Away We Go (6 page)

HOW TO IDENTIFY A HIGH-CALIBER HUMAN BEING

I spent the rest of September alternating between raging drunkenness and hangovers so severe the mere thought of movement prompted waves of nausea. To be sober was to miss Alex, to
act
was to miss Alex. It was so easy to lose people. We were all so weightless and insubstantial. To keep myself rooted to the ground, I kept the shots coming, night after night, made intimate friends with toilet seats, rising past noon to wash away the stench of vodka as hot water pooled in the drain at my feet, until one day, I realized halfway into my shower that I'd forgotten my room key. All newsies got stuck in doubles or triples for their first year at Westing, but my roommate Marty had already left for class.

“Locked out this early in the semester?” a voice said, just as I'd been contemplating whether or not to try to bust my door open.

I turned, and felt like the disparate pieces of me had suddenly congealed into a person again, a person whose stomach promptly lurched into his throat. The voice belonged to a boy of sixteen or so, lean and tan and strangely happy. The words escaped my mouth before I had a chance to think twice about them: “No,” I said. “I just like standing outside my door for hours on end. It's a pastime.”

He laughed. “You
do
have that practiced aura about you,” he said with a nod. His eyes were blue, like he had a splash of water in them. “An aura of togetherness.”

My turn to laugh. Aside from my current key-less predicament, my only form of attire at the moment was a blue-and-yellow polka dot towel, my eyes were so bloodshot it looked like I'd smoked three pounds of weed in the shower, and to top it all off, I wasn't exactly sure what day it was.

The very picture of togetherness.

“Today is a Tuesday, right?” I asked.

He tried not to grin and failed. He extended a hand. “I'm Zach, by the way. Zachary, if you like. I'm the student council vice president and self-appointed-newsie-helper-person-dude, God help you all. I like your towel.”

“Is it Wednesday?” I tried, and felt guilty for flirting. I'd been away from Richmond, from Alex, for three weeks. . . . Was that all it took? Three weeks? And then there was Alice. I'd been avoiding her, but couldn't she see that we'd never make each other happy?

“Better I don't answer that,” he said with a wink. “You'll need to find security. They can bust down your door for you! I can show you where they are.”

“It's okay,” I said, because I wanted to leave Zach, to prove to Alex I remembered him.

He placed a hand on my bare shoulder and said, “Nonsense, kid. It is my solemn duty to help you. You are, after all, my constituent, and besides, I'll need your vote in the next election.”

So we rode the elevator down to Clover's ground floor, together in that cramped space. I couldn't help fantasizing about the elevator getting stuck, the lights going dark.

No such luck.

We arrived on the ground floor without incident, at which point he led me outside, all the way to the campus security office in Galloway.

“You'll do well here; I can tell by your towel,” he said by way of parting, and pressed a hand to my bare shoulder again.

“You can tell a lot about a person from his towel,” I managed.

“
Exactly,
” he said, and beamed at me. “You are a human of high caliber, kid.” He tapped a finger to his temple to indicate his knowledge of such things. The temple-tap turned into a good-bye wave.

Before I could figure out how to make him stay, he was gone, and I felt light and airy again, like I was a boy made up of strands of wind.

THE SKY IS FALLING AND I LIKE IT

I was trying to reform.

After spending my first solid month at Westing married to alcohol, I'd set myself to reading numbers 10 and 51 of the Federalist Papers in Galloway's Victorian-style lavender parlor as rain drummed against the roof, like a good, model newsie. I could make out the Galloway lawn and the empty parking lot from where I sat. The sky had darkened and the last of the teachers' cars had rolled through security at the main gate, a funny name seeing as it was the
only
gate.

I glanced at my assignment, due tomorrow.

Please devote 3-5 pages to discussing how democratic the framers intended our original constitution to be.

What I had so far: “Contrary to popular belief, not very.”

It was difficult to write, when it seemed like my thoughts wouldn't matter much to anyone, when they didn't even matter much to me.

