by Dean Gloster
After a while, Dad called the funeral home and the hospice ladies and the medical equipment company, and pretty soon a bunch of strangers were in our house.
The hospice ladies came and hugged us all, those long nurturing hugs that last half a minute. They put Beep’s time of death on some official certificate, and one of them signed a form, while the other one took the Valium dropper bottle.
“Kind of a shame to have that go,” Rachel said. “It’d be nice if we could squirt a little liquid Valium under Mom’s tongue, as needed.”
“Yeah.” I put my arm around Rachel and leaned in to whisper. “But that little bottle wouldn’t last twenty minutes.”
We wrapped Beep up in a white sheet and the guys from the funeral home let Dad and Rachel and me carry him out to the back of their car, a beetle-black long dark station wagon like a vampire prom limousine, with curtains in the back. While we watched, they took my brother away.
Then Mom collapsed, sobbing, on the sidewalk. We surrounded her, first trying to pick her up, but that turned into a kneeling group hug while we all shook. Then there was an awful, awful howl, like a siren, but full of agony and loss and something broken and gone, and it went on for seconds before I realized it was coming from me.
31
My Last Post for Beep
Richard Bud Nelson Monroe, AKA the Beep, died at home this morning in his sleep, surrounded by love and beautiful music. There are no words.
It’s not fair that there is sunshine, in a world he can’t see anymore.
Good-bye, Beep, our shooting star: Bright, amazing, and here not long enough. He burned fiercely and fought bravely. Cancer never beat him. He finally went to a place it couldn’t follow. He doesn’t hurt any more. Now we do. We miss you Beep, and the best part of us—our hearts—go with you.
32
Rachel sang again at Beep’s funeral, and I joined in on vocals during the chorus and played electric guitar, especially butchering the opening to “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” Mom’s friend Mrs. Castlewitz played electric violin, so between her and Rachel’s great voice, we had plenty of production value to cover my mistakes.
When we got back to our seats, Calley Rose and Amber gave me little hand hugs, reaching from the row behind me to squeeze my shoulders.
“You sang perfect. Beautifully,” I whispered to Rachel. “Sorry I played so bad.”
“You were fine.” She put her arm around me. Under that comforting touch, something broke in me. I leaned into her, and buried my face in her shoulder, grabbing her with one arm, like I was never letting go. She wrapped the other arm around me, and I put both of mine around her.
During the eulogy part, someone’s cell phone went off and I whispered to Rachel, “It’s resurrection calling.”
Afterward, we stood outside, shaking hands with everyone as they left, and eleven zillion or so people shook our hands and hugged us. They all said “What a beautiful service” and told Rachel how wonderfully she sang and fibbed to me that I also played and sang the chorus well. And every single one of them said “I’m so sorry.”
I wanted to say back, “Apology accepted. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t your fault.” I didn’t, though. Turns out, even I can keep a lid on it in extreme circumstances.
On the way out, Evan didn’t say anything. He just gave me the longest hug. Which was way better than “I’m so sorry” eleven zillion and one.
We had an after party at our house that Mom called a reception. I didn’t feel like hearing “I’m so sorry” twelve zillion more times, so I mostly hid out in a corner with Evan and ate poppy seed cake with ice cream.
Evan leaned close. “Don’t let your parents try to make you forget Beep”—approximately the weirdest thing he’d ever said.
Before I could ask him what he meant, Mrs. Umbriss tottered over on stiletto heels under piled-up dark hair. “I guess God needs little angels.” She wiped away a tear.
“Excuse me?” I said. “If God is all-powerful, he can solve his staffing shortages without child labor. Recruited through freaking cancer.” I wanted to pelt her with cupcakes and then shove her face into a plateful of macaroni salad—give her another something to cry about. Instead, I grabbed Evan’s sleeve and pulled him away and toward Mom. “You’re coming with me, but you have to promise to not talk.”
“Okay.” He leaned back slightly, though, as I dragged him along.
