Side Effects May Vary

by Julie Murphy

  He turned, and the way Harvey looked at me, with the moonlight dancing shadows across his features, made me wonder if he had known all along that I was uncomfortable with the ocean. It made me feel weak, so I forced myself to ignore the crippling scream in my chest and ran to meet him.

  His hand drifted through the water to find mine and I took it, my body easing with relief. Suddenly, my mom and Luke and Celeste mattered a little less.

  As we went out farther, the ocean floor began to disappear from underneath us, and I gripped Harvey’s hand a little tighter. I knew how to swim, but he pulled me along anyway. The ocean was quiet except for the sound of lazy waves lapping against jagged rocks. Finally, Harvey let go of my hand so he could float on his back. I wanted to cling to him, but I settled for treading water and staring at the moon. If I stared at the moon long enough, I could forget about the abyss beneath me.

  “Question game,” I said. “If the government was populating another planet and they asked you to go, would you?”

  “Would you be there?” He moved upright and dipped his head beneath the water, his wavy curls springing when he resurfaced.

  “Maybe.”

  “Then yes. If you had to eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

  “Peanut butter.” My guilty pleasure. Give me a ticking bomb slathered in peanut butter and I would gladly dig my own grave.

  “What would you do if your mom got married?”

  “That would be weird. I guess if he was an okay guy it wouldn’t be bad. I’ve never really thought about it. I wouldn’t, like, call him Dad or anything.” His voice was a little lost, reminding me of the boy version of Harvey. I think he was genuinely considering this possibility for the first time ever. “It would be good, I think,” he said, a little unsure of himself. “What about Eric Guy? How’s that going?”

  I smiled. “He’s good.” I didn’t know why, but I didn’t want to tell Harvey that Eric was moving. It felt like I would be losing some game.

  “How’s it going with Debora?”

  Harvey blew bubbles in the water, which I found to be a little gross. “I like her. Dennis thinks it’s weird. She’s nice, though. And pretty brilliant.”

  “And pretty in general,” I added. It was true. Even if I didn’t want it to be. She was pretty in a first-day-of-school kind of way.

  “Yeah,” he concurred. “Yeah, she is.”

  Harvey swam out a little farther, but I couldn’t make myself follow. I couldn’t feel the ocean floor beneath me, but I knew the farther out I went the less the floor beneath me would exist. Something slid against my leg. Seaweed, please be seaweed.

  “What do you want to do tomorrow, Harvey?” I asked, trying to distract myself.

  “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that.” His voice echoed from somewhere ahead of me, but I couldn’t spot the silhouette of his bobbing head because the moon had slid behind a cloud, blocking the light from our little world.

  “Okay.”

  Silence.

  “Harvey?”

  Silence.

  “Harvey?” I called again, the anxiety in my voice rising.

  Silence.

  “Harvey!”

  The ocean was still.

  I began to panic. “Harvey!” I screamed, my voice choking on sobs. My muscles tightened, but I couldn’t make myself be still and float. There was a jackhammer in my chest, completely obliterating my attempts at breathing. The salty water was wet in my mouth. Then I realized my lungs were full, not with air but with salty ocean water, and my eyes stung. All four of my limbs thrashed, creating splashes at the surface. I looked up to see the moon creeping out from behind the cloud; it looked wavy and distorted from beneath the water. My limbs wouldn’t push me forward. A pane of glass sat above my head, keeping me from the surface.

  Something torpedoed past me, grabbing me underneath my arms as it did. Water spilled from my mouth as I broke through the surface. My eyes were blurry, and I choked on the rush of oxygen. Harvey held me tight. I wrapped my legs around his waist, leaning my head against him. I was freezing, but his body warmed me. He treaded water for the both of us.

  “Hey! Al, it’s all right. Are you okay?”

  I nodded against his chest.

  After I caught my breath, Harvey swam back to the beach with me still clinging to him. It was slow going, but every muscle in my body felt useless. When the seafloor returned to us and we were able to walk, Harvey pulled me in front of him with my back to his chest and his arms wrapped tightly around my waist, squeezing me like I might disappear.

