Authors: Julie Halpern
“Spill!” Becca’s eyes were voyeuristically wide, which would have been creepy if we didn’t already know every last perverse detail about each other’s lives. That’s what best friends were for, and we pushed that to the limit.
“So, yes. We had sex,” I pronounced with a cheeky smile.
“I knew it! It’s almost like I could psychically feel you doing it last night while I was in bed!”
“My god, Becca, contain yourself.”
“Okay, not really, but I had a feeling.”
“Could it be possible that having cancer has turned you into an even bigger perv?”
“Yes. It’s a common side effect. Go on. How was it?”
That always seemed to be the question you heard after someone had sex. It was weird to me, like there was some sex scale that everyone was supposed to be measuring their experience by. People were so different in what they liked and knew and felt. Was that just the generically polite thing to ask after sex, like saying, “I’m so sorry for your loss” after someone died?
“I guess it was good. I mean, it was definitely good. Bordering on amazing?” I was at a loss for words. So much of what I experienced last night with Leo was purely tactile, not emotional or analytical. Was that how you knew when sex was good? Or was there more to it than that?
“So what part of it was on your list? Did you do something freaky?” She waggled what was left of her eyebrows.
“I am so renting you a male prostitute just to get you to shut up.”
“Come on. Humor me. You’ve seen my list. What was it?”
“I had an orgasm,” I declared. “With him.”
“Ooh la la.” Becca smiled, satisfied that she nudged the truth out of me.
“Yeah, but there’s a problem.”
“You’re in love with him. I knew it! You know, you’ve proven that the endorphins released during an orgasm—”
“No, that’s not it. I just feel like it’s too much for me right now. Does it mean we have to start calling each other and sending cutesy texts? Go to stupid dances and exchange birthday presents and shit? I don’t need that. I have my mom and my brothers to take care of and school and work and you…” I trailed off. I didn’t want Becca to think I blamed her for anything, didn’t need her to worry about me when she had to take care of herself.
Instead of worrying, though, Becca exploded. “What are you fucking talking about? Leo sounds like a great guy, and I don’t just mean in bed. Don’t put the blame on me just because you’re scared to get close to him.”
“First of all, how do you know that he’s such a great guy? And second, I’m not scared of anything.”
“He’s a great guy because he’s done nothing dickish since you started frisking each other. He carried me through the hall while I puked, for fuck’s sake. And you are too scared of things. Do I have to remind you of Ronald McDonald?”
That fast-food clown scared the crap out of me with his red mouth and huge feet. But he wasn’t real. “Just because he hasn’t done anything dickish doesn’t mean he’s a great guy.”
“He is, though, isn’t he?” She calmed a bit, watching me lose the argument.
“Yeah. He’s nice. A lot nicer than I am.” I chewed a cuticle.
“That’s not too difficult an accomplishment, Alex.” I smacked her leg. “Ow! Cancer leg!”
“Always with the cancer. And was that a cancer fart you just made?” I waved my hand in front of my face.
Becca rolled up in hysterics. “It’s not my fault! It’s the meds!”
We didn’t mention Leo for the rest of the day, but that night I reviewed what was said and still came to the conclusion that I needed some space from him. Everything we did together just felt too good. Sooner or later, that would turn to shit as all good things did. I’d rather put an end to it myself than watch it unravel or blow up in my face.
*
After work the next day, I decided to fulfill a Fuck-It List entry—number 9:
Bake cookies for the janitor.
I chose classic chocolate chip because the recipe was right on the bag. When it came time to mix in the chips, I lunged my hands into the batter instead of using a mixing spoon. The small chunks of chocolate and batter rolled in my palm with a massage-like effect. I could’ve stood there all day, until my brothers barged in and tried to finger their way into the bowl.
“Stop!” I yelled, and whacked at their hands. “These are for someone else!”
“Alex has a boyfriend,” sang the twins.
“You guys are turds. I’m making them for the school janitor.”
“Alex is dating the school janitor,” AJ and CJ chimed in unison, as if they shared an idiot brain.
“Get out of here.” I pushed them out of the kitchen.
They gave me an idea, though. Maybe I could soften the blow to Leo with some cookies. A sort of
let’s be friends
peace offering. And these were real, homemade ones, not fresh from the fridge impostors. The janitor couldn’t possibly eat all of the cookies anyway.
