Side Effects May Vary

Her toes bent at the balls of her feet as she rose nearer to the ceiling. She wore lyrical dance shoes in black. They reminded me of gladiator shoes. Thin leather straps wrapped around her feet. Her unpolished toes were red and bulbous; her feet calloused. Most people would say they were ugly, even disgusting. But she wore them proudly, like a badge, a display of her hard work. Without her stiff satin pointe shoes with their stubby toes, she was closer to earth. Closer to me, a little more in reach.

She was in a class of fourteen other students, all by herself.

I’d known her my whole life. Other girls didn’t exist for me in the same way she did. They had been there all along, these feelings; the only thing that had changed was my understanding of them. My whole body finally connected the dots, and I realized that even if we were never together, she’d ruined me and I’d never feel that way about anyone again.

On that cold night in January it all slipped into place for me and she became my everything and my everyone. My music, my sun, my words, my hope, my logic, my confusion, my flaw.

I was thirteen years old, and she was all these things to me.

And I was her friend.

Alice. Now.

Mom and Dad cried freely now, and rightly so. I wasn’t dying.

I wasn’t dying. Not actively, anyway.

“You’re sure?” I asked in a quiet voice.

Somehow Dr. Meredith heard me over my parents’ celebratory tears. His glasses had slid down to the tip of his nose. He flipped through the stacks of papers in my thick file. “I’m positive, Alice. Your white blood cells are regulating, and in your most recent bone marrow sample, there was no trace of cancerous cells. I had the lab techs double-check and triple-check. Remission is constituted by shrinking or lack of growth, so there you are. Of course you’ll still be going in for scans and blood work on a weekly basis. We’ll be keeping a very close eye on you. It can always come back stronger, so it’s always best to be aware and prepared.” He closed the file sitting in front of him—my file.

My stomach twisted. This should have felt good, but it didn’t.

“You’ll need to start intensification therapy followed by maintenance therapy, but not until we know what triggered the remission. We’re at the peak of the mountain, folks, but let’s not relax yet. Thankful, but mindful. That’s going to be our mantra these next few months.”

My parents sobered up at that and turned in their chairs to face me. They looked at me, really looked at me like they hadn’t seen me for a year, and I guess in a way they hadn’t.

After I got sick, I wondered if they tried to stop loving me a little bit. Not on purpose, but maybe in the interest of them surviving this thing. I mean, my parents loved me. But wouldn’t anyone try to distance themselves from something they knew they were about to lose entirely? I was their only child, but my life had never consumed theirs. Then I got sick, and for the last fourteen months, my disease had become the axis of their world. They’d gotten to this point where they started looking through me, rather than at me. It wasn’t anything I fully realized until this very moment, this moment when they were really looking at me again, their daughter. It made me want to be anywhere but here. With a handful of words my life had fallen off the rails.

I’d wondered what would happen to them after I died. Would my mom have left my dad for that guy? But, now, what would happen now? Would she tell us that she’d been having an affair? Would she leave us after we’d weathered this storm together?

I opened my mouth to speak, but swallowed my words when I realized I had no idea what words to use. My body was being stretched in every direction, begging to be felt. The list—my final to-do list—had fixed almost everything. But nothing could fix this.

My vision blurred, and all I saw was everything I’d done over the last year. Everything I’d said. Harvey. I didn’t know how to live with the weight of what I’d told him the other night, what I’d said without words.

“That being said,” the doctor continued, “in all my years I have never . . . I’ve never seen anything like it. My profession frowns upon this word, but, Alice, it appears to be what some call a miracle. You hear about these things from time to time, circumstances that defy science. It seems that after we had decided to suspend your chemotherapy treatment, your body began to fight back. I could go on for days with theories and possibilities, which I will do next week during our official appointment. And I do apologize for the last-minute call, especially right before the holidays. I wanted you all to know the moment we were sure.”