A roar erupted from Charlie and his friends. Audrey and I turned in time to watch a plume of fire and sparks shoot into the air and explode like a supernova. Diego winked at me from across the lawn.
“I’m assuming Diego is the bacon in that analogy.”
“I need another drink.”
• • •
Diego and I stood in my bedroom, the lights off, our arms wrapped around each other. The TV blared in the living room. It was still ten minutes to midnight, but it could have been ten seconds, and I wouldn’t have cared.
The bright moon shone through my window, and I froze Diego’s face in my mind, committing to memory the curves of his cheeks and the scar on his temple and the way he shivered when I touched him.
Diego’s skin pressed against mine as he kissed my lips and my neck, lingering only long enough in one spot to make me want more. This was prolonged euphoria, better than the carrot the sluggers used to turn me into their trained monkey.
“It was my mom.”
I stopped kissing Diego. “Is this really the best time to talk about your mom?”
“She’s the reason I came to live with Viv instead of going home when I got out of juvie.” He spoke so softly that I felt his words vibrate against my skin. I stroked Diego’s hair but didn’t move otherwise. “It was self-defense—even my lawyer said so—but my mom refused to testify against my dad. It was my word against his, and my father had a silver tongue when he wasn’t tweaking. I needed my mom to back me up, but she refused. He’s going to kill her one day, and she chose him over her own son.” His voice broke.
“You don’t have to talk about it.” I tried to imagine being betrayed by my own mother, but I couldn’t. Despite her flaws, my mom was always there for me.
Diego rested his forehead against mine. “I wanted you to know.” He pulled me to him and kissed me as if that might erase his memories of the past. He slid his hands under my shirt and pulled it over my head. I couldn’t unbutton his shirt fast enough. I lost track of time. We were arms and legs and lips, fearless and frenzied.
“Is this all right?” he asked as if I wasn’t the one who’d wrestled him out of his black dress pants. “You’ve had a lot to drink.”
“It’s good,” I murmured, tipsy but not drunk. “Is it okay for you?” I looked into Diego’s eyes, feeling self-conscious now. I’d been poked and prodded by aliens, wandered Calypso without a stitch, but standing in front of Diego was the most naked I’d ever felt.
“Better than okay.”
“Have you ever done it with a guy?” I asked. Diego shook his head. “Not even in juvie?”
“It’s not like that,” he said with a chuckle.
“I have . . . with Jesse. And Marcus.”
Diego laughed. “So much for just being friends.”
“We can stop.”
“I don’t want to. Unless you do.”
“I don’t.”
I led Diego to the bed, and we eased under my sheets, letting instinct and hormones take control. I thought it must’ve been midnight because I heard shouting, but I ignored it. Only Diego and I existed.
My bedroom door burst open. “Henry! Henry, you gotta come quick!”
I scrambled to cover Diego and myself with the sheets. “Jesus Christ, Charlie, we’re fucking busy in here!”
Charlie was crying. I didn’t notice that at first because I was freaking out about my brother walking in while Diego and I were naked and about to have sex. But when I did, I knew something was wrong. “Henry, please. It’s Zooey.”
1 January 2016
I watched my brother chew his fingernails down to the quick, and then keep biting. He gnawed on the ends until they bled, and I finally had to pull his hands away from his mouth. He looked at his fingers and shook his head.
“How long are they going to be in there?” he asked.
“I’m sure someone will be out soon.” The hospital waiting room was far from comforting, and our coffee cups sat forgotten on the small plastic side tables. We’d been waiting for more than an hour, starving for even the smallest scrap of news. Diego had been the only one of us sober enough to drive, and we’d rushed Zooey—moaning in pain and clutching her belly—to the nearest hospital in Audrey’s car. I wanted to call an ambulance, but Charlie refused to wait.
“Do you think I should call her parents again?”
“You left them a message, right?”
Charlie nodded. “I don’t think they get reception on their boat.”
