Rules for 50/50 Chances (5 page)

Faulty logic. Plus, it turned out I wasn't able to imagine
all
the bad things. You can't possibly conceive of all the bad things that could happen to you or the people you love in a lifetime.

You'd think watching your best friend lose a parent would make you realize that you could survive something like that, too, if it happened to you. But when Lena's dad died, it didn't have that effect on me. Instead, I thought two things: one, Lena is stronger than I am. That's always been a theme of our friendship: Lena would swing upside-down on the monkey bars with no hands and I was afraid to let go; Lena would bound up to Trevor McMahon on the playground and shove him if he took the dodge ball we were playing with, where I would just let him have it. Lena didn't cry when we got our ears pierced; I almost ended up with a piercing on only one side because I could barely go through with the other one. When her dad died, it was just further proof that where she could survive, I would crumble.

The second thing I thought was that when two girls are best friends, it's highly unlikely that something terrible will befall both of their families within a short span of time. Lena and I have always been intertwined, since preschool, like sisters, so it seemed like the big bad thing that happened to her counted for me, too. Like I'd already done my time. Again, faulty logic.

In some ways, Lena and I are just the same. We laugh at the same lame jokes. We get annoyed by all the same things (the little tuft of chest hair that pokes out from the top of our physics teacher's shirt, for example, and people who pretend they don't know your name, even though you've been in multiple classes with them for the last four years). We love the combination of popcorn and M&M's. We both understand that huge, bad things can appear out of nowhere and change everything you know about your life.

But somehow she manages to just get on with things without worrying, and I'm saddled with the anxious gene. She claims she doesn't bother worrying because she knows it doesn't help. Life still happens the way it's going to happen, with its instantaneous, irrevocable shifts, and you can't stop them so there's no point even thinking about them. Unfortunately for me, that message hasn't sunken in very well.

 

 

We get off the Red Line at Downtown Crossing and make our way across Washington Street. It's muggy out, and the sky is choked with low, heavy clouds. I can feel my hair starting to frizz as soon as we come up onto the sidewalk. Downtown Boston is busy with the usual weekend shoppers and we have to thread our way through a throng of slow tourists with their Macy's bags and soft pretzels. A blond, sunburned family daring to wear Yankees gear is stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, consulting a map. I'd stop to help them but they're obviously busy, pretending to be in New York.

The DSW really does feel like a warehouse of abandoned footwear, a shoe orphanage, aisles and aisles of sad discount items lining the racks, their boxes stacked up by size and color on the shelves below. We make our way up the escalator to the fancy shoe section, Lena's target.

Lena can wear heels. I cannot—which is ironic, really, because I can turn a triple
pirouette
on pointe like it's nothing, but I'm so clumsy that I can barely walk five feet in a pair of three-inch heels without tripping over myself. This is before potentially losing my motor control, mind you.

“Ooh, cute!” Lena exclaims, holding up a pair of chocolate brown snakeskin stiletto heels.

I nod. “Do you need those, though?”

Lena pulls a size eight box from the shelf. “BCBG stilettos for under fifty dollars are not about need.”

“Okay. I'm going to look at the flats.”

Lena grabs my wrist, dropping her shoebox suddenly on the knee-high bench in the middle of the aisle. “No. More. Flats. For you!”

She's so serious about it that I can't help but laugh in her face. Lena has been trying to wean me off flats and into heels for, I don't know, all of high school. With limited success.

“We are finding you a pair of heels today. They can be wedges, it's fine—I'll settle.”

“Tell me again why I need a pair of shoes I probably won't wear?”

“You are going to wear them, stupid. This is our senior year. Seize the day, Rose Alexander Levenson!” She only uses my middle name when she really means it. Alexander is my mother's maiden name. It's an annoying middle name because it sounds like my parents just wanted a boy. For the record, they did not. They were both quite pleased about my double-X chromosome-ness.

“I fail to see how wearing heels equates to seizing the day,” I tell her.

“Fun! Going out! Parties on the weekends! Dates!”

