10 November 2015
Mathematics rules the universe. The earth orbits the sun, traveling at an average speed of 107,200 kilometers per hour. The actual speed can be determined at any point in the earth’s orbit by using the distance to the sun and the specific orbital energy. The earth also completes one full rotation every 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.09 seconds, and has an axial tilt of 23.4 degrees. Because of the constancy of the math that governs these events, I can tell you with absolute certainty that on May 1, 2091, the sun will rise over Calypso at exactly 6:45 a.m. and will set at 7:57 p.m.
Scientists even theorize that if you could take the position, speed, trajectory, and mass of every object in the universe and feed it into a supercomputer, you could predict the future of everything.
Predicting my routine over the days after the attack was far easier. I lost myself in the minutiae of life. Charlie drove me to school each morning, and I watched him grow more comfortable in his shirt and tie, and more confident in his role as a father-to-be, though he still found time to torture me—his new favorite game was to stick his finger in my mouth every time I yawned. Diego and I continued to eat lunch together. Sometimes we skipped the cafeteria, but most days we found the quiet end of a table and pretended the other seats were empty. I still haven’t figured out why he’s wasting his time on me when he could easily fit in with any clique he wanted. He’s a chameleon that way. He seems to change personalities the way he changes styles, and that makes it difficult to figure out who he is. The only times I catch a glimpse of the real Diego Vega are when he’s talking about books or art.
Sometimes I think about pushing him to talk about his family, about why he moved to Calypso from Colorado, but my goal is to simply survive until the world’s end, and that does not include antagonizing Diego.
Nana officially resigned from lunch-making duty, and on Tuesday, Mom packed leftover fried chicken, which I shared with Diego. I offered him the thigh and kept the leg for myself. He peeled off the skin and ate it first, savoring each bite. “This is killer.”
“My mom uses ground unicorn horn and the blood of virgins for the coating.” In truth, I don’t know what’s in her chicken, but I love it. Laughter drew my attention away from Diego, toward the lunch line where Audrey Dorn stood with her arms extended like she was frozen mid-pirouette. I didn’t understand what was happening at first because her scoop-neck shirt was brown, and I couldn’t see the spilled soda until the rivulets reached her white pants. All the kids at the nearby tables were cracking up, but Adrian Morse was doubled over. I hoped he pissed himself.
“Don’t you know that girl?” Diego asked.
“Audrey?”
“Looks like she’s having a rough day.”
Audrey shook the soda from her hands, not caring who she flung the drops on, and stormed out of the cafeteria, leaving her lunch tray on the floor. Adrian stood up and did a fairly accurate impression of her stance and walk. Possession of the mask hadn’t been sufficient proof for Principal DeShields to link Adrian to my attack, but harassing me with it had earned him a three-day suspension. He’d returned more vicious than before.
“I don’t want to sit through study hall,” I said, trying to change the subject.
“It’s better than PE.”
“True, but Mr. Weiss spends the entire period posting on Brony forums—”
“That should surprise me, but doesn’t.”
“And Chloe Speedman smacks her lips when she chews gum, which she does constantly. If I have to spend another hour there, I might consider self-immolation as a form of protest.”
Diego leaned over his tray, his arms resting on either side, and poked around his lunch for any crumbs he might have missed—he was the only person I knew who ate faster than Charlie—but there was nothing left. “Let’s ditch.”
“And do what?”
“Whatever.”
“I hear whatever’s fun this time of year.”
Diego rolled his eyes. “Come on, man. Don’t you want to get out of here?”
“Yeah, but—”
“How can you make an informed decision about whether to save the world if you never leave your tiny part of it?”
The bell rang, but we didn’t move. Diego was staring at me so hard, it was like he was trying to force his thoughts into my brain. I know it was only my imagination, but I felt like I could hear a chorus of Diegos encouraging me to say no to class and yes to anarchy. Diego was one variable no equation could predict. Being in survival mode for the next seventy-five days didn’t have to mean I couldn’t have fun.
“Fine, but we’re not going to the beach.”
• • •
Diego and I loitered on the side of the math building while we waited for the final bell to ring. Vice Principal Marten patrols the parking lot between classes, making sure only students with passes escape. He locks the gate the rest of the time, but it’s hardly a deterrent, since all you have to do is hop the curb and drive around it.
VP Marten cruised the lot for a couple of minutes after the last bell before heading back toward the administration building. Diego grabbed my arm and motioned for me to follow.