Diego held my hand and smiled when I glanced his way. It was difficult to think of anything other than what we’d been about to do when I looked at him, but Charlie needed me, so I tried to pretend Diego wasn’t there.
“Do you think she’s going to be all right?” Charlie asked.
Audrey’s eyes were half closed—she never could hold her liquor—but she said, “It was probably false labor. Sometimes it happens.”
Diego and I agreed, but I’d seen the blood on Zooey’s hands and between her legs. I didn’t know what it meant, but I doubted it was good.
“Well, she’d be the first Denton in history to be early to anything.” I tried to loan Charlie my smile, but he wasn’t in the mood.
“Zooey’s always early,” he said. “If she’s not at least fifteen minutes early to wherever she’s going, she starts to get physically sick.”
Audrey said, “I thought I was bad.”
“You are,” I said.
Charlie wasn’t listening to us so much as talking to fill the void where Zooey should have been. “She has this saying: ‘Early is on time, on time is late, and if you’re late, don’t bother showing up.’”
“I’d hate to work for her.” Diego couldn’t figure out which cup of coffee was his and so just took one at random. He grimaced. “This is worse than what they served in juvie.”
Audrey blinked to clear the sleep from her eyes, and tried to sit up straight. “What was it like?”
Diego’s back stiffened, and he bit the corner of his lip. He hadn’t talked about it, and I hadn’t asked. I was about to change the subject, when he said, “At first it’s scary. When you go inside, they strip you and search you in the most humiliating way imaginable. Guys’ll hide drugs and weapons anywhere they think they can get away with it, but I think the strip search is more about the guards showing you that your ass is theirs. No matter how tough you think you are, you’re their bitch.”
I wondered if that’s why the sluggers always sent me back without my clothes. They had the technology to travel the universe and draw out my memories; surely, they could have returned me to Earth fully dressed.
“I tried to keep to myself, and read every book I could get my hands on, but it’s tough. Most every kid in juvie is inside because they screwed up pretty bad, but they’re all just boys hiding under layers of false bravado. They act like thugs, but most of them miss their mothers. Most still believe they can do anything.”
“Do you believe that?” Audrey asked.
Diego nodded. “If a kid looks like he doesn’t give a shit, it’s not because he doesn’t believe in himself anymore; it’s because no one else believes in him.”
I thought about Jesse. I wondered if that’s why he killed himself. If he thought no one believed in him and that his only escape was at the end of a noose. I wondered about Marcus, too. People believed in him, but the person they believed in was a lie. I don’t know when Marcus stopped being himself and started pretending to be the person others expected him to be.
Charlie was chewing on his fingers again, biting the skin around the nail, and Audrey looked like she was going to fall asleep. “Did it work?” I asked. “Juvie, I mean. Did it change you?”
Diego cocked his head and looked at me as if that wasn’t the question he’d expected me to ask. “People don’t really change; they just find something else to give their life meaning.”
“Do you regret what you did?” Audrey asked.
“Sometimes . . .”
I
sensed Diego was going to say more, but Charlie stood up, drawing our attention. I followed his line of sight to the doctor walking through the double doors. She was short and stocky, and carried herself with confidence. Charlie rushed to meet her, and Diego held my hand while we watched. I knew it was bad news the moment I saw her pinched lips and tired eyes. Charlie went rigid, offering the doctor robotic nods as she explained what happened. We were too far away to hear.
“They’re going to take me to see Zooey,” Charlie said when the doctor left. “You should go home.”
“What about you?”
“Just . . .”
Audrey stood, her keys jingling in her hand. “We’ll drive your car here and leave it in the parking lot.”
Charlie nodded, but I doubted he’d heard the words.
“Mr. Denton?” A nurse stood waiting by the doors.
“I’m gonna . . .”
I slugged Charlie lightly in the arm. “She’s okay. You’re both going to be okay.”
