Away We Go (19 page)

CONVOCATION DAY

Beep.

Alice stirs beside me in her bed.

Beep.

Seconds pass.

Beep.

My feet hit the hardwood with a thud. I stumble around Alice's darkened room, searching for the source of the noise.

Beep.

“What is—sound,” she mumbles, still half asleep.

The noise is coming from my pants, in a heap on the floor of Alice's room.

“Nothing,” I say. “Go to sleep.”

The text is from Sarah. . . Allison's roommate. It reads,
Ally is sick and i dont no what to do

God. Allison and those fucking boys.

“Noah?” Alice says, shifting in the bed.

“I'll be back in a bit.”

I text
be right there,
slip my clothes on, stuff the cell in my pocket, push out into the corridor. The door to my room hangs open, so I shut it with a click. I'm about to run down the stairs when I stop myself. Marty's door is a couple feet away. I could apologize, I could pull him into a hug, press our foreheads together and reaffirm our shared mythology. I shouldn't have ever made fun of it. But apologizing is hard, sorting through this tangle of feelings is hard, and besides, one of my kids needs me, the only kids I'll ever have.

I knock anyway, but he doesn't answer.

I don't blame him.

On the path that runs from the apartments to Galloway, I pause, and text him:

lunch tmrrw? u can quote Tolstoy and i wont even groan 2 loudly.

And another:
under 100 decibels, i prmise.

A few minutes later, he texts back:
thanks for carrying me that one night.

In Galloway, a girl rides the elevator with me up to the fourth floor; neither of us acknowledges the other. Tomorrow. Marty and I will talk tomorrow.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow . . . till the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death!
The girl and I avert our eyes, listen to the hum of the elevator. When the doors open we go our separate ways, like shadows fleeing before the light. That or two strangers, tired as all fuck, too tired, even, to entertain similes for more than a second or two.

Inside room 413, Allison has caught the trash can in a trembling embrace. I watch her heave as I silently repeat a mantra that serves me well in such times.

Must keep eyes open. Must keep eyes open. Must—

My gaze drifts across pre-calc textbooks and pink beanbag chairs. Littered across the floor are clothes, pillows, the semester's first copy of the
Westinger
. Her roommate Sarah has a birthmark the shape of Italy on her neck and is dressed in a wispy thin blue night-robe. She looks on with an expression that is simultaneously
very
concerned and
very
unfocused, hair ruffled, long black strands going every which way. She says something I don't catch.

“Sorry?” I say.

“It's her second time,” Sarah says blankly, drawing her robe
more tightly around her. “Throwing up,” she adds, as if I'm blind.

I nod, to show Sarah I understand.

“We had salads.”

“Salads,” I say, staring at the dangling ends of her robe.

“At dinner,” she explains, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I had Caesar and she had this vinaigrette thing.”

“A vinaigrette,” I say.

“I didn't think she ate enough to throw anything up
.”

“She drank a lot?” I ask, my gaze catching on a pair of empty Poland Spring bottles on the floor.

Sarah opens her mouth, closes it, then opens it again. “It's her second time,” she says.

I shake my head. “Sorry, that's not what I—” I cut myself off. “She drank a lot of water?” I gesture to the bottles. “Before bed?”

“I guess. I—don't really know.”

“Right,” I say. “Right. She probably drank too much water. You can drink too much.”

By now, Allison's finished puking. She's slumped next to the trash can.

“Ally, I'm sorry,” Sarah starts, and I realize she's apologizing for
me,
for calling
me.

Allison speaks over her roommate, says, “Feel like shit.” She turns to me. “Don't call EMS. Please.”

“Okay.”

“I've heard Westing mails your parents reports,” Allison says. “Can't. Don't want them—”

“Okay,” I say.

“I thought I'd be happy,” Allison is saying. “Here. Come here and. Be. Happy. But nobody here is happy. I've been here—week and a half, okay?”