“Who gives their kid an eighty-thousand-dollar car?” Diego asked. He was eyeing Marcus’s Tesla, though he could have been talking about any of the cars. The parking lot was full of Lexuses, BMWs, and Mercedes.
“The McCoys.”
Diego raised an eyebrow and glanced again at Marcus’s sleek ride. Even though I hated him, I couldn’t deny it was a beautiful machine.
We reached Diego’s car, and he breathed a sigh. He stuck the key in the ignition and turned; nothing happened. Not even the car’s characteristic wheeze that I’d come to know well. “Come on. Please Start, please start, please start.” Diego cranked the ignition again, but Please Start refused to. “Maybe the battery’s dead.”
While Diego tinkered under the hood, doubt gnawed at my resolve. Mr. Weiss wouldn’t care if I snuck into study hall a few minutes late. I could’ve lied and told him the cafeteria burritos gave me stomach cramps, even though I’m smart enough never to eat those cheesy laxative bombs. This was a stupid idea. Skipping class wasn’t going to change my mind about pressing the button. It wasn’t going to bring back Jesse or make Marcus and Adrian disappear. Even if we found something to do, my shitty life would still be waiting for me when the fun ended. I was about to say so when Diego slammed the hood and said, “She’s toast.”
“I guess we should go to class.” I tried to sound crestfallen as I grabbed my bag and got out of the car. That’s when I saw Audrey speed-walking toward us. It was really more of a trot.
“Problems?” she asked.
“We were planning to ditch,” I said.
Audrey glanced nervously over her shoulder. “Were?”
“Car trouble,” I said.
“I hate to break it to you, but Marten’s headed this way.”
Diego sighed. “We’re not going anywhere in this thing.”
I swore I could hear the predatory whirr of Marten’s golf cart approaching.
Audrey fidgeted with her keys. She kept looking behind her, her eyes wide and dodgy. “Listen, I’ll give you a ride off campus if you want, but we should hurry.”
“It might be safer to go back to class.” I’d agreed to skip school with Diego; catching a ride with Audrey hadn’t been part of the plan.
Diego snorted. “No way. Marks will give me detention. I don’t do detention.”
“Now or never.” Audrey took a couple of steps toward her car and disarmed the alarm.
I wasn’t paranoid. I could definitely hear the golf cart’s motor. I’d earned some sympathy because of the attack, but I doubt I’d be able to weasel out of a detention if Marten caught me trying to skip. “Fine. Let’s go.”
Nobody said much as we left campus. Vice Principal Marten chased us out of the parking lot, but he couldn’t catch Audrey’s V8. I wasn’t sure what Diego and I were going to do without a car after Audrey dropped us off. Ratting out Adrian for the mask didn’t make us even. She pulled into a CVS and parked.
Diego hopped out and stretched his legs. “Thanks for the save.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
Audrey looked at me in the rearview mirror. “I never pegged you for a skipper.”
“You’re one to talk.”
I noticed she’d changed out of her soda-stained clothes, and into jeans and a tank top. “I . . . yeah . . . I needed to get out of there.”
“I know the feeling.” Diego wandered to her side and offered her his hand through the open window. “I’m Diego Vega, by the way.”
“Audrey Dorn.”
“Henry’s told me nothing about you.”
Audrey flashed him a wry smile. “I bet.”
“Seriously,” Diego said. “All I know is that you used to be friends.”
“It’s . . . whatever,” I said. We’d managed to escape school, but we didn’t have a car, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day in a drugstore parking lot. “Where were you headed?”
“Home, probably,” Audrey said. “Me and Leah and a couple of other girls had plans to go to the fair tonight, but they’ve been avoiding me lately.”
Diego perked up. “Fair?”
“It comes around every year,” I said.
“Is it far? I haven’t been to a real fair ever.”
“I don’t know. Maybe we could go this weekend.”
“What else are you going to do today?” Audrey asked. “It’s not like you’ve got a car.”
Diego was so excited, he was practically bouncing up and down, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. Hanging out at the fair with Audrey wasn’t how I’d planned to spend my afternoon, but she had a point.
“Come on, Henry,” Diego said. “It’ll be fun, I promise.”
“Do you think you can stand hanging out with me for a few hours?” Audrey’s lips hinted at a smirk I knew well.
I sighed dramatically. “You did sort of save my ass—”
“Twice.”
“So I suppose I can make an exception.”
Audrey shrugged. “Then I guess we’re going to the fair.”