“Yeah, Henry. Sure.” Charlie followed the nurse into the bowels of the hospital, and I watched him go. I jumped when Diego touched my shoulder.
“We should get out of here,” he said. “Clean the house before your mom gets home.”
“What do you think happened?” Audrey asked.
“I think I’m not going to be an uncle anymore.”
• • •
Audrey tried to make me sit in the front seat on the way home, but I refused. It was her car, after all. I stared at the streak of blood on the leather and wondered if the baby were already dead or if it had offered the world one mewling cry—a first and last protest—before succumbing to gravity.
We sat parked in my driveway for a while. I didn’t even realize we’d arrived until Audrey looked at me in the rearview mirror and said, “We missed midnight.”
I didn’t know if the stain would come out or if some shadow of it would always remain. “We didn’t miss it,” I said. “It just happened without us.”
It seems silly to worry about the arbitrary moment some person long dead declared to be the end of one year and the beginning of another, as if our attempts to divide time into meaningful chunks actually mean anything. People wait for the countdown to tell them that it’s okay to believe in themselves again. They end each year with failure, but hope that when the clock strikes twelve, they can begin the new year with a clean slate. They tell themselves that this is the year things will happen, never realizing that things are always happening; they’re just happening without them.
“I should get home,” Audrey said.
“Are you okay to drive?” Diego asked.
“Yeah.”
When Audrey’s BMW disappeared into the night, Diego hugged me close. I wanted him to kiss me, to kiss away everything that had happened. To kiss me until time reversed and we were back in my bedroom. But you can’t live in the past; you can only visit. I wasn’t sure what was happening between us, but I didn’t want it to happen without me.
“Happy New Year, Henry.”
“Happy New Year, Diego.”
6 January 2016
Hardly giving us time to breathe, Ms. Faraci launched into her lecture on acids and bases and the importance of a neutral pH. I already knew most of what she was teaching, and glanced over my shoulder at Marcus out of boredom. He’d snuck into class at the last minute, looking ragged. I searched for the boy who’d given me the calling card behind the auditorium before winter break, but couldn’t find him. Marcus’s eyes were bloodshot and his cheeks hollow. His New Year’s Eve party was all anyone had talked about in the halls and before classes. Rumor was that Marcus had leapt from his roof into his pool wearing nothing but his grin; that he’d passed out pills like candy; that the party had devolved into an orgy of Dionysian proportions. But the more Marcus tries to prove that he’s the life of the party, the less I believe him.
Adrian’s seat was noticeably empty, though most speculated he’d been expelled and questioned by the police. I wondered if he’d ratted out his friends or if he was the kind of guy who’d take the fall rather than snitching. I suppose I already knew the answer, since Adrian was gone but Marcus wasn’t.
After class, I hung back to talk to Ms. Faraci. “Did you have a nice break?” she asked.
I didn’t want to tell Ms. Faraci about Charlie and Zooey, so I said, “Yeah. It was all right. You? Tell me you didn’t spend the whole break buried in books.”
Ms. Faraci flashed me a wry smile. “Despite your insinuations, I do have a life outside of this classroom.” If she’d said it with even a hint of conviction, I might have believed her. “So, what can I do for you, Henry?”
“Is your offer to do some extra credit still on the table?”
“Of course!” She looked relieved and surprised simultaneously. “Do you know what you want to write about?”
I hung my head. “Well . . . it’s just . . . I’ve been keeping journals since I was a kid, and I thought I could put them together, maybe write about how the world ends.” I glanced up at Ms. Faraci to judge her reaction, but her expression didn’t change. “It’s stupid, I know.”
“As long as it’s got something to do with science, no matter how tenuous the relation, I’ll take it.” Her lip twitched, and I wondered if she was going to ask me about the sluggers—I suspected even my teachers had heard the rumors of my abductions—but instead she said, “What changed your mind?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just like having choices.”
