Dessert First

by Dean Gloster

“In the morning, you’ve got a house tour. With clients,” I said. “If you don’t get some real sleep, you’ll scare them. You look like an experiment with raccoon DNA.” Mom was a realtor, and on Thursday mornings in Berkeley they have “brokers’ opens” where realtors tour the homes that are going to be open houses the next weekend. They can even drag their buyer-couples along, like Mom was supposed to do. She needed a good night’s sleep, which she wouldn’t get if she stayed in the hospital.

  “What about your schoolwork?”

  Good question. I nodded toward my backpack on the visitor’s chair. “I brought my books.” Not that the books would be doing the short-answer questions by themselves. “And a change of clothes.” I could shower in Beep’s hospital room bathroom before heading back across the Bay on BART in the morning for school.

  “You have to be eighteen to stay overnight,” Mom said.

  “No. I only have to say I’m eighteen, if they ask. I’ll tell them I look young for my age, and I’m sensitive about it.” Which would totally work. The pediatric unit was full of kids with heart defects and lung problems that made them look small for their ages.

  I wasn’t sure why someone has to stay with Beep all night, because he was surrounded by a hospital full of doctors and nurses, but Mom was convinced that he’d get gobbled up by flesh-eating bacteria or something if one of us wasn’t there to press the call button. At least with me guarding him, Mom would be able to sleep, knowing I was on the lookout to make sure they hadn’t hauled Beep to the operating room for secret organ harvesting. (Organs full of cancer, probably not high on the must-have spare parts list. But common sense isn’t the border of Anxiety Momistan.)

  It took twenty minutes of knocking down Mom’s objections, one by one, to get her to agree, and in the end, Beep still had to play the cancer card.

  “Please, Mom,” he said. “Don’t make me use my one Make-A-Wish just to get a night to hang out with Kat.”

  She paused, pressing her lips together, but I knew we had her. “Fine,” Mom said. “But you have to call if anything—anything at all—happens.”

  I promised to text regular updates all evening. Then I physically walked Mom to the door, with my hand on her back, in case I had to literally push her out of the room.

  “Whew,” Beep said, when we were finally alone. “Thanks.” His hair hadn’t fallen out yet from the chemo, but he had a buzz cut, so when what was left came out, it wouldn’t be in big clumps.

  I plopped down on the guest chair, and let out a long breath. “You look good,” I said. “Like the world’s smallest U.S. Marine. It’s weird that you’re not doing sit-ups or something.”

  Beep grinned. “I could do a sit-up. But I’m saving my energy for the dry heaves. They’re a better ab exercise. You should try them, to get in shape for soccer.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.” On my current no-homework program, there wasn’t much point in conditioning for soccer—dry land, dry heaves, or otherwise—because I wouldn’t be eligible. “But maybe you should do a workout video. For cancer kids and bulimics: ‘From Sit-Ups to Spit-Ups: Dry Heaves As a Functional Exercise.’”

  Beep laughed, which he always did at gross-out humor.

  Beep turned off the TV, which had been silently broadcasting some show from the Cartoon Network on mute. “Better call Mom,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “Something ‘just happened.’ You know—I turned off the TV.”

  I laughed. “Yeah. I should totally keep her updated. How’s it been, in Anxiety Momistan?”

  “Gaah,” he said. “Insane.” He did an impression of Mom’s voice. “‘Honey, should I try to get them to increase your dose of Zofran? Have some water. Don’t get dehydrated. Let me adjust your pillow. Don’t rub your eyes—you can get germs that way. You really should use the hand sanitizer again. Eat something, honey.’ Yeah—something pretty, because I’ll see it again.”

  He flopped back on his bed. “Was Mom always this bad? And I just didn’t notice cause it wasn’t focused on me?”

  Not really. Her anxiety had gotten worse, but I didn’t want Beep blaming himself or his cancer on how whacked-out Mom was. “Pretty much. She just freaked out over smaller things, so it was even weirder.”

  “Smaller than—”

  “You know, cancer. It’s like the woman thinks you have a serious condition,” I said. “Crazy bitch.”