• • •
The last time I attended the fair, Audrey and I were still friends, and Jesse was alive. I thought Jesse was happy, though in retrospect, the signs were there that he was going to fall apart. It wasn’t any one big thing; it was the way all the little things added up and compounded. He didn’t kill himself because of a single overwhelming problem; he died from a thousand tiny wounds.
Audrey walked ahead of me and Diego, moving with the line, which was longer than we’d anticipated. Clearly, we weren’t the only ones skipping the last two classes of the day, but it still wasn’t as busy as it would have been on a Friday night or Saturday afternoon.
“There’s no way you survived living in a house without Internet.” Audrey’s head was cocked to the side, and she jutted out her hip. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
Diego shoved his hands into his pockets and shrugged. “Wish I could.”
Diego had been telling us about life in Colorado to kill time while we waited to buy the bracelets that would let us on every ride at the fair. He’d casually mentioned having to go to the library to check SnowFlake, which led to the conversation we were having. “Next you’re going to tell us you didn’t have cable, either,” I said.
“No TV at all,” Diego said, a shy smile on his face that made me wonder if he was messing with us.
Audrey inched forward with the line. “Were your parents Amish?”
“Nope. Just poor.” He said it with a simplicity that expressed no regret and asked for no pity. It was just a statement of fact.
Audrey began to stammer. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t mean . . .”
Diego patted her arm. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Seriously . . . I . . . I . . .”
“Her family wasn’t always rich,” I said. “Her mom invented this recyclable paper coffee cup that holds in heat but keeps the outside from burning your hand.”
“Seriously?”
Audrey blushed and glanced at the trampled grass under her feet like she was considering digging a deep hole and crawling into it. “My . . . my mom’s a genius.”
“My mom knits sweaters for cats.” Diego’s deadpan delivery was so good that I didn’t know whether he was telling the truth, and I busted up laughing at the image of grumpy cats in ugly sweaters. Audrey relaxed; I was in awe of Diego’s ability to always know the right thing to say.
At the front of the line, Audrey and I got into a fight when she tried to pay for all of our tickets. Diego stealthily paid the admission while we were arguing, causing me and Audrey to join together in righteous indignation. But all was forgotten and forgiven by the end of our first ride on the Pirate Ship.
We stared at our twisted reflections in the mirror maze, ate powdered-sugar-dusted elephant ears, banged out our aggression on the bumper cars, and got sticky fingers from cotton candy. I was sweat-soaked and flushed, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed so loudly or smiled so often without having to fake it.
Diego grabbed my and Audrey’s hands and pulled us toward the flying saucer with the garish blinking lights. “Whatever that is, I want to ride it!” His curiosity was insatiable, his joy infectious. He approached everything he did like it was both the first and last time he was ever going to get to do it.
Audrey glanced at me knowingly, and not because of the obvious UFO reference. The last time I’d ridden the Gravitron was with Jesse. He killed himself sixty-eight days later. I said, “I’m okay,” and we crowded onto the ride, shoving past some preppy parents who dragged their whining, disinterested brats alongside them. The dark, muggy interior was a nineties fossil, a dream frozen in amber. The ride whirled around and tilted up and down, but it never moved forward. We shuffled to our narrow slats along the wall and leaned against the cracked and taped vinyl panels. I tried not to think about the parade of filthy people who had previously stood in my place, sweat matting their hair, soaking into the headrest.
“All right, partners!” shouted the lanky-haired, metal-band reject at the center of the Gravitron. “Let’s get this thing a-movin’ and a-shakin’. Yee-haw!”
“I bet he drinks heavily to smother the shame of what his life has become, and dies of liver failure by forty-three,” I said. Diego laughed, and I wanted to preserve the sound in a jar for the days when laughter was scarce.
“Yeah, right,” Audrey shot back. “Two funnel cakes says that’s you in ten years!”
“In ten years, we’ll all be gone.”
Audrey gave me a perplexed look, but Diego shouted, “Fuck that! I’m gonna live forever!” as the ride fired up and the room lurched into motion. Diego howled—earning us glares from the preppy parents who probably presumed we were drunk—and the wave of bad music continued to assault our ears as Creed blurred into Nickelback.
The trucker-hat-wearing scarecrow at the controls continued yee-hawing like anyone cared. We were swept up in the spin and in the smell of metal and vomit and bleach. I was swept up in Diego Vega. In the way he sounded like he honestly believed he’d never die despite my telling him the whole world was on borrowed time; in the way he looked at me like I was someone other than Space Boy, a way that was impossible and endless. Diego looked at me and saw me. No one had seen me since Jesse.
