Free After Ever After (9780545292788) by Jordan Sonnenblick

their names in crayon. And I guess Steven has had a lot of those shocks, too, through being my brother. But that’s still not the same as being me. Iremember this other time, Steven came down to the hospital in Philadelphia with me, and found out that another leukemia patient had died. Her name was Samantha, and I don’t remember much about her, except that she used to play Go Fish with me. Anyway, Steven went absolutely ballistic. I think they might have even had to give him tranquilizers. I was sad and all, but even at the age of five, I was also a little bit like, Duh! What do you think happens on the cancer ward when you’re not here? It ain’t all snow cones and Ping-Pong tournaments.
    Wow, it never occurred to me until just now that maybe I’m a bit more grown-up than my brother is. He still thinks life is supposed to make sense. I mean, I know it’s not easy to be like Tad, who constantly thinks the whole planet is zooming toward some kind of gigantic cosmic toilet. But skipping around being all jolly is just asking the world to smack you upside the head with a tennis racket.
    Which is what happened to me the day after Thanksgiving break.
    Can you believe it all started with a candy heart?
    Thanksgiving Day was pretty odd, because it was the first year Steven hadn’t been around. Come to think of it, it was the first time Annette hadn’t been over for at least part of the time. Mom made her usual huge turkey-with-every-single-side-dish-in-the-universe meal, and Dad and I ate as much as we possibly could. But without Steven’s bottomless-pit stomach around, we barely made a dent in the mounds of food.
    There’s no sadder sight than Mom’s homemade pumpkin pie with only three pieces missing.
    Steven called after dinner, but the connection was really bad. He had stayed up until three AM so he could call us during dessert, which was sort of nice, at least. It was only the third or fourth time I had talked to him since September, so there was a ton I wished I could say. But with my parents standing there, and my memory of that horrible convo he had had with them floating around in my head, I didn’t say much of anything. Most of the call was just him blabbing on and on about all the amazing drumskills he was learning, and how cool all the drummers from around the world were.
    Oh, and apparently he saw some zebras.
    I couldn’t imagine ditching Lindsey and my family for a bunch of stripey horses and some bongos, but whatever.
    The day after that, Mom went shopping and Dad worked. I rode my bike over to Tad’s and we hung out for a while playing violent video games. I’m more of a race car–game guy, but Tad loves to blow things up. Shocker, right? Then Tad’s mom made leftover turkey sandwiches for me, Tad, and the E.R.C. That’s what Tad calls his eight-year-old sister, Yvonne. It stands for “Emergency Replacement Child.” She was born less than a year after Tad was first diagnosed, so he insists his parents only had her in case he didn’t survive.
    After lunch, just so he would give me credit for trying hard, I asked Tad if he thought maybe we should do some math. He said I deserved the weekend off. So I told him in that case maybe I’d ride onover to Lindsey’s. Then he got all mad and said he wasn’t just some kind of twenty-four-hour on-call math service. I told him I knew that, and pointed out that I had just spent the morning machine-gunning random pretend mercenaries with him, but when I left he was still sulking.
    When I got to Lindsey’s, nobody was even home. I stood on her porch like an idiot, ringing her bell every minute or so, until I remembered she and her dad were going for the weekend to visit her brother at college. I know, I know. How could I forget something that big?
    Can you say “methotrexate”?
    So I rode my bike for miles and miles, then spent the rest of the day bored out of my skull at home.