  On the beach, my legs wobbled, my muscles having forgotten the laws of gravity. Harvey held my hand and spotted me as I stumbled through the wet, cool sand. If I hadn’t been in complete shock, I would have relished the feeling of it sliding through my toes. I stood in the moonlight, shivering violently. We reached the pile of clothes and towels, and carefully he surveyed my body for damage before pulling his sweatshirt over my head and guiding my limp arms through the sleeves. I stared over his shoulder at the ocean, the unknown, the answers to questions I didn’t want to ask. Then he wrapped one towel around my waist and the other around my shoulders. I tore my eyes from the ocean, turning my focus to him.

  Then I kissed Harvey. I stood on my toes and kissed him on his salty lips. He didn’t say anything or push me away. He stood still, not kissing me back. His jaw twitched, but then that was it. My mouth went dry as my lips slipped into a wordless Oh. I didn’t know what I expected to happen. But I did not expect for him to place his hand around my shoulder and walk me back to the beach house in silence, which was exactly what he did. Was it Debora? Was she why he wouldn’t kiss me? Harvey didn’t say no to me. Even when he said he would or even when he wanted to, he didn’t. My breath quickened, and I walked past him and back into the house.

  Inside our room, he said, “You’ve got to change out of that bathing suit, Al. You’re shaking. I think you went into shock or something.” Then he left, giving me some privacy. I dried off and stripped out of my soaking mismatched bikini in favor of fresh underwear, boxer shorts, and his sweatshirt. I slid onto the bottom bunk bed, Harvey’s bed, and rolled over on my side, curling into the wall.

  I heard the door open. Harvey climbed up the ladder and pulled the blanket off the top bunk, and then he pulled both his blanket and my blanket over my body, tucking me in. He wasn’t going to sleep next to me. Completely disappointed, my eyes stung with the threat of tears. I’d lost him, and this time he wasn’t coming back.

  But then his weight sank into the mattress as he climbed under the blankets behind me. His hand slid up my bare back beneath the sweatshirt, and he began to trace letters of the alphabet on my back, like Natalie used to do to us when we were little.

  “Q,” I said. My muscles eased beneath his light touch, despite my racing heart.

  He tried again.

  “W. Harvey, where did you go?” I asked in a small voice that I had never heard myself use before.

  “I thought I felt the key to the beach house fall out of my trunks while we were swimming.”

  “Oh. B.”

  “Then I remembered I left it on the towel, back on the beach.”

  He continued to trace letters and some numbers too, even after I stopped guessing.

  “Al, it’s okay to be scared.”

  I swallowed. My mouth was dry and wordless. Just images of the water rushing around me, as I created my own panic. A nonexistent storm that had only been real in my head. My cheeks flushed.

  “Huh,” mused Harvey.

  “What?”

  “Did you notice the plastic stars on the ceiling?” Harvey stopped tracing on my back, the absence of his touch jolting me.

  I rolled over and leaned past him to look up at the ceiling. “Like the ones in your room,” I said. “Let’s sleep on the top bunk.” I crawled over him, the heat of his body pressing against mine for a moment, and climbed the ladder before he could object. He followed me up the ladder w
ith both blankets thrown over his shoulder, but not before opening the window next to the bed.

  “It feels so good outside,” he explained. “But I’ll make sure you stay warm.” I didn’t say anything, because that’s exactly what I wanted, for him to keep me warm.

  We lay down flat on our backs, side by side, our bodies barely fitting in the twin-size bed, beneath the glow-in-the-dark stars, the secrets between us thinning.

  “Someday,” I said, “when we’re married to different people, we won’t ever be able to talk to each other.” Turning on my side, I draped an arm over his chest.

  “I know,” whispered Harvey, running his fingertips along my arms.

  I slid in closer to him. “I couldn’t be happy for you, you know.”

  I’d always heard that when you truly love someone, you’re happy for them as long they’re happy. But that’s a lie. That’s higher-road bullshit. If you love someone so much, why the hell would you be happy to see them with anyone else? I didn’t want the easy kind of love. I wanted the crazy love, the kind of love that created and destroyed all at the same time.