I told Mom we were walking to Thousand Oaks Park, where Beep used to play when he was little, to say good-bye to him.
Mom compressed her lips into a how will I explain you’re not here tight white line, but I had her. Was she going to say, “No, Kat—you’re not allowed to mourn your brother your way”? No. Besides, it would be even harder to explain if I started bashing her guests for saying stupid things or shoving their faces into little plates full of food until they couldn’t even mumble.
On my way out, Rachel shot me an annoyed look, maybe because if she thought of it first, she could have used the saying-good-bye-to-Beep-at-the-playground excuse to sneak off with her actual boyfriend Brian. But now the excuse was taken, because I said it first. As usual.
So Evan and I walked the few blocks to the park and sat in the swings, like little kids. It was overcast and had rained, so the playground sand was wet, under gray clouds.
Finally I just sat in the swing and cried, closing my eyes while the tears trickled out, pretending I was invisible. When I opened them, Evan was finishing a message he’d dug into the wet sand of the playground with his heel. I walked over. In big letters, it read, There will be sunshine again, someday. Then he drew a heart shape with his heel. It was cheating on the no-talking rule, but I didn’t mind.
I gave him a quick hug to say thanks, and stepped away. “We should go back,” I said.
He put out his hand, offering to hold mine on the walk.
I just looked at it.
33
Six totally stupid reasons I didn’t hold hands with Evan:
I was so freshly wounded from Beep dying, I couldn’t bear the hurt of also maybe messing up my friendship with Evan. We were back to best friends, and I didn’t have anybody else. I needed him to be there, not just be some boy who might break up with me.
I didn’t want to use my brother dying as the excuse to get a boyfriend. That didn’t seem right. Plus, I didn’t want Evan to be only a pity boyfriend.
If I walked back in holding hands with Evan, Mom would have freaked, that I’d snuck off from Beep’s wake to hang out with a boyfriend, without even changing my name to Rachel.
My hands were rough from the hand-washing and hand-sanitizer-rubbing that comes with hanging around a cancer kid with a missing immune system. For Evan, it would have been like holding hands with a chapped sandpaper brick.
Hunter, 3000 miles away, was calling himself my (possibly dying) boyfriend. Even though I wasn’t Hunter’s actual girlfriend, holding hands with Evan would have made me feel weirdly disloyal to a possibly dying guy.
I have no idea. Those first five reasons I made up afterward. At the time, I wanted to take Evan’s hand, but somehow couldn’t. I was afraid. What I did instead: crossed my arms in front of myself and gave him a shake of my head.
He looked forlorn, and let his hand drop, and I knew I’d blown it. Except when he’s playing guitar, Evan is shy, and I’d rejected him. He wouldn’t be offering to hold hands again.
34
We had Beepster cremated and put him in a dark lacquer urn, a little bigger than a water bottle. It was closed and looked like a polished flower vase with a clamped lid. Like some sealed magic bottle for a genie—except, of course, that when you rubbed it (a) no genie came out and (b) no magic wish came true. I tried.
Next year, when the Geminid meteors would be back in Earth’s atmosphere, we were going to scatter Beep’s ashes near the campsite where we saw the shooting stars. In the meantime, Beep-in-a-bottle hung out on the mantle above the fireplace in the living room.
The Monday after the fu
neral and reception, we had to go back to school and to work, to the rest of life, still bleeding from this huge new hole in our world.
So I went from doing something important—taking care of Beep, being there so Mom could get a break and cling to what little sanity she had, even talking Beep through it when he went on to find the light—to doing algebra problems in a daze, in the back of class where the other girls were tying themselves into square knots over who was or wasn’t invited to Tracie’s birthday party. (There was a rumor that Sara might be on the outs. And on the ins—moi? Nope. Somehow I wasn’t on the invite list. Shocker.)
Except I wasn’t ready to let go and move on. And I was trying to figure out how I would make up for not saving my brother—and for maybe helping to kill him—with my borrowed bone marrow.
