Julie Halpern: The F- It List

Gag. “What I don’t need is this bullshit pity party you’re throwing me. I need details, Jenna. What do you actually know?”

She straightened herself up, a little insulted, but still the Keeper of Information. Then she transitioned into gossip mode, complete with hand held next to her mouth as if she were hiding the news from those only on one side of her. Drama divas. “My mom takes pilates with Becca’s mom, and she told her that at the beginning of the summer Becca started to get sick. Like, sick all the time. They thought it was all sorts of things, like a pulled muscle and the flu and asthma, and finally she was in so much pain and they ended up in the hospital, draining fluid from her chest.”

“Jesus fuck.” My stomach turned. “Is she going through chemo? Is that what she has to do?” My knowledge of cancer was limited to what I read in books, watched on TV, and remembered from my mom’s friends. But, really, it wasn’t much. All I knew was wigs and death and probably a whole lot of awful in between.

“She started her first round this week. That’s why she’s not at school. Do you want me to give a message to my mom to give to her mom?”

That pissed me off. Just because I didn’t know anything didn’t mean that Jenna’s mom had some sort of one-up on me when it came to Becca. “No. I’m going over there now.”

“You sure? I don’t know if Becca wants visitors.”

“That’ll do, Donkey,” I warned Jenna. She meekly accepted defeat. I knew she meant well, but this was my best friend she was talking about. Estranged, maybe, but that would be over once I saw her.

Would she be bald? Hooked up to a machine? Gorier than the goriest of my horror movies? I felt utterly clueless.

I found my dad’s station wagon in the parking lot, bequeathed to me by my mom after his death. She said that my having a car would help alleviate some of the stress of trying to get everyone everywhere. It may have alleviated that stress, but the idea of me driving after my dad was killed in a car accident had my mom shaken and stirred. I tried to quell some of the anxiety by reminding her that he wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and he was in a taxi, being driven by someone we didn’t know. Mom trained me as a road warrior herself, and I wouldn’t dare leave the garage, or anywhere else, without a seat belt. That I promised her. She made me ditch my nicely aged Ford Escort for the upgrade to the safety-sealed Volvo. It was fine for driving to school, work, and the library, pretty much all I did. My brothers took most of Mom’s energy, which wasn’t entirely bad. At least she was forced to focus on something other than my dead dad. Too bad they were mutant turds with skateboards.

I drove on autopilot to Becca’s. The traffic gods were kind, and I made it to her house quickly. I parked my car on the street outside Becca’s house, just in case someone needed to get in or out of the garage in a hurry. Becca lived on a quiet cul-de-sac in one of the nicer subdivisions that fed into our high school. I lived in a one-step-down subdivision, which meant that the houses were a little older and a little smaller. Becca had the good fortune of having her own bathroom, being the only child. Did good fortune matter if you were the one with cancer?

Instead of sitting dazed in my car, I decided on the rip-the-Band-Aid-off approach and forced myself to get out. The doorbell, a classic ding-dong edition versus the bleepy, robotic one my dad installed at our house, rang in the pit of my stomach. The anticipation of are they home or not hung in the air, until the telltale shuffle of Becca’s mom’s slippers (it was a take-your-shoes-off-when-you-enter house) approached the door. Upon seeing me, her tired face brightened, and she opened the screen door and ushered me in. Before I could say “sorry,” or, “Is Becca home?” or whatever the appropriate thing was that wasn’t coming out of my mouth, Mrs. Mason enveloped me in her lean arms and said, “Alex, so good to see you. Becca missed you. I knew you’d fix whatever it was that you were fighting about this time.”

Not surprising that Becca didn’t tell her mom this particular fight had her sleeping with my boyfriend, so I said, “Yeah. I just needed some time.”

“Of course. Becca is upstairs. She might be sleeping, but I’m sure she’ll want to see you. Go right up.”

Maybe I had wanted Mrs. Mason to detain me for longer, tell me all that I’d missed or ask me how my family was doing or even reprimand me for staying away so long. I didn’t expect heading up to my best friend’s room so soon to be so difficult. My best friend, Becca, who had cancer.

I IMAGINED BECCA in the center of a giant, four-poster canopy bed, so tiny and sickly that the bed practically engulfed her. None of that made sense, since Becca neither had a four-poster bed nor a canopy. In fact, she constantly bitched about the fact that her bed was merely a twin on a metal bed frame. It was a hilarious argument I witnessed between her and her mother.

“Mom, I’m getting close to adulthood now. Don’t you think that warrants a queen? Or at least a double?”

“My dear,” her mom pronounced, “you are no queen, and giving you a bigger bed just gives you license to share it with someone else.”

Touché.

“Knock knock,” I said and did. My heart beat behind my eyes, and my stomach hovered around the middle of my chest. I hoped whatever I saw behind that door wasn’t like something out of The Exorcist. Pea soup grossed me out.

“Come in,” said a familiar voice. Becca’s voice. Who else would it be?

I opened the door with a jerk, not purposely, but my hands also seemed not quite in working order. The back of the door slammed into the wall as it flew open. A picture hanging behind the door jumped off the wall and landed with a smash.

“Shit. Sorry,” I said, trying to pick up the pieces.

“Does that mean you’re still mad at me?” Becca asked from the corner of her room, where she sat in her big blue comfy chair, hidden under a blanket her grandma had knitted. The only parts of her exposed were her arms, which held a PS3 controller, and her head, which looked surprisingly the same as the last time I saw her.

“Are you kidding?” I asked, gingerly closing the door behind me and stepping over the broken frame containing a picture of the two of us from eighth-grade graduation. “How can I still be mad at you?”

“So cancer absolved me of everything? Shit, I should have gotten cancer a long time ago.”

“Ha ha.” I wasn’t ready to joke about Becca having cancer, and I was a bit put off that she was. I sat on the edge of her bed and dangled my feet. “I was all ready to forgive you when I came to school today, but apparently you had to go all drama department on me.” That was me attempting to be light, but it was a stretch. “What’s going on, Becca?”

“What don’t you know?” She assessed how far the rumor mill had gotten.

“All I know is what Jenna told me, which wasn’t enough. She said you had cancer and that you started chemo today. I don’t even really know what that means. And you look okay.” I looked at Becca’s face and recognized a tiredness and an unfamiliar fear in her eyes that I hadn’t noticed a second ago. I averted my glance to the television screen where she had her game paused. Two medieval-looking people were frozen, strategically placed pixels obscuring the sexual deviancy on her tv. “Lovely, Becca. Are you just faking cancer so you can watch digitized people get it on?”

“If only,” she sighed, threw down her controller, and began to cough an extended, pained cough. When it subsided, she said, “It is pretty sick that I can do this while you’re in school, though, isn’t it? My mom walked in on me today mid-sex scene, and she said, ‘You have as much computer-animated sex as you like, honey.’”