Chapter Three

Carson

Friday, September 29

Carson Bennett didn’t get excited about the grocery bags stacked in the minivan’s wayback when his mom picked him up from school on Friday afternoon. He knew there wasn’t anything good in them. In July Carson’s mom had decided to become a vegan, which meant they all sort of became vegans. Being a vegan meant they didn’t eat meat or cheese or anything made with milk or anything that came from any part of an animal. No processed foods. Carson and his brother were allowed to eat cheese pizza at parties, but she made them promise that they would never, ever eat pepperoni or anything else that had nitrates or nitrites, which were some of the worst things they could put in their bodies.

A year ago he would have complained, but now Carson didn’t complain about anything.

A year ago most of the stuff his mom bought at the grocery store was healthy, because she believed in eating healthy meals all through the week, lots of vegetables, no junk. But she’d also believed in loosening up a little on weekends, so after Carson and Win carried the bags of groceries into the house when they got home, they dug down through the broccoli and chicken breasts and brown rice to find the good stuff, Cokes and Nutty Buddy ice-cream cones (six to a box, so three for Carson, three for Win) and one pack of Double Stuf Oreos and two bags of ranch-flavored Doritos.

A year ago, weekends had been about pigging out and playing soccer and going to Frankie’s Fun House with their friends. Carson’s dad traveled a lot during the week, so he mostly liked to chill on Saturday and Sunday, which was fine; his mom was willing to drive them all over the place, mall, movies, games, it didn’t matter. “Where do you want to go now?” she’d ask, jangling her car keys.

They always ended up someplace good.

Then Carson’s mom got cancer. One day she was fine, and the next day she was in the hospital for surgery. After that, she had chemo, lots and lots of chemo, and she lost her hair and her energy and her appetite. Grammy came to stay with them, and Carson’s dad was home a lot more, but there were no more Friday night movies at the mall or Sunday afternoons spent at Frankie’s Fun House, no more jangling car keys.

Mostly Carson and Win spent the summer riding their bikes to the neighborhood pool. Their buddies lived in different neighborhoods and went to different pools, so the neighborhood pool was pretty boring, but what else were they supposed to do? Home was too depressing, and besides, they had to be quiet because their mom was always resting. At the pool Carson and Win did a lot of underwater fighting, which was sort of fun, except for the last time, when they’d ended up grabbing each other’s hair and pulling really hard, and when they came up out of the water, they both were crying, the big hiccuping-snorting sort of crying, snot coming out of their noses, and they never did any more underwater fighting after that.

In July and August the blood tests came back cancer-free three times in a row, and now his mom’s hair was growing in and she felt a lot better, though she still had to go to the doctor’s every month to get her blood checked. Hers was the kind of cancer that could come back. If it didn’t reappear for three years, the doctors said, it probably never would, but three years was a long time from now.

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“How did the pizza party go?” his mom asked as she pulled away from the pickup line. “Was there plenty of cheese?”

“Yeah,” Carson said. “I had three pieces.”

“Good,” his mom said, sounding distracted as she waited to make a left-hand turn out of the school parking lot. “By the way, I got a call from somebody’s mother today, but now I’ve got total chemo brain and can’t think who it was. A girl in your class is having a birthday party tomorrow afternoon at her house, but the mom is just inviting kids now so the kids who aren’t being invited wouldn’t hear about it. Does that strike you as strange?”

Carson’s mom glanced over at him. He’d noticed lately that she’d started talking to him like he was almost grown up, asking his opinion about stuff, telling him more personal things about herself. He didn’t really like it, but it didn’t matter what he liked or didn’t like anymore. Our primary goal is to make your mother happy, his dad had said back in May, and as far as Carson knew, that was still true.

“They’ll hear about it Monday,” Carson said, “So it doesn’t really make any difference.”

“Lila!” his mom exclaimed suddenly. “The girl having the party is Lila, and her mother’s name is… Well, I’m not going to remember that. But she said the party is at four o’clock, it’s a cookout, and instead of a present you’re supposed to bring a book for the Book Harvest program. And your swim stuff, because it’s a pool party. Do you think it’s a little late for a pool party? Maybe it’s a global warming thing—pool parties all year round, why not?”

His mom sounded happy and relieved because she remembered the message, but Carson didn’t feel happy or relieved. He didn’t want to go to a party, not even a pool party at Lila Willis’s house. Nothing against Lila personally; he thought it was cool how she’d said she was a vegetarian in class today, like she wanted to make him feel less dumb about saying he couldn’t have pepperoni. But he’d been to one other birthday party since school started—Garrison’s birthday party at Climb the Walls climbing center—and he’d felt strange the whole time. He could tell nobody else there had a mom who’d had cancer; if they did, they wouldn’t be acting like everything was so great.

