Dessert First

Copyright © 2016 by Dean Gloster.

All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

Published by

Merit Press

an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

10151 Carver Road, Suite 200

Blue Ash, OH 45242. U.S.A.

www.meritpressbooks.com

ISBN 10: 1-4405-9454-6

ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9454-0

eISBN 10: 1-4405-9455-4

eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9455-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gloster, Dean, author.

Dessert First / Dean Gloster.

Blue Ash, OH: Merit Press, 2016.

LCCN 2015047822 (print) | LCCN 2016021782 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440594540 (hc) | ISBN 1440594546 (hc) | ISBN 9781440594557 (ebook) | ISBN 1440594554 (ebook)

CYAC: Leukemia--Fiction. | Sick--Fiction. | Brothers and sisters--Fiction. | High schools--Fiction. | Schools--Fiction. | Dating (Social customs)--Fiction. | Family life--California--Fiction. | San Francisco (Calif.)--Fiction.

LCC PZ7.1.G589 De 2016 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.G589 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]--dc23

LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2015047822

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and F+W Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.

Cover design by Colleen Cunningham and Alexandra Artiano.

Cover photography by Frank Rivera.

• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Dedication
  
• 1
  
• 2
  
• 3
  
• 4
  
• 5
  
• 6
  
• 7
  
• 8
  
• 9
  
• 10
  
• 11
  
• 12
  
• 13
  
• 14
  
• 15
  
• 16
  
• 17
  
• 18
  
• 19
  
• 20
  
• 21
  
• 22
  
• 23
  
• 24
  
• 25
  
• 26
  
• 27
  
• 28
  
• 29
  
• 30
  
• 31
  
• 32
  
• 33
  
• 34
  
• 35
  
• 36
  
• 37
  
• 38
  
• 39
  
• 40
  
• 41
  
• 42
  
• 43
  
• 44
  
• 45
  
• 46
  
• 47
  
• 48
  
• 49
  
• 50
  
• 51
  
• 52
  
• 53
  
• 54
  
• 55
  
• 56
  
• 57
  
• 58
  
• 59
  
• 60
  
• 61
  
• 62
  
• 63
  
• 64
  
• 65
  
• 66
  
• 67
  
• 68
  
• 69
  
• 70
  
• 71
  
• 72
  
• 73
  
• 74
  
• 75
  
• 76
  
• 77
  
• 78
  
• 79
  
• 80
  
• 81
  
• 82
  
• 83
  
• 84
  
• 85
  
• 86
  
• 87
  
• 88
  
• 89: Kat's Afterword: (After Lots of Words—a Few More)
  
• Acknowledgments
  

For my wife, Nancy Ricci, and our children, Alexandra Hope Gloster and Jay Antonio Gloster, who keep teaching me how to live.

I've thought a lot about what happens when we die, and I'm pretty sure it's not reincarnation. No loving and merciful God would put us through high school twice.

The first day of school this year, I'd finally forgiven Evan enough to sit next to him again in morning carpool. We were alone in the back of his mom's Camry, surrounded by the smell of leather upholstery, and his hand brushed mine, a light tickle.
Was that deliberate?
Did it mean something? Hope bubbled up in me. Maybe I could fix things with Evan—and the rest of my friends—despite last year's blowup. Then perspective slapped me with a ringtone.

“They're admitting Beep,” Mom said through the scratchy cell phone reception, without even hello. She babbled white count and neutrophil numbers, blood labs awful enough to start my twelve-year-old brother on chemo. Again.

That was a soccer cleat kick in the stomach. After I hung up, my mouth wouldn't work for a second.

It had just been a bruise. On his arm where I'd grabbed him three days ago.

“Beep's cancer's back.”

“Oh, jeez,” Evan said, squirming. He raised an arm to put it around me. I gave him a look, and he plopped his hand back on his knee.

I looked ahead blankly at the elevated BART train tracks past our high school, and then we pulled up at the drop-off area. Evan scooted out of his side, but just stood, looking earnest and like he wanted to help. I was frozen. Clots of kids streamed by the open car door, talking too loud.

Someone honked. I flinched, and Evan's mom turned around in the driver's seat. We were blocking the loading zone. “Should I take you somewhere else, Kat?”

Yes. To someone else's life. I could have used a complete transplant. But since that wasn't medically possible, I shook my head and stumbled out into sophomore year.

• • •

I just wanted to get home to pack Beep's hospital kit. But after school Evan followed me out of our seventh-period French class, catching up at my locker. “Hey.” He touched me above my elbow. “I'll walk you home.”

All the hairs on my arm stood at attention. I wasn't sure what to say. My silence stretched over the hallway shuffling gabble and slamming of lockers, and my arm tingled where he'd touched it. Evan's serious brown eyes are so pretty they're almost wasted on a guy. Lost freshmen streamed past us while I weighed the heart-hurt risks. I already ached, so how much worse could it get?