  I got a shock laugh out of Beep with that, which was the goal, but he couldn’t stop laughing, and then the laughs turned into coughing. I got up to pat him on the back, but before I could he leaned over the side of his bed where the spit-basin was, and threw up with a watery splat. And then another.

  I felt awful. “Sorry, sorry.” I grabbed the pink basin he’d barfed into and carried it into the bathroom to get the acid-retch smell away from him, and set out a clean plastic basin to replace it. Then I gave him a warm wet washcloth for his face and gave him a peppermint candy to get rid of the puke taste. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. “It was going to come back anyway. That’s the most fun barfing I’ve had all week. You should come entertain me all the time.”

  “Nah. You’re already sick of my jokes.”

  That made him laugh again, so I clapped him on the back.

  “I’ll rub your back,” I told him. He rolled over onto his side, so he wouldn’t mash the snaking Broviac line in his chest. I rubbed his back, keeping it gentle so he wouldn’t bruise. He was already bony again. I could feel each of his little ribs. Get well, I thought with every circular rub across the tops of his shoulder blades. Get healthy. I wished his cancer hadn’t come back, and that it would have waited until he was bigger and stronger.

  “You give the best back rubs,” he said after a while.

  “Don’t tell Rachel. She’ll get jealous.”

  “Yeah,” Beep said. I’d been joking, but he sounded serious.

  “She’s bummed that she can’t visit you more,” I said. “Because of her cold and Mom’s paranoia.” Rachel hadn’t actually said that to me, but I assumed that she would have, if we still talked, like normal sisters.

  • • •

  It was totally worth it, but it was a long night. Every two hours a nurse came in to check on Beep and take his vitals, waking me up, and the blood-draw lady came before 6 A.M., when it was time for me to get moving. But it had been fun, chatting with Beep, and at least Mom got some sleep. In the morning I headed back across the Bay to spend the day yawning and dozing in school, unaccompanied by finished homework.

  10

  I was doubled over in P.E. on Friday, after running the mile for time, gasping for breath, while my stomach tried to decide if it was going to start Beep’s dry-heaves-as-exercise program. I was definitely not in soccer shape, but I’d gone for it anyway. Coach Paulsen had said this run affected our P.E. grade, and she’s old-school, always-give-a-hundred-and-ten-percent.

  “Nice hustle, Kat.” Coach Paulsen walked over. She’s also the varsity soccer coach, so she knows me. She’s tall, with short blonde hair, an angular face, and that athlete-for-life lean look even in her thirties. “You’ll get more air if you straighten up.”

  I knew that, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to spit up. I straightened anyway. I figured she was going to hassle me for being out of shape.

  “We need you out there this year. Playing center mid,” she said.

  Ah. About soccer and my grades. Deep breath in. Slow breath out.

  “The other girls play harder when you’re on the field,” she said. “Scrimmage harder, too.”

  I’d never thought about that. I play aggressively on defense, all about the slide tackle, even in practice. I play clean, but intense. I’m that girl that the other team starts fouling before the first half ends.

  “So you need to get your grades up,” she finished.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said, which in most of my other classes so far hadn’t included finishing homework.

  “Good.
We need you.”

  No pressure, or anything.

  11

  The first time Beep temporarily died, he picked an inconvenient night. It was the evening in October when I was supposed to put together the final PowerPoint for our World History group presentation and email it to Kayla and Ashley and Jamaal, so they could practice it before morning. Instead, I saw Beep go into cardiac arrest and stop breathing for a while.

  Beep had been pretty thrashed coming off radiation treatments, and they’d put him on an even more barf-o-matic chemo cocktail than usual, which made him throw up so much that his esophagus ruptured and started bleeding, as he weakly puked red streams. With a lot of blood cancers—including Beep’s—bleeding isn’t good: Your blood is so messed up it doesn’t clot; once it starts pouring out, it won’t stop.

  The whole family had been visiting Beep when he started the red spit business. Mom freaked out, which, for once, was totally appropriate. She put half the hospital staff in headlocks until they’d come look at Beep. Pretty soon the room was crowded with scrubs. Beep’s vital signs crashed and he stopped breathing, and his heart stopped. At that point, they semi-threw us out. Mom, wanting us out of the way of the medical staff, herded the family to the waiting room to sit, terrified.

