14 September 2015
I woke up laughing. For a few disorienting seconds, I thought I was still on the spaceship. The sluggers had shown me a projection of the earth exploding again, along with the big, red button, but they hadn’t shocked or blissed me. They simply offered me the choice and waited to see what I would do. Maybe that’s why I was laughing. Averting the apocalypse shouldn’t be so easy. It should require elaborate schemes hidden from the public to keep them from panicking. It should demand sacrifice and tearful good-byes and Bruce Willis.
Obviously, I didn’t press it.
When I regained my senses and realized I wasn’t on the sluggers’ ship anymore, the laughter died in my throat. My back was damp, and something sharp dug into my hip. My hair, my boxers, and my chest were wet. I stank like stagnant canal water. When I sat up, I spit, in case some of the water had gotten into my mouth.
The moon was dark, and clouds obscured the stars. I had no idea where I was. I remembered being at Marcus’s party, sitting by the pool—then I was on the ship—but I had no idea how I’d ended up floating on a sea of sandspurs and goose grass. The sluggers had stolen my jeans and Jesse’s shirt, but at least they’d left me my boxers. A teenage boy running around Calypso in his underwear is odd, but a teenage boy running around Calypso naked is a felony.
My legs trembled as I stood, and I listed dangerously. I focused on the horizon like Jesse had said to, but without the moon, the sky and ground bled into one another. Eventually, my eyes adjusted, and I was able to pick out a few distant shadows. I set sail for those.
I walked for ten minutes, carefully picking my way through the weedy field, forced to stop occasionally to pluck a spiny sandspur from the tender skin between my toes, cursing the sluggers for never dropping me off anywhere interesting. I hope before the world ends, they drop me off somewhere I’ve never been—Paris or Thailand or Brazil. Anywhere has to be better than Calypso.
The shadows turned out to be jungle gym equipment. Towers and monkey bars, the various structures connected by wooden bridges. I didn’t recognize the playground, but I did recognize the Randy Raccoon mascot painted on the wall of the nearest building. This was my old elementary school. It had changed since I was a boy. There used to be a metal geodesic dome that I’d climb to the top of and leap from, trying to break my ankle so I’d be sent home. I wasn’t Space Boy back then, I was Hillbilly Henry because of a cowboy hat I’d worn every day for weeks. I don’t even remember where I got it, but I hardly took it off. Not until Matt Walsh stole it during recess and pissed on it. No one but me had seen him do it, and Mr. Polk—my third-grade teacher—accused me of peeing on it myself and trying to blame Matt. When my father picked me up from school and asked me where my hat was, I told him I lost it. He spanked me so hard with a wooden spoon, the handle broke.
Ben Franklin Elementary was too far from home to walk, so I trudged to the front of the school. I was exhausted, my legs ached, and my head felt like the sluggers had unspooled my brain through my ears and then stuffed it back in wrong so that it resembled a bowl of gray linguini. Needless to say, I was overjoyed when I saw a pay phone next to a wooden bench near the student drop-off area. The phone booth was decorated with faded stickers for bands I’d never heard of and brands that sounded only vaguely familiar—relics of rebel kids long since assimilated into adulthood. I picked up the receiver, trying not to imagine the hundreds of snot-nosed brats that had probably groped it, and prayed it still worked. The dial tone was the most beautiful sound I’d heard in ages.
My finger hovered over the numbers. It was late, but I didn’t know how late. It had been eleven or twelve when I was sitting by the pool—those shots had skewed my perception of the passage of time—but the sluggers could have kept me for an hour or five. Waking up my mother was out of the question, and Charlie would sleep through the end of the world, so I knew he wouldn’t answer his phone. I didn’t know my father’s number or if he even still lived in Florida, and Audrey was the last person I wanted to see. I only knew one other number.
The first indignity was having to call collect. Pay phones should be free. If you’re desperate enough to need one, it’s probably an emergency and you don’t have change. It’s not like boxer shorts come with pockets. I hadn’t even known that you could make collect calls until Jesse explained it to me one morning after the sluggers had dropped me off near his house. The information had seemed about as useful as Latin, until the first time I actually needed to use it.
I pressed zero and followed the prompts, first dialing Marcus’s number, then speaking my name into the receiver, and, finally, waiting.
The second indignity was hearing Marcus ask who it was three times and then pause, as if he were actually considering whether to accept the charges, before muttering a weary yes. His voice was drowsy and annoyed. “Henry?”
