We Are the Ants (5 page)

“Next time.” I pinched my leg through my jeans and focused on the pain. I had no right to be upset; I'd bailed on him first. It's not like I expected him to sit home all weekend, pining for me, but would it have killed him to act a little disappointed?

“Definitely.” Marcus checked the time on his phone. “Come on, Space Boy. Bell's gonna ring soon, and I didn't invite you out here to talk.”

On Friday, Marcus hardly acknowledged I existed. I loath admitting I wanted him to pull me into the restroom to make out or send me a text, begging me to come to his party. Anything to prove he gives a shit. To occupy my mind and keep me from spiraling out of control, I tried to come up with an explanation for why the sluggers chose me to save the planet.

I think most people would have pressed the button the moment they realized the stakes. Most people are motivated by their own self-interest, and pushing the button would ensure their survival. But I am not most people. Maybe that's why the sluggers chose me: they weren't sure what I'd do.

On the surface, it seems like there are a million reasons to press the button—great movies, books, sex, pizza with everything, bacon, kissing—but those things mean nothing. The universe is more than thirteen billion years old. What is the value of a single kiss compared to that? What is the value of an entire world?

It's too much to wrap my brain around, which only leads me back to wondering why I've been chosen. There are smarter people who could make a more informed decision, and dumber people who'd make a quicker one.

The sluggers didn't abduct them, though, they abducted me, and all I can do is be honest.

  •  •  •  

I trudged through the front door when I got home from school, and all I wanted to do was make a sandwich, take a nap, and sleep through the weekend. But Mom and Nana were huddled around the kitchen table, staring at a shoe box stuffed with papers and envelopes like they were water moccasins. Mom's cheeks were flushed, and she was sucking on her cigarette—puff-puff-ash, puff-puff-ash. I considered skipping my snack and retreating to my room, but I couldn't sleep on an empty stomach.

I regretted my decision immediately.

“Henry, tell your mother she's not putting me in a nursing home.”

Mom rolled her eyes, which she knew Nana hated, and blew a cloud of smoke into the air. “Mother, you need someone to look after you.”

“I can look after myself.”

“Before I moved you in with us, you were eating rancid meats and hadn't paid your water bill in three months.”

Nana crossed her arms over her sagging breasts—fucking gravity. “I had water.”

“Because you ran a hose from Mr. Flannigan's house through your kitchen window!”

“I am not an invalid, Eleanor.” She spoke with a quiet fury, her anger reducing to a hard crust you'd need a hammer to chip away.

Mom laughed in her face. “When was the last time you showered? Or brushed your teeth?”

“That's irrelevant.”

“I've got two children, Mother, I don't need a third.”

“I would rather die than live in one of those places.”

They glared at each other across the table. The air between them a toxic cloud of cigarette smoke and resentment. I was certain they'd forgotten I was there, and the intelligent decision would have been to sneak away, but I was thinking with my rumbling stomach rather than my brain.

“Nana doesn't belong in a nursing home, Mom.”

“Mind your own business, Henry.”

Nana stood and shuffled to the fridge. “Go to your room and wait for your father to get home.” She lingered before the open doors, staring at the shelves of food.

“Daddy's gone,” Mom said, her fight evaporating. “He's been dead a long time.”

“That's a terrible thing to say,” Nana mumbled. “I think he'd like pot roast for supper.”

Nana's forgetfulness was cute at first—she'd call us by the wrong names, mix up our birthdays, send us Christmas cards in the middle of summer—but it isn't cute anymore. Sometimes she looks at me, and I see nothing but a deepening abyss where my grandmother used to be. She's becoming a stranger to me, and I'm often nobody to her. Then she'll turn around ten minutes later and tell me I'm her favorite grandson. Nana's doctors believe her memory will continue to deteriorate. Good days outnumber the bad now, but eventu­ally only bad days will remain.

“I'll come home right after school,” I said. “Don't put her in a home.”

Nana unloaded butter, tomatoes, and a package of chicken thighs onto the table. Whatever she was cooking, it wasn't pot roast.