“Okay,” I say.

“Apocalypse cults and everyone's counting down the days. Twelve days. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve! And
you're not happy.
” Her voice rises. “
You're
not happy.”

She starts to get up. I offer my hand. She brushes past me, collapsing onto her bed.

“On your side,” I say, and place the trash can by her bed.

“It
smells.
” She tries to push it away with her foot.

In the bathroom I empty her trash into a larger bin, but there's still puke clinging to the sides of the can. I fill the can up with hot water from the sink just as a guy pushes through the door, heading toward a urinal. When he's done and washing his hands he watches me swish the hot water around and around, trying to get at all the puke. I empty the mucky water into a nearby toilet, repeat the process several times.

“You're a hero,” he says to me. His eyes are red. He claps me on the shoulder and repeats, “Hero.”

I bring the trash can back to Allison's bedside, where she has fallen asleep. Then I'm in Galloway's tiled halls again. Allison will probably be all right.
Probably.
I pause by a window and take out my phone, dial 000.

“Emergency Response Service, what is your emergency?”

“Galloway room four-one-three, alcohol overdose,” I say, and hang up.

But why?

If not tonight, then a week, a month, a year from now.

I'll have to see Allison tomorrow, or rather,
later today,
shepherd her and all the rest of my newsies to the chapel for the director's convocation day speech. She will hate me, but it will be okay, because I can't promise her a week, a month, a year, but I can her promise tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

It's the best I can do, and maybe that's okay.

There are no great battles, no Peacekeepers or Elders to lead a rebellion against, no beautiful slaves to save. But there are small moments, small gestures, like dialing a phone, like directing your newsies to security when they lose their keys, making sure they get to convocation all right, and maybe small gestures can also be great battles. Maybe there are ways to be a hero that do not involve saving whole cities.

If you accumulate enough small moments, you become
real.

A dozen feet ahead, a boy rounds a corner.

A small coincidence—it is the boy from some nights before, blond haired and slender. He stops in his tracks. We study one another in the quiet. The feeling that it is possible to be a hero swells inside me.

What is a relationship, if not a story? A series of small moments and coincidences that memory strings together into narrative. Narrative that fills the empty space inside us. Narrative that is a hero's weapon against the great tragic powers of the world.

Without a word, I fall into him.

Without a word, he takes my hand and leads me away to his room. The angels can wait their turn.

Autumn light streams through the window. He is golden in it.

The wall clock reads 10:19, which leaves me exactly two hours and forty-one minutes to get myself together, meet Marty for lunch, and shepherd my kids to convocation. If I'm feeling ambitious, I might even have time to check in on Allison to make sure she's alive to hate me.

I linger in bed, trying to figure out what he smells like.

Salt. Sweat. Cum. A whiff of tobacco. We smoked the night
before, sat on the windowsill and passed a cigarette back and forth. His nails were pristine.

Our legs are tangled, and a sliver of his chest pokes out from under the blanket. His foot brushes mine.

“You know,” I say, “I think I might be bi-curious.”

He snorts softly. “You ruined it. We had that whole silent and mysterious thing going. Was kinda hot.”

“Like a nineteen-twenties porno.”

He brushes a bit of hair out of his eyes. “You want to—” He pauses.

“Fuck?”

“I was going to suggest food.”

“I can't,” I say, and tell him the truth, or at least try to. It's easier, with a stranger. “I'm sorry. It's just—I'm dating a girl. But I'm gay and she knows I'm gay. And I'm in love with a guy but he's straight and going to die. Soon. So there you have it.”

He raises an eyebrow. “And this prevents you from ingesting food?”

A witty retort fails to present itself, so I pick myself up off the bed and dress. I'm almost to the door when he says, “Hey. Wait.”

I turn.

“If this were some sappy AwayWeWatch rom com, I'd ask you if I can at least know your name. But I'm not going to do that.”

“‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,'” I quote.

