Dessert First Read Online Free PDF Page A

hair. Glurg. A picture of that sweaty clinch would have made an awesome diet aid, taped to the fridge at home, but about then Beep was going through his earlier round of chemo, so there was already plenty of mealtime nausea for the Monroes.
    Then, when Tracie broke up with Evan, it was all he wanted to talk about—how sad he was. A topic, weirdly, I wasn’t super interested in. I tried to be sympathetic, but then they got back together, but then she drop-kicked him away again. And then the blonde spit-burp from hell got together with him
again
, and he didn’t believe me, that she was horrible, because somehow her lip lock was more persuasive than my mere words.
    Tracie hated me even more than I hated her. Maybe my friendship with Evan was a threat. Unfortunately, as the leader of the popular clique, Tracie was in a position to do something about that hate. And when the Tracies crank up your misery, they’re thorough. While Tracie was using Evan as her yo-yo boy toy, she and the rest of her in-crowd also got to all my girl friends—Calley Rose, Amber, and even Elizabeth. Breathless promises of admission to the Tracie-Wannabe set were dangled, or threats of total social death, or both. Also, Tracie passed on to those girls some semi-horrible funny jokes I’d made about them. Jokes Evan had helpfully shared with Tracie.
    With Beep’s cancer and the start of fighting with Rachel last year, I was cranky. And during my hundreds of hours with Evan, I’d vented some of that anger, joking just between the two of us. I might have been a teensy sarcastic when I talked about things like Amber’s shopping obsession and Elizabeth’s endlessly-repeated dramatic hair flip. Evan apparently thought my lines were so funny, he repeated them to his new girlfriend, Tracie. Who scuttled over to Elizabeth and Calley Rose and Amber, pointing out how amusingly Kat had slammed them. Thanks, Evan.
    I wasn’t invited to Elizabeth’s or Amber’s birthday sleepovers. Those girls cut me off. Completely. So basically, I’d lost everyone. Lost my other friends because of my big mouth. Lost Evan because every other week he was lip-locked to Tracie’s big mouth. It broke my heart.
    After that, to avoid the lemon-juice-on-paper-cut sting of sitting next to Evan on carpool days, I scooted myself into the front seat for the rest of freshman year. I’m not sure Tyler, in morning stupor mode next to Evan, noticed. But Evan did. Every day, he asked me how I was.
    “Fine,” I said in an empty voice that meant not fine, and didn’t ask how he was.
    Sometimes, Evan’s mother tried gently, “How’s your brother doing?”
    Vomiting everything, thanks
, but no one wants to hear that right after breakfast. “He has
cancer
,” I said, to shut her up, which worked. “I don’t want to talk about it.” I put in my ear buds to listen to music and pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my sullen face.
    Everyone tries to fit in somewhere in high school, but there’s no My Brother Has Cancer Club. I guess at the end of last year I could have done other school activities. Maybe even combined them with a service project: if not a blood drive, maybe I could have introduced the boys in chess club to the mysterious toothbrush. But somehow, Beep’s struggle with cancer seemed more important.

4
    After school that day, Mom called to say Beep “looked punky,” but that was just Mom’s report so I didn’t worry much. Anyone back for a third round with cancer would look a little down. So, unaware of the growing problem, while I was at the computer and supposed to be doing my homework, I went on Facebook. I was way overdue in posting an update for Beep.
    Beep doesn’t really Facebook, but for the last two times he had cancer, I set up an account to share how he was doing, so we didn’t have to answer a zillion calls from distant relatives, family friends, and classmates’ parents. It helps to let everyone know what’s going on, to take the edge off worry.