After Ever After

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  “So of course you told her how you threw out the letter, right?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “So you didn’t tell her about the letter? That wasn’t very honest of you.”

  For the millionth time, I forced myself to take a deep breath. Then I said, “Hey, uh, can we just work on math for a while?”

  “Absolutely.” He booted up his laptop and put it on the table in front of us. “But while we’re waiting … is there anything I should know about the seat on the exercise bike?”

  I smiled. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe.”

  Tad punched me, and we got to work.

  Over the next few weeks, Lindsey and I spent every spare moment talking. Or texting. Or IM’ing. Basically, we did everything but connect our houses with two cans and a string. I found out so much amazing stuff about her that I don’t even know where to begin. I guess a list makes as much sense as anything else, so here goes.

  AMAZING STUFF ABOUT LINDSEY

  Moved from California because of her dad’s job. He’s a digital effects designer, and Lindsey knows how to make movies on a computer. Her name was even in the credits of a movie once.

  Her supposed BFF from California started out e-mailing her every day, but now they’re running out of things to talk about, and the messages have slowed down to maybe one or two a week. (Who could run out of things to talk about with Lindsey? I told L. that her “friend” must be an idiot.)

  Misses Cali oranges the most; insists that Florida ones aren’t as sweet. Promised to let me do a taste test someday.

  Loves baseball, is a huge Angels fan. When I told her I love the Yankees, she went into a whole speech about their lame payroll-to-wins ratio. Really knows the sport. Favorite color: red. Looks hot in Angels jersey, but I will never admit it.

  Has one older brother named David, who’s away at college. Actually likes having both parents to herself.

  Says I’m different from other guys because when I met her, I didn’t check out her body. Or as she put it, “You actually looked at my face. I love that.” I changed the subject before my truth-telling compulsion could burst her bubble.

  Knows how to surf and ski. Has never shoveled snow.

  Thinks Tad is “sweet, deep down inside.” I was like, “Dude, I think you’d have to be doing some serious exploratory drilling before you found Tad’s sweet spot.” But I am glad she likes him OK.

  Speaking of Tad, he was doing a great job of helping me with my math, plus I was up to three sets of curls with ten-pound weights by Thanksgiving. AND I got an eighty-six on my first report card in math. I know that probably doesn’t sound so high to you, but for me it was a total world record. My father practically wet himself.

  In other news, Tad walked across the entire exercise room the day before Thanksgiving. He could barely breathe when he sat down on the weight bench afterward, but he was smiling from ear to ear as he gasped, “Twenty-two steps!” Again, not such a Guinness moment for most people, but in Tad-steps, that’s like a mile and a half.

  So everything was going great, which is why I should have known we were in trouble. But I let my guard down, and BOOM!

  Before I tell you what happened, I have to tell you something about me. A couple of years ago, we got a phone call. In the middle of mowing his lawn, our Grampa Pete had slumped over the mower and died of a heart attack. Steven went into hysterics. I mean serious hysterics — like, he couldn’t even breathe. I think I probably cried some — I really loved Grampa Pete — but I didn’t lose my mind like Steven did.

  When Steven got calmed down, he looked at me and said, “What? Aren’t you even upset?”

  I was like, “Of course I’m upset. I’m just not surprised.” That’s yet another thing about cancer. See, most kids who haven’t had it think that their normal, everyday lives are safe, that their parents’ jobs are secure, their grandparents won’t die without a warning, the stock market won’t crash. Their mom and dad won’t get divorced. Their family pets won’t run out in the street and go SPLAT. Most kids, even though they don’t realize it, believe they live in a plastic bubble.

  But most of my earliest memories are of spinal taps, throwing up for two hours straight on my birthday, watching my own hair fall out while my friends were worried about learning how to write their names in crayon. And I guess Steven has had a lot of those shocks, too, through being my brother. But that’s still not the same as being me. I remember this other time, Steven came down to the hospital in Philadelphia with me, and found out that another leukemia patient had died. Her name was Samantha, and I don’t remember much about her, except that she used to play Go Fish with me. Anyway, Steven went absolutely ballistic. I think they might have even had to give him tranquilizers. I was sad and all, but even at the age of five, I was also a little bit like, Duh! What do you think happens on the cancer ward when you’re not here? It ain’t all snow cones and Ping-Pong tournaments.

