Julie Halpern - The F- It List

“I could bring you stuff. Crappy magazines and chicken soup?” It was all I could pitifully think to offer.

“Maybe. I’ll let you know. I’ve heard it can really get ugly.”

“You’ll never be ugly, Becca,” I assured her.

“I said it can get ugly, not I could.” She laughed a little, then choked on the laugh and coughed some more. Her eyes welled with tears. “I’m going to lose my hair, Alex.”

I deflated for Becca. That hair. If I had cancer, I could do without my hair. I had gone pretty close to no hair a couple of times. But Becca’s hair was too bountiful. “Alex?” She looked at me for help. “I want you to shave my head.”

“YOU WANT TO SHAVE your head? Why? Is your hair definitely going to fall out?” Cancer had so many preconceptions, so many things that I’ve heard about through passing Yahoo! articles I never bothered to read, movies I didn’t want to watch. Why depress myself? And here I was, living it. Or, not living it. Instead, watching it possibly devour my best friend.

“My hair will fall out. Fact. I don’t want to wake up with chunks of hair stuck to my pillow. This way, I control things.”

I understood that. Control in any situation is important; in one where you pretty much have none: imperative. “But maybe it won’t fall out,” I tried to reason, with no logic behind it.

“It will, and it will suck.” She stood up slowly off her chair. She moved more cautiously than I was used to. “Whatever they inject in me during chemo is attacking my cells, including the cells that do this.” She flipped the bottom of her bouncy, thick, nearly waist-length hair. A vacant and glassy expression let me know that as cool as she was being, she was not entirely one with the cucumber.

“Do you have a razor? Not, like, the leg kind, but for your head?”

“My mom bought one for me yesterday. She was totally crying because my soul lives in my hair, apparently. I’ll go get it.” Was that supposed to be funny? Was there a manual for this somewhere, How to Respond to People with Cancer, because I didn’t know what was appropriate and what was just plain off. Like when my dad died, and every person said they were sorry. I get that that’s the polite thing to say, but after a while it sounded so insincere. Just once I wanted someone to be honest, tell me that they couldn’t imagine what it felt like to one second have a dad, and the next second have a pile of body parts and insurance money that’ll pay for the college of my dreams. Would Dad even know if I went to college now?

I almost said something to Becca then about my dad, how I missed him or felt confused or even hated him sometimes for leaving just when I really needed him to lean on, but how did that make sense when the reasons I needed him all had to do with the cancer sufferer standing in front of me with a brand-new electric razor in her hands?

“Where should we do this?” she asked. I noticed a twitch in her hand, and I didn’t know if it was nerves or something to do with the cancer. I guessed nerves were technically something to do with the cancer. “Seeing as you’re the expert and all.”

That made me feel guilty. The fact that I’d shaved my head before, just to change things up, made me feel like a dick, as if it was insensitive of me. Did Becca see it that way? That only people who have to shave their head should be allowed to do so, otherwise it was just belittling the magnitude of losing one’s hair?

Or was I overthinking?

I chose to believe the latter and that, of the two of us, I technically was closer to being a professional head shaver than Becca was. “Do you have any garbage bags? The big black kind?”

“In the kitchen.” She sat down heavily on a rolling desk chair. “Would you mind getting them?”

“No, of course not. Need anything else?” She shook her head. “Why don’t you check in on your humping game pals, and I’ll be right back.” That got a smile out of her.

Becca’s mom stood in the kitchen cradling a steaming mug in her hands and staring out the window. In days BC (before cancer) I wouldn’t have hesitated to barge into the room, ask where the garbage bags were, and go on my merry way. But what if she was crying? And all I could offer her was a “sorry”? Thankfully, Mrs. Mason turned around and saw me, a drooped but tearless look on her face. “Hi, Alex, does she need something?” Obviously, Becca was at the forefront of her brain.

“We’re about to shave her head, and I came to get some black garbage bags for the mess. Under the sink, right?” I let myself into the cabinet and pulled out several bags. When I stood up, Becca’s mom was close by with a gallon Ziploc bag in her hands.

“Save some of it, please. In here.” If this were a horror movie, the moment could have been so creepy: the obsessive mom wanting to save lost locks of her daughter’s hair. Instead, it forced a lump to my throat.

“Thanks.” I grabbed the bag before the two of us lost our shit and ran back upstairs. Becca was in the same hunched position in her desk chair, no romping computer people to be seen.

“Got the bags. And your mom wants me to save your hair in this.” I held up the Ziploc.

“Weird. She better not give it away. I know they make wigs out of hair for cancer patients, but, shit, it’s my hair. And I’m already a cancer fucking patient.” She seemed angry for the first time today. If it were me, anger would have been my first, second, and third response to every step of this. Becca was still so composed.

“It is your hair. You should make a coat out of it or something,” I suggested as I cut a hole in one of the garbage bags. I pulled the bag down over her head to keep the hair off her pajamas. I ripped two other bags down their seams and spread them under the chair.

“Get that mirror, will you?” She pointed to a flimsy, full-length mirror that she used in various locales around her room to practice monologues. “I want to watch this.” Her expression was resolute. When the mirror was in place in front of her, she said, “I don’t think I have enough for a coat. Maybe a vest.” It could have been funny, if she’d smiled the tiniest bit when she said it.

“I’m going to use scissors before I hit the clippers, if that’s okay. Then they won’t get clogged.” I pulled a pair of red-handled scissors out of a drama camp mug on her desk.

