cars began to trickle through the school parking lot. Today was the yearly drunk-driving seminar where the student government and the booster club teamed up with local police officers to do a cautionary skit and presentation in the gymnasium. All that really meant was that everyone got out of at least one class today.

I turned off the car. “We better get inside.”

Alice threw the blanket into the backseat while I grabbed her notebook and my backpack from the trunk.

“Al, what if someone gets hurt?”

“No one is going to get hurt.”

My feet stopped, anxiety bearing down in my chest.

Alice turned around and sighed, doubling back to me. “What is it?”

“What about Tyson? He has to live with this too.”

She took the last step between us and held my face in her chilly hands. “I swear to you, Harvey, no one will get hurt. The only person who will have to live with what happens today will be Luke.”

I didn’t know how she could promise me that. Of course someone would get hurt. I shouldn’t have given in so easily, but it was her touch that convinced me. All I could think about was her breath on my lips and her skin against mine. “Okay,” I said.