“College applications, AP exams, ballet, my mother's doctors' appointments.”

Lena slumps her shoulders and drops her head to her chest in a great dramatic show of defeat. “You're killin' me, Levs. Seriously. You can do those things and still have fun. Give me an inch, here. Or two point five inches, at least.” Obviously proud of her joke, she gives me a goofy smile that looks like it ends with a question mark.

“Fine. Sorry.”

“Excellent! In that case…” Lena pauses as she wanders down an aisle of party shoes. “In that case … these.” She drops her hands on a pair of yellow suede wedges with round toes. “These look like you. Look, no sparkles, no pointy toes, no patent leather, and you'll be able to walk in these, no problemo.”

I have to admit they're kind of cute. They're a nice color, bright but not insane, and I can sort of reasonably imagine wearing them with either jeans or a skirt, which my mother would say (or would have said, when she still thought about such things) makes them versatile. I flip one over to check the price: $29.99, marked down from $99.99.

“Fine,” I tell Lena. “I'll try them.”

She practically explodes off the ground, clapping her hands. “Yes! We're going to have a great senior year, trust me.”

I can't say I'm completely convinced that one pair of wedge heels is an airtight prognosticator of a great senior year to come, but I find a box marked size seven and slip my feet into the yellow suede. The foot beds are padded so they're actually halfway comfortable. I look at my feet in the low mirror. Honestly, they look good. When I pull my jeans up, the heels have a nice lengthening effect on my calves, which are already muscular from ballet.

“All right, fine,” I tell Lena. “Sold.”

 

 

When we finally emerge from the last store of the day, the sky has darkened considerably, a thunderstorm clearly en route.

“This weather's been crazy,” Lena remarks, glancing up at the sky. “Last week was pristine, then the hurricane, and now whatever this is.” An empty plastic bag drifts by, skipping along the cobblestoned street in a gust of wind.

We duck into a coffee shop as the first drops of rain start to fall, and sit in the window, sharing an M&M cookie the size of my face. “I'll guess we'll be here for a little while,” Lena says. Outside, a woman holding a newspaper uselessly over her head runs by, then turns back and comes darting into the coffee shop.

“We can stay here forever as far as I'm concerned,” I say into my scalding tea.

I can feel Lena's eyes on me, observing. “What's with you?” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“Don't play dumb. You're acting weird. Like something is going on. Was the walk okay?”

Lena and I know each other's families about as well as anyone can know anyone else they're not personally related to. Between her dad's illness, her mom's second marriage last year, and my mom's diagnosis, we've seen each other through a lot of highs and lows. Mostly lows, actually.

I chew on my bottom lip, debating mentioning Caleb to her. But she'll just get overexcited, and there's no point. “The walk was fine. I found out something noteworthy.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“And that would be?”

I shift my focus to the dark street outside. The rain has already slowed to a light drizzle. Finally, I look back at her.

“I thought I couldn't take the HD test until I'm like thirty or something. That's not true. I can take it whenever I want, once I turn eighteen.”

“What do you mean ‘the test'? For the disease?”

“For the gene. It'll tell me if I'll get the disease eventually.”

I watch Lena process this information, rolling it over in her mind as she chews a piece of cookie. She stares at me for a moment. “Do you want to know?”

As if I can answer
that
so easily. “Obviously, I don't know,” I say.

I'm not sure I'll ever
really
know if I want to know. It sort of depends on the answer, doesn't it? I mean, obviously, if I don't carry the gene, it would be nice to know that now. But if I do … I don't know. In the interim, every time I drop a pencil, or mess up a turn in rehearsal, or trip over my own feet—which is more or less all the time—I wonder if it's Huntington's. This is ridiculous, I know, because even if I am carrying the mutation, it's super rare for symptoms to show up before your thirties or even later. But still. That's the thing about the uncertainty. It puts the possibility of this disease in everything.

