The Cast

by Amy Blumenfeld

  Before I could respond, Lex hip-bumped Seth out of the way so she could grab his spot near the top of my bed. It was as if they were competing for my attention. As soon as he moved, she leaned her petite frame across the IV tubes on my blanket and peeled the latex glove from her hand. I was taken aback by the ease with which she embraced her proximity to “ickiness.” This was not a girl who ever played in the mud. “What do you think of this color?” she asked, wiggling her fingers inches from my face.

  “It’s turquoise,” I said, and looked at her quizzically. As a matter of philosophy, Lex wore only pink or red on her nails. She claimed it went better with her porcelain skin. She was right.

  “‘Robin’s Egg,’” she corrected, and made quotation marks in the air. She had started doing that thing with her fingers at the beginning of eighth grade. “You like?”

  “Yes, I like ‘Robin’s Egg.’” I chuckled, mimicking her air quotes. We locked eyes for a few seconds. But in that brief exchange, we acknowledged that there was no need to discuss her uncharacteristic color choice; we both knew she had picked turquoise because it was my favorite. “Thank you,” I said softly. Lex had a harder exterior than the others, but her core was just as tender. She simply held those cards close to the vest.

  “So, we brought you something!” Holly exclaimed, a little too exuberantly, as she dragged a chair across the floor. I was getting the sense that all this cheerfulness had been prearranged. As if they had agreed before walking in that conversational lulls were forbidden and it was their job to keep me entertained.

  Holly parked the chair by my elbow. When she sat down, I could see wisps of her silky red hair peeking out of the sides of the cap. “Jord,” she whispered forcefully. Jordana was perched atop the windowsill, where she was hugging her long, gazelle-like legs to her chest. She had clearly spaced out and missed her cue.

  “Oh, right,” Jordana muttered. She reached into her backpack and pulled out a black VHS cassette with Becca Night Live written carefully along the spine in her signature rainbow bubble letters. She passed the video to Holly, who handed it to me. Atop the cassette sleeve was a neon-pink square sticky note that read: “With Love, The Cast.”

  “What’s this?” I asked. Jordana seemed a thousand miles away. I couldn’t tell whether she was tired or simply out of her element—not that this room, or having cancer, for that matter, was my element, either.

  Jordana shrugged nonchalantly. I wanted to put her out of her misery and tell her it was okay to leave. But I knew if I did, she would simply deny that anything was wrong and remain in a quasi-fetal position on the windowsill. Beneath the mask, she was probably making that reluctant grin of hers—that go-to look she did every time she was asked to read one of her beautifully crafted essays in class, or when the principal presented her with some award for academic achievement, which happened at least twice a year. It was the smile that revealed her timid side, the side that was scared shitless and knew that opening her mouth would cause her brave facade to come crashing down.

  I loved the entire group, but Jordana was different. Her family became an extension of my own the day she moved across the street, when we were three years old. Lex, Seth, and Holly lived only a few blocks away. We were all in the same class until high school, but because Jordana’s front door was literally twenty-five strides from mine (forty strides when we were younger), she was more like my sister than just a friend. I knew when someone was in her upstairs bathroom or doing laundry in the basement. I could smell her family’s backyard barbecue in the summer and the smoky coziness of their fireplace in the winter. On the few occasions I threatened to run away from home—for the injustice of being denied ice cream before bed, or the time I claimed my “self-expression was getting muzzled” because I wasn’t allowed to wear a bathing suit for fourth-grade picture day in November—my parents didn’t balk. They knew that even if they were dispensable, I wouldn’t last a day without Jordana. For most of junior high, the kids at school referred to us as Jordecca.

  “We’re not telling you what it is.” Lex pointed her polished fingernail at me. “Just watch.”

  Holly popped the video into the VCR covered with partially peeled masking tape that read: “Pediatrics Dept.,” and shut off the room’s fluorescent ceiling light.