  Wow, it never occurred to me until just now that maybe I’m a bit more grown-up than my brother is. He still thinks life is supposed to make sense. I mean, I know it’s not easy to be like Tad, who constantly thinks the whole planet is zooming toward some kind of gigantic cosmic toilet. But skipping around being all jolly is just asking the world to smack you upside the head with a tennis racket.

  Which is what happened to me the day after Thanksgiving break.

  Can you believe it all started with a candy heart?

  Thanksgiving Day was pretty odd, because it was the first year Steven hadn’t been around. Come to think of it, it was the first time Annette hadn’t been over for at least part of the time. Mom made her usual huge turkey-with-every-single-side-dish-in-the-universe meal, and Dad and I ate as much as we possibly could. But without Steven’s bottomless-pit stomach around, we barely made a dent in the mounds of food.

  There’s no sadder sight than Mom’s homemade pumpkin pie with only three pieces missing.

  Steven called after dinner, but the connection was really bad. He had stayed up until three AM so he could call us during dessert, which was sort of nice, at least. It was only the third or fourth time I had talked to him since September, so there was a ton I wished I could say. But with my parents standing there, and my memory of that horrible convo he had had with them floating around in my head, I didn’t say much of anything. Most of the call was just him blabbing on and on about all the amazing drum skills he was learning, and how cool all the drummers from around the world were.

  Oh, and apparently he saw some zebras.

  I couldn’t imagine ditching Lindsey and my family for a bunch of stripey horses and some bongos, but whatever.

  The day after that, Mom went shopping and Dad worked. I rode my bike over to Tad’s and we hung out for a while playing violent video games. I’m more of a race car–game guy, but Tad loves to blow things up. Shocker, right? Then Tad’s mom made leftover turkey sandwiches for me, Tad, and the E.R.C. That’s what Tad calls his eight-year-old sister, Yvonne. It stands for “Emergency Replacement Child.” She was born less than a year after Tad was first diagnosed, so he insists his parents only had her in case he didn’t survive.

  After lunch, just so he would give me credit for trying hard, I asked Tad if he thought maybe we should do some math. He said I deserved the weekend off. So I told him in that case maybe I’d ride on over to Lindsey’s. Then he got all mad and said he wasn’t just some kind of twenty-four-hour on-call math service. I told him I knew that, and pointed out that I had just spent the morning machine-gunning random pretend mercenaries with him, but when I left he was still sulking.

  When I got to Lindsey’s, nobody was even home. I stood on her porch like an idiot, ringing her bell every minute or so, until I remembered she and her dad were going for the weekend to visit her brother at college. I know, I know. How could I forget something that big?

  Can you say “methotrexate”?

  So I rode my bike for miles and miles, then spent the rest of the day bored out of my skull at home. I repeated
the whole ugly cycle for the next two days — the only difference was that the turkey in the sandwiches kept getting older and drier. If there hadn’t been any school on Monday, I think I would have been eating green turkey jerky, and died of food poisoning.

  But no, there was the whole candy heart thing to contend with instead. When I got to homeroom, my teacher told me to report to the guidance office and see Dr. Galley. She’s new this year, or at least sort of new. She was around when my brother was in middle school, but then took the last couple of years off to get an advanced degree. I knew all this because, believe it or not, Steven stayed in touch with her by e-mail. Which is more than he did with me.

  I hadn’t seen her since the first year of my treatment. All I remembered was that she had soft, blond hair that didn’t quite match her tough-sounding voice. Plus, I knew Steven had an old in-joke with her: He always said that if she offered him a candy heart, he would run away in terror. Apparently she only busted out with the candy hearts right when she was about to tell you some horrible news. I knew Steven thought she was awesome, but truthfully, as I walked into her office I was kind of scared.

