20 October 2015
My situation at school deteriorated. Marcus and Adrian glued my locker shut and wrote Space Boy gargles alien balls on the door in permanent marker, and I couldn’t walk the halls without being stalked by whispers and cruel laughter. I tried to ignore them, but that only made them meaner. In PE, Adrian’s been keeping his distance, but I’ve noticed the murderous glares he shoots me across the gym. I started something I’m certain he’s determined to finish.
Diego is still a mystery, but I enjoy spending time with him. He listens when I need to vent, talks when I don’t want to, and knows more about literature than anyone I’ve ever met. The only thing about him that unnerves me is the dark look that falls over him when I tell him about something that Marcus said or that Jay Oh and Adrian have done. It’s like a completely different person replaces the smiling Diego I’ve come to know. And then, quicker than a summer storm, it disappears, leaving me to wonder if I imagined his reaction.
Nothing will make me change my mind about the button, but I’m trying my best to maintain the status quo for the days that remain. I figure if I keep my head down, maybe I can serve out the balance of my life sentence in relative peace. Wake up, go to school, go home. Repeat until the world ends.
• • •
The house was quiet when I got home from school—Mom wasn’t screaming at anyone, and Charlie wasn’t being Charlie. It was nice. Living in a house with my mother, brother, and Nana means that someone is usually shouting or dashing from one room to the next as if everything is of monumental importance. I wish they understood how little their actions matter. With the end of the world looming, I can finally see the pointlessness of everything. How the whole of human civilization is nothing more than a mosquito’s annoying buzz to the universe.
My stomach rumbled, so I figured I’d make a snack and watch TV while there was no one around to bother me. The fridge was pretty barren, so I settled for peanut butter and jelly. The bread had some mold on it, but I cut it off, too hungry to care.
A sonogram with HAWTHORNE, ZOOEY printed across the bottom clung to the refrigerator door—held in place by a magnet from our favorite Chinese takeout joint. The picture looked like a miniature monochrome galaxy, teeming with stars and worlds and boundless potential. I took the sonogram to the kitchen table and tried to determine which part of the amorphous blob was my future niece or nephew. It was a game: find the fetus. Was it too early to know the sex? Probably. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t even a baby yet. It was just a little parasite, and it would never be anything else.
A shadow fell across the table, startling me. Nana hovered to my left, staring at the picture over my shoulder. “Jesus, Nana, you scared the crap out of me.”
Nana’s flaccid, wrinkled cheeks pulled back into an impish grin. “Mission accomplished.” She eased into the seat next to mine and snatched the sonogram, turning it this way and that, examining it from every angle. “What the devil am I looking at?”
“Charlie and Zooey’s kid. I think.”
“Are you certain? It looks like an ink blot test.” Nana covered her right eye. “I see Jonah and the whale.”
“I won’t tell Zooey you called her a whale.”
Nana snorted. “I wonder if they’ve thought about names.”
“Probably not. I call it the little parasite.”
“I like that,” Nana said. “That little parasite is lucky. Its life is just beginning, while mine is nearly over.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You’ll understand when you’re my age, Henry. You spend your life hoarding memories against the day when you’ll lack the energy to go out and make new ones, because that’s the comfort of old age. The ability to look back on your life and know that you left your mark on the world. But I’m losing my memories. It’s like someone’s broken into my piggy bank and is robbing me one penny at a time. It’s happening so slowly, I can hardly tell what’s missing.”
I tried to think of the right thing to say, but sometimes the right thing to say is nothing.
“I look at people and I don’t know them. Yesterday, I spent twenty minutes trying to figure out who the grumpy woman sitting beside me was before I realized it was your mother.” I laughed, and Nana offered me a feeble smile in return. “I’ve led a rich life, Henry, but I’m terrified of dying a pauper.”
While there are some memories I wish I could dispose of, sometimes my memories are the only things that keep me sane. There are times when I walk along the beach and smell the hot tar and sand, and I think of all the summer days Jesse and I spent lying in the sun, making our plans to rule the world. Then there are times when I see something funny on TV or hear a great song, and I pick up my phone to text Jesse before I remember he’s dead, and the wound tears open, bloody and raw all over again. A person can become a part of you as real as your arm or leg, and even though Jesse is dead, I still feel the weight of that phantom limb. I have a thousand amazing memories of Jesse, but his suicide is leaking into those recollections, poisoning our past. I can hardly remember him without hating him for taking his life and leaving me alone in mine.
