Before We Go Extinct (5 page)

How could you have known?

You should have known.

Of course he loved her, too.

The really stupid part is how much all of you laughed about that dumb show that your mom works on. How you were like, “This is so fake, man. This is so lame.” How none of you really got how real it feels, even if it is all wrong. Even if it's hidden behind a bunch of crappy production values and thick makeup.

Right?

It's so stupidly human, that's the thing.

 

8

I come out of the school and into a blast of hot sun an hour after everyone else, which sucks because now it's rush hour and the 6 train will be a nightmare of body odor and strangers' sweat dripping into your personal space. My commute takes two hours at this time of day and sometimes I like it because it gives me time to become the person I'm meant to be at the end of it. On hot days at rush hour, though, I'd rather light myself on fire than get onto one of those trains where even the windows are sweating back everyone's sweat, like a body odor sauna and the air-conditioning doesn't even begin to make a difference. If spring has been shockingly, unnaturally hot, now that it's officially summer, it's incendiary. It takes me a minute to adjust from the ice-cold office to this crazy heat, this oven of unforgivingly still air. It takes me another minute to think of where I can go. What I can do so that I don't leave here until late enough that the crowds will have cooled off, the train will be less of a horror show.

I don't know what to do.

The school is giving me grief counseling. It's mandatory. I think they're worried that The King's death will make me kill myself, like a grisly misguided Romeo-and-Juliet bromance. And while the Obnoxious School for the Overfunded
loves
to be on the news, they don't want it to be for some kind of lame suicide epidemic. If I don't do the counseling, they revoke my scholarship. They are serious about this. I mean, obviously for my own good, etc.

The counselor, “call me Ah-knee,” is a person who has probably never experienced grief and who thinks I need to expel my negative energy by holding a crystal in my fist and humming one note over and over in a darkened room. It's so crazy that I want to laugh but I can't because The King is dead and it isn't funny because nothing is and at least the school has air-conditioning, which is more than I can say about our apartment. When I go home, I leave behind everything, all the best things like cool, metallic, machine-made air. I lose things like privilege and personal space. I become one of a million hot bodies destined for somewhere else, going back to where we belong, our little cheap boxes somewhere far away from this shiny, rich place.

I wonder how much “Ah-knee” charges. Where she lives. I bet she has an apartment overlooking the park. I bet the air conditioner blows so hard that her Persian cat's hair blows back in the cold air. I bet her doorman holds the door extra long for her, his eyes lingering on her aerobically perfect body. I'm human, I noticed. She's a person who cares what she looks like. She wants you to notice. Every week so far, she has worn a different pair of über expensive-looking shoes and they are always unscuffed, brand-new. They look like they are handmade from the skin of baby peacocks by elderly Italian artisans. They look like they've been soled with the hide of an embryonic rhino or a shark who swam into the wrong line at the wrong time. They are so delicate that I want to grab one from her foot, I want to twist it in my hands and feel it being destroyed.

I hate her for that, for making me feel that way. It feels disgusting.
I
feel disgusting.

And for her, I have to miss basketball practice, which used to be the best part of my day. But you know what? Screw it, because I quit.

I'm going to quit everything that I
can
quit.

I can't quit school because it would give Mom too much to grieve, but right now I feel like I would if I could.

I look across the street to the spot where he'd normally be waiting for me, smoking, shirt untucked, looking
insouciant
, which is exactly the kind of word he loved.

And there she is.

Ms. Daffodil Blue, age seventeen.

She sees me. Yeah, well, I quit her, too. I already have, but right now, in this second, I know that I have to make it official, I just don't know how. So I do the only thing I can do, which is run. She yells, “Wait, you jerk! Sharky, wait for me.”

But I
can't
.

I jump over a garbage can to avoid a crowd of little kids on their way to the playground. I sprint. When I don't see her behind me, I stop and type,
Arrête
. And the word flies into her pocket, fast and low, like a weapon swinging and hitting, spinning her right out of the neighborhood. I run again. I haven't run like this for ages, glancing off surfaces, climbing things, jumping gaps. I run so hard and so fast that I can't feel my feet on the ground anymore, I'm flying, I'm soaring.

