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. When 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?”
“No.”
“Don’t protect him!”
I flinched. The air around Diego vibrated the way it does before a thunderstorm, warning me that worse was coming. “Stop, Diego, just stop. It doesn’t matter who did it.”
Diego clenched his fist. He punched the steering wheel until his knuckles bled. “Don’t you get it, Henry? I love you. I love you so much, and I know this is all a big joke to you because the world is ending and you don’t think any of this matters, but when it comes to you, it always matters.”
I unbuckled my seat belt and twisted around. I held Diego’s face in my hands and kissed him despite the agony that exploded around my nose and eye. Pain has a way of reinforcing memories. It binds them to the moment so you never forget, and I didn’t want to forget.
“I think . . . I think I love you too, Diego.” They words hurt. Saying them to someone other than Jesse, but I knew they were true. And that made them hurt even worse. “But that’s why we shouldn’t see each other.” I don’t remember when I started crying, but I couldn’t stop. “I wish the sluggers had chosen you to save the world. I just . . . I can’t be the reason you end up back in juvie.”
Diego was shaking, but I couldn’t tell if he was crying or going to punch me. “I don’t need you to look after me. You can’t even look after yourself.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You won’t press the button to save the world because you don’t think you deserve to live in it.”
“I was going to do it, Diego. Because of you.”
Diego shook his head. “Maybe you’re right. We shouldn’t see each other.” He laughed bitterly, but I didn’t get the joke. “I wanted you to press the button because you wanted to, not for me or anyone else. If you can’t see how amazing you are, then . . . forget it.”
I tried to think of something more to say, but I’d run out of words. I got out of the car and walked back toward school to call Audrey for a ride. I half expected Diego to chase after me, but he didn’t.