Side Effects May Vary Read Free Page B

tears, but instead they rolled down his hand and into the cuff of his jacket.
    Oh shit .
    This, I did not expect. This was not on my list.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
    Harvey.
    Now.
    M y eyelids hung heavy from staying too late at Alice’s last night, again. I jogged down Aisle 9 (soup, canned vegetables, and dressing) toward the employee break room, with the Christmas Muzak crackling over the speakers. Pushing the door open with my back, I called to Dennis as he restocked the prepackaged lunchmeats. “I’m out early, man. Heading to Alice’s. We’re watching your favorite, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou !” One of Dennis’s life goals was not to be like Bill Murray, but to be Bill Murray.
    A couple nights ago we’d watched Jaws , and afterward Alice said movies about the ocean were “lame,” but I promised The Life Aquatic would be different. Even if she would never say it, she had always been scared of the ocean or any other un-chlorinated body of water. It was the one thing I ever knew Alice to be scared of, and not even she realized that I knew.
    â€œRestock aisle six for me?” I didn’t wait for him to agree. “I owe you!” He waved me on and said something under his breath.
    I slid my time card into the clock and punched out. Only an hour and a half today. Shit. These short after-school shifts were killing me. Normally, I worked five to six hours, four days a week after school. Lately I had been leaving early and sometimes not even coming in at all.
    Grocery Emporium was the last family-owned grocery store in Hughley. They had a strong local following, but in order to keep the big supergrocery stores at bay there were some modern conveniences we went without—like a new time clock. And vending machines, digital produce scales, working barcode scanners . . . You know, all the things necessary to actually run a modern grocery store. I couldn’t complain. They worked with my fucked-up schedule, and given all that was going on with Alice they’d been cutting me a lot of slack lately.
    Alice. She would miss me. She said she would. And now it was all I could think about. And she loved me. At least, I thought she did. She didn’t really say so. The whole thing gave me these bursts of stupid happy, which were always followed by guilt because it didn’t feel right to be happy.
    Â 
    I was thirteen years old when it changed.
    Alice’s birthday was in eleven days, making it the middle of January.
    I remembered playing some Chopin for the intermediate class at my mom’s dance studio. All Mom’s studio rooms had these old beat-up stereos, but the main studio where the intermediate class usually met had a piano. We’d bought it off one of my piano teacher’s friends a long time ago. Mom had always hated dancing or instructing to anything but a live accompaniment. So, a piano-playing son had been no accident.
    I never knew who my dad was, but I always thought he must have been a piano player since pianos were the only thing my mom loved more than ballet.
    Warm-ups had wrapped, and each student took turns with a forty-five-second solo in preparation for spring auditions. My mother was handing out a ballet solo, which Celeste and Alice were the top contenders for. The tension between them had always been a continuous competitive cycle that only escalated with age.
    Celeste stood with her arms spread and a smug expression on her face, waiting for some kind of praise. Ever since we were kids, she would show up to dance with her portfolio of sheet music and monologues tucked beneath her arm, ready for voice and acting class too. For Celeste, dance was one piece of the puzzle. She wanted to be famous and I don’t even know that she cared what for.
    My mother, Miss Natalie to her pupils, clapped to the beat and said, “To appear effortless requires much effort! Alice, next!” There was