I’m not sure my answer made sense to Ms. Faraci, but she smiled anyway, her round cheeks so high, they brushed the bottom of her glasses. I was about to leave, when she snapped her fingers and said, “I almost forgot.” She dug around in her bag and plopped an ancient yearbook on her desk from a school called Jupiter High. “I brought this to show you something.”
“You graduated in 1996?” I would have guessed she was older than that, but didn’t say so.
“Indeed. It was quite a year. They cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996.”
“Good for Dolly.” Diego was waiting for me in the cafeteria, so I said, “What’d you want to show me?”
Ms. Faraci flipped through the pages. She stopped on the only section of color photos. The boys were all wearing tuxes, and the girls, black dresses. “In high school one of my nicknames was Spacey Faraci because I always had my head in the clouds.”
I wanted to ask her what her other nicknames were, but I had a feeling she wouldn’t tell me. “No offense, but I already knew you were a nerd.”
“None taken.” Ms. Faraci pointed at a picture of a boy with a flattop and a bold smile. “Andrew Darby once told everyone I had a penis. These days he sells insurance and has been divorced three times.” She pointed at a girl. “Molly Roswell stole my clothes during gym all through tenth grade. She has four children with two different fathers, and a DUI.
“Tyler Coombs, Gregory Nguyn, and Chris Brentano tormented me during lunch. Tyler runs a successful Internet business, Greg now goes by Caryn, and Chris works with special needs children at a school in Miami.”
I tried to stop her, but Ms. Faraci cut me off. “I’m almost done.” She pointed at a picture of a beautiful girl with a prom queen smile. “Nasya Boulos. Everyone loved her. She tortured me for four years. No matter what I did, she made certain I knew I would never be as beautiful or as popular as she was.” Ms. Faraci took a breath and smiled. “She’s a heart surgeon in New York, married to a handsome man in publishing. She’s got a beautiful child and the life she always dreamed of.”
I waited to make sure Ms. Faraci was finished before I said, “Is this supposed to make me feel better? That the people who bullied you didn’t get what they deserved?”
“It’s meant to show you that these people don’t matter, Henry. Their successes and failures mean nothing to me. I am exactly who I want to be, doing exactly what I want to do. After graduation, the people who torment you will disappear, and they’ll never have the power to hurt you again. Whe
n I tell you it gets better, this is what I mean.”
“I guess it’s just hard to believe that right now,” I said.
Ms. Faraci closed the yearbook and smiled. “And one day you’ll wake up, look around, and wonder how you could ever have believed otherwise. If the world doesn’t end, of course.”
“Thanks, Ms. Faraci.”
I was in a hurry to get to lunch. Diego had texted me to find out where I was, and I was busy typing a reply instead of paying attention to what was in front of me. I turned the corner out of the science building and pain exploded in my face. The suddenness of it paralyzed me. It felt like I’d been hit by a brick instead of a fist. The force of the blow knocked me into the wall, and I banged my head, the pain of the collision spreading through my skull like ripples on a pond.
“Rot in hell, Space Boy.” A large figure in my blurry vision darted past me, leaden footsteps pounding down the hall. I didn’t need to see his face; I’d heard Adrian’s voice in my nightmares often enough to recognize it.
Mr. Curtis poked his head out of his classroom. “What’s going on out here? Mr. Denton?”
I leaned against the wall and held my hand over my throbbing, watery eye. “Nothing, sir.”
• • •
Diego punched the steering wheel so hard, the dashboard shook. “I’ll fucking kill him.” I’d skipped lunch to avoid Diego seeing my eye, but he found me after last period. We’d been sitting in the school parking lot for ten minutes while he raged, blaming himself for not being there to protect me. “I’ll rip his fucking hands off.”
“Calm down, Diego. It’s not a big deal.” It was difficult to sell it with a swollen eye and a plum-colored bruise running across the bridge of my nose.
“It’s a big fucking deal,” Diego yelled. “Which one of them was it? Was it Marcus?”