A tap on the shoulder made me jump. Numbers 10 and 51 spilled out of my lap onto the polished hardwood. My laptop almost went down, too; I barely caught it in time.

“Bit jumpy there, eh, kid?” Zach asked as he bent over and began to scoop my papers up. I started to help him, but he said, “I got this, no worries.”

He handed me the stack with dripping hands. He was soaked, dark hair plastered to his head, had on a T-shirt that read:
I react to chemistry.

“Now, Noah, I haven't seen you in all of forever,” he said as he plopped down next to me, put a wet arm around my shoulder. I didn't know whether to lean into it or to pull away, so I stayed limp and unmoving. “What I want to know is,” he went on, “well—how are you? Any complaints? Grievances? Issues you're too shy to take up with the administration?”

“Now that you mention it, there's no toilet paper in the bathroom—”

“Because,” he interrupted, “that's what the secretary is for. Or the treasurer. Or the president. Noah, do not hesitate to bother them. Consider this permission granted. That's what they're for, and
God,
I don't particularly like them, so I won't pretend I won't get a certain satisfaction out of it—Noah, I know I'm pretty but please, we need to concentrate. There are times for drifting off into my eyes and there are times for serious business.” He gave me a stern look. “This is a time for serious business.”

“You're completely wet.”

“Oh, that,” he said, as if he hadn't noticed it, but he withdrew his arm. “I took a jog in the rain. Was hoping I'd catch pneumonia. So far no luck. I think I'm going back out there to try again. Care to join me?”

“Pneumonia together?” I said. All thoughts of reforming myself into a better student vanished.

He nodded. “What better way for an elected officer to bond with his constituency?”

“By advocating for their best interests, à la toilet paper in the bathroom on the—”

He scoffed. “We're not running a socialist utopia here, Noah. There will be no redistribution of toilet paper. We must trust in the market.” Then, “Are you coming, or am I going to have to go right on out there and get pneumonia all on my lonesome?”

I nodded to my computer, my papers. “Give me a minute?”

I met him outside Galloway's main entrance, under the canopy, my heart hammering as if I'd already run three marathons, and as soon as he saw me push through the door, he took off into the rain, yelling over his shoulder, “WE'RE RACING!”

I chased after him, splashing through the wet, down paved paths, and then the dirt trails. Past the Wellness Center and the residential quad. Then up a trail that led us by the Lakeside Apartments on our left, the wall on our right, the lamps along the wall lit in the rainy dusk.

He was fast, faster than me.

The rain fell hard against my skin, the dark in the horizon punctuated here and there by rumbling undercurrents of light. I heaved breaths in the lulls between distant peals of thunder, and as I drew up beside him he winked at me, sped up, pushed himself harder. There was a massive puddle up ahead; my sneakers squelched with every step through it and the mud left splotches against my legs. I knew if I looked behind, I'd see a trail of footprints, mine and his, side by side; I knew if I looked back I'd see the rain falling into the lake water in a thousand thousand places, the lake connected to the sky by strips of water, everything was water, and it seemed ridiculous now, the idea of my life not mattering, the idea that I was nothing.

I was the rain.

I was the lake.

I was the ground beneath my own feet.

I was full of everything.

I came back to my senses when I saw Zach breaking away. We'd passed the lake and were on the slick cobblestones of the forest path that ran behind Galloway, in the shadow of the
evergreens, and I pushed harder. We were running like there was a ribbon waiting for us somewhere, anywhere, until finally, the cafeteria peeked into view, and I knew we were headed for the steps, but I couldn't beat him, and that's when he slowed.

Almost imperceptibly, but enough for me to catch up, enough for us to reach the steps together, and when we did he threw his arms up exultantly. Somehow we were hugging each other.

“God,” he said, breaking away to stare off somewhere, then at me. “This calls for some hot chocolate.”

Of course, the cafeteria was closed by this time, so we had to make our way back to the Academy Café in the rear of Galloway. We waited in line at the cashier with our cups, trailing water from our clothes, our hair. The cashier raised his eyebrows at us.

