Side Effects May Vary

Our lips touched. It wasn’t our first kiss, but in that moment, I knew the meaning of it all. I knew every word in the dictionary, every color in the rainbow. For a moment, cancer was cured and the world had halted to a stop in an eerie state of perfection.

With our lips still joined Alice reached for the bed behind her, and leaned backward. I wrapped my arms around her, bending my body to the curve of hers as she pulled away the blankets. I laid her down on the cool sheets, gently, like she might break. Then I stood back and really looked at her.

There was no denying that Alice had always been the driving force behind my hormones. But what I saw was wrong, not what I had always dreamed (yes, dreamed) Alice would look like. She was completely bare, and I saw everything the baggy T-shirts had been hiding for months. Her waist dipped in dramatically, her rib cage moving slightly with each breath. A mean-shaped bruise wrapped across her hip, purple at the center and yellowing at the edges, fading into her lighter-than-ivory skin. She bruised so easily now, and I wondered what small infraction was the cause of this one. The sharp ridges of her sternum jutted out, her collarbone draped with ashen skin. Tiny red dots splattered across her thighs and shoulders, broken blood vessels. I had only ever seen them a few at a time, but here with nothing to hide behind, they were an epidemic. Her lack of hair didn’t shock me. That, I had grown used to.

She bit her bottom lip and used her arms to cover her bare chest. I was a horrible person, but I didn’t want to remember her like this. I didn’t want to remember that this shell containing Alice was withering away. I closed my eyes tightly, with my arms at my sides, my fists curled tightly.

“Harvey?”

But I wanted to do this.

I opened my eyes and Sick Alice was gone, her wavy brown hair fanned out around her on her pillow, framing her face and shoulders. Her cheeks were full and her curves filled out. The rosy tint teasing beneath her ivory skin had been restored.

I didn’t care what Alice looked like. I never had. I just wanted her to be alive. I hovered above her, knowing that what we were about to do could never be undone. Her fingers played at the hem of my T-shirt as she slipped it over my head. My lips met her neck and spread small kisses to her ear and back as she turned her head to the side, her lips parting and her eyes closed.

She twisted over to her bedside table, opened a drawer, and retrieved a condom, holding it between two fingers.

I stood and slipped out of my remaining articles of clothing. What if I didn’t do this right? What if I couldn’t do this?

“Harvey,” Alice said, her voice slipping through my insecurities. “Harvey, I need you to be in this moment with me because you’re the only one I’d ever want to share it with.”

Her words swept away my doubt. I lay down next to her, propping myself up on my side with my elbow.

It was true. I didn’t know how long we would have after this. It could be five days or five years, but no matter how short or long our time was, I could no longer spend it as friends. I didn’t need a label to own her with. I needed to know that we were more, that she would belong to me just as much as I had always belonged to her.

“Is this . . . have you done this before?” I asked.

She shook her head no.

A little bit of the tension inside of me settled. Not that I wanted her to be a virgin or anything. I wasn’t like that. It was that this would be as new to her as it was to me. “I can’t be just friends after this, Alice.”

“I know,” she said.

“You’re okay with that?”

She nodded. Her eyes told me she loved me. Tonight, she loved me. Even if she could never say it. Does love still exist if you can’t say it? If you can’t admit it? I wasn’t sure, but her eyes had told me enough. I took her face in my hands and pressed my lips to hers. She tasted like Chapstick, waxy and sweet.

And I found out sex wasn’t this perfect, airbrushed, mind-blowing thing. It was quiet and sweaty and personal. But it felt good. And I’d get better at it. I wished I could get better at it with Alice.

I had loved her for so long. I didn’t think it was possible for me to feel any more for her, like she had already maxed out all my feelings. But that wasn’t how it worked. That night Alice swallowed up a whole piece of me I never knew existed. She ruined me that night.

When you’d loved the same girl for your entire life, it was hard to believe that there might be anything after that. When you’ve loved one person so wholly, do they take that love with them? Was that how it worked? If so, I was okay with that. I loved every bit of Alice, even the horrible, ugly parts of her that made other people cringe. If this was all the love I could ever give, then my love had been well spent. When Alice was gone, she would take all my love with her. Whether she was floating through some heaven or decomposing six feet under, that part of me would always go with Alice.

Alice. Now.