I'm a pigeon, swooping high and far.

I'm flying.

All I need now is a Nimbus 2000, and I'd be out of here for good.

Last Halloween we went to the party as Harry Potter, Ron, and Hermione.

Daff was Harry. I was Ron. There are pictures of us howling with laughter on Facebook, the three of us, The King's face crumpling so hard that his eyes vanish into the folds of his cheeks and he looks so happy and he looks so young and weird and crazy and his hair is hidden under his Hermione wig and he's laughing, and he's everything he was and wasn't at the same time.

That's the picture that
People
magazine used when they ran his obit.

That's the one everyone thinks was really him, mouth open, eyes rolling, wearing a girl's uniform from Hogwarts, looking like an idiot.

They have no idea who he was. They have no idea who he could have been.

Harry Potter fan
, they said. Like that was something sordid. Come on. Everyone liked those books when they were kids. The costumes were a joke and the media made too much of everything, that's a fact.

I'm standing on top of a chain-link fence. I have no idea how I got here. I stop to breathe, my heart hammering. Someone yells,
“Hey, kid!”
and I am going again and running down an alley like a guy who has stolen a purse and can't be stopped, not now. Not ever.

My phone buzzes.

U can't run 4evr
, she texts.

Pls,
she texts.
I'm gng 2 puke.

I run faster and faster and my heart beats out the words,
I quit you, I quit you, I quit you.
I run light and hard, people staring, wondering if they should stop me, looking for the nonexistent purse under my arm, searching for blood on my hands. They're confused by my uniform, my tie and white shirt. Should they do something? They are all too well dressed and too dazed, actors playing the part of fancy New Yorkers who don't know what to do with this interruption in their regular scene.

No one does anything. Because that's what people are like. That's what they do, which is to say, they
don't
. They wait for someone else to solve the problem, fix the leak, stop the end from coming.

They don't
do
anything.

I
am
running from something I've done. I'll be running from it forever, but I'll never be able to get away.

That's how it works. You can't quit your past. That's just how it is when your best friend is dead and your other (newly former) best friend is chasing you through the streets of Manhattan, sweat streaming down both of your faces, not knowing how it's ever going to end or if it can. Because all I really want is for her to catch up to me. All I really want is for her to hold on to me tight.

 

9

Then it's the last day of classes. Did I take exams? Did I pass?

Do I care?

The grief counselor wears pale pink suede sandals with three-inch heels that look like they've been dipped in actual gold. A newborn lamb died for those, I bet. A fetal pig. Something small and pink. Her toenails are painted like the Fabergé eggs that Daff's mom collects. Her calf muscles look like they were carved out of soft stone. “You're doing fine,” she tells me. “You are going to be fine. Keep this.” She presses a crystal into my palm so hard that it hurts.

I nod mutely. My palm feels bruised. The first thing I will do with this crystal is throw it as far and as hard as I can.

“You may want to start talking again,” she says. “You may find you have something to say.”

I nod. Shrug. Try to arrange my face appropriately.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.” She gives me a pat on the shoulder. Pat, pat, pat. I feel like I'm something that she's efficiently checking off her list. I stare at her.

“You can go,” she says. “You're done.”

Then I'm free. That's it. My shoes squeaking on the hallway floor. The bang of lockers. Filling my bag with crumpled papers and textbooks that I don't know what else to do with. Teachers leaning in doorways, looking depleted. People whooping and tumbling into each other like suddenly they take up too much room to be contained in this building, like they are bursting to be gone. There are ties all over the floor because that's a thing that happens on the last day, you take off your tie and throw it.

I wonder what happens to those ties. Each one costs forty-nine dollars at the school uniform store. I keep mine on. When no one is looking, I scoop a few extras from behind the trash. I'm always losing my stupid tie.