“I don't have any clean clothes,” I realized aloud. I'd been meaning to do the laundry today.

Zach hesitated, his gaze flicked down and away. Then his eyes met mine: splashes of water, clouds, racing in the wet.

“I can spare you some,” he said.

I was not going to write that paper. I was not going to write that paper. My delinquency had never made me happier.

I trudged beside him through the rain in the direction of the residential quad, holding my hot cup. In his room, I suddenly realized how wet and dirty I was. “Radiator's warm,” he suggested, and coughed. “We're actually going to get pneumonia, though,” he said with a slight frown.

“Here.” He set his shoes and socks by the radiator, offered me a nightshirt and a pair of sweatpants to change into. He stripped out of his own shirt and jeans without a glance at me, revealing bronze skin, threw them on top of the radiator.

It made me stupidly happy, how well I fit into his clothes. I
toweled my face off, any lingering wet on my body, and then we sat cross-legged next to the radiator, beside our sodden shoes and dripping clothes. I sipped my hot chocolate. The silence deepened, but we were close, our legs almost touching, until I pushed mine against his, gently. He set his empty cup down and I stretched out on the floor beside him. My hand found his; he let me hold it.

His leg brushed against my head and I pressed my cheek to his thigh, stared up at him.

Alex had pushed me away. Had he found someone to replace me?

But I couldn't think about Alex now.

I pushed myself up, and into Zach. He closed his eyes and I kissed him. We tried to fit our arms around each other, our bodies into each other.

“You taste like chocolate,” he said pensively.

He brushed a leg against mine. We stayed like that for a minute or an hour, and it was uncomfortable, but also the best. Alice seemed strangely distant, not even real. We weren't together; I'd barely seen her since our first week at Westing, but she'd be hurt. Was it my fault she'd be hurt? A voice in my head insisted:
yes.

“As much as I don't want to move—” I started.

“Because you're drifting into my eyes—”

“Yes, that. As much as I don't want to, my whole body is numb. If only there were a more comfortable place for two boys to lie.”

He tousled my hair, which nearly killed me.

“Very sly,” he said. “If only all my constituents were so subtle.”

“Mention your constituents. One. More. Time. Zach.”

I pulled both of us up, then pushed him gently onto his bed with a sheepish grin. I turned the lights off and jumped onto the bed after him, hit my head on the wall, and laughed.

“I'm so awkward,” I said as I slid under the covers and lay facing him.

The brush of his hair against my forehead made me feel real.

I wanted to tell him I liked that he said
God
all the time, and that he had led me on a race through the rain, that he would've won, that he'd let it be a tie, that his boxers were blue, that he smelled like clean clothes and rain, that he had a radiator, that he was sick, that he existed at all, that there was a world with Zach in it, that I could reach out and touch him, feel that he, too, was real.

I wanted to do more than just lie there, but I couldn't.

He might say no.

He might push me away.

Before he fell asleep, he whispered into my ear, “By the way.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I'm starting a club.”

“Of course you are.”

“I want you to be in it.” He paused. “It's Polo.”

“Uh,” I said. “Like, with horses?”

“Don't worry about trivialities, Noah.”

And then he was snoring into my ear.

POLO

I dragged my roommate Marty along to Polo Club's first meeting, without telling him what I was dragging him to.

“It's a surprise,” I explained.

“
Noah
.”

“Oh, come on. Hurry up,” I said, cutting across the Galloway lawn in the direction of the academic quad.

He sighed theatrically, lagging behind. “All right.”

“You won't regret it. I swear.”

When we got to Lombardy 207, we saw written across the board in neat, bold letters:

POLO CLUB

Marty turned to me, eyes wide behind his glasses.
“Polo?”
he spluttered.

“That was my reaction, too.”

“The sort with—
horses?
”

“That was
my
reaction, too!”

Before Marty could adequately translate the exasperation on his face into words, Zach grabbed a piece of crumbling chalk and wrote a question that knocked everyone's breath away.

What is ‘going away'?

And a second.

Where do we ‘go' when we ‘go away'?