“Did you say it’s a cookout?” Carson asked his mom now. “That means hamburgers and hot dogs, right? On a grill?”

His mom frowned. “Yeah, usually.”

“You said no grilled stuff. Grilled equals car—” He couldn’t think of the word, but he knew it meant stuff that caused cancer.

“Carcinogens,” his mom said. “And grilled stuff can be okay, just as long as it’s not charred.”

“But hot dogs aren’t okay,” Carson reminded her. “Hot dogs are the worst.”

“You could bring some tofu dogs. You liked the ones I got last week, right—the spicy ones?”

“Really, Mom? You really want me to walk into a party with tofu dogs?”

“Why not? I bet at least one or two of the kids will be vegetarians. They’ll appreciate that somebody thought of it.”

He didn’t bother to tell her that everyone in his class was now a vegetarian. It was kind of cool, how between him and Lila, they’d gotten the whole class turned against meat. Stuff like that had started happening to him last year. He hadn’t noticed it at first, and then Stefan Morrisey, who was his math partner, pointed it out to him one day. “Before Christmas all the boys in our class wore white footie socks, and then after Christmas, after you started wearing those socks like soccer players wear? A week later everyone else was wearing them too.”

Now things like that happened all the time. Carson didn’t know why exactly, but he had to admit there were some pretty cool things about it. People gave you the good junk from their lunches, their M&M’s and cupcakes and Fritos. Girls like Becca Hobbes let him copy their homework, although he tried not to ask Becca too often because she got so freaked out about getting caught. “I’m only doing this because we’re friends,” she’d say, looking nervously around. As far as Carson was concerned, they weren’t friends at all, not that he ever said so.

All in all, sixth grade was pretty okay. His mom wasn’t sick, people gave him things he didn’t even have to ask for, and for once in his life he had a teacher who seemed to like him. Not only that, Mrs. Herrera liked soccer and football, too, which was sort of amazing, since those were his sports. On that shelf where she kept all that stuff she liked, she had a miniature Browns football signed by this old-time player named Jim Brown, and once when Carson had to stay in at lunch because he’d gotten a little rowdy during morning announcements, out of nowhere she’d called, “Go out for a pass, Carson!” and thrown him the ball. And she’d even caught it when he threw it back. Pretty cool.

“Doesn’t Win have a game tomorrow at four?” Carson asked his mom, thinking about everyone at the party tomorrow throwing balls around and splashing each other in the water, laughing and sort of being jerks (he could already hear Matt Collins yelling, “Take a joke, dude!” which is what he always said after he’d done something really stupid and mean). “We kind of have a pact about going to each other’s games.”

They were at a red light. His mom turned to look at him. “Carson, you know Win won’t mind if you miss a game. Besides, he’s got another one on Sunday.”

“We have a pact, Mom,” Carson said. “Do you understand what the word ‘pact’ means?”

He couldn’t look at her. He looked out the window instead, and it took him a second to realize that he was crying. His mom could never understand what it was like spending the whole summer underwater, kicking and punching his brother, his brother’s slow-motion fists and feet kicking and punching back, how terrible and great that had felt. Every single day all summer they’d pretended to try to kill each other. It was like Carson was the cancer and Win was the cancer and if they just hit and kicked each other hard enough, the cancer would go away.

And it had. His mom’s cancer had gone away. But it could come back any minute. If Carson or Win let down their guards—broke their promises, ate pepperoni, stepped outside the force field holding their family together the way the water had held Carson and his brother together this summer—the cancer could come back.

“I know what a pact is,” his mom said softly. She reached over and put her hand on Carson’s shoulder, and then the light turned green and they headed for the elementary school, which was just a block down the street. When they got there, Win was waiting for them at the curb, and Carson could tell by the look on his face that something was up.

“Hey, fart face,” Win said as he slid into the minivan’s back seat. “Do you know that in Spanish, ‘Carson’ is the word for ‘butt ugly’?”

“News to me,” Carson replied, turning around to look at his brother. “Did you know that ‘Win’ means ‘fifth-grade snot eater’?”

Win wiggled his eyebrows and opened his backpack so that Carson could see inside to where two bags of Cool Ranch Doritos were nestled against each other.

“You’re a green-bean snorter,” Carson said, grinning at his brother.

“You’re a cockroach chewer,” Win replied.

“I was thinking we could have some quinoa and strawberries for snack when we get home,” his mother said, and that made Carson and Win laugh so hard that Carson thought his guts might explode all over the car.

“Yeah, Mom,” Win said. “Sounds delish.”

Carson shot his brother a thumbs-up. “Sounds like the best thing ever.”