  But Harvey had moved on, and all we had was whatever was left of our spring break. Here, tonight, Harvey felt easy and right, but tomorrow the light of day would melt the simplicity of night to reveal what we really were—a complicated, confused mess.

  He squeezed my hand once. “Me too,” he confessed. “It would feel wrong.”

  He turned into me and did that thing that always crushed me—he kissed my cheeks and my eyelids, saving my lips for last. His mouth was salty, but it didn’t make me thirsty. My hands drifted along the waistband of his shorts and up the back of his T-shirt. My body kept moving, even as I could feel the ground slipping out from beneath me, like in the ocean. His hands did the same, sliding up the sweatshirt I wore and up the length of my back and around to the front of my chest. I exhaled in his mouth.

  And then he pulled back and sighed. For a second, my lips continued to move, confused by the absence of his. The echo of his hands on my skin left a searing heat in my chest.

  I laid my head against him and he wound his arm around my shoulder. “What’s going to happen to us, Harvey?”

  He pressed his lips to my head and said, “It’s a surprise, I think.”

  Harvey.

  Then

  “Hello?” I called. “Al?” The house was quiet, which had become the norm now that Alice spent more time sleeping than not. I hated to think of her so still like that. Instead, I thought of how I’d taught her to drive a few weeks ago in the SaveMart parking lot and of the way that my fingers had brushed against hers as I’d helped her maneuver the steering wheel.

  After locking the front door behind me, I trudged down the hallway to her bedroom. Bernie had been invited to a client dinner with her firm. It was an attempt to include her, despite her dying daughter. A Good Samaritan act.

  Months ago, Bernie had cut back to half days at the office. Her five half days turned into two or three half days, and then those turned into mere hours a week. She tried to do most of her work from home, but a lot of the cases she worked on were handled by groups of attorneys, so it wasn’t an easy job to do solo. Originally, Bernie had declined the dinner invitation, but Alice had insisted that Bernie and Martin go. After much deliberation, they decided to attend only if I came over and stayed with Alice. Typically, Alice would guffaw at this, but she called me herself and explained the situation. She was completely reasonable and not at all bothered by asking me to babysit her.

  She was up to something.

  I knocked lightly on her door. “Alice?” No answer. “Alice?”

  “You can come in now, Harvey.”

  When I opened the door, Alice stood there with a small bath towel wrapped around her paper-thin body, water dripping off her and pooling at the carpet. Her legs were so much thinner than I remembered, making her kneecaps seem big and bulbous. Her body swayed a little, like she was bracing herself against a strong gust of wind that only she could feel.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize you had just gotten out of the shower. I’ll be on the couch.”

  “Come here.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Come here.”

  She could have said “Light your car on fire,” and I would have done it. I stepped forward a few steps.

  “Closer,” she said, and I spanned the last couple steps between us. “Closer, Harvey.”

  The space between us was nearly nonexistent, but I filled what little there was, pressing our bodies against each other. We were in a little bubble, and outside of that bubble I could hear the entire world spinning on its axis ten times its normal speed.

  Alice held her arms wrapped around her chest, keeping her towel in place. She looked up, her bottomless eyes steadying me, taking away my dizziness. Everything felt stable and solid again while she held my eyes with hers.

  Then Alice dropped her arms. Her towel fell to the floor, bunched up in a heap around her ankles.

  “What are you doing?” I breathed. She wrapped her arms around my waist and held herself against me, my clothing separating our bare skin.

  “I want to do this, Harvey,” she whispered into my T-shirt, walking backward, with her arms still circling my waist, pulling me with her.

  “You—you’re sick, Al.” She looked so fragile, like a feather could break her.

  “It’s a good day, Harvey. I can’t say that very often,” she said softly. And then, in her sharp, familiar voice, “Do not ruin this.” She tilted her face to mine, and I dipped my chin to meet her.

  Our lips touched. It wasn’t our first kiss, but in that moment, I knew the meaning of it all. I knew every word in the dictionary, every color in the rainbow. For a moment, cancer was cured and the world had halted to a stop in an eerie state of perfection.