  I get why you push the family out, so they aren’t in the way, when you’re trying to save a kid’s life. Still, the waiting room? Where we can’t even hear what’s going on? While my brother might be dying? It was partly Mom’s doing, but that was bull manure piled so deep it could drown short people.

  Mom, Dad, and Rachel were sitting in the waiting room clutching each other looking frozen—except Dad, who was trying, but failing, to look not scared, which was somehow scarier. I said I was going to the bathroom, and instead marched toward the ICU. Dad made sputtering Dad noises, but Mom shouted after me, “Report back.”

  Sneaking into the ICU is easy—just don’t skulk. Stride down the hall like you belong or even actually own the hospital wing because of some huge charity donation. It’s not hard, because (1) any hospital floor has dozens of rooms screened off by curtains, with plenty of places to duck into, (2) during a code involving your brother, with his heart and breathing stopped, the scrubs-people have plenty to do other than keeping you out of the room next door, and (3) I did belong. By then I’d logged more hours in the ICU than most bone marrow kids.

  So I strode back to the room next to Beep’s. The kid in there was a frightened ten-year-old named Nathan with ALL, who stared at me with wide eyes. His mom had stepped away for all of fifteen minutes to the cafeteria, leaving the poor guy to overhear a nearby cardiac arrest after chemo.

  “Don’t worry, he’s fine,” I lied confidently. “And his kind of cancer is different from yours.” But not being able to see what was going on ramped up my anxiety. “I’ll check on him, though, to make sure.”

  I scuttled over into Beep’s room and slid into a corner, like I was invisible. The nurses and the doc working on Beep were matter-of-fact about it, which was slightly reassuring. Nurse Chestopher was doing Beep’s breathing for him, holding a plastic balloon up to Beep’s face. It’s called hand-bagging, which sounds like hitting someone with a purse but was totally different. He squeezed it to force air into Beep’s lungs. At the same time, Nurse Adrienne was next to the bed, mashing on Beep’s chest to keep his blood flowing. She was also watching the red LED readout on the monitor. At short breaks, she’d stop her mashing and say, “No pulse. No breathing.”

  Beep sat up during one of those, stunning everyone. Chestopher pulled the bag away from his face. “I’m not ready to go,” Beep said in a clear voice. He didn’t even open his eyes. “I’m just twelve.”

  I got excited about that. But then he flopped back down.

  After a shocked moment, while a couple of people looked at each other, they went back to shoving on his chest, and Adrienne said, “No pulse.”

  Beep. Come back. Please please please.

  Chestopher spotted me and switched off with someone else, who started hand-bagging Beep instead. “Kat, you don’t need to see this.”

  I moved, as he came over, like I’d dodge his long arms if he tried pushing me out. “I’m staying.”

  “Then let me explain,” Chestopher’s voice was quiet, like how you talk to an animal you don’t want to frighten. He talked me through the rest of the drama. They gave Beep drugs to sedate him and partly paralyze him so they could “intubate” him, which is to stick a plastic hose down his throat into his lungs to have a machine breathe for him. Once they had that going, they’d shock his heart, to restart it.

  Someone yelled “clear,” and they slammed electricity through the paddles. Beep bounced about a foot off the bed. It didn’t work. They did it again. Then Beep’s heart decided that was exactly enough electric-shock torture, and started beating on its own.

  They just tidied up after that, putting more blood products in him and stopping the potentially fatal bleeding. Piece of cake. My hands shook for forty minutes after they said he’d be fine.

  • • •

  The leading book for leukemia patients warns about chemo drugs: “Heart failure can also occur, but is rare, mild, and usually successfully treated.”

  Really. That’s a sentence from an actual book, from an actual hospital, called Johns Hopkins Patients’ Guide to Leukemia. Coming at us with more spin than a world-class Ping-Pong serve. No wonder Mom has an anxiety disorder, when even the freaking hospitals are so obviously lying about important stuff.

