Julie Halpern: The F- It List

She laughed because it did sound absurd. But she wasn’t allowed to laugh. She was my best friend. My dad just died. And she slept with my boyfriend. Who I had planned to break up with anyway, but still.

“I can’t deal with this now.” I stood up. “There are people downstairs waiting for me.”

“I’m really sorry.” The tears tumbled out of her eyes again, but all I could do was give her an exhausted glare.

“Don’t call me, okay? Don’t text or email or smoke signal or anything. I need some space right now.”

“Are you breaking up with me?” she choked.

“I just need us to take a break. I don’t need something else to deal with.” I stood up without another look at Becca and walked back downstairs to accept the trays of deli food and hugs of sympathy from everyone who knew and loved my dad.

That was the beginning of June and the end of our junior year. Becca called, texted, emailed, messaged, left notes in my mailbox, and sent a muffin basket. It was all duly noted in my mind, but I meant what I said. I needed some space and time to process the summer of shit I had ahead of me. Mourning the loss of my dad, helping my mom with two middle-school brothers, and working at Cellar Subs was all I could handle. I steered clear of social situations, unless they involved family, and I dove deeper into watching horror films as inspiration for a movie I planned to make someday.

The first day of senior year, the plan was to head straight to Becca’s locker and tell her, “Okay, I’m over it.” Then hug her and never look back.

Only it didn’t happen that way. Because Jenna Brown, a peripheral friend who was fun because of her song-parody-writing abilities but also lame because of her obsession with weight loss, waited for me by my locker. When she saw me, she offered her arms in a sympathetic hug. I assumed the gesture was about my dad, which I had hoped was already so last year, when she said, “Oh, Alex, I’m so sorry about Becca.”

“It was just a fight. I’m over it. What’s to be sorry about?”

“You don’t know?” She backed off the hug and looked at me with concern.

“Know what? What happened to Becca?” My heart leaped. Was she dead, too?

“I thought you’d know, since you guys are best friends—”

“Yes, yes, and she fucked my boyfriend. The end. What the hell is wrong with her?”

The problem with being friends with so many people from the drama department was that there was always drama. I had no patience for games of communication. Jenna looked around, frazzled, so I grabbed her shoulders and shook. “What. The. Fuck. Happened. To. Becca?”

She looked genuinely terrified, like I was going to bite off her ear. Which I actually felt like doing. She managed to eke out the worst string of words I’d heard since my dad died. And all of them before that day, too.

“Becca has cancer.”

I’D GONE DEAF. I couldn’t hear anything around me after Jenna uttered those three little words. That’s not true. I could hear those three little words over and over in my head. Becca has cancer Becca has cancer Becca has cancer Becca has cancer. Did deaf people hear words in their heads, too? All around me I watched in frenetic motion as people hugged their tanned, post-summer hellos, and all I wanted to do was fold my body up and stuff myself into my narrow locker.

“You didn’t know?” I made out Jenna’s muffled reply, and I responded with a wobbly head shake. She enveloped me in her newly thin arms, my own arms pinned to my side. I didn’t have the ability to move them even if I wanted to hug her back. Which I didn’t.

The bell rang, and students scattered. The first day of school was the only day everyone seemed to want to be on time to first period.

“I gotta go. You gonna be okay?” I’m sure Jenna’s concern was sincere, but it felt hollow. A nod from me to her, and Jenna was off down the hall. I managed to stuff my empty backpack into my locker and remembered to grab a pen and notebook before I zombie-walked to advisory.

While everyone around me chattered about vacations, parties, hookups, and breakups, I doodled on the cover of my pristine red notebook. Cancer, I scratched. What did I know about cancer? I knew one of my mom’s best friends died from it. I also knew a couple of my mom’s friends who lived through it. So that was encouraging: Not everyone with cancer dies.

Then why did it equal death in my head? Why did it hit me in my stomach and make me cave in on myself when I heard Becca had it?

I didn’t even know what kind of cancer she had. Were some kinds better than others? Would she lose a boob? Her hair?

Becca loved her hair.

I was never one to fawn over my straight, dark brown hair, and the second my mom allowed me to choose my own hairstyle I lobbed it off into a bob. I’d been through short and spiky, asymmetrical and edgy, shaggy, up through my latest look: blunt bangs and a nub of a ponytail, inspired by my favorite character, Kelly, from the brilliant British zombie miniseries, Dead Set.

But Becca was attached to her hair beyond its roots. She only allowed her mom to trim it after the fourth-grade gender-bending play. What wasn’t to love about Becca’s hair? It was dirty blond, almost waist-length, wavy most days, curly when she curled it, straight when she straightened it. She felt it gave her another prop with which to act. If she parted it on one side, it meant she was flirty. Down the middle: serious. High ponytail: fun. Low ponytail: somber. All of this I knew because I helped take her head shots for her résumé. Not that she had done any acting beyond school productions, but she wanted to be prepared.

What if she already lost her hair? What if I was so busy mourning the loss of my dad and the absence of an assnut boyfriend that I wasn’t there for her when she needed me? What if all those times she tried to get in touch with me, she was asking for help? What if I was too late?

The bell signaling first period rang, and I let the push of the hallway crowds propel me to my next class. The bubbliness of my Spanish teacher, Señorita Goodwin, and the fiesta-themed decor of the room brought me out of my question-stalled brain for a short while.

I opened my notebook while people passed around this year’s textbook and wrote:

THINGS I KNOW:

1) People don’t always die from cancer

2) Becca is not dead, which I know because

a) Her mom would have called me

b) Jenna would not have spoken about her in the present tense

I was interrupted by the delivery of my new textbook, which I wrote my name in:

I always added the upside-down crosses, not because I was a Satanist but because I liked to imagine the next person to get my textbook wondering if somehow the book itself was evil. My legacy, if you will.

Thinking about my legacy made me think about death, which made me think about Becca.

I added one more item to my list:

3) Becca cannot die because my dad just died, and that would be much too shitty.

But was it enough to make it true?

I MANAGED TO SIT through my first three classes before completely losing my shit. Instead of wading through the inanity of gym class the first week of school (it’s always painful to watch the gym teacher try to locate her students among the five other classes sharing the gym, only to assign tiny lockers and reinforce uniform and deodorant rules), I walked to Becca’s locker. Her full-sized one, not the gym-class one, where she forgot about a pair of socks last year and discovered that the locker room smell had, indeed, been her fault.