  After a bit of static, the movie began with a forty-second still shot of the pilling mocha couch in Jordana’s basement (the one in which we hid Halloween candy wrappers between the cushions when we were five, then completely forgot about them and remembered to retrieve them only when we were seven). They must have prematurely hit the record button, because the shot of the couch was uncomfortably long and I could hear Lex whispering directives in the background. But then, from stage right, Seth jumped into the center of the screen.

  “Live!” he shouted, with his hands in the air.

  “From Jordy’s basement . . .” Holly came in from stage left, landing beside Seth.

  “It’s Becca . . .” Lex joined in, with a singsong voice.

  “Night Live!” Jordana entered and crouched down on one knee, doing shimmying jazz hands.

  For the next ninety minutes, we sat in my hospital room, snort-laughing at sketch after endearingly pitiful sketch. There was a group dance to the Electric Slide; a “Weekend Update” news analysis of ninth-grade gossip; a bodybuilding scene where Seth and Holly stuffed toilet paper into their sweatshirts like Hans and Franz; and a cooking segment that accidentally set off the fire alarm in Jordana’s house, causing her father to run across the screen bare-chested and repeatedly scream, “What the fuck?”

  The amount of effort they had expended on my behalf took me aback. Did they really think I was dying? “When did you do all this?” I asked.

  “We shot most of it back in May when you left, but then we got busy with school and finals and stuff, so we finished it last weekend before Lex’s date,” Seth said matter-of-factly.

  “Lex’s what?” I rocketed into an upright position. This was major news, as none of us had ever been on a real date. I didn’t know anyone was even interested in dating. Though we didn’t publicize it, Jordana and I still played with dolls, for Chrissake!

  “My date,” she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Didn’t I tell you? I thought I told everyone.”

  “Nope, no idea,” I said, looking at Holly and Jordana for confirmation that this was a shocking headline. But it was clear this was news only to me—a realization that was more astonishing than Lex’s announcement.

  “It wasn’t a big deal, Bec. I just went to Carvel with a guy from math class.”

  “No big deal? Please,” Holly said, with palpable disbelief. “Let me tell you, Bec, it was like she was preparing for the Academy Awards. She changed her outfit seventeen times!”

  “Yeah, well, it didn’t matter anyway.” Lex flitted her hand in front of her. “He was totally weird. It’s not even worth discussing, ’cause that’s not happening ever again.”

  I reclined onto my pillows. “Can you pass me that water on the rolling table, please?” I asked Holly. I felt a lump form in my throat as she handed over the plastic cup. Never before had I felt so on the periphery of this group.

  I wondered if Lex had called about the date and my parents had forgotten to give me the message. I would’ve loved to hear the details—who he was, how he asked her out, what she wore, whether he kissed her. I glanced at the wall calendar opposite my bed. What was I doing last Sunday? I wondered. Oh, right. That was the afternoon Dad threw a container of Tylenol in a fit of rage. He knew I had tried repeatedly to swallow the tiny capsule. He knew my mouth was raw and sore. But right then, six weeks into my stay, something in him snapped. “You can handle chemo, radiation, multiple blood transfusions, and a fucking experimental bone-marrow transplant, and you can’t swallow a goddamn Tylenol, Becca?” he bellowed, before storming out of the room and down the hall. There was no point in arguing. I could tell he’d reached his breaking point, and I knew that my normally calm father
would return after he let off some steam. I simply took a deep breath like a patient parent who recognized her child needed space to work through his feelings.

  I thought for a moment about the dichotomy between Lex’s date and Dad’s tantrum and wondered where I belonged. Was I the little girl for whom the closest thing to a date was getting Barbie ready for a night out with Ken? Or did life experience give me wisdom, maturity, and perspective far beyond my years, making it seem as if I were a fifty-year-old trapped in a teenager’s body?

  “You’ve got to see these closing credits! They’re amazing,” Lex said, as she stood up and rolled the monitor’s stand closer to me. We had clearly moved on from the topic of her date. I turned my attention to the handwritten well wishes from teachers and classmates scrolling across the screen as Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings” played in the background. The whole thing would have been a complete tearjerker had they not accidentally recorded a toilet flush at the climax of the song.