  I sat down in the hard plastic chair next to her desk, and she swiveled to face me. The blond hair had gone partly white, but other than that, she looked very much the same. She smiled at me and said, “Would you like a candy heart?”

  Yikes.

  “Uh, no, thank you.”

  She smiled warmly, like a happy grandmother. “So. Jeffrey Alper. I can’t believe how grown-up you are. I’m Dr. Galley. I don’t know whether you remember me, but I could never forget you. I can’t believe you’re that same little boy with the baseball cap from your brother’s All-City jazz band concert.” At this point, her eyes got all misty, and I almost got myself ready to hand her a tissue, but then she recovered. “I’ve kept meaning to call you down just to say hello, but with four hundred students on my caseload and all this testing to deal with …” She swept her hand in a circle to indicate the huge piles of official-looking boxes all around the little room. What perfect decor for a counselor’s office — nothing says Relax like a million standardized test booklets.

  “Anyway, I’m really happy to see you again, looking so big, strong, and healthy. How is your eighth-grade year going so far?”

  She sat there perfectly still, smiling and waiting for my answer. It was unnerving. If genetic scientists ever cross an elderly homemaker and a praying mantis, the result will look a whole lot like Dr. Galley. Oh, boy. This woman knew something. But what?

  “Oh, fine, fine. Thanks for asking.” I looked down into my lap and folded my hands.

  “That’s great to hear. I’ve been looking over your five-oh-four plan, and I see that you have faced some academic challenges in the past. But your first marking period grades look good. I haven’t heard any complaints from your teachers, either.”

  She stared. I twiddled my thumbs. She stared some more. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I grabbed my backpack, started to stand up, and said, “OK, then, since everything’s going so well, I guess I’ll just head on back upstairs. It was really great seeing you again, but I have science first period, and I wouldn’t want to miss any —”

  “Jeffrey, I just got off the phone with your mother.”

  Wham! My butt hit that chair again so hard my teeth rattled. I suddenly remembered this time in sixth grade when Jimmy Blasingame got called downstairs, and the counselor told him his father had been in a car accident. “Is everything all right? Is Steven OK? What happened?”

  It was weird — even though I’ve been mad at my brother for months, he was the very first person I worried about. I guess even if your idol drops you like a radioactive hot potato, that doesn’t mean you want them to get squashed by a charging rhino. Or mauled by a lion. Or even bitten by the deadly green mamba snake. Unless those are in South America, not Africa.

  I shook my head to clear it, and Dr. Galley said, “Everybody in your family is fine. I was just calling up the parents of all my students with five-oh-four plans to discuss the upcoming testing, and I surprised your mother a bit. Do you want to guess what she and I figured out?”

  Surprised my mother a bit? What did she — oh, geez. “Uh, the square root of negative one?”

  “Try again, Jeff.”

  I felt the breath leave me in a whoosh. I swallowed, then said, “Does it have to do with the new promotion requirement?”

  “Bingo!” she said, and pushed the candy hearts across the desk again. This time, I took one.

  That Dr. Galley is wasting her talents as a school counselor. Really, she should be an interrogator for the army. I tried to resist, but at the first sign of pressure, I spilled like a waterlogged piñata. Then she called my mom. By the time I got home from school, I was almost surprised there wasn’t a WANTED: JEFFREY ALPER poster plastered across the front door.

  As it turned out, that was only because my parents weren’t home yet. Mom got there first, right when I was in the middle of making oatmeal. She started in on me right away, and wouldn’t even give me a one-minute cease-fire to finish the crucial sweetening procedure. As a result, I rushed the tasting part, and ended up burning the roof of my mouth to shreds. “Jeffrey Alper,” she screeched, “how could you? Did you think you’d be able to hide this from us forever, just by getting rid of the letter? Did you ever think about what would happen when you failed the state test?”

