Side Effects May Vary

Alice didn’t verbalize it much—that she was in pain. But it was everywhere, all over her. This weird part of me wanted to feel everything she felt, including the pain. It wasn’t even that I wanted to carry her burden, but I was scared of her going somewhere I couldn’t follow. “You can’t play the cancer card forever, Alice.”

“You’re right, just until I’m dead. Then I dub you the carrier of the card, which shall henceforth be known as the ‘my friend died of cancer’ card.”

If it weren’t so true, I would have laughed.

Things were getting worse. I overheard my mom talking to Bernie and Martin the other night. They said that they were going to focus on Alice being “comfortable.” The thought made me numb. I didn’t ever think it would come to this, that the sum of Alice’s life would amount to her level of comfort. I always thought we would look back on this and I could say, “Hey, Alice, remember that time you had cancer?”

I worked diligently on the apple, and came up with something manageable. I stood up from the bench and pulled a little mini ziplock baggie from my pocket that screamed illegal substances. Alice’s gaze followed the baggie, her pale blue eyes eager and only slightly apprehensive. “We can just say we did it, Al. I won’t tell anyone.”

She bit her lip in thought; she looked sweet. I blinked my eyes and sweet Alice was gone. “Stop being a pansy, Harvey.”

I sighed loudly and stuffed the dry green flakes into the top of the apple where I had used a pocketknife to create a long cylinder that ran to the core. “Ready?” I asked, giving her one last chance to say no, but she stood up next to me and nodded once.

I handed her the apple, and she pressed her mouth to a horizontally running cylinder that cut straight through the bottom of the vertical cylinder. All of this was fancy talk for Apple Bong.

Alice looked at me expectantly. I took my little plastic gas station lighter and held it to the top of the apple. “I’ve never done this before, but online it said to suck in, hold for a couple seconds, then blow out slowly. And in case you didn’t get it by now, I think this is a horrible idea.”

I lit the lighter, the leaves crackling, and then she sucked in like I told her to. She held the smoke in her lungs for a couple seconds before trying to blow out smoothly, but instead unleashed a fury of coughing and wheezing. She held her hand to her chest as she tried to catch her breath and stumbled backward. I wrapped my arm around her waist and guided her back to the picnic bench.

We had decided that the best place to do this would be in a public park. Craven’s Park was on the outskirts of town and had recently been partially redone, so we opted for its older, less-trafficked area. The leaves were beginning to change, most of them still clinging to their branches. At the moment, I was supposed to be working the after-school shift at Grocery Emporium, but I had called in sick last night.

“This is stupid, Alice.”

I’m sure she would have had some snarky remark to bite back with if she weren’t trying to catch her breath. I patted her back, smoothing the nonexistent wrinkles in her paper-thin T-shirt. I tried my very best not to think of the outline of her bra beneath my fingers. Her shoulder blades stuck out, each vertebra visible through her shirt. “Alice, there are so many things wrong with this picture. I am officially the worst friend of all time for letting you do this.”

She said nothing, but pulled the apple back to her lips. I lit it again, and this time the process went a little smoother. She inhaled twice more and passed the apple to me. I took one hit and passed it back to Alice again. We went like this for a while, just stopping to add more crumpled leaves to the top of the apple.

A breeze pushed through the park, leaves whispering as they fell to the ground.

“Harvey.” It came out like a breath, like she needed my name to breathe. “Harvey,” Alice repeated back to herself quickly. “Harvey, tell me why on earth Natalie gave you that name,” she demanded with her eyes closed.

“You know why, Alice.” My name had always been a little bit of a sore spot for me. I hated it; it sounded so old and . . . old. I always wondered what my life would have been like if I were a Nick or a Carson or an Asher.

“Tell me again.”