After the cookies finished baking and I doled out a few to appease my annoying brothers, I packaged them neatly into two Ziploc bags. One I labeled “To: Mr. Cooper, From: an appreciative student.” I wavered over what to write on the second bag, how to address it, how to sign it. In the end, I simply wrote, “Leo.”
He’d be fine. I’d be fine. We didn’t even know each other that well—mostly in the biblical sense, as they say. (Were they really doing all that in the Bible?) I would keep myself busy with school and work and Becca, and he’d go back to whatever it was he did before me. He could start smoking again. I bet he wouldn’t miss me at all.
ARMED WITH TWO BAGS
of cookies, I picked up Becca for school. On her head was a brilliant blue, bobbed wig.
“Attention much?” I asked as she got into the car.
“This may be my biggest moment in the spotlight,” Becca declared.
“This will be one of many, Becca. Soon you’ll star in a Hollywood blockbuster, date a movie star, burn out, land on a worst-dressed list, then have a miraculous comeback in some brilliant indie film, which will garner your first of many Oscars. I will be the only person you thank, of course.”
“You have this all planned out, don’t you?”
“Yes. And my career will go like this: Straight out of high school I write the next big horror franchise, totally revolutionary. I’ll go on to a lucrative career in writing and directing, and I’ll fall in love with Norman Reedus.”
“Who’s Norman Reedus?”
“You’re kidding. You
must
have cancer brain to forget sexy hick Daryl from
The Walking Dead.
”
“The one who always looks dirty?”
“They all always look dirty.”
“The one with the crossbow?”
“That’s him.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“If we could only get high school to hurry itself up and get out of our way.” Before we arrived at school, Becca had me park in a discreet spot on a side street. “You were right about Caleb having something for me.” She dug through her bag.
“Please tell me he did not give you his detachable penis.”
“Better,” Becca said, and pulled out a joint.
“Homeschool pot, huh? Caleb’s full of surprises. Maybe next he’ll tell you he’s really a demigod from Asgard.”
“You want to try it?” Becca lit up the joint as if she had been smoking professionally.
“No. Unlike you, I have no excuse for acting like a glassy-eyed paranoid with the munchies in homeroom.”
“Don’t judge. It helps me eat.”
“I’m not judging. Just promise me that when the cancer’s over you won’t turn into some Phish-loving pothead. I would have to divorce you.”
“Duly noted,” she coughed.
*
Becca walked with her hand on my shoulder into the school. I wasn’t sure if she needed help balancing or the extra assurance on her big day back. I chose not to ask, pretending it was all normal. Before parting ways at my locker, I handed Becca the bag of cookies for Mr. Cooper. “You can be the messenger.”
“But you made them.”
“It’s off your Fuck-It List, Becca. And, I might add, something you totally could have done yourself. If I weren’t so trusting, I’d say you were taking advantage of me.”
“I am, and you are one of the least trusting people I know.”
Becca walked off slowly with the bag, and I watched as a concerned and adoring crowd swarmed her. “Let me know if you want me to call Norman Reedus and his crossbow!” I called after her. “And try not to scarf all the cookies!”
I waited to see Leo as the hallway crowd thinned, but he didn’t show at my locker. That wasn’t unusual, since we weren’t really the locker-meeting types. Still, we did have sex Friday night and I did have a bag of cookies for him. Oh god, what if I didn’t have time to explain that the bag of cookies was a consolation prize and instead he thought I baked him cookies
because
of the sex? I set the bag inside my locker and headed to first period.
Leo was nowhere to be found at lunch or art, our usual meeting times, but I was so busy fending off Becca’s cancer groupies that I didn’t mind. Breaking up with someone, even if we weren’t technically together, was unpleasant for all involved. My guilt meter was pretty much ratcheted to full. Any more, and it might overflow.
The end of the day came, and still no Leo. I guess I’d postpone the cookie drop until tomorrow.
But tomorrow came and went, and still no Leo. I worked Wednesday and Thursday, and Leo didn’t visit, nor did I see him in school.
I didn’t want to call him or text him. First of all, he hadn’t called or texted me in all this time, which wasn’t very cool. But if I did, that just seemed like leading him on in some way. What if he was avoiding me? I was annoyed with the unknown, so I decided to do a little detective work.