I honestly don’t know whether it would be better to forget or be able to remember, but it physically hurts being forced to watch Nana diminish. Charlie and Zooey’s baby will never know the terror of creating memories only to lose them, but Nana knows all too well.
“I love you, Nana.”
• • •
I was sitting in the living room, flipping through the channels, unable to find anything worth watching, when Charlie and Zooey came home. I didn’t want to be in the same room with Charlie, but I wasn’t about to leave and let him think he’d beaten me. He mumbled about needing to take a shower before stomping toward the bathroom.
Zooey looked cute in a pair of little jean shorts and blousy white top. I’ve never been able to figure out what magic my brother cast to make someone like her stay with him. To want to have a kid with him. When they first began dating, I assumed she must have been blind, but she wasn’t. She actually and improbably seemed to like Charlie. Love him, even.
“Whatcha watching?” Zooey asked. She flopped down onto the couch with a thick book and a legal pad.
I’d stopped on the Bunker live feeds, but no one was doing anything interesting. You could watch for hours and never see any good action. It was a miracle the producers were able to cobble together enough entertaining footage for three weekly shows. “Nothing.”
I tossed the remote to Zooey and started to stand, but she said, “Don’t leave on my account. I have so much studying to do.”
“What class?”
She rolled her eyes and glanced at her book. “Just a stupid history survey.”
“Sounds like a blast.”
“I hate it. Not history—history’s pretty cool—just the way they cram two thousand years of human civilization into a five-month class.” Zooey shook her head. “Seriously, it’s like history for dummies. No, strike that. It’s like white male history for dummies. The professor totally ignores every major contribution by anyone who wasn’t a white dude.”
She talked about history the way I felt about science. Science is all around us. We are science. It governs our bodies, how we interact with the world and universe. But most people are too stupid to realize it. They think science is optional. Like if they refuse to believe in gravity, they can simply ignore it.
“Is that what you want to do?” I asked. “Be a historian, I mean.”
“No,” she said. “I think I want to be a psychologist.” Zooey flashed me a wry smile. “To be honest, I’m not even a hundred percent certain about that.”
“You’ve definitely got the patience for it. You’d have to, dating my brother and all.”
“Who knows? Maybe I’ll major in history, too, and become a historical psychologist.”
“Is that even a thing?”
Zooey shrugged. “Got me.”
Talking to her was easy. Even when she was watching the TV with one eye, I felt like she was really listening to me. Like she actually cared. “If you knew the world was ending, and you had the chance to stop it, would you?”
“Of course.” Zooey rubbed her belly. She wasn’t even showing yet, not that I could see. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s for a school project.”
“That’s interesting.”
I shook my head. “Not really. Like I said: it’s just a school thing.”
Zooey turned toward me, giving me her undivided attention. “Not the question—the fact that you’d even need to ask.”
“You don’t think there are some pretty compelling reasons for wiping the earth clean and starting over?”
“No,” she said, “but clearly, you do.”
I didn’t get the opportunity to respond because Charlie returned, his shirt sticking to his still damp body. He flopped down between me and Zooey and grabbed the remote, which was my cue to leave. Though she didn’t say anything, I felt Zooey’s eyes on my back as I left the room.
• • •
I was surprised when Diego texted me later that evening to meet him outside in twenty minutes. He refused to tell me where we were going, but Charlie and Zooey had ordered pizza and traded her history homework for baby name books, so I was especially grateful for the opportunity to escape.
Diego grinned when I hopped into the car, and didn’t even wait for me to buckle my seat belt before throwing Please Start into drive and lurching toward our destination, which didn’t take long to deduce.
“We could have walked here,” I said when Diego parked on the side of the beach road. It was empty, save for a couple of packs of cyclists that whizzed past, wearing those obscenely tight spandex shorts.
“I didn’t want to carry that.” He pointed at a long black duffel bag in the backseat.
“Are those the tools you’re going to use to kill and dismember me?”
Diego rolled his eyes. “If they were, do you think I’d tell you?”
“I’d tell you.”
“As if. I’m pretty sure the only thing you could dismember is a sandwich.” Diego hoisted the bag over his shoulder. “Speaking of, there’s a sack with subs on the floor. Grab the pop, too.” He started down the dunes, and I had to hustle to catch up. By the time he stopped, my shoes were full of sand, so I kicked them aside and peeled off my socks.
“If I’d known we were going to the beach, I would have worn flip-flops.”
“You usually do. I hadn’t expected you to be in fancy dress.”