“Were you sleeping?”
“Obviously. It’s, like, three in the morning.”
I forced a laugh. “I figured you’d be drinking until dawn.”
Marcus paused. “Drinking? What the fuck, Henry? I’ve got school tomorrow. So do you.”
School? Seriously? The sluggers had kept me on their ship for at least two whole days. I hate when they do that.
The third indignity was listening to Marcus speak to me in that condescending tone, knowing I couldn’t tell him to eat a dick because I needed him to pick me up, and having to pretend it was Sunday when my brain was telling me it was still Friday.
“I wouldn’t have called if it weren’t important.”
“Couldn’t you have called someone else?”
“No.”
The silence on Marcus’s end of the line worried me that he’d hung up, but he coughed, and the phlegmy noise was a relief. “What’s the big emergency?”
“I’m at Ben Franklin Elementary, and I need you to pick me up.”
“Funny.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Dude, that’s way out by Beeline. What’re you doing there?”
The fourth indignity was that Marcus already knew the answer but wanted to hear me say it. “Can you get me or not?”
Part of me wanted him to refuse. To hang up the phone and fall back to sleep, wake up the next morning believing my call had been some crazy, late-night, Chinese-food-fueled dream. But he said, “Give me a few minutes to get dressed.”
• • •
No one memorizes phone numbers anymore. They call “Mom” or “Dad” or “Assface.” The entries in their phones are completely divorced from the ten-digit numbers that make calling people possible.
I tried to bring my cell phone onto the ship with me a couple of times. I’d slept with it clutched in my hands, stuffed in my underwear; I’d even duct-taped it to my thigh once. The sluggers had ditched the phone but left the tape. I’m not ashamed to admit that I screamed when I pulled it off the next day. I thought if I could sneak my phone aboard, I could snap some grainy photos, record some video, maybe grab GPS coordinates to prove I wasn’t lying. As an added bonus, I’d be able to call for help if the sluggers dropped me off far from home.
I finally gave up and memorized the numbers of everyone I knew worth calling. The list was short.
Marcus zipped into the parking lot in a sleek black Tesla. His poor taste in music reached me before he did; the car vibrated from the bass, and Marcus sang loud and proud.
When he pulled to a stop in the loading zone, I caught my reflection in the car’s tinted windows before Marcus pushed open the door. My hair was tangled and stiff from the dried water, my chest was streaked with mud, and I was wearing the boxers with the kissing whales Jesse had given me for our first Valentine’s Day. I’m pretty sure whales don’t actually kiss.
“Looking hot, Space Boy.” Marcus, of course, looked perfect. His hair had just the right amount of wave in the front, and he was dressed in khaki shorts and a V-neck T-shirt. He didn’t look at all like someone who’d recently rolled out of bed.
“Can you not call me that?” I started to climb into the car when Marcus shouted, “Whoa, whoa! Hold on.” He dug around in the backseat and retrieved a towel for me to sit on, and one of his track jerseys to wear. It was crusty and reeked of salty sweat, but it still smelled better than I did. “Thanks.”
We barely made it out of the parking lot before Marcus started in on me. “Is this some sort of Space Boy thing?”
I leaned my head against the window and watched Ben Franklin Elementary disappear, trying to ignore Marcus. For him, the party was two days ago—old news—but the things he’d said, the way he’d treated me, were still fresh wounds for me. Being desperate for a ride didn’t mean I was willing to forgive him.
Marcus smacked my arm. “Those aliens lobotomize you or something?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You were totally abducted, weren’t you?” Marcus fired off a high-pitched cackle that made me fantasize about punching him so hard in the balls that the trauma traveled back through time and rendered his ancestors sterile, thus wiping Marcus McCoy from history. “What’d they do to you? Anal probe? That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Totally,” I mumbled. “Why do you even want to know?”
“I’m curious.”
“Bullshit. You just want the gory details so you can tell your asshole friends how Space Boy got bummed by aliens.”
Marcus’s eyes widened. “Did you really?”
“No!”
Despite being the only car on the road, we caught every red light. When Marcus pulled to a stop, he slid his hand across the center console and rested it on my thigh, slowly inching toward my crotch like he thought I wouldn’t notice. “I was dreaming about you when you called.”
“Funny, I was dreaming about you, too.”
“Yeah?”