The ride spun faster, so fast that gravity squatted on my chest and pushed the air from my lungs, and then faster still. Jesse fought the centrifugal force and flipped onto my panel, straddling me, his curly blond hair hanging in my face, his body pressed against mine. Audrey glared at us, disgusted, and the conductor yelled for Jesse to return to his slab. Jesse ignored him. Rules didn’t apply to Jesse Franklin, and I loved him for it.
We were whirling around so fast that Jesse couldn’t hold his head up any longer and buried his face in my neck, his chapped lips grazing my skin. He was insane, and I told him so as I wrapped my arms around him so tightly that nothing would ever tear us apart.
I nipped at Jesse’s ear and ran my hands up the back of his shirt. His skin was sticky with sweat. He smelled like the ocean.
“Never stop,” whispered Jesse.
“I don’t plan to,” I promised, and meant it.
The ride slowed, and our bodies began to separate, but that only made me hold Jesse closer. He kissed me so hard that I cut my lip on his teeth.
Jesse and I disappeared into a world where we two alone existed.
“Honestly,” said Audrey as the ride slowed to a stop, “can you stop dry humping my best friend?”
But we pretended we didn’t hear her, and I wrapped my arms around Jesse’s neck, and he kissed me like the world had fallen out from under our feet. We were two bodies floating in space, brighter than stars.
• • •
When the ride ended, Diego left me and Audrey hanging out by the Tilt-A-Whirl while he hunted for a toilet. I didn’t say much, and neither did Audrey. I was pretty sure we were both thinking about Jesse. Audrey picked at the peeling paint on the side of the ride and kept repeating that she was having so much fun. After the hundredth time, I craned my neck to look for Diego.
“How long have you guys been together?” Audrey asked.
I was standing on my tiptoes, looking over the crowd, and her question didn’t register right away, so I said, “Yeah, sure.” Then, “What?”
Audrey had this way of making you feel like the dumbest person in the room. She didn’t do it on purpose, but when she looked at you, you knew her brain worked on a level many times greater than yours. “I’m glad you’re not with Marcus anymore. If he doesn’t roofie someone before graduation, I’ll be shocked.”
“Diego and I aren’t together. He’s straight.”
“Really?”
“Yup.”
Audrey furrowed her brow like she was staring at a math problem that had been marked wrong when she was certain it was correct. The calculations didn’t make sense, and Audrey hated for things to not make sense. “The way you were looking at him on the Gravitron . . .”
“I was thinking about Jesse.”
“Oh. But you like Diego, right?”
I wanted to tell Audrey how conflicted I felt. How I sometimes thought about Diego while jerking off; how, when I tried to recall memories of Jesse, Diego appeared in them instead. Jesse was dead, he’d committed suicide, but I still felt like I was betraying him for liking a guy who wasn’t even capable of liking me back. Audrey was maybe the one person who could have understood, and I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t. “Drop it, okay?”
“Fine. What do you want talk about?”
I spotted Diego walking toward us, but he stopped in front of the bumper cars, and I couldn’t see why. “I don’t know, Audrey.”
“Come on. Don’t be like that.” Everything about her was pleading with me to let it all go. Her eyes and her lips and the way her shoulders slumped.
“We did fine not talking at all for the last year,” I mumbled.
“Maybe you were fine, but I needed you.”
Diego had clearly run into someone, but I couldn’t see who it was. “I was here. I’m not the one who left.” I just needed that stupid kid with his stupid balloon to get out of the way so I could see who Diego was talking to.
“I was hurting too, you know.”
Standing in the middle of the fair was not where I wanted to have this argument. I didn’t want to have it at all, but Audrey was maddeningly persistent. “Yeah, you were hurting so bad you took a three-month vacation to Switzerland. That must have been horrible for you.”
“Henry—”
A passing family obscured Diego, so I turned my full attention to Audrey. The festering wound split open anew, spewing a geyser of pus. “You didn’t even say good-bye, Audrey. I showed up at your house, and your dad told me you’d gone to stay with family in Switzerland. I thought you’d come back after winter break, but you were gone for three months.” People turned to stare at us, but I couldn’t stop draining the abscess. “Jesse killed himself, and you were the only person I could talk to about it. I needed you, but you didn’t answer my e-mails, my calls, nothing. My boyfriend, your best friend, committed suicide, and you abandoned me. You both abandoned me.”