“Fancy?” I tried to ignore my burning ears, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t put some thought into my outfit. Still, it was only jeans and a V-neck tee. Compared to Diego, though, I suppose I was a little dressy. He was wearing khaki shorts and a green tank that showed off his lack of tan lines and his impressive shoulders. I tried not to stare at the way his muscles rippled when he moved, but I rationalized that it would be insulting not to admire them a little. “Anyway, at least I can pick a style and stick with it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Preppy one day, surfer the next. It’s like you can’t decide who to be.”
Diego shrugged. “I like to try new things. You don’t go to a buffet and only eat spaghetti all night.”
“Still, it’s weird.” I walked to the edge of the water and breathed in the salt air. The sun had set, but the western sky was the color of peach skin, while the sky over the ocean was a clear lapis blue. The moon was a bright smile, hovering high to the south. “Is this the surprise?”
Diego knelt beside the bag and lifted out a navy tube and black tripod. It slipped, and I rushed to help. “It’s my sister’s telescope. I thought you’d enjoy looking at the stars.”
“I guess.” I’d never looked through a telescope before, and I’d always wanted to, but I kept waiting for Diego to crack an alien joke or ask me about the abductions, even though he hadn’t mentioned either in weeks.
After twenty minutes of trying to set up the telescope, Diego threw his hands in the air and admitted defeat. I had no idea what I was doing, but I tried to aim it at something interesting anyway. “You know,” I said, as I fiddled with the knobs, “I kind of like that you suck at something.”
“Me? You’re crazy. I suck at lots of things. Stargazing, for instance. And Ping-Pong. I’m the world’s worst Ping-Pong player.” Diego busied himself with spreading out a ratty blanket that had been wadded up in the bag with the telescope. “Anything?”
I peered through the eyepiece and tweaked it until I managed to bring Neptune more or less into focus. “Check it out.”
Diego sprang to his feet and peeked through the lens. “Is it supposed to be that small?”
“It’s almost three billion miles away. Even traveling at the speed of light, it would still take about four hours to reach.” I tried to imagine standing on that cold, distant planet, breathing hydrogen and helium, viewing Earth from the other side of the solar system. I wondered if it was lonely out there on the edge of space, so far from the light and warmth of the sun. “I bet I can find Saturn. We can probably see its rings.”
“It’s not a very good telescope, is it?”
“Better than nothing.”
Diego patted the tube. “Viv got it cheap, I think. She’s not a telescope expert.”
“And you are?”
“No.” Diego swiveled the telescope to another part of the sky and looked through the eyepiece. He kept adjusting the knobs, but I don’t think he knew what he was doing. “I just thought I could show you something beautiful.” He glared at the telescope. “Or try to, anyway.”
I trudged back to the blanket, flopping down and staring at my toes. It was one of the most considerate things anyone had done for me, and that twisted my stomach into knots. “Why are you so nice to me?”
“I’ve got a soft spot for lost causes.”
“I’m not your charity case.”
Diego abandoned the telescope and sat across from me. The way he looked at me—with curiosity or pity, I couldn’t tell which—made me wish I’d ignored his text. “It was a joke, Henry.”
“That’s what Marcus always says.”
“That’s because he’s a douche.”
“He’s not. I mean, yeah, he is, but sometimes he’s okay.”
“Wait.” Diego’s eyes widened. “Please tell me Marcus isn’t the guy you’ve been fooling around with.”
“No,” I said, but it was obvious I was lying when my voice broke. “Damn it.” I stood and walked to the water, let the waves run over my toes. If I dove in, maybe I could swim off the edge of the world. When I heard Diego behind me, I said, “Don’t you dare tell anyone.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know how to keep a secret.”
“That’s obvious.”
I waited for Diego to decide I was too much trouble, to leave or fight with me. Something. He simply stood beside me while the moments passed and my anger drained into the ocean. Then he said, “Do you actually like him?”
“I thought I did.”
“He’s not the kind of guy I figured you’d go for.”
“He isn’t.”
“Then why?”
“Because he’s not Jesse.” It was the first time I’d admitted it to myself. Marcus and Jesse were so different. Jesse had never called me Space Boy, he never would have hit me, hadn’t cared what his friends thought, and I’d never felt ashamed of who I was with him. Jesse had loved me.
But that’s a lie, isn’t it? If Jesse had loved me, he wouldn’t have left me. “Marcus isn’t a bad guy. He can be sweet.”