Mom fumbled with her cigarettes and lit another. “What­ever. It's not like we can afford it anyway, especially with the way you and your brother eat.” She glanced at the shoe box of unpaid bills. “Waiting tables isn't exactly the path to riches.”

“Get a new job then,” I said. “You studied cooking in France. You should be running a restaurant.”

“Henry—”

“Come on, Mom. You know I'm right. I bet there are tons of restaurants that would hire you. If you'd just try to—”

“Henry,” she said. “Shut up.”

Charlie and his girlfriend, Zooey Hawthorne, barged into the kitchen, carrying grocery bags, oblivious to the tension that clung to the walls like splattered grease. I never thought I'd be glad to see Charlie.

“Who's hungry?” he asked, dropping his bags onto the table, which pushed Nana's growing collection of odd ingredients aside. “Zooey's making pasta carbonara, and I thought Nana could bake an apple pie.”

Zooey kissed Nana's cheek and led her away from the fridge. “You have to give me your recipe. It's so yum.” Zooey is taller than Charlie, slender, with skin like a buckeye, and spacey brown eyes. Way too good for my dipshit brother.

I was still waiting for Mom to pick up our argument from where we left off, while Charlie and Zooey unpacked groceries like we were some kind of happy family. Like this was normal.

“I'll skip the food poisoning tonight,” I said.

Charlie grabbed my arm, squeezing hard, and pulled me into an awkward hug. It threw me off-balance. Charlie doesn't hug me—we don't hug each other—it isn't our thing. Wedgies, wet willies, dead legs, and broken noses—those are our things. “Family dinner, bro.”

Mom shook her head. Her shoulders were slumped and her back bowed, giving her the impression of having a hump. “Charlie, I don't think tonight—”

“We're pregnant.”

Zooey and Charlie snapped together, linking hands and sharing a goofy grin. She rubbed her still-flat belly and said, “Ten weeks. I wasn't sure at first, even after I took a dozen home tests, but I went to my gyno and she confirmed it and . . . we're pregnant!”

“I told Mom to have you neutered,” I said, and Charlie boxed my ear.

“Show some respect, kid.”

“Kid?” My brother is a kid. Sure, he can drink, smoke, and kill during wartimes, but he's still a dumb kid. He pees on the toilet seat and doesn't know how to operate the washing machine, and it was only a couple of months ago that he shoved a peanut M&M so far up his nose that we had to take him to the emergency room to have it extracted. Charlie has no business having a baby when he's just a baby himself.

But Charlie and Zooey stood in the middle of the kitchen, smiling and smiling, waiting for someone to congratulate them or tell them they were ruining their lives. The longer they waited, the more strained their smiles became, cracking around the edges. They might have waited forever if Nana hadn't broken the silence.

“Young man, do your parents know you're having a colored girl's baby?”

“Nana!” I said, mortified by what she'd said but laughing at her the way you'd laugh at a toddler screaming “fuck!” in the middle of a crowded department store.

Charlie and Zooey latched on to Nana's anachronistic racism and wrung out a chuckle that turned into a torrent of laughter. We were so busy being mortified by what Nana had said and uncomfortable at our own response that we didn't notice Mom crying until she said, “Oh, Charlie.”

  •  •  •  

The pasta carbonara smelled delicious, but I didn't expect I'd get to eat any because of the yelling and fighting and Charlie's occasional hysterical outbursts. Once the shock wore off, Mom got around to listing the various ways Zooey and Charlie were ruining their lives, and Charlie's only defense consisted of shouting loud enough to drown her out.

I could have settled the argument by informing them that I wasn't going to press the button. If the world needed someone as pathetic as me to save it, we were better off dead. Nana wouldn't be shipped off to a home, and Charlie and Zooey wouldn't be saddled with a little parasite neither of them was ready to care for. I'd be doing them a favor. Only, I'm still not sure what I'm going to do.

I found a bag of stale potato chips under my bed and munched on the crumbs. I was too worked up to sleep, but not bored enough to do homework, so I killed an hour on the Internet, which is how I ended up stalking Marcus's SnowFlake page. It was flooded with comments about the party, and it looked like he was going to be hosting more than just a few friends. Based on what I read, I guessed he'd invited every kid at CHS. Well, almost every kid.