Friday morning, Becca and I got to school early. I hadn’t driven her since Monday, when the walking and talking and human contact seemed to knock her around more than she expected. Like a school-loving crazy person, she was determined to try again. I was glad to have her there to assist me in my Leo recon. She wore a red wig, shoulder length, with thick bangs. Apparently her mom went on a shopping spree at a costume shop and bought Becca no fewer than seventeen wigs. They didn’t always help her feel well enough to stay in school all day, but at least she looked good. And gave her mom an excuse to go shopping.
We headed to the front office, and when Becca entered, it was like the moment where the birthday girl enters her surprise party. The secretaries screamed; the vice principal patted her back. My god. Cancer was a strange disease. I finally managed to get Mrs. Novak, the oldest and most crotchety of the secretaries, to recognize there was someone else in the office besides Becca.
“How can I help you, dearie?”
It may have sounded sweet, her calling me “dearie,” but she only did so because she couldn’t recall my name from the other fifteen hundred students, no matter how many tardies I got.
“I have a friend”—even that felt odd to say—“who’s been absent this week, and I was wondering if you knew why.”
“What’s her name, dearie?”
“It’s a he. Leo Dietz.”
Mrs. Novak typed briskly onto her computer keyboard. The juxtaposition of a prune of a woman and the shiny new technological equipment was always funny to watch. She mastered it a lot better than my parents could. Mom was always afraid that she was going to click some button that would make the computer implode. As if they actually built computers with a panic button.
Mrs. Novak’s expression read that she found what she was looking for, and she looked up at me with sympathetic eyes. “I’m sorry, dear, but it looks like there’s been a death in the family.”
Those words caused a physical reaction so quickly in my gut that I had to hold on to the counter and rest my head. I flashed back to when our principal came to my English final to pull me out with the news that there had been a death in my family. I relived that moment all summer and every time I saw him in the halls wearing one of his tweed suits and Bears ties.
“Do you know who?” Becca came to my rescue, asking the question I couldn’t.
“Sorry, dearie, it doesn’t say in the computer. You can ask Principal Donovan—”
“No thank you,” I interrupted her, and fled the office.
I found the nearest bench in the foyer, a modern, rectangular slab with no back, ensuring the least amount of comfort to discourage lollygagging and dillydallying. I sat down and cupped my head in my hands. Becca sat next to me and rubbed my back.
“See? This is what I’m talking about. If I hadn’t gotten involved with Leo, then I wouldn’t even have known about this and had to deal with it. You should not be rubbing my back.” I ripped her hand off me.
“Alex, you can’t seriously be mad that someone in Leo’s family died.”
“Why not? It’s just another thing, Becca. Another layer of shit on the massive shit parfait that is life.”
Becca snickered, and I shot her my death-ray look. “How am I not supposed to laugh when you’re talking about a shit parfait?”
“How can you laugh right now? You have cancer! My dad is dead! Now Leo’s dad could be dead. Or his mom. Or his brother.”
“Alex, what am I supposed to do? Sit around crying all day? That’s not how you deal with shit. You get to be all broody and mad and dark. Let me try to look on the bright side and laugh at parfaits.” She snickered again, and I remembered the homeschool joint she lit up just ten minutes prior.
That got a smile out of me, but only a tiny one. “I have to call him.”
“You don’t have to. But unless your heart really is a lump of coal, you should.”
“How about a text to start with?” I bargained.
“Sure,” she mused. “I really want a granola bar.”
I pulled out my phone and tried typing. All that came out were idiotic things like, “Who died?” and “I heard there was a death in your family. Sucks.”
“Help me!” I pleaded to Becca. She grabbed my phone.
“How about, ‘You haven’t been in school. Hope everything is ok.’”
“But I know it’s not okay.”
“He doesn’t know you know, and maybe he wants to be the one to tell you.”
“Hit send before I chicken out.”
“Done.”
I waited until the last possible second to walk into first period. No reply texts from Leo, but I couldn’t bring my phone to class to keep checking. If a teacher heard the buzz of a text, that would be an instant confiscation until the end of the day. I placed my phone in my locker on top of the bag of cookies that was becoming less edible as the week wore on. Throughout the morning, I checked my phone in my locker every chance I got. Nothing. When lunch came around, I decided the wait was too much for me. But I wasn’t ready to call Leo and sound like an asshole. Instead, I visited Mr. Esrum, Leo’s creative writing sponsor. I looked through the glass window of his office door. Head down, he graded a stack of papers on his overflowing desk. I knocked on the door. He looked up over the top of his glasses and waved me in.