Julie Murphy - Side Effects May Vary

Then I saw my mom. She pulled the duvet cover at the end of the bed, straightening the edges. She wore the same navy blue pencil skirt I’d seen her in that morning and her bra, which was a total mom bra: beige with a floral pattern and no padding. The man. He looked a little bit younger than her, but I could see his light brown hair fading into white at his ears.

I’d heard in class once that our society has become so accustomed to violence that when we actually do witness real gore and brutality, we’re unable to differentiate between what’s real and what’s not. This was how that moment felt for me. Truth and fiction were one big blur. I’d seen infidelity on television and in movies. I’d seen it so many times. This exact scenario. Daytime affair while the other spouse was at work, a working relationship gone too far. My breaths came fast and hitched, unable to catch their rhythm. I curled my fingers into fists to stop them from trembling.

Who was this man? Maybe he had a family. He and my mom might work together. Or he could be her client. This could be a one-time thing. Or it might not. This might be the beginning. She could be leaving us for him. Anger slipped through my veins.

He held my mom’s hips and kissed her shoulder before zipping up the back of her skirt. The pale stretch marks across her belly shone against her skin. She had a little pooch, but it didn’t look like she was bothered by it even though it always made her groan in fitting rooms.

She looked happy.

I wanted to be angry. But I was sad. Sad that she couldn’t feel that way with us—me and Dad. It was like she was cheating on both of us inside our home. I wish I had better, smarter words, but all I wanted was to throw a rock through the window and scream, Fuck you, Mom.

The fence creaked.

“Hey,” said Luke. “What’s going on?” He was trying to be nice, but I could see that he was anxious. Like a little boy whose baseball game was about to get rained out. He craned his neck. “Is someone in your house? Is that your . . . wait, that’s not your dad, is—”

I stood and pushed back on his shoulders. I wouldn’t let him know about this. No one could know about this. “It’s no one. Just some cleaning people that come once a month. Let’s go. What about your house?”

“My mom doesn’t work, remember?” He dug his car keys out of his front pocket. “What about Craven’s Park?”

I felt sick, like physically sick. “Can you take me back to school?”

He sighed. “Fine. Let’s go.”

I followed Luke down the sidewalk back to his car, maintaining the distance between us. I wanted to feel bad for leading him on and letting him think that we might finally do it. But now, all I could think of was my mom smiling, happy. Broken families were such a commonality, almost to the point of being cliché. I think I went to school with more kids who had stepmoms and stepdads than I did with kids whose biological parents were still married. Infidelity. Divorce. That was the new normal. But just because it was normal didn’t make the cut any less deep.

Luke stopped a few steps ahead of me. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Did something happen back there?”

“I’m good. Just can’t get in without my key.” I stood at his passenger side door. “Let’s go park somewhere.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “We don’t have to.”

In a way, he seemed almost relieved.

“You’re sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Come on. But I’m not doing it with you in the back of your car, just so you know.”

I expected him to laugh, but he didn’t.

There was no way I could go back to school and sit in a goddamn classroom, not while this silent avalanche slid down on my world. In the back of Luke’s car, I closed my eyes and let his hands roam as I wished for a problem—a distraction—so big it would blanket me and my parents and everyone I loved most in an all-consuming darkness.

About a month later, I got the big distraction I’d hoped for. I was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. Cancer. I had fucking cancer.

“Why can’t we watch one of those reality shows about cat-hoarding old ladies?” mumbled Alice.

I laughed. “You’ve never even seen this movie and it’s only the opening credits. Give it a chance, Al.”

She lay next to me on her bed with her head propped up on a mountain of pillows. Her eyes were closed, her skin warm and clammy, but still her lips smiled a little.

Tonight we decided to watch A Christmas Story , the movie with the leg lamp and the Christmas dinner at a Chinese food restaurant—the movie that everyone else in the world, except Alice, had seen a million times. I didn’t know how that was even possible since it played on TV every Christmas for twenty-four hours straight. Christmas wasn’t for another two weeks, and if there was one thing Alice wasn’t guaranteed, it was another two weeks. It’d been a little over a year since she’d been diagnosed. I didn’t know what I expected one year later to look like, but it wasn’t this. It wasn’t Alice lying in her bed, waiting for the cancer to eat up whatever was left, while I half-assed my way through eleventh grade, trying to pretend that stupid things like homework and my lame minimum-wage job mattered.

She hadn’t been able to leave the house much for the last couple of weeks, so we started working our way through my best friend Dennis’s collection of must-see movies. Dennis loved movies, pop culture, and video games, but he was smart too, like future Rhodes Scholar smart. His whole family was like that. His twin sister, Debora, was this political mastermind. When we were kids, she used to make us play Congress. It was miserable.

A Christmas Story had been at the top of Dennis’s list, and we’d tried to watch it a few times, but Al always said she hated Christmas stuff. Really, I thought Alice got off on hating all the things others were so quick to love.

In fifth grade, she came with me and Mom to pick out a small Christmas tree for the apartment. It was a warm Christmas, but it snowed a little that night. I followed the tree guy up and down the aisles with my mom behind me and Alice behind her. I found the perfect tree. I was sure I had. Alice didn’t say so, but I knew she thought so too because as I circled the tree, pretending to inspect every limb, she swayed a little and hummed to herself as Noel played over the crackling loudspeakers and the snow melted on her cheeks.

Other than the glow of the television, her whole room was dark. We were quiet for a few minutes, so I watched the movie as Alice’s breathing evened out and her body slumped against mine. She sounded sicker than normal, like she had a respiratory infection or something. When people like her—people with cancer—got sick like this, a common cold could be the thing that ended it all. It didn’t seem fair. She had cancer, but it was the flu that did her in.

I tried not to think about that because this moment felt perfect. Her lying here, next to me, her body curving into mine. It was perfect except that she was dying and I was living and I didn’t know how we could do both at the same time.

She had these good days every once in a while, and those were bold-faced lies that I fell for every time. Last week she had three good days and two the week before. The closer we got to what Alice affectionately referred to as her “expiration date” the more I was fooled into believing all of this wasn’t real.

I knew that I should have left so she could turn the TV off and get some rest, but I was selfish. I wanted every moment. When Alice was gone, she was going to take a giant Alice-shaped chunk out of me and it would go with her, wherever it was that she was going. I was scared to think what might be inside that chunk of me. Whatever it was—our past, our present, our never-going-to-come-true future—would die with her. Everything about the situation made me manic. But when the girl you loved was dying, it was hard not to let yourself go with her.