So I kept writing my cancer blog, and posting on the blood cancer Facebook page and AML cancer forum, and Skyping and emailing with Hunter.
I did let go of one thing. My hair.
I couldn’t think of what else to do with myself after Beep died, so a few weeks later in January, I had my hair chopped off.
This was not as completely stupid as it sounds, because I donated it to Locks of Love, which makes hairpiece wigs for cancer kids. Radiation and chemo kill fast-growing cells like hair, so cancer kids’ hair falls out. It’s especially tough on girls. When they go out in public, ignorant strangers hassle their moms (“I can’t believe you let her cut her hair like that”) or call them boys—despite the pink dress.
I was nervous, though. My prior donation, stem cells, hadn’t worked out so great. Plus, my hair wasn’t super-long, so I’d have to cut it almost completely off to give Locks of Love enough to work with.
Also, I wasn’t sure I’d look even semi-okay. The woman at Heads on Solano sold me on the new look by showing me a picture of this cute woman with short spiky red-tipped hair, but the picture was of a gorgeous model, which I didn’t have going for me.
I went with it anyway, short, spiky dyed-red highlights in the middle and all. After my bone marrow killed Beep, or at least didn’t save him, I wanted to be a different person.
35
I sat there crying while the hairdresser maimed my hair with scissors and clippers. I was saying good-bye not just to my hair, but also to Beep. And what I had left, when she finished, looked like red squirrel leftovers from a blender, on my head. Not, you know, in a good way.
My old, light brown hair was in a bag or in little bits on the floor. And in the mirror was an absolute horror. It was Marine-Corps-guy super-short in the back and the sides, with a longer spiky thatch left on top, sticking up, tipped with red highlights. Augh.
Rachel stared at me in sick horror when I got home, probably imagining what life must be like to be less good-looking and without piles of gorgeous hair. Or almost any hair.
The best Hunter could manage in our short Skype session that night was, “Uh, that’s really interesting—and much better looking than my haircut.” Which wasn’t saying much, because Hunter was cue-ball bald. I had a sick pit of misery in my stomach, instead of hair on my head, after I logged off from that conversation.
“I’m proud of you,” Mom said, the next morning at the breakfast table. A better reaction than Rachel’s or Hunter’s. “Some girl will be very happy with your hair.”
“Sure—she got the best part.” I hoped she’d have better luck than Beep did with my stem cells. Probably would. It’s hard, even for me, to kill someone with just my looks.
“Honey, are you okay?”
“Mom, a red squirrel died, in a lightning storm, on top of my head. Not super okay.”
“You’re beautiful,” Dad glanced up from the work stuff he was reading, to show he pretended he meant it.
“You need to spend more time at home.” I shook my head. “The beautiful one’s Rachel. The blonde.” I looked like Donald Trump’s love child with a short-haired Medusa. Maybe Dad didn’t know any better. His idea of fashion was putting sunglasses on top of his head, in case his bald spot grew eyes.
“You can wear a hat,” Rachel said. “You want to borrow one?”
Right. Like one of Rachel’s hats would fit. My head’s not that swollen. Plus, hers are designed for piles of beautiful hair underneath. Which I don’t have. As the kids at school reminded me, later that day.
36
I’d posted a warning on my blog and on Facebook that I’d chopped off my hair to donate to Locks of Love and instead of feeling noble, I was suffering from extra ugliness and hair-butchery-shallow-person’s remorse. I put on my 49er ski hat before going out to carpool, as if the dead squirrel on my head still needed to keep warm.
“Hey,” Evan said when they picked me up. “Take off the hat. I want to see.”
“Sure. When summer comes.”
“I bet you look great with short hair.”
“Rachel offered to loan me hats—plural—so she wouldn’t be embarrassed by the extra ugly sister, even at a different school.” That was the only time Rachel had ever offered to let me borrow clothes. “So—no.”
We picked up Tyler.
“Kat’s going to show us her haircut,” Evan said. “She donated the rest of her hair to cancer kids.”
“Cool,” Tyler said.
