Julie Halpern - The F- It List

When we were relatively alone, aside from the people whose actual lockers were housed in that section, Jenna placed her hand on my shoulder and assured me, “Anything you need, Alex, I’m here for you.”

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.’”

I laughed, but switched gears quickly. “So was Jenna right about the chemo?”

“No, of course she wasn’t. I mean, yes, I’m having chemo, but not until tomorrow. So you can tell her know-it-all ass that she got something wrong. Fuck. She’s probably planning her audition scene for the fall play.”

“Who cares about that, Becca?” It felt like the two of us were avoiding the actual cancer discussion no matter how many times we brought it up or got close. But my stomach, heart, and hands wouldn’t get back to normal without knowing what the hell was going on. “Tell me what happened.”

“The long or short version?”

“Long, if you want to tell it.”

“It involves someone and some events that I probably shouldn’t bring up.”

“Davis, I’m assuming? He’s bagged and tagged to me. Speak about him freely.”

“If you’re sure,” she checked. I nodded the okay. “After we, you know, after your dad’s, you know, he kept calling me. And at first, I told him to leave me alone. But when you wouldn’t talk to me, I don’t know, I guess I was pissed at you, so Davis and I sort of hung out a bunch over the summer. Not really hung out in an intellectually stimulating way. More of an…” Becca pointed to the computerized sex on her TV. “That kind of way.”

I shuddered and grimaced, but I couldn’t fault her. Davis repulsed me at that point, and, well, Becca had cancer.

“I know this must suck to hear, and believe me it gets grosser.”

“I can’t imagine how, but go ahead. ‘It gets grosser’ is such an intriguing setup.”

“He was visiting down south”—she gestured to the crotchy portion of her body—“and he found some lumps. All very sexy, of course. I checked them out in the mirror later on, mortified I had some disgusting zit infestation or something. But they weren’t zitty, really, and then I realized I had them in other places, too. So my mom made an appointment for me at the doctor.”

“You told your mom Davis found lumps while deep-sea diving?”

“God no! I didn’t tell her how I found them, and she didn’t ask. After that it was like a shitstorm of doctor appointments and tests. The biopsy was fucking horrific. They seemed to want to rule everything else out before they went with the capital-C cancer diagnosis. Do you want more gory details about my summer?”

Gore, as in horror-movie-blood-and-guts-made-of-corn-syrup, I could handle. But after Dad’s death and the real-life gore of that, I could do without. “Why don’t you skip to what they said,” I told her.

“They said I have Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which they claimed is very treatable. So, yay me, I guess.” She didn’t look “yay me.” She looked petrified.

“That sounds promising,” I hoped.

“I guess, except that I still have to go through chemo, which, if everything I read about it online is true—”

“Which it never is,” I unhelpfully interjected.

“—is going to suck oversized donkey balls,” Becca continued.

“You have been hanging around Davis.” I rolled my eyes.

“Sorry,” she said.

“No. It’s okay. If Davis’s donkey balls help you get through cancer, then suck them all you like.” Becca threw a pillow at me.

“You know he stopped calling after I figured out it was cancer. Something like his next-door neighbor died of cancer, and he couldn’t handle it.”

“Sorry,” I told her. “He bailed on me, too, obviously.”

“He’s gone now. Joined the army.”

“What? When? We both dated a guy that’s in the army? That’s so weird. I’m a pacifist, for fuck’s sake.”

Our eyes floated over to the two sexing computer creations on her TV. “Dude, you need to turn that off. It’s so wrong.”

“Says you,” she uttered, but turned off the screen.

“So you go for chemo tomorrow? What exactly is chemo?”

“They explained it to me, but I only hear every sixteenth word when the doctors are talking. It’s so surreal. Like a TV show moment. You have cancer. And then I’m supposed to listen to someone explain a million billion things to me? What I got was that they inject me with a bunch of different drugs for a week that attack the cancer. Then I get at least a two-week break so my body doesn’t completely shut down, which sounds delightful because I’ll probably be puking and gross the entire time. And then I go back and go through it all again. And again. They said I need at least four rounds. I’m pretty freaked out.”

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked. A stupid question that too many people asked me after my dad died. I would have taken the chemo for her if I could.

“No, I don’t think so. But if I don’t call or text you this week, don’t be upset, okay? I have no idea what I’ll be like.”