Tears filled Audrey’s eyes, and I hated myself for causing them. I hated myself for needing her. I wanted to hate her for leaving, but I didn’t, and I hated myself for that too. “You got to see Jesse at his best, but I saw him after he punched a brick wall so hard, he broke his fingers, when he cut his thighs with razor blades, when he put out lit cigarettes on his hands and told you he’d burned himself baking brownies. I was the one who cleaned up his blood and made sure he didn’t drink himself to death. Me, Henry. Not you.”
I didn’t learn about those things until after the funeral. I spent weeks scouring old texts and pictures, looking for the clues I’d missed. Thinking about the times I suspected something was wrong but didn’t push Jesse to talk about it keeps me awake most nights. I failed Jesse. We all failed him. “Why’d you leave, Audrey?”
“I needed space to breathe.”
“So you went skiing?”
Audrey was shaking. I looked for Diego; he was still by the bumper cars. She clenched her fists so tightly, I thought she was going to punch me. “I wasn’t in Switzerland, Henry.”
“What?”
“I don’t have family in Switzerland.” Audrey bit her bottom lip and said, “My parents checked me in to a psychiatric hospital. I spent eight weeks there and then another month with my grandparents in Jersey.”
I was tempted to believe she was lying to gain my sympathy, but going on an extended vacation after the death of her best friend had never seemed like an Audrey thing to do. I’d accepted it as the truth because she’d given me no reason to think she was lying. But this—that she’d been in a hospital—made sense. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Jesse and I had a pact. He swore he’d call me if he were thinking about hurting himself. He called me that night, but I didn’t answer. He was upset all the time and . . . I needed a night off.” She paused. “I thought it was my fault he’d killed himself, and I didn’t tell you because I couldn’t bear for you to blame me too.”
“Instead you ran away, and I blamed myself.” The crowd blocking my view finally moved. Diego was talking to a short girl, perky with pink glasses and a blue stripe in her blond hair. I think she attended our school, but I didn’t know her name. She covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed and kept touching Diego’s arm. Diego hugged the girl and pointed toward me and Audrey. He probably wished he’d come with her and was likely plotting some way to ditch us.
“I needed to leave,” Audrey said. “I was hurting so bad that I wanted to die too. It took me a long time to realize Jesse’s suicide wasn’t my fault. Don’t you know how sorry I am? I don’t know what else you want me to do.”
Diego walked toward us; the crowds parted for him. He waved. I returned it robotically.
“I wish I’d killed myself instead of him.” I kicked at the ground, blinking to keep from crying.
“I wish no one had died,” Audrey said. “I wish Jesse were here, singing and telling bad jokes and going on and on about some stupid book he read.”
“But he’s not,” I said. “And it’s our fault. Yours, mine. It’s everyone’s fault. Or no one’s. Fuck. I don’t know.”
When Diego reached us, he stopped a foot away and said, “What’s going on?”
Audrey wiped her eyes. “Sometimes I hate him, Henry. Mostly I miss him.”
“Yeah.”
“And I miss you.”
I didn’t know what to say. Audrey had been Jesse’s friend first, but I missed her too. My feelings for her were buried under scar tissue built up over 103 lonely nights spent wondering what I’d done to drive away everyone I cared about. My father, Jesse, Audrey—they’d all abandoned me. Audrey had her reasons, and I could see that, but it didn’t erase the pain. Not entirely. I stood there, my arms hanging limply at my sides, unsure what to do next.
Audrey glanced at her phone. “Maybe we should call it a day.”
Diego furrowed his brow. “But we haven’t even gone on the Ferris wheel yet.” His voice was filled with a child’s enthusiasm, a desire for life that Jesse’s suicide had stolen from me and Audrey both.
The suggestion of a smile played on Audrey’s lips. “What do you think, Space Boy?”
“Don’t call me Space Boy.”
Diego threw his arm around my shoulders and Audrey’s, too, drawing us to him. His skin was warm and sweaty, but I didn’t pull away. “No deal. You’re our space boy, Space Boy.”
The way Audrey looked at me—as if we could somehow fill the canyon that had grown between us with laughter and meet again in the middle—made me want to hug her and tell her how much I’d missed her, but I wasn’t ready for that. Not yet.
“Fine,” I said after a moment, “let’s ride the goddamn Ferris wheel.”