“Give me a bob first, will you? I’ve always wanted to try one. Haven’t had the guts to go that short since that awful haircut in elementary school.”

“I’ll do my best.” I pulled all of Becca’s hair behind her head into a low ponytail, then started cutting with the scissors. “Damn. Do you have any sharper scissors? These are weak.”

“Just keep going, okay?” Becca’s eyes were wide as some of the newly shorn strands escaped the hold of my hands and dangled around her face. Eventually, I hacked my way through the dense ponytail and held it up.

“We got one, Pa,” I drawled as if I just cut the tail off a raccoon.

Becca said nothing, just turned her head side to side to look at her drastically shorter hair. “Kind of cute, right? I can rock this. When my hair grows back,” she convinced herself, as I bagged the ponytail in her mom’s commemorative Ziploc.

“Now for the buzzing,” I announced. “These razors have different length attachments. Which do you want?”

“The shortest one but not totally bald. I’d like to be fuzzy for as long as possible,” Becca told me.

I plugged in the razor and flicked on the switch. The razor jumped to life in my hand. I approached Becca’s head. “Ready?” I asked.

She inhaled deeply, in her actorly way, and then stuck out her hand. “I’ll do it.”

I didn’t ask if she needed help, just handed her the vibrating razor. Without hesitation, she attacked her hair on the right side of her head. Clumps fell off onto the garbage bags with a puff. When she approached the center, she changed sides and buzzed the left. Eventually, only a Mohawk remained.

“I almost look tough, don’t I?” She looked at me in the mirror.

“Badass,” I agreed.

Then down came the Mohawk.

In the end, a short fuzz remained of Becca’s once lustrous, long hair.

“I don’t know why,” I said, “but I just envisioned myself swallowing all the hair on the ground and choking to death.”

“Time to lay off the horror movies, Alex.” I actually pulled a tiny smile from her. She looked really pretty, hair be damned.

“Want me to shave mine now? In solidarity?” I asked. “’Cause I don’t mind.”

She turned in her chair to look at me instead of my reflection. “It doesn’t mean anything if you shave your head, Alex, because you would shave your head even if I didn’t have cancer.”

“True.” I looked down at the hairy mess.

“Instead, you should wear a really long, glamorous wig.” I widened my eyes in a horrified manner. “I’m just kidding. God. You’d think I asked you to have sex with my boyfriend and then get cancer or something.”

We both laughed. Maybe it wasn’t funny, but standing next to heaps of Becca’s hair while barely any was on her head, it felt a lot better than crying.

“I have one more thing I need you to do.” Becca was serious as I gathered the garbage bags from the floor.

“Sure. What? Anything.”

“Put down my hair, and sit. This is important.”

I dropped the garbage bags, and fluffs of hair exploded from the mess.

“What? You’re not going to put me in your will, are you? Because you’re not going to die,” I told her.

“Maybe. Maybe not. But I don’t have a will. I wrote something else. And I need you to help me with it.”

“What? Do you want me to kill someone?” I asked nervously.

“Alex, shut up. Although, I’ll keep that in mind. No, I wrote a bucket list. And I need you to help me do it.”

“A BUCKET LIST? Like something an old man writes when he retires? Bungee jumping and shit?”

“Not only old men write bucket lists, Alex. And I already went bungee jumping when my family went to Acapulco.”

“So what are you talking about?”

“Stuff I want to do before I die. Not only old people die, you know.”

“I’m thoroughly aware of that, thank you.” I pursed my lips at the thought that my dad, while parently old, would never have been considered an old man.

“All the more reason to do a bucket list. We have no idea how much time any of us have left, and what if we don’t get to do all of the things we dreamed we’d do?”

“Big fucking deal. Then we’ll be dead in a box, in the ground, not knowing any better. Actually, I’m thinking cremation and having my ashes sprinkled on the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland. But don’t tell anyone.”

“I’ll take it to the grave.” Becca smirked.

“Why are we even talking about this? You are not going to die. You are not. Going. To. Die.” I stood up and started to pace, kicking at broken pieces of frame glass along the way.

“Let’s say I’m not, for the sheer joy of being not dead, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be doing amazing things.”

“Amazing things? You want me to build a well in a Third World country?” I stopped pacing long enough to give her my patented you’ve got to be kidding look.

“Your kindness shines through your blackened exterior, Alex.” I flipped Becca off. “Maybe not amazing, but we have to do what we want and not let conventional fear get in the way. Like when we were freshmen, remember when Channing Tatum was at an appearance at a bookstore because he wrote a page or something in a book on dancing, and you totally wanted to go…”

“I thought we promised not to talk about that.”

“I’m playing the cancer card and bringing it back.”

“How gloriously thoughtful of you,” I drolled.

“I know, right? Anyway, you had that box with all of those pictures of him in the secret hole in your closet, but you refused to go see him. And you cried, remember? Because you regretted not going.”

“I did not cry.” I sat down again at the degrading memory.

“Two tears, but for you that’s extreme.” I shrugged because I knew she was right. “We should never have any regrets, not when we’re dying and not when we’re alive. Like Ke$ha so wisely puts it, ‘Let’s make the most of the night like we’re gonna die young.’” Becca looked so determined, I couldn’t fault her for quoting Ke$ha.

“Does this mean you want me to write a bucket list, and we’ll drop out of school together and travel the world pursuing our sick and twisted fantasies and then drive off a cliff holding hands?”