“I’m not showing you my hair.”
“Then I’m calling my Massive Lifetime Favor,” Evan said. “And buying your hat.”
“You are not.”
“It’s either that, or you have to come over for an all-night songwriting session at my house Friday.”
His mom’s strangled noise carried from the front. I frowned at Evan and crossed my arms.
“If your hair doesn’t look great,” Evan said. “I’ll loan the hat back, and you won’t owe me a favor anymore.”
I sighed. “No laughing allowed, okay?”
He nodded, and held out his hand. I took off my hat, and handed it to him. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear another look like Rachel’s.
“You look great,” Evan said. “Like Chloe from After Darkness, but with even shorter hair.” That’s a videogame with zombies. I hoped Chloe was one of the live people. Evan ran his hand through my hair, from the back to the front. “Wow. Feels great to touch.”
I wanted to push my head into his hand, like Skippy did when he got petted. My stomach did a flip-flutter, but I wished he wasn’t petting me like a zoo animal. “That’s sweet, Evan. But give me back the hat.”
“If I give back your hat, the only reason will be because you look so great, all the other guys will want to run their hands through your bristly hair, and you won’t have time for hanging out with me.”
Did he mean that? Probably just trying to cheer me up.
“Before you give her the hat,” Tyler said, “could I touch Kat’s hair?” An actual complete sentence. From Tyler. Before 8 A.M. He has a long arm, so he reached over Evan. “Wow,” he said, running his fingers through what was left. “Awesome haircut.”
“Thanks, guys, but petting zoo is closed.” I pulled away from Tyler’s touch. “And I can’t face the Tracies like this.”
“Actually, you should,” Evan said. “If you wear the hat, they’ll sense weakness, and close in for the kill.”
I wavered. He might have a point. “You think I’m weak?”
“You’re the strongest person I know. But the Tracies won’t see that, if you wear the hat.”
Evan thought I was strong? I couldn’t even do homework. “Won’t see what? Bad hair?”
“That you’re different. Not afraid. And your spiky hair sticking up in the middle? It gives the Tracies, and everything they care about, the finger.”
“Totally.” Tyler laughed. “The hair finger.”
37
By the time we got out of the car, I’d let Evan talk me into not wearing the hat. The crazy idea that doing good trumped looking good rejected everything the Tracies thought was important.
Evan stuffed my hat in his jacket pocket, so I wouldn’t chicken out. “Can I pleas
e touch your hair one more time?” he asked, after Tyler shuffled toward the school doors.
That was the least I could do, since I owed him a Massive Lifetime Favor, and it’d probably make me feel better about the hair butchery. “Sure.”
He reached up and ran his hand through my short hair, from the back of my neck to the top of my head. “Ummmm,” he said.
This was in plain view of everyone arriving. I looked up.
Tracie was fifteen feet away, looking shocked and horrified, standing frozen next to Ashley. Then her expression changed to tight-lipped fury. Like I’d personally insulted her by having my head touched by her ex-boyfriend while I was this ugly.
She spun and stalked into the building, and I thought, uh oh. I doubted that, even with her look of horror, we were done.
I made it work in first-period World History, telling people how I cut my hair for Locks of Love.
Unfortunately, Tracie and Ashley were in my first-period class, busy playing whisper-and-glance and passing notes back and forth. Which gave them plenty of time to plot how to deal with my short-haired presence in second-period Algebra 2. That class has all five of the Tracies and three of the Tracie-Wannabes.
I went to my locker and exchanged useless unread textbooks, made a stop in the bathroom, and then headed for Algebra 2, and the trap they set for me.
38
I was almost late to class, but Ms. Clarke wasn’t at her desk yet. All the kids, though, turned around in their chairs to watch me come in. As soon as I came out from behind cover, several burst into laughter, the mocking ugly kind. Jenna put on an exaggerated mouth open expression of shock and horrified delight, both palms at her cheeks. Sara covered her eyes with a hand, as if it was too awful to see. The laughter crested.