  How can they get away with calling heart failure “mild”? (“Sure. The kid’s heart stopped and he died. But it wasn’t, you know, spicy.”) There was nothing mild about the terrifying procedure that yanked Beep out of the revolving door next to the pearly gates. But I posted a quick Facebook update on Beep’s adventure anyway, in Mom Calmese:

  A little scare with Beep tonight. Some trouble stopping bleeding. After great work from our wonderful medical team (and lots of bags of blood) Beep’s stable, and fine, and sleeping well. Remember, donate blood! Our cancer kids need it. Thanks again to the great team at UCSF.

  “Sleeping well,” really meant sedated out of his bald little head. While they were at it, the docs should have given Mom a shot too. If the bags under her eyes got any bigger, she’d mistake one for her purse, and we’d never find the car keys.

  • • •

  With Beep briefly dying, and my hands shaking, and then my sitting there staring at Beep while he was sleeping, I didn’t finish the PowerPoint slides for our group project and email them until the next morning. That is, the same morning we had to present, first period.

  It was harder than it sounds to pull together, because I had to revise what everyone sent me and put it into bullet points, especially difficult with Kayla Southerland. She uses words like she uses makeup—too much, badly, and not in the right place. And after Beep’s cardiac arrest, somehow I had trouble concentrating.

  The kids in my presenting group—especially Kayla and Ashley—were furious, like I’d single-handedly wrecked everybody’s academic record and choice of colleges. Even though I’m not sure Kayla Southerland needs a good World History grade to get into remedial beauty school, where she should probably go to adjust her makeup before going outside, let alone off to college.

  I cut short the group rag-on-Kat session at the start of class by saying I’d talk to Mrs. Miller, explain about Beep’s heart stoppage, and get us put over to the next day. There were other groups presenting, and they always run over anyway.

  So I tromped up to Mrs. Miller, barricaded behind her big gray desk, bathed in the scent of dry erase marker and too much floral perfume. As soon as I started explaining, she folded her flabby arms across her chest and cut me off. “I told everyone at the beginning that deadlines are deadlines, and the point of working in groups is that if you run into problems, rely on the people in your group. I’m sick of student excuses.”

  I stared at her. I was pretty sick of my brother having cancer, but watch
ing him temporarily die really did cut into quality homework time. I tried to explain again, about how Beep had his heart stop, and how they had to bring him back with electric paddles.

  She closed her eyes briefly. “Hold on. Beep Monroe is his name?”

  I nodded.

  She pulled out her phone, and started thumb-clicking away. Students weren’t supposed to use our phones in class, but maybe teachers could get away with setting a bad example.

  “Well.” She gave me an exasperated look, like she was disappointed, but not surprised. “According to his Facebook page, it didn’t sound dire, since it was just ‘a little scare.’ I’ve had it with exaggerations and alibis. Your group will present first.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I was getting slammed for successfully downplaying Beep’s temporary death in Mom Calmese.

  Our group got a D-plus on the presentation, a grade that included massive additional points taken off because of my so-called “insolence” when I tried to argue more about our presenting first.

  Then, in a really amazing coincidence, the next morning the cartoon cat on my locker sprouted enormous permanent-marker male genitals, with an arrow pointing at them and lettering that shouted “Kat Likes.” The handwriting looked like Kayla’s. My life kept getting better and better.

  • • •

  “Kat, could you stay for a moment?” Mr. Brillson asked at the end of English class the next Friday, looming over my desk. “I’d like to talk to you about your assignments.”

  My stomach dropped. I’d been expecting this for weeks.

  The bell rang. Tracie shot me a poisonous glare of tight-lipped disgust on her way out the door that said great—you’re screwing up in another class.

  Since the beginning of the quarter, instead of doing the essays and short writing, I’d been handing in reworked pieces from my cancer blog. The first couple had been vaguely related to the assignments, but now I was handing in stuff about cancer and the language of Mom Calmese and the side effects of chemo that had zip to do with the work assigned. And my papers kept coming back from Mr. Brillson marked, Please see me, which so far I hadn’t.