“We suspect, we speculate, we hear rumors,” Zach said, gesticulating at the front of the room, the same Zach whose hair had brushed against my forehead. He wore a shirt that
read:
Earth Science Rocks,
which nearly killed me. “But we don't
know
for sure. Polo Club is about knowledge. We're not going to be like F.L.Y
.
We're not going to demonstrate, or write editorial letters. We're not going to go on hunger strikes in Galloway. We're not even going to be an official organization. Our first rule is discretion. And the first thing we need is a plan of escape, a fail-safe—”

“You can't be serious,” a blond boy near the front said. “What are we even talking about? Even if we could get out—I mean—we're quarantined for a reason. You want to get more kids sick?”

“Houston all over again,” someone else muttered, and there were murmurs of assent.

“We're out in the middle of nowheresville, Vermont,” Zach said, his splash-blue eyes searching for a friendly face, resting briefly on mine. I winked, and he blushed slightly. “As long as we don't go near other people we'll be fine,” he continued. “Look, what I'm saying is—there are fourteen of us here. The woods are nearby. We could survive with fourteen people. Organize ourselves. Make shelters. Gather fruit. Hunt. Fish. God knows what else.”

“I heard the guards at the main gate have guns,” Marty said into my ear.

If I made it through the guards at the main gate, stowed away in the trunk of a car, the way Jane did to bypass a Vanguard checkpoint in
Firewalkers
—which I'd read in lieu of Faulkner the other day—then hiked through the woods, down the highways, across state lines, back to my home in Richmond, Virginia, would I knock on a worn door with flaking red paint, listen to the steps echo from inside as the wood of the porch creaked beneath me only to have a strange woman open the door, holding a child in her arms? I tried to picture her face and
drew a blank. But I could hear the gentle currents of her voice, the swell of her laughter. I had no idea what she was saying, but sometimes, when it got quiet, and I was alone, going for a run, I could hear her,
Mom,
though I could never make out her words. I knew nostalgia wasn't good, wasn't healthy. Digging up the past was like digging up the dead, and my NAAP score had singled me out as a kid who left what's buried in the ground where it belonged, high-performing and well-adjusted, like everyone else here, and so I was rewarded with a campus full of castles and stained-glass windows while kids who got diagnosed in their later years, kids who were “troubled,” kids who remembered their parents, rumor had it, were packed into improvised mass recovery clinics in Wyoming where they entered tertiary stage within a few scant years of diagnosis.

I had long given up on the possibility of hearing—
actually hearing—
Mom again.

“How many of us know how to do any of that at all?” said Grace, meaning hunting, fishing, evading bears. “I mean, gosh, I've always loved nature, I've always had what you call a green thumb and everything, flowers budding, plants sprouting, but what about everyone else?” Grace was completely sincere. We had twentieth-century American lit together, where the fact that she hadn't done any of the readings did not dissuade her from volunteering her opinion on issues ranging from Atticus's parenting philosophy to Carver's use of color in passages of great and terrible middle-American sadness (i.e., his whole canon). She was also the captain of the girl's rugby team and had more muscle mass in her left arm than I had in my whole body.

“But that's exactly the point.” Zach bit his lip. A note of desperation had entered his voice. “It's a fail-safe. There are books on this sort of thing. We have the whole library. Look—if
we work together, divide the labor, we can figure out how to live out there. But the point of Polo isn't escape. Escape is a last resort. The point of Polo is to figure out what happens. Westing's not perfect, but we're happier here than we would be out there—”

“Without meds we wouldn't last long,” Marty said, quietly.

“The escape plan is about giving us a choice,” Zach said, his shoulders, his whole body tense. He massaged his temples with one hand, as if the novelty of this business had worn off and it was now all giving him a headache. “For our entire lives we've never been given a choice. I'm not talking about living in some city, exposing other people. What I'm saying is—we can't talk or visit friends at other recovery centers. Our news is filtered through AwayWeGo, even our news about why we only get news from AwayWeGo
is filtered through AwayWeGo.
And nobody tells us exactly
what happens
when they take us away, just stuff about tertiary clinics, those terrible flyers, spacious rooms and bright windows—you guys don't actually
believe
the flyers? You guys don't actually believe, palliative support and grooming and bathroom aid and then that's
it
?”