“I won't try to make you talk,” Evan added.

So Evan walked me home, like we were best friends again, except I wasn't in the mood to make him laugh, or even talk, and he wasn't leaving a trail of gooey footprints from stomping my little heart like last year. I mostly looked down at the gray sidewalk and tugged on my backpack straps, worried about Beep, while red maple leaves swirled past us in wind gusts. It was one of those perfect Bay Area September afternoons, with clear blue skies and just enough breeze to keep it from being too hot. Which made me mad, because it was the day Beep's cancer was back.

Evan finally broke the silence. “I'm sorry about Beep. And also—” He gave me a worried look. “—about last year.”

“Me too.” I had a hollow misery pit inside. Walking with Evan helped. But enjoying his company had its own dangers. Like Beep's latest cancer relapse, hanging out with Evan scared me and made me think
I can't go through this again.

We turned onto my block, and I half expected to see our house crushed into lumber scraps by the weight of Mom's anxiety. But there it was, still perched between trees up the stairs from the sidewalk, in its two-tone brown. We both stood at the bottom of the stairs, for so long it got awkward. Evan stuffed his hands into his front pockets, as if he wasn't sure what to do with them.

“So—” He looked down at my knees. “Could we get together and write songs again?”

“Evan, can you think of any
worse
possible time to ask that?”

“Yeah. Pretty much anytime at the end of last year.”

That actually made me laugh. “Yeah.” He had me there.

He raised his eyebrows and his mouth twitched into a fragile smile.

“Thanks.” I shifted under the weight of my backpack. For walking me. And for joking with me again. Someone had to start that. “It was nice.”

He gave me the warm flicker of a broader grin, as if the words were a present he'd keep. “Am I forgiven?”

Except for Calley Rose, my other ex-friends had still shunned me at lunch, even in the new school year. Thanks to Evan and his big mouth. “We'll see.”

• • •

Our dog, Skippy, greeted me at the door, a tiny enthusiastic gray mop of leaping joy, trying to dog-cuddle my knees, while I struggled out of my backpack.

Rachel, my older sister, was at the kitchen table, surrounded by books. When she swiveled her head to look at me, her honey blonde hair swung, with actual bounce and body, like some model from a hair commercial. A soaring wail of syrupy pop blared out of her white iPhone. For once, though, I didn't slam her musical taste. I wanted to get along, and maybe even get her help with pulling things together for Beep's latest hospital stay.

Rachel got up from the kitchen table and gave me a stiff hug. After I got over the surprise—she hadn't done anything like that in more than a year—I hugged her back. When I was little, Rachel was my best friend, and I think I was even hers. But that was a long time ago, before she discovered boys. Now my breathing in the same room annoys her. Maybe Beep's cancer relapse would be a common enemy, and we could get along again for one night. Rachel goes to a different school, Berkeley High, where she's a senior. Our house is technically one block across the border in Albany, California, but she got a transfer to go to Berkeley High, for their “nationally famous Latin program” because, apparently, she likes dead languages better than she likes going to school with her live sister—me—at Albany High.

“I'm making dinner,” she said, stepping back. “With no carcasses.” Rachel doesn't eat meat, because she doesn't believe in cruelty to animals—except, usually, to me. She also doesn't eat eggs or cheese.

The kitchen was full of baking bread-and-onion smell. I peered into the oven, where a frozen vegan pizza was browning to the proper blandness. “How about I put cheese on my half?”

“Really?” Rachel skewered me with her you-immoral-omnivore glare. “Congealed mammary secretions? Of another species?”

I opened the fridge anyway, but the brick of cheddar was gone. Maybe we weren't going to get along tonight. “Did you throw out the cheese?” She'd done that before.

“
Mom
did. It had a spot of mold.”

Right. Ever since the last two times Beep had cancer, when fungal infections had tried to snack on him while his immune system was mostly missing, Mom has been a fungus-phobe. Even though I'd explained we should eat lots of mold, to keep the food chain in the right order.

I held up both hands in surrender, or at least peace. We both sat at the table in a stunned, mostly no-talk zone, while the vegan pizza crisped into cardboard. Rachel blew her nose twice, and used hand sanitizer after each time, already doing the Beep-has-a-compromised-immune-system drill. We took turns petting Skippy, who shuttled between us, his scruffy tail wagging, panting with the effort of trying to cheer us up, his collar jangling with every wiggling round trip.

“Except for Beep's cancer coming back,” Rachel finally said, “how was your day?”

I looked up from petting Skippy. Rachel doesn't usually ask about my life, except to find out when I'll be out of her way. “Weird. Evan walked me home.” I wasn't sure how I felt about that. A little scared. A little hopeful.

“
Um hmm
.” Rachel raised one of her perfect eyebrows, then went on to what she was probably planning to say anyway. “Mom doesn't want me coming to the hospital tonight, because of my cold. And I don't want to just sit around here worrying. So I might go out with Brian. Unless . . .”