  When the screen faded to black, Seth flipped on the overhead lights and climbed onto the windowsill beside Jordana. My friends glanced at me, awaiting a response.

  I searched my brain for the appropriate words. Touching? The greatest gift I’ve ever received? It makes me feel loved and secure and like I have the best friends in the world, even if I do feel like a charity case? I opted for keeping it simple. “It’s incredible. I mean it. Thank you. How the hell did you do that?”

  Four pairs of eyes crinkled with delight, even Jordana’s.

  “My dad won a Sony Handycam at his company’s holiday party,” Seth explained. “We set it up in Jordy’s basement. As you know, her house is the cleanest—least amount of crap to have to move out of the way for set design.” He leaned over and tenderly nudged Jordana’s arm with his shoulder, clearly trying to elicit a small grin, but came up empty.

  “We couldn’t figure out the camera’s edit function, so we just hoped the first take of every scene was good enough,” Holly added. “Maybe when you get out of here we can make another video. All five of us. You know, the entire cast.”

  Holly always knew just what was needed to make someone feel better. It was her sixth sense. When we were little, she was the kid who’d momentarily leave a group of friends on the playground to extend a hand to the shy child sitting on the sidelines. Her radar must have been going off now, because, as much as I adored the tape, part of me was feeling marginalized, wondering if I’d ever be able to play again.

  Just then, the door to my room opened and a nurse walked in. “I’m sorry, guys, but it’s time to go. It’s been two hours. Becca needs to rest.”

  In a single, fluid movement, Jordana ripped the shower cap off her hair, extended her lanky limbs, and jumped to the floor from the windowsill. Her silky blond mane swung from side to side.

  “Mwah,” she said, blowing an air kiss toward me with her hand. She already had one foot out the door.

  Seth followed with a high-five and a promise to call. I knew he would, because he dialed my hospital room every day at 4:30 p.m. As he exited, I could hear him ask Jordana if she needed help untying the back of her sterile paper gown. I grinned. Despite the radical upheaval of my world, some things—like Seth’s perpetual and unrequited fawning over Jordana—remained the same.

  Not surprisingly, Lex made a dramatic exit. She placed a hand on her hip and sashayed her petite frame to the door. She stopped, pointed to me, and said, “You look mahvelous, dahling,” imitating Billy Crystal on Saturday Night Live. I laughed. My reaction was genuine, but it was also what I knew she wanted. I could tell throughout the visit how hard she was trying to rise above her discomfort to make me smile.

  Holly lingered. While everyone was disrobing outside the door, she leaned over my bed and whispered, “I miss you, Bec. Hurry up and get home. It’s not the same without you.” And then, like a doting mother, she lowered her mask and kissed my scalp with her bare lips. As she stepped away, I noticed Jordana watching us sullenly through the glass window.

  In the weeks leading up to my hospitalization, I sensed something off in Jordana. If the five of us went out for pizza, she’d save me a seat beside her, as if sitting directly across the table weren’t close enough. If I told a story to the group, she’d chime in with something along the lines of, “Oh right, you told me that the other day.” These seemingly innocuous gestures staked her turf as the BFF with the inside scoop. I figured whatever was eating her would pass, but there it was again—right there at the hospital—in her silence, her distance, and her stare.

  “So, how was the visit?” my parents asked when they returned to the room.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Fine? That’s all we get?” Mom laughed and kissed my head.

  My parents had grown so accustomed to knowing everything about me—my platelet count, my urine output, what I ate for breakfast—that our boundaries had blurred. Holding back and keeping a little something to myself didn’t seem unreasonable. Not to mention, I didn’t really know how I’d summarize it. On the one hand, this had been the first day in seven weeks that I had actually felt like myself. Every fear I’d had about hair loss becoming a divide between my friends and me had completely vanished. It was almost anticlimactic. Their ability to take a look at the new me, process it, and carry on as if nothing had changed was exactly what I needed. Sure, Jordana wasn’t herself, but the rest seemed to manage just fine.