  With our lips still joined Alice reached for the bed behind her, and leaned backward. I wrapped my arms around her, bending my body to the curve of hers as she pulled away the blankets. I laid her down on the cool sheets, gently, like she might break. Then I stood back and really looked at her.

  There was no denying that Alice had always been the driving force behind my hormones. But what I saw was wrong, not what I had always dreamed (yes, dreamed) Alice would look like. She was completely bare, and I saw everything the baggy T-shirts had been hiding for months. Her waist dipped in dramatically, her rib cage moving slightly with each breath. A mean-shaped bruise wrapped across her hip, purple at the center and yellowing at the edges, fading into her lighter-than-ivory skin. She bruised so easily now, and I wondered what small infraction was the cause of this one. The sharp ridges of her sternum jutted out, her collarbone draped with ashen skin. Tiny red dots splattered across her thighs and shoulders, broken blood vessels. I had only ever seen them a few at a time, but here with nothing to hide behind, they were an epidemic. Her lack of hair didn’t shock me. That, I had grown used to.

  She bit her bottom lip and used her arms to cover her bare chest. I was a horrible person, but I didn’t want to remember her like this. I didn’t want to remember that this shell containing Alice was withering away. I closed my eyes tightly, with my arms at my sides, my fists curled tightly.

  “Harvey?”

  But I wanted to do this.

  I opened my eyes and Sick Alice was gone, her wavy brown hair fanned out around her on her pillow, framing her face and shoulders. Her cheeks were full and her curves filled out. The rosy tint teasing beneath her ivory skin had been restored.

  I didn’t care what Alice looked like. I never had. I just wanted her to be alive. I hovered above her, knowing that what we were about to do could never be undone. Her fingers played at the hem of my T-shirt as she slipped it over my head. My lips met her neck and spread small kisses to her ear and back as she turned her head to the side, her lips parting and her eyes closed.

  She twisted over to her bedside table, opened a drawer, and retrieved a condom, holding it between two fingers.


  I stood and slipped out of my remaining articles of clothing. What if I didn’t do this right? What if I couldn’t do this?

  “Harvey,” Alice said, her voice slipping through my insecurities. “Harvey, I need you to be in this moment with me because you’re the only one I’d ever want to share it with.”

  Her words swept away my doubt. I lay down next to her, propping myself up on my side with my elbow.

  It was true. I didn’t know how long we would have after this. It could be five days or five years, but no matter how short or long our time was, I could no longer spend it as friends. I didn’t need a label to own her with. I needed to know that we were more, that she would belong to me just as much as I had always belonged to her.

  “Is this . . . have you done this before?” I asked.

  She shook her head no.

  A little bit of the tension inside of me settled. Not that I wanted her to be a virgin or anything. I wasn’t like that. It was that this would be as new to her as it was to me. “I can’t be just friends after this, Alice.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “You’re okay with that?”

  She nodded. Her eyes told me she loved me. Tonight, she loved me. Even if she could never say it. Does love still exist if you can’t say it? If you can’t admit it? I wasn’t sure, but her eyes had told me enough. I took her face in my hands and pressed my lips to hers. She tasted like Chapstick, waxy and sweet.

  And I found out sex wasn’t this perfect, airbrushed, mind-blowing thing. It was quiet and sweaty and personal. But it felt good. And I’d get better at it. I wished I could get better at it with Alice.

  I had loved her for so long. I didn’t think it was possible for me to feel any more for her, like she had already maxed out all my feelings. But that wasn’t how it worked. That night Alice swallowed up a whole piece of me I never knew existed. She ruined me that night.

  When you’d loved the same girl for your entire life, it was hard to believe that there might be anything after that. When you’ve loved one person so wholly, do they take that love with them? Was that how it worked? If so, I was okay with that. I loved every bit of Alice, even the horrible, ugly parts of her that made other people cringe. If this was all the love I could ever give, then my love had been well spent. When Alice was gone, she would take all my love with her. Whether she was floating through some heaven or decomposing six feet under, that part of me would always go with Alice.