Julie Halpern - The F- It List

WINTER

BECCA FINISHED HER LAST round of chemo yesterday. She claimed it was at maximum toxicity, and I didn’t doubt it. It seemed like the chemo was meant to kill everything except her. Sometimes she could barely lift the remote, and other times her head hurt so badly all she could do was silently cry.

School and life had been lonely, but not much different than it had been over the summer. I worked, watched movies, helped my mom out. Talked to friends at school, but that was about it. Whenever Becca felt up to it, I went to her house. My mom had taken up making a different casserole for each visit. I don’t think Becca managed to try even one. The smell of her bedroom had evolved. In eighth grade, Becca went through a fragrant phase after her aunt Vicki visited the Caribbean and bought her a perfume called White Witch. Becca thought this was the coolest thing ever, never mind the nose-piercing smell. She managed to collect dozens of bottles and sprayed everything she owned with the scent. Thankfully, she finally moved on to a new smell, one of Britney Spears’s concoctions, but the White Witch bottles still remained in a box in her closet. The White Witch smell hung around too, and I couldn’t be in her room without flashing back to innocent dances and early curfews.

Her room smelled nothing of White Witch anymore. The smell was a combination of disinfectant, Jell-O, and puke. I wondered if Becca could smell it. Or if her nose was immune to it, like how grandparents have an old-person smell that I’m sure they’re not aware of.

Some days the smell in Becca’s room was so bad I almost suggested pulling out the old vile of White Witch and coating the air with it.

I watched helplessly as she dealt with the side effects: constant nausea, puking, not being able to walk, not being able to see, not to mention the tubes and holes and weight loss and not wanting to eat. Why did this happen? To Becca, and to anyone? Why can someone get so sick that the only way to get better is to make them more sick? It’s like the world’s longest exorcism. It doesn’t make sense that I can chat with someone live on a tiny screen, that governments spend billions of dollars on war and mayhem, that actors make millions of dollars to just look pretty and skinny, yet no one can fucking figure out how to cure cancer without torturing people.

The other day Becca’s mom said, “Thank God” about something. It wasn’t anything important enough to remember or anything big enough to warrant divine intervention, but she felt the need to thank God, something she’d been doing a lot of recently. Becca didn’t hesitate to correct her mom, “I don’t believe in God.”

“What?” Her mom looked shocked, uncomfortable, as if saying she didn’t believe in God would somehow make Becca cursed. If she could be more cursed than she already was.

“I don’t believe in God,” she repeated.

“I suppose that’s understandable, though I’m sure you don’t mean it,” Becca’s mom conceded. “I’m going to believe in Him and keep praying for you.”

“That is just wrong, Mom.” Becca’s mom had hit a nerve. “What kind of god do we have to beg to make us well? What kind of god allows people to get this sick? And not just get sick, but have months of pain and misery? Is it some kind of vengeance? A lesson He’s trying to teach me?”

“God gives what you can handle.”

“So it’s a test? Let’s see how much shit Becca can endure, so she can come out a better person on the other end? Was I that bad a person to begin with?”

“It’s not just what you can handle, Becca. And God doesn’t control everything, but He can help us get through.”

I wondered if Becca’s mom had always been this religious and I hadn’t noticed, or if this was a direct correlation to watching her daughter disintegrate.

“I don’t want to believe in a god who can help me because I can’t believe in a god who would let something like this happen in the first place.”

Becca’s mom was shaken. Maybe she was holding on to the belief that God would save Becca. That if she prayed long enough and hard enough, she’d get better.

I didn’t know what to believe anymore. Here I was, surrounded by death and sickness, guilty for the tiniest crumbs of pleasure I allowed myself: ice cream, horror movies, and the selfishly selfish act of finding happiness in making Becca laugh. Where did God fall into any of that? I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want the blame, or the hope, to be on someone else. So I carried on, waiting for whatever was to come, with or without God’s help.

I HADN’T SEEN LEO since the funeral. I told myself he needed space, that he wouldn’t have taken a semester off if he wanted to be around people. I tried to convince myself that somehow we were different; that my absence was appreciated instead of begrudged. But really, why would he want me around after the way I treated him? I went with that, but I thought about him all the time. When a movie came on TV that I thought he’d like, or I read about what celebrities were coming to Dead of Winter Con next month. I wanted to call, or at least text. Once I managed to force my fingers onto my phone.

Got a 2nd copy of Frankenhooker. You want?

Two painful days later, I heard back from him.

No

Like I said, ouch.

Becca tried to keep things light, when she could willingly move her body. We made a list of things to do at Dead of Winter Con, and we planned on going, no matter what state she was in. I told her if she couldn’t walk, I’d push her around in a shopping cart.

“What if I throw up?” she asked.

“Who would know that was real and not just some realistically sick-ass costume?”

Just one day earlier, Becca got the news everyone was waiting for: chemo was officially over, at least until after radiation and the results came back.

Then why was she still so fucking sick? Instead of cancer being over, Becca was in total, all-consuming pain. Her joints ached, her head hurt, and the nausea was just as bad as it ever was. Whatever they used to kill the cancer was beating the shit out of her insides nonstop. Her meds made her groggy and incoherent, and she still seemed to be in so much pain.

The last time I visited, packing Mom’s patented tuna noodle casserole, she slept most of the time, except when she woke up to whimper. I stayed out of obligation and guilt, not because I liked it. There was nothing I could do for her, and even being next to her didn’t matter when she was unconscious. Her mom came into her room every few minutes, and each time she told me, “You’re such a good friend, Alex.” It made me feel worse. Especially the fifth time she added, “God bless you.”

The only thing that lightened my mood was reading the love notes Caleb had been writing to Becca for the last couple months. He was a smart guy and an old-fashioned romantic.

My dearest Becca,

Today I chose to study the films of Lillian Gish. She reminds me of you, and I envisioned you on the screen someday as bright a star as there ever was. My sister is still in her baking unit, and she made some chocolate-chip cookies using coriander. I’ll make sure to drop some off. I don’t know if you can eat them now, so she froze some for when you can.

Looking forward to our next visit, Caleb

If a guy wrote me a letter like that, I’d be embarrassed to the point of burning the paper. But it suited Becca. She deserved to find some joy in the shitty quagmire of her life.

During the quietude of her bed rest, I tinkered with the idea of getting in touch with Leo again. It killed me that he ate away my brain like that. Maybe it was just the loneliness of being next to someone who couldn’t even talk to me, who had stacks of love notes tucked under her mattress. But she deserved those love notes. I deserved the loneliness. It was self-imposed, after all.