  On the other hand, I had never felt more out of the loop. Being excluded from Lex’s news made me wonder what else I had missed. Did they assume I had no interest in a conversation about what to wear on a date because I was busy fighting a life-threatening illness? Did they think I’d be jealous or incapable of sharing her excitement? This disease had shaken nearly everything in my world to the core—my appearance, my burgeoning independence, my ability to simply walk outdoors. Would losing common ground with my friends be the next casualty?

  I closed my eyes and pretended to fall asleep—the way I did whenever a social worker stopped by to chat, or when a circus clown visiting the pediatric ward knocked on my door. This time, however, I wasn’t avoiding those well-intentioned professionals. No, this time, when I shut my eyes, all I saw were my friends.

  I envisioned them schlepping into Manhattan from Queens that morning via the Q46 bus, then two subway lines operating on the excruciatingly slow weekend schedule, and braving a three-avenue walk to the hospital in what I heard was quite the heat wave.

  I looped the image of them donning those blue gowns, their eyes peeking over the masks and darting from wall to wall, ceiling to floor. To me, every inch of the ten-by-ten-foot sterile space was loaded. Even if we looked at the same objects, they wouldn’t see what I saw.

  To me, the cerulean-blue vinyl recliner in the corner by the window wasn’t simply a chair; it was the bed my parents took turns sleeping on every night so that I was never alone. The algebra and biology textbooks piled high on the radiator weren’t just study guides; they belonged to the residents and nurses who, for the entire month of June, spent their breaks helping me prepare for my New York State Regents Exams so I wouldn’t fall behind at school. And that dent in the wall beside my bed? I created that the night I shook so violently from chemo that the footboard banged against the wall and chipped the paint. I remember Mom throwing her five-foot-two-inch frame atop my blankets, pinning down all eighty-seven pounds of me with the force of a professional wrestler, and in a single breath emitting the most desperate string of words I had ever heard: “Don’t you dare leave me Goddammit Becca you stay with me do you understand don’t you do this!”

  I wanted so badly to tell her how I felt trapped in a foreign, defective shell. How the real me was right there, just beneath the shaky surface, ready to run and dance and be a kid. But I lacked the energy. I didn’t have the words to explain the divide. Instead, I summoned every bit of strength, grabbed her hand, and whispered, “Ma, I’m here.”

  Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t sleep. The warmth of the midaf
ternoon sun streamed through the window, and when I opened my eyes I noticed Mom and Dad had assumed their positions beside my bed and were quietly reading, just as they had been that morning.

  “No nap today?” Dad asked, looking at me over his glasses.

  I shook my head.

  “Well, I hear there’s a new movie out and it’s gotten rave reviews,” he said, closing his book and carefully placing it on the windowsill. “Just so happens we were able to snag a copy.” He smiled and waved the Becca Night Live cassette in his hand.

  It was a good idea. I wanted Mom and Dad to see it. I wanted them to know I had others in my corner, and that they didn’t have to carry the entire burden of buoying my spirits.

  About a half-hour in, a nurse entered to check my vital signs.

  “In all my years, I’ve never seen anything like this,” she remarked, watching the movie, instead of the dial on my blood pressure cuff. “I wish I’d had a group like this when I was fifteen. I bet you’ll be friends for life.”

  When she left the room, I shifted toward the wall so that my back faced my parents. I didn’t want them to see me dab the tear pooling in my right eye.

  Friends for life assumed so many things. Life, for one thing. But even if I survived, and even if this ugly, scary, acute stage didn’t turn my friends away, I wondered if the ripple effects eventually could. Would this crazy experience be just another childhood memory we shared, like trick-or-treating on Halloween or trips to the beach? Or would my cancer become the game-changer—the pivotal event we could all point to as the cataclysmic moment when everything was permanently altered?

  The sound of a turning key unlocking our apartment door jolted me out of my stupor, and I stopped the VHS tape.

  “I’m home,” Nolan called out. A second later, the door slammed shut.

  “Daddy!” Emma hollered, and ran into the foyer. He dropped his black messenger-style work bag onto the floor, kicked off his shoes, and lifted her in the air above his head.