Side Effects May Vary

He could probably hear my heart beating against my ribs. All I could think was, This hurts. This hurts so much worse than I thought it would. I knew Harvey would never hurt me, but he was crushing my heart because I was feeling these things for him that I didn’t want to name. This feeling that the world was so pleased to call love destroyed people every day and it would do that to me too. It would disappoint and deceive and manipulate. But then, the part of me that was dying thought, What would it matter? If I wasn’t going to live long enough to have to worry about the aftermath of it all, what did it matter?

I leaned back against him, still undecided, but pushing my limits. He sighed, his breath brushing the bare skin of my back, and then dipped his head down, practically pressing his lips against my shoulder. The sensation traveled down my spine, causing me to shiver.

I watched our reflection, and wondered if this was really happening or if it was the mirror playing a trick on me. We hadn’t kissed since that night at Lake Quasipi, and I could almost talk myself into believing nothing had really happened. I closed my eyes, and I was falling, tripping into an abyss of unknown.

A violent banging shocked my eyes open. I caught a glance of Harvey in the mirror, wide-eyed, like he had been woken from a hypnotic trance.

The door shook.

“Only one person per fitting room!” Gwenda called out.

Harvey backed up what little the fitting room allowed. “I’ll be right out here if you need me.”

“The zipper,” I breathed.

“Oh, right. Yeah. Sorry.”

He unzipped the dress and left in a hurry.

I wondered if this moment felt the same for him.

I stood, studying myself in the mirror, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. The straps of the dress began to slip down my shoulder and across the smattering of small red spots accumulating there, little broken blood vessels—a reminder of my leukemia. I blinked, trying to wash away my feelings, but it didn’t work—it would never work. Then, through the fitting room door, I called, “Harvey, we’ve got some serious planning to do.”

Harvey. Then.

“Are you sure I can be here?” I asked, my eyes scanning the treatment clinic. It wasn’t very full, and no one had said anything to me when I sat down next to Alice with an IV in her arm, but it still felt like some hushed private place where visitors shouldn’t be allowed.

She leaned her head back against the recliner. “Yeah. Nobody cares.”

I watched an old bald guy covered in age spots come in by himself with nothing but the daily sports section in his hand. A lady, about the same age as our moms, sat down across from Alice as a nurse rolled over a tray full of utensils.

“Does this place weird you out?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Death was everywhere. So much so that I wondered if just her being here made her more dead than alive. More one of them than one of us.

“Me too. It smells weird. Like, too clean.”

I laughed. “Would you rather it didn’t?”

She tilted her head back again and shrugged.

A few minutes passed, and I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep until she said, “There’s a notebook and a pen in my bag. We need to make a to-do list, but first grab me one of those blankets at the front.”

Alice had brought her own blanket from home, but I’d heard chemo made you really cold. I went for a second one up at the front where they had water coolers and blanket warmers full of blue hospital blankets. In Alice’s bag, I found the notebook and pen.

“Okay,” she said, with her eyes still shut and the second blanket spread out across her lap. Maybe it was the fluorescent lights, but her skin was too yellow, her eyes more sunken in than I remembered. “We got Luke, but we’re not done. Celeste is going down.”

“Seriously, Al? Don’t you want to do something good like, I don’t know, hold a canned food drive?”

She smiled and the irony of it against her sallow skin made my chest hurt.

“Fine,” I said. Of course Alice would want to have the final word with Celeste.

“Write this down,” she said. “We need a DVD of Oklahoma! the musical, and we have to find a recipe for fake blood.”

“What?”

A nurse hushed me from across the room.

“What?” I whispered.

“Hear me out, okay?”

I huffed.

“Okay, so Celeste is the lead in Oklahoma! and their last showing is a few days after this round is over. But I need someone to videotape a dress rehearsal for the ballet scene at the end of the second act. Write that down too.”

None of this could mean anything good.

“We also need a third person who isn’t afraid of heights.”

“For what exactly?”

“To sit in the rafters.”

“You’re not kidding?” I laughed because all of this was so damn absurd. Only Alice would plot someone’s social demise while undergoing chemotherapy.

“Of course not. Do you know anyone on the inside? I don’t want to get Tyson involved. I need, like, a tech person. Someone who can get us in and out of the backstage area.”