Lena rests her chin in her hands. Even with her hair falling out of its ponytail, a few strands plastered to her face from the rain, she's beautiful. Sometimes I look at her and I actually feel pride that she's my best friend and no one else's. Not just because she's beautiful and so much better dressed than I am, obviously, but because of all her Lena-ness.

“Here's what I think,” she says. “I think if you don't know if you want to know or not, the answer for right now is that you don't want to know. Once you know, you can't
not
know again.”

“Um, correct.”

“Correct.”

“But here's the issue,” I say. “If I don't find out one way or the other, the answer to every question in my life is maybe. Do I want to eventually get married? Maybe. Have kids? Maybe. Join the CIA? Maybe.”

“Do you want to join the CIA?” Lena interrupts.

“Probably not. But you get my point.”

“I mean, I think that would be awesome, but it seems unlikely. You're not that good at keeping secrets. Or math, and I think CIA people have to pass some kind of big math test.”

“No, they don't.”

“Okay, well, whatever. Look, I get your point, but I sort of feel like it's normal for someone our age to have a lot of maybes. Right? I certainly hope so, because I have a lot.”

Hardly. Lena has the next decade of her life at least already planned out. NYU next year (assuming she gets in, which she will), a degree in fine arts with a concentration in graphic design, a few years of working for a New York design agency, or maybe doing graphics in-house for a fashion designer, then a master's degree. After that, she'll probably be married with a bunch of gorgeous kids and ready to launch her own hugely successful design house out of her inevitably
ü
bercool Brooklyn brownstone.

Anyway, maybe she's right that most seventeen-year-olds don't really know what's supposed to come next. But to me, this feels different. Because here's what Lena doesn't get: It's not that I'm waiting to make a decision, waiting to see where life takes me, waiting to find out what happens next. What I'm waiting on has already happened. It happened before I was born. If I knew the answer, if I knew I didn't have the gene, then the answer to those questions could still be maybe, but at least the maybe would be in my control. And if I have it, if I'm positive like Mom, what's the point in imagining all the possibilities? Might as well be real about it and get back to the business of dying.

Then again, if I have it, I'll still have probably the next twenty years before my symptoms really start, maybe longer. Do I really want to get ready to die ahead of time?

“Listen, girl.” Lena pauses, pulling her ponytail loose and then twisting her hair effortlessly up into a messy bun. Her silver bangles clack together. “There aren't any rules for this kind of thing, you know. You're making it up as you go along.”

I don't like making things up as I go along. I like to know what I'm doing. That's why I dance ballet, not modern. I like precise choreography, nothing improvised.

“Maybe there should be some rules,” I say.

Lena shrugs. “Would that help?”

The espresso machine interrupts us with a sudden hissing noise loud enough to jolt me back to the reality of the coffee shop. Lena's eyes flicker over toward the counter, then back to me. She waits for me to respond.

“Maybe,” I say finally. “Maybe it would help.”

Four

I keep the printouts about the HD test folded up and stuffed inside my journal. All week, I pull the pages out on the bus, at boring moments in the middle of class, when I get home at night and close my bedroom door. I roll it over and over in my head. One blood test. A few weeks. An answer. But I don't bring it up again with my parents.

“So, what's on your schedule for this week?” Dad says at dinner on Sunday night, clearing his throat. He shovels rice and refried beans from Mexican takeout containers onto Mom's plate.

“Usual,” I say.

“Exciting stuff,” Dad says. He leans over and cuts a piece of steak fajita for Mom. After a moment too long of quiet, he clears his throat again. “So. What happened this week? You didn't even give us any gossip. Did senior year start off with a bang?”

“It was fine. Same as every other year with an extra dose of get off your asses and apply to college.”

I'm not just editing for my family's sake, although if there had been any actual good gossip—if anyone had come back pregnant or anorexic or converted to a new religion or something—I probably wouldn't have told them. I would've told Mom all of that stuff, a couple years ago when her symptoms were just forgetfulness and the occasional low mood, but now she doesn't get things in the same way she used to. She understands the words, but it's like the texture's taken out of the meaning. She's not a good gossip anymore.