“It was great. I showed up at your party, and you didn’t publicly humiliate me. Of course, that’s how I knew it was a dream.” I peeled his hand off my leg.
“Lighten up, Henry.”
I despised his bully logic. If I did nothing when taunted or teased, I was a pussy. If I fought back, I was accused of taking things too seriously. He hides behind the excuse that he’s only fooling around, that everyone else needs to learn how to take a joke. Normally, I would have let it pass, but I was too exhausted, too sore, and too upset. It was one indignity too far.
“Do you think this is funny for me? Having to call the guy who humiliates me one second and gives me boners the next to rescue me from the middle of nowhere at three in the morning? Do you think this is my idea of a good fucking time?”
The light turned green, but the car didn’t move. Marcus looked at me curiously, but I had no idea what he was thinking. “I’m glad you came to my party.”
“What?”
Marcus shrugged. “I should have invited you, but I didn’t figure you’d come. I’m glad you did.”
That wasn’t even remotely close to what I’d expected Marcus to say, and I didn’t know how to respond. Moments of sincerity from him are rare, but he can be sweet when he thinks no one is watching. That’s the only thing that kept me coming back, but it wasn’t enough anymore. Marcus finally drove on and, when we’d gone a bit farther, I said, “You called me trash. You made me feel like trash.”
“Chill, Henry. You need thicker skin.” Marcus glanced at me, but I refused to look him in the eyes. “Anyway, I tried to find you to apologize, but you’d left.”
“Whatever.”
Marcus cut the wheel and pulled into a Taco Bell. The pink-and-purple lights cast a garish glow on the empty parking lot. He parked the car, unbuckled his seat belt, and turned toward me. His smile was gone, replaced by an earnestness that unnerved me. “It’s more than sex to me, you know.”
“What is?”
“Us.”
“Are we an us?” With Jesse I’d never needed to define our relationship. From the beginning, we’d felt like a unit. Jesse was my parallel subject—I always knew he was on the other side of the ampersand—but I didn’t know where I stood with Marcus. Was I his object or something more?
Marcus ground his teeth. His jaw muscles twitched. He was looking at me like having to answer a simple question was beneath him. Like I was beneath him. “Henry . . .”
I got out of the car. We were only halfway home, but it was closer than I’d been. “I’ll walk from here.”
“Get in the car, Space Boy.”
I slammed the door as hard as I could, relishing the hollow thud, but Marcus ruined it by rolling down the window, so I gave him the finger in case he hadn’t understood me the first time.
“Come on, Henry. I got up in the middle of the night for you. Doesn’t that prove something?” His voice betrayed no sarcasm, no condescension. It was almost enough to make me believe he cared.
“It proves you thought you could trade a ride home for a hand job.”
Marcus gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white. He wasn’t used to people telling him no. He grew up surrounded by people who convinced him he deserves everything he wants and that no one should refuse him anything.
A red pickup truck barreled into the drive-thru, the modified exhaust announcing to the world that the driver had a micro-penis. I noticed the Calypso High bumper sticker at the same time Marcus did. “Get in the car, and we’ll talk about it, Henry.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
Once the truck reached the pickup window, the driver would be able to see Marcus. They’d see me standing next to Marcus’s car. After a moment’s hesitation, he peeled out of the parking lot, leaving me stranded again.
I walked the rest of the way home, sticking to the shadows to avoid catching the attention of cops on patrol. Calypso is a quiet town, and the police often have nothing better to do than pester anyone who looks like they don’t belong, and that includes teenage boys walking home in the middle of the night wearing kissing-whale boxers and a running singlet.
This is my life. A parade of humiliation and suffering. Before Jesse, I could deal with being Space Boy. He knew about the abductions but never made me feel like a freak. Before Jesse, I knew that no matter what happened to me, I could soldier on so long as we were together. But I’m living in an After Jesse world where I ache from missing him and nothing makes sense. My boyfriend and best friend both abandoned me. Marcus was using me for sex. I am a punch line at school, a ghost at home.
I hate Jesse for leaving me behind. If he asked, I would have walked into the air with him.
I was wrong to believe that the sluggers had given me freedom. Going to the party changed nothing. If anything, it made my life worse. I no longer cared why they’d chosen me to decide the fate of the earth. It didn’t matter.
By the time I reached my house, my feet cut and sore, I decided I would never press the button.
Fuck it. Let the world burn.