Marcus probably hadn't even waited an hour after I'd turned him down before organizing the party.

Fuck it.

I shut off my computer and flopped across my bed, letting my head fall backward so that the blood rushed to my brain. The pressure increased, and I counted the quickening
thud-thud-thud
of my heartbeat. I wondered how long I'd have to stay upside down before I passed out. How long after that before I'd die. I wondered what Jesse had thought about after he'd stepped off the edge of his desk and dangled on the end of the rope. Charlie has a buddy who works for Calypso Fire Rescue, and he said Jesse's knots were the best he'd ever seen. A perfect noose on one end, and a textbook clove hitch on the other. Once Jesse took the plunge, he couldn't have changed his mind even if he'd wanted to.

I wonder if he thought of me in his final seconds. Or about his mom and dad, or his dog, Captain Jack, that he had put to sleep only a few months earlier. Maybe random thoughts invaded his brain the way they often do right before you fall asleep. Thoughts like how he'd never taste chocolate again or about the homework he'd neglected to finish. I doubt he thought of me at all.

If I die before deciding whether to press the button, will the sluggers abduct someone else and force them to choose, or will they let the world end? I should ask.

No . . . fuck it.

I'm being stupid. If Marcus doesn't want to be seen with me, why kiss me at all? I remember the first time it happened. I'd hung around after Faraci's class to ask her a question about our lab. I went to the restroom after, and knocked into Marcus on his way out. I thought he was going to rearrange my face, but he kissed me. It was the first time since Jesse had died that I'd felt anything. I knew, even then, Marcus was never going to be my boyfriend or write me sappy love letters. I'll never have with him what I had with Jesse—I doubt I'll have that again with anyone—but I want to be more than Marcus's stand-in. To him, I am the cheap pair of sunglasses you buy on vacation because you know you won't care if you break or lose them.

Fuck it.

Nothing matters. If I don't press the button, the world will end in 140 days. Marcus's party, Charlie's baby, Mom's job, Nana's memory. None of it matters. The sluggers didn't give me a choice, they gave me freedom.

So what if Marcus hadn't invited me? He hadn't
not
invited me. No matter what happened, I could always let the world end and the universe forget. It would forget the party and Calypso and Earth. It would forget Charlie and Zooey and Marcus and Mom and Nana. It had already forgotten Jesse, and if I let it, it would forget me, too.

I could write my name across the sky, and it would be in invisible ink.

  •  •  •  

I showered and dressed, settling on jeans and a short-sleeve plaid shirt I'd borrowed from Jesse once and never returned. It had looked better on him, but that was true of everything. My hair was hopeless, so I did my best to make it appear purposely messy.

My stomach roiled as uncertainty gnawed at my apathy-­fueled courage. I doubted Marcus would be thrilled I was crashing his party, and I wasn't sure whether I was going because I didn't care or because I was hoping to prove that Marcus did.

Mom, Charlie, and Zooey were still talking in the kitchen; at least they seemed to have agreed upon a temporary cease-fire, probably thanks to Zooey, who's far more level-headed than either my mom or brother. Nana was reading a book on the couch and watching
Bunker
. I waved when I left, but she didn't notice.

Audrey Dorn was waiting in the driveway in her cobalt blue BMW, a present from her parents on her sixteenth birthday. She smiled when I climbed into the car, and leaned toward me like she was going to hug me, but hesitated and reversed course when she saw the look on my face.

“Thanks for the ride.”

“I was surprised you called.” Even wearing Jesse's shirt I felt underdressed compared to Audrey. She was wearing jeans too, but hers probably cost more than my mom made in a month, and her silver halter top sparkled like the noon sun on a calm ocean. “You used to hate parties.”

“I still do.”

“Did Marcus invite you?”

“No.”

Audrey
mmmhhhmmmed
at that, which made me regret calling her. I wouldn't have, but Marcus lives on the other side of Calypso, and it was too warm outside to walk. She put the car in gear and sped off. At least she hadn't pestered me about why I was going.