The kids in the room looked unconvinced, so I spoke up. “We've all heard things. We never hear from anyone who's taken away. Why? Haven't you guys wondered?”

Zach's features softened. He shot me a look of thanks.

“Yo, what I heard?” an extra-large-sized boy in a polo shirt piped up, between sips of orange soda. I was pretty sure his name was Nigel. He was so white he glowed in the dark and had an IQ of 157, or so he claimed. In our first week at Westing he drank half a liter of vodka, then got into a naked brawl with a door, which, incidentally, the door won. “I heard they get meds tested on them at those tertiary places. Experimentals. Probably half
the time the cure's what croaks you up.”

“Apes will only get you so far,” Melanie, an Asian girl who dressed all in black and bit the last guy who tried to kiss her, said. “Their immune systems are much stronger than ours. If you're going to find a cure, human trials are a necessity.” I was pretty sure she'd described the general plot of
The Cure,
an AwayWeWatch Top Ten Thrillers of the Year pick, but that didn't make me any less excited.

“Something's off,” Zach said, summoning everyone's attention. “It's up to us to figure out what. And if we need to escape. . .”

Escape.

Zach and I could escape together.

We could go home.

I held on to the thought.

AWAY WE KNOW

WESTING PROFILES

Katrina Mackey:

The Girl Whose Death Transformed Westing

Former lacrosse star Katrina Mackey was diagnosed with PPV at the age of fourteen, the summer before her sophomore year of high school at Elford High in Albany, New York. She was admitted to Westing but took her own life a mere month and a half after matriculation, following a campaign of cyber-bullying that continued post-mortem, with vicious comments from former classmates at Elford High accumulating on a tribute page set up by her friends at Westing. The comments referenced the events of the Houston quarantine, which had taken place several weeks prior.

“I'm sorry for what happened down in Houston, that I am, but it doesn't have a thing to do with our daughter, no, it doesn't,” Mr. Mackey told
Good Morning America
shortly after his daughter's death.

The Mackeys have since divorced, but almost a decade later, they still do not know how anyone could have done such a thing.

“What kind of a person bullies a sick child? I don't care if they had family in Houston. They should know better,” Mrs. Mackey said.

Katrina Mackey had been suffering from depression even before her PPV diagnosis, but her parents reported she'd made friends at Westing and was looking forward to trying out for the Westing lacrosse team in the spring. The Mackeys believe the taunts from former classmates pushed her over the edge.

In response to the events in Houston and the death of Katrina Mackey, Congress passed the Safe Recovery Act, which reformed contact between youths in recovery and the uninfected.

After Polo's first meeting, Zach demanded to know how he'd done. We sat together on a bench next to the library while students played Frisbee in the academic quad beneath a purple-orange sky. I tried to put into words how happy I was, that the boy whose bed I'd shared wanted to lead us all home, and also how wrong it felt, to be so happy while sitting on a memorial dedicated to a girl named Alexandra Cheung.

All the benches at Westing were dedicated to the memory of kids who'd gone away.

“Give me a rating,” he said. “On a scale of one to ten.”

I bumped my knee into his. “Terrible.”

“I know. I know
.
I
know.
” He brushed a hand through his hair. “God, they were looking at me like I was downright crazy
.
”

“I helped,” I said.

“You did.”

“Because you were
bombing.
I mean, like,
nosediving.
I mean, like—”

“Dive-bombing!” he added excitedly. “Totally.” He bumped me with his knee.

“Soooo,” I said. “Wanna dive-bomb into your bed?”

“So sly,” he said.

“Right?”

“So subtle.”

“
Right?
”

He hesitated. “Not tonight, okay?” he asked softly.

I hid my hurt with an “Okay” and whipped out my phone. Alice had invited