Julie Murphy - Side Effects May Vary

Since she didn’t sit with Luke anymore, Alice sat at a table by herself. But, every day, people sat with her. She hadn’t really talked to any of them, but they all sort of talked around her, waiting for Luke’s ex-girlfriend to make her next big social move.

The last time I really talked to Alice was the week before high school. Bernie had made partner at her law office, so Martin threw a party for her. The attendees were basically old fat men wearing khaki pants and dress shoes without socks and accompanied by their wives. The backyard smelled like barbecue, cigars, and beer.

Alice had reached this point in the night where she’d stopped verbally responding to all the old people trying to ask her questions about school and ballet—especially since she’d just quit.

The old guys who’d managed to leave their wives at home flocked to my mom in her usual all-black attire with her hair done up in a bun.

Alice’s eye caught mine from where she stood next to the dessert table. She mouthed to me, Driveway . Question game.

I nodded, unable to stop myself from smiling.

I may have been a mediocre piano player, a horrible dancer, and a little too easygoing, but I had always been a supreme lip reader.

I sat in the grass waiting for Alice since the driveway was full of cars.

She plopped down next to me and handed me a beer.

“How’d you swing this?” I asked. Bernie was careful to separate the beer cooler from the soda cooler so she could police us. Alice’s parents may have been cool with swearing and stuff, but drinking was not on the okay list.

She shrugged. “Old guys love me.”

“Gross!” But it was probably true.

“Not like that,” she said. “Okay, well, maybe like that. But who gives a shit?”

She wore cutoff denim shorts and this really tight navy blue tank top with little flowers. I wanted to kiss her so bad. I wanted to know what it would feel like to lie in the grass with her on top of me and nothing but clothes between us.

She held her bottle up to mine. “Cheers!”

It wasn’t the first time I’d ever had a beer, but it tasted as sour as I remembered.

“Question game,” said Alice.

The question game was a game we played growing up. Well, really, I guess it wasn’t a game, just a conversation. But when you’re a kid, everything’s more fun if you can call it a game. My mom used to call cleaning the clean-up game. Alice and I would race to see who could clean up their mess of toys or construction paper first. We never won anything. Well, except gloating rights—which, to Alice, was the only thing worth winning.

Alice asked first. “If you had to choose to sleep on your back or your stomach for the rest of your life, which would you choose?”

“What about my side?” I asked.

“Not an option.”

I took a sip of beer. “My stomach.”

“Me too.”

“My turn,” I said. I wanted to ask her why she quit ballet, but Alice quitting ballet felt a lot like me not knowing who my dad was. We tiptoed around it. “If you had to choose a brand-new first name right now, what it would be?”

“Joey,” she said without pause.

“That’s a guy’s name.”

She stretched her legs out on the grass. “I think it’s sexy when girls have boy names.”

I didn’t know if my hormones could survive her bare legs and the word sexy all in one moment.

“What would your name be?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something like Mike. Something normal and not old.”

She laughed and her hand brushed mine. “I love your name.” Sounding out both syllables, she said, “Harvey.”

If she kept saying my name like that, I might not mind it so much.

“If you could take a test right now and skip all four years of high school, would you?”

“That’s a good one,” I said, feeling the bubble of beer in my chest. I thought for a second. “I would . . . not. It’s going to suck so hard. That’s all anyone tells us, but I think maybe there’s some stuff that might be worth it, and I don’t want to miss out just in case. What about you?”

“In a freaking heartbeat,” she said. “I wish I could wake up tomorrow and be on the other side of graduation.”

I didn’t know what to say back to that. “It’ll be okay.”

“Alice,” called Bernie from the side of the house. “There’s someone who wants to meet you.”

“Oh, shit. Dump these.” Alice handed me her half-empty beer and ran off to the backyard.

That was the last conversation we had. It all made me wonder if maybe the Great Alice and Harvey in my head was a distorted version of reality—reality being that we were two kids, forced to hang out with each other because our moms had become best friends, but now we weren’t even that.

Dennis sat across from me, rehashing some stand-up act he’d watched online last night. I nodded my head along, but didn’t really catch what he was saying. Alice, her lips pressed together in a thin line, rolled her eyes at something one of the girls behind her said, and then I lost sight of her. I tried focusing my attention back on Dennis, doing my best to push her out of my thoughts. It was one of those stupid moments where nothing at all is really happening, but you’ll always remember every detail because you’re trying to hold on to all that was solid in your life before it exploded. It was being in an awful car accident and remembering every lyric to the song you were singing before the crash. That’s what that moment was for me, my last memory of Alice pre-cancer.

Then the scream—an earth-shattering scream, followed by multiple shrill screams. I stood, trying to get a better look at whatever was going on. My chair clattered to the floor behind me.

It was quiet for a second before the tidal wave of gossip began to roll through the cafeteria.

“She, like, passed out!” one girl said.

Some guy yelled, “Someone get the nurse!”

“Call 911!” shouted another panicked voice, prompting an army of technology-armed teenagers to reach for their cell phones.

I searched for Alice’s crown of hair, but nothing.

I don’t know how I knew it was her, but I did. Like I could recognize her absence as much as her presence. I pushed through hordes of kids to get to her. People yelled at me and pushed back, but I didn’t care. I saw familiar faces, like Celeste and Mindi, but I shoved my way relentlessly to the front of the crowd. Everything went dead quiet, and all I could hear was the pumping of my blood in my ears.

I pulled up short, in front of her body splayed out on the ground. It looked unnatural, with her knee bent all weird. Her bottle of water had spilled all over her stomach and now rolled around at her side back and forth, water dribbling from the open top. I wanted to clean it up. Her skirt was flipped up, revealing more than I wanted anyone to see. I threw my jacket over her lower half and sat there on the floor next to her until the paramedics came, like me sitting there would change something.

When the paramedics arrived, they enlisted a couple of guys from the wrestling team to pull me back, which said a lot because I wasn’t ripped or anything. The paramedics kept asking if we were related.

“We grew up together,” I said over and over again.

“You her brother?” the youngest paramedic asked as he held open the cafeteria door for the gurney carrying Alice.

“She was my friend. She’s my . . .” I didn’t know what Alice was. The guy shook his head and let the door swing shut behind him.

I should have lied. I should have said I was her brother, but I didn’t. It was one of those stupid mistakes that plays over and over in your mind for days.

The next week, she came back to school and didn’t even look at me. She acted like nothing had happened, and I began to wonder if I had imagined the whole thing. It was an earthquake, one that only I seemed to feel.