  Ooh, that made me mad. Unfortunately, my singed palate took away some of the power of my argument. “Gak’s not gair! Goo gon’t know I’n gonna kail ga kest! Why gon’t goo hag any kaith in me?”

  The weird thing is, Mom understood what I said anyway. “It is fair, Jeff. I do have faith in you — usually. But how am I supposed to react when you deliberately deceive your parents? Plus, I’m sorry to say this, but there is a chance you might fail that test.”

  I swished some water around my mouth until I could talk again. Then I replied, “But I fixed the whole situation. Tad has been doing a great job tutoring me. Come on — you know I got an eighty-six in math this marking period. I’ll be fine.”

  “Maybe, Jeffrey. But I’ve been teaching for a long time, and I’ve seen plenty of kids pass my class and still fail the state test. Those tests don’t always match up with what kids learn in their courses.”

  “So what do you want me to do about it? If the test doesn’t measure what I’m learning in school, what’s the point?”

  She sighed. “Jeff, don’t get me started on the testing system. This is not the time to make me even more irritated; plus, it’s irrelevant. You have to pass that test, and we have to come up with a real plan for making that happen. Do you understand me?”

  I played with my oatmeal. Mom hates that.

  “I said, do you understand me?”

  I played some more. Did you know that if you stir hot cereal really fast in a circle, you can make a little steam tornado?

  Mom grabbed my wrist. “Jeffrey —”

  “Do we have to tell Dad?”

  “What do you mean? Of course we have to tell Dad. Why on earth wouldn’t I —”

  “Mom, he’s the whole reason I stuffed that stupid letter down the disposal in the first place.”

  “You stuffed it down the disposal? It was recyclable!”

  “Uh, Mom, can you please focus? I stuffed the letter down the disposal because Dad already hates me enough without this hanging over everything.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Mom, you’re kidding, right? Haven’t you ever noticed how mad your husband gets whenever your son has trouble with math? I knew if he saw the letter, he’d, like, chain me to a desk and make me do worksheets twelve hours a night. AND he’d run out and get me some super-expensive tutor. Then he’d spend the whole year making critical comments about how Jeffrey’s condition will send us to the poor-house yet! whenever you guys think I can’t hear. Plus, he’d still insist on ‘helping’ me with the math himself. And he’d explode at me every fifteen seconds a
bout how lazy and unmotivated I am.”

  “Do you really think your father would do all that?”

  “Have you met my father, Mom?”

  “Oh, Jeffrey. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but your father loves you more than you will ever know. He just sometimes has a hard time showing it. And he gets so frustrated when you have so much trouble. But he’s not frustrated at you.”

  I snorted.

  “Jeff, do you remember the first meeting we had with your fourth-grade teacher, when she told us you were falling behind in math?”

  “Uh, I believe the actual phrase was hopelessly behind.”

  “Yeah, well … after you went to bed that night, and after Steven was safely locked away in his room, do you know what your father did?”

  “Um, try to sell me on eBay?”

  “No, he did not try to sell you on eBay! He cried, Jeffrey. He cried.”

  “Dad cried? About me?”

  “Oh, buddy. Your father adores you. He just worries about you so much. You have to understand: No parent ever wants to see his child struggle. And it’s even harder for Dad to see you struggle with math, because that’s always come so easy to him.” She sighed again. “Jeff, do you know how Steven always gets really impatient with us when he tries to explain some drumming concept and we don’t get it right away? That’s how your dad is about math. It’s so natural for him that he just can’t see why it wouldn’t be that easy for everyone. And he wants it to be easy for you — not because he thinks you’re stupid, or lazy, or anything else. Just because he wants his son to succeed. For your father, numbers have always been the path to success. He wants you to have that, too.”

  “So you don’t think he’s going to, like, ground me until I’m thirty?”

  “Nope,” Mom said. “I am.”

  The next day at lunch, I tried to fill Tad in on the whole fiasco. “Your mom grounded you until the test?”

  I nodded.