“Dude, have a good one, see you.” “Catchya after break.” “Smell ya next year.” “Text me if you wanna…” Words thrown over their shoulders so they won't see my face or have to wait for an answer. I stare at them so hard they disappear, whisper thin, until I can see past them, through to the wall, then through the wall, outside, past buildings and cars and sidewalks on the other side to The King's gravestone and then I think, Get over it, you sick maudlin freak, you need to just get over it.

From a distance, I see Daff dumping her books into a garbage can, her tie tied around her hair like a bandanna.

There once was a blue girl named Daff / Who made the Sharkboy laugh / She rode on the train / To protect her hair from the rain / Because she hates when her hair looks like crap.
I can't explain Daff except to say that when I see her, it's not like a magnet pulling me toward her, it's something so much more powerful than that. I want to be close to her. I need to be close to her. I would kill to make her laugh. I want to ride down the railing at her building on my board. I need her to get excited about something she's listening to and reach over without warning and jam her earbud into my ear. I want her and me and The King to grab some falafel and go to the place in the park where there's a cave, an actual cave, and to eat them there, even though it stinks like a drunk's piss. I need to touch the skin of her shoulder with my tongue.

I hate that I still want her.

I hate that I still love her.

I want to not think about the funeral every time I see her.

I want to not think about how weird she looked, like someone who was not Daff dressed up as Daff. Her overly made-up red lips, her fake tears, her look-at-me pose, the way she smiled just slightly at the cameras, the way she knew they loved her.

Don't think about the funeral. Don't think about the funeral. Don't think about the funeral. Don't—

And then,
bam
, like the time travel machine that Mrs. S. will never have access to, I am hurled back in time to the church and there I am in that cold stone room, the light filtering through the stained glass splashing inappropriately beautiful rainbows in patterns on the pews. The oppressive presence of a God that The King didn't even believe in is everywhere, from the worn leather on the kneeling bench to the oily marks on the backs of the benches from people pressing their foreheads there. I couldn't sit, so I stood in an aisle. My legs wouldn't bend.

“Are you…?” Daff had said, hesitating, her hand hovering near her face. I wanted to touch her face so bad. But I couldn't. My arms were paralyzed. “… okay?” Then she'd lifted her hair back, winding it up behind her head, knotting it into a bun. Everything she did looked like she was performing it. Her dress was dark red, something expensive from a movie that was black-and-white. “I mean, are you going to be okay? Obviously not. But. Why didn't you call me?” Her hand on my arm, her hand on my arm, her hand on my arm.
I love you
, I wanted to say, but didn't. I didn't say anything. I shook her arm off. In the pew beside me, Number Six was crying for real, her shoulders shaking, making a strangling sound. In front of her, Number Seven's lips were set in a straight line, as flat as a tabletop. She was, for some reason, staring at me. The King's dad looked stoically through me and Daff. His eyes drifting away from everyone's face.

Stoic was all wrong for this occasion. Monster.

“D'accord. Je suis désolé,”
I whispered into Daff's perfect ear, the last of my voice feathering the air like tiny wings. I could smell apples.

“Everything totally sounds better in French,” she said, like we were still friends, agreeing about something. “
Desolated
. It's a way better word than sorry.”

My legs suddenly remembered how to move and I turned and ran, pushing people out of my way. Old people, young people, famous people, whoever. Daff yelled something, but I don't know what it was. Then I was outside. Throwing up. On the steps. Running the gauntlet of cameras and gawkers.

Then I left.

I walked to the Broadway-Lafayette station, down those stairs, down deeper and deeper and deeper than any grave, wishing the station would collapse above me and squash me, bury me in the rubble of everything I was doing wrong. When I finally got on the train, it was empty except for a group of old men playing some kind of flutes, the music of that so thin and delicate that I wanted to claw off my own ears. I didn't need that. I needed something angrier. Something with drums and a guitar solo that tore through your skin. The train broke down like it always does at the worst times and I was trapped. I sat there for an hour, that flute music wrapping around me in thin threads like a cobweb, while somewhere in Manhattan, people (and Daff) sang hymns around The King's coffin and pretended not to be scanning the crowd for famous faces that they could whisper about afterward on the Internet.