A wave splashed across my feet and sloshed up my legs, soaking the cuffs of my jeans. In the dark it was difficult to see where the ocean ended and the sky began; I could pretend the sky curved down and around, and that it was possible to walk on the clouds. But even though I wasn’t looking at Diego, I felt the pull of him, the way he distorted everything around him so I didn’t know what was right or real anymore.
“What about all the names he calls you? The shit he and his friends put you through? A guy who does that . . . Well, he’s not really boyfriend material. I mean, is that honestly who you want to be with?” Diego’s voice contained a dangerous undertow. He hardly sounded like the boy who’d flung himself into my chemistry class, pretending to be a nude model. “Well, is it?”
I knew the answer. Jesse Franklin was who I wanted to be with. Jesse, who’d wrapped his arms around my waist and kissed my neck and told me it was going to be okay after I fought with my mom, and who stayed up all night on the phone with me when he went to Rhode Island to visit his family for Christmas, and we watched the sunrise together even though we were separated by 1,377 miles. That was who I wanted to be with. But he was dead. “Maybe that’s what I deserve,” I said under my breath.
“What?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does.”
“We’re all going to die.”
“Which is why it matters.” Diego stood beside me quietly for a few seconds before he returned to the blanket. “Hungry?” He tossed me a sub—roast beef with all the veggies. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I hated onions.
“Thanks.” I unwrapped it and ate it even though I wasn’t hungry. Diego didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t know Marcus, he didn’t know Jesse, and he didn’t know me. If he did, he’d understand.
“I met Jesse freshman year. I knew who he was; everyone knew Jesse Franklin. It wasn’t that he was popular, but he had this way of dominating a room. No matter how many other people were there, you couldn’t help noticing Jesse.
“Of course, he talked to me first. I never would have had the courage to approach him. It was during lunch. I always sat alone, reading, and he walked up to my table, all smiles and perfect hair, and asked me if my name was Daniel. I told him it wasn’t, but he insisted I looked like this guy Daniel he’d known from summer camp. Finally he asked me my name. But it wasn’t just Jesse standing there. It felt like every kid in the cafeteria was at my table asking. I’ve never done well under pressure, so when I opened my mouth to answer, I said, ‘I don’t know,’ instead.”
Diego snorted and laughed.
“Jesse gave me this crazy look and was like, ‘You don’t know your own name?’ and all I could do was nod, even though in my brain I was screaming, ‘Henry Denton! My name is Henry!’ Jesse eventually returned to his own table. I was sure I’d blown my only chance to get to know him.”
“But you hadn’t,” Diego said.
“No.” I felt a tear burning in the corner of my eye, but I refused to acknowledge it. I wasn’t going to cry in front of Diego. “I ran into him at the mall a few weeks later. Actually, he’d found out my name from one of his friends, and when he saw me with my mom shopping for shoes, he chased after me, yelling my name. My mom thought he was a lunatic, but all he wanted to do was give me his number.”
Diego finished his sub and tossed the crumpled wax paper into his duffel bag. “Your Jesse sounds like a cool guy.”
My Jesse. He wasn’t anyone’s Jesse anymore. “He was the best. We spent almost every second together, and when we were apart, it hurt—it physically hurt. My entire life revolved around Jesse, but in the end, it didn’t matter. He slipped a noose around his neck and hanged himself without saying good-bye. No note, no text, no last voice mail. The last thing he said to me was that I needed a haircut, like it was just another day. Only, it wasn’t any other day. It was the day before he committed suicide. If everything matters, wouldn’t Jesse have said something more meaningful? Wouldn’t he have wanted to do more than hang out and watch TV like we always did? Wouldn’t he have at least left me a note to explain why he felt he had to die, instead of leaving me here alone, wondering why. Why is Jesse dead? Why am I not?”
I waited for Diego to answer. I wasn’t sure how he had expected this night to go, but I doubted it was this. There was nothing he could say that would change my mind, but I waited for him to try. Instead he said, “Do you think we could see them with the telescope?”
“Them?”
“The aliens.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay, sure.” A moment later he said, “I believe you, you know.”
“I don’t need you to believe me.”
“I know. It’s one of the things I like most about you.” It caught me off guard, and I didn’t know how to reply. Diego stood up, brushing the sand off his shorts. He peered through the telescope again. Maybe he was looking for the sluggers, maybe he just wanted to see the stars and dream of a world beyond this one while I sat on the blanket and remembered Jesse. Dreams are hopeful because they exist as pure possibility. Unlike memories, which are fossils, long dead and buried deep.
We stayed at the beach for a while longer but, no matter how much we fiddled with the telescope, the stars never seemed so far away.