“That makes us roses, I suppose.”

“Me, specifically.”

“Tell me one thing.”

“Okay.”

“What's the beginning of time?”

“What?” I say, more from surprise at the question than curiosity at an answer.

“The letter
T
.”

I can't help smiling. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I got one for you then. What's the meaning of life?”

“I'm lying down, so go ahead—”

“The condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, manifested by prodigious quantities of existential angst, alcohol-induced reproduction, and the power of adaptation to the environment with the aid of AwayWeBlog self-help blogs about lessons we can learn from canine companions we haven't had since we were children.”

He laughs. “I'm going to tell my friends about you, you know. I'm going to tell them I met a boy and I fucked him once and I fucked him twice and then he told me the meaning of life.”

“Hey, now that we've shared the secrets of the universe with each other, want to do me a favor?”

In the shower, I use a bottle of golden boy's bodywash, dry myself off with one of his towels. Couldn't bear to go back to my apartment to clean myself up. Not after Alice and I had that whole talk and then I went and fucked—well—the first golden boy I ran into.

He tells me to leave the bodywash and towel on his bed.

“The sheets will get wet,” I say.

“It doesn't matter.” He leans in. It is an awkward, almost platonic kiss. We part with the finality of somber “Bye”s and the shutting of a door. The feeling that something inexpressible passed between us hangs over me. And I'm not simply referring to the uncommonly decent caliber of our lovemaking.

It is that rightness I felt earlier.

The sense that I was solid, and full, and real.

I try to hold on to this feeling, this warmth, whatever it is, this thing that draws people together, the pull of coincidence and story-making.

My head feels numb. I need to speak to someone. I need to speak to—

Marty
.

I need to apologize to Marty, to make things right between us.

I text him:
is lunch at 11 ok?

I set off toward the cafeteria half running, not waiting for a response. I push through Galloway's main entrance and almost walk into a campus security cart. There's at least a dozen of them in front of Galloway alone, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, men in blue, with holstered guns. I count four police cruisers parked on the Galloway lawn, even more in the parking lot, lights flashing. We never had this sort of fuss over convocation last year. Then again, I spent most of the day last year tucked into a fetal position, massively hungover, and slipping every now and then into erotic dreams about Alex (all in all, not a bad day) while outside they lit up the sky with fireworks. I hurry toward the cafeteria. Hassled-looking teachers linger on the cafeteria steps with cigarettes pressed to their lips.

I pick a lone table in a distant corner of the caf, flanked on two sides by windows that look out into the direction of the greenhouse. Marty hasn't responded.

I text him
Here.

Ten minutes pass. Twenty.

At 11:30 I text,
martin dear. u coming or am I goin 2 have 2 endure the caf by my lonesome?

I text,
i want 2 talk.

I force a hot dog down my throat, pick at some dead skin on my forearm, wondering if golden boy noticed.

Here I am, sitting by myself at lunch, in a crowded cafeteria, picking at flaking pieces of me, wanting to tell my best friend,
what,
what is it that I want to say about the warmth I felt? I feel holy, like the night we created new constellations together—no,
felt,
the sensation has already passed. I felt holy, but what made me feel holy in the first place was a transgression, a stolen moment of warmth with a golden boy, a story that would hurt both Marty and Alice, if I recounted it to them. It seems ridiculous, now, that I thought I had anything to say. Here I am, in a glorified hospice, trying to speak of holiness and love! Love makes us immortal! Love makes us eternal! Oh Zach, give it to me up the ass and I'll see the face of God!

I laugh at myself.

That's when my phone rings.

I pick it up, expecting to hear Marty's voice.

“This is Nurse Sanders, from the Wellness Clinic. Am I speaking to Noah Falls?”

Jane passed out halfway through her morning yoga class.

“During downward dog,” she explained, over the phone. “The doctors say I can go to convocation but you need to look after me to make sure I don't give up the ghost.”