Dessert First Read Online Free

off sis’s bone marrow. Which shouldn’t be a big issue because it’s not like
I
often get rejected.
    I just hadn’t thought it through. What I did instead was check my Cipher email to see if Drowningirl had answered. Nope. Maybe Drowningirl had an actual life, full of friends and even a boyfriend. Although if she had lots of friends, it’s hard to see how she’d be that miserable. And if she was that miserable, maybe she had as much trouble as I do making new friends.
    • • •
    By the time I bicycled home through darkness from the El Cerrito BART station to our empty house, it was 11:45. Skippy greeted me with four hours of pent-up enthusiasm. I petted his little belly and scratched his ears, which he loved, for so long that I realized I was doing it partly to put off the call to Evan. So after I gave Skippy his time in the back yard, I carried him upstairs to my room for moral support. I turned on my computer and sat at my desk.
Don’t cross the line into flirting.
I took a deep breath and called Evan. Maybe it was so late he’d gone to bed.
    He picked up on the first ring. “Hi Kat. Thanks for calling.” His voice was quiet, like he was trying not to wake his parents up.
    “Thanks, uh, for helping.” My pauses between words were so long it sounded like I was translating French.
    “I’ve missed talking to you so much,” he said.
    Which was like a stab in my chest. I almost gasped at the quick razor-cut-through-my-heart sharpness of it, because of how I’ve missed Evan. “I was really mad at you,” I said. “You wouldn’t have enjoyed talking to me.”
    “I’m enjoying it now,” Evan said. “So maybe that means you’re not as mad anymore?”
    Long pause, on my end. “If you help me find a clinical trial for Beep, we might be able to work things out.”
    “Enough to write songs together again?”
    “Don’t press it,” I said, and I had to clamp my teeth together to keep from calling him Skinnyboy, which is what I call him when I’m in my secret online identity of Cipher, who no one knew was me. It had been a long day, and I was almost dizzy. Talking to Evan felt like walking on a high wire. “Maybe if we find a complete cure for Beep’s cancer.”
    “Well, then,” he said, “let’s
find
this cancer cure.”
    I laughed, a nervous bark of scared, and we were off. I explained we were looking for phase III clinical trials for pediatric AML and then Evan pounded away on Google, while I searched the different blood cancer sites. We shot links back and forth by email about leads we were turning up.
    The official Monroe house rule, instituted because of Rachel, is no calls after 11 P.M. But Mom was at the hospital, Dad was back at work, Rachel was off fogging car windows, and we were fighting cancer. Forget the rules.
    Evan found it first: www.clinicaltrials.gov, the searchable trial database of the National Institutes of Health.
    Then it was a slog. The descriptions were in medical jargon about as readable as medieval French. In the middle of our search, Rachel came home and at one point banged on the wall, because I was talking so excitedly with Evan. I ignored her. After we turned up a bunch of random phase I trials, I finally stumbled on “Bortezomib and Sorafenib Tosylate in Treating Patients with Newly Diagnosed Acute Myeloid Leukemia,” a promising phase III trial accepting patients at 140 different hospitals, including UCSF Benioff Children’s, where Beep was.
    The chemicals were supposed to generally stomp little misshapen leukocyte butt, seven different ways. The trial was limited to patients with “High Allelic Ratio FLT3/ITD.” I had no idea what that meant, even as a serious cancer sibling geek, but for once I hoped it described my brother. Unless it was bad.
    “Wow,” I said when we were done. It had taken almost two hours, and by then we were giddy, having won the online scavenger hunt, making unpronounceable cancer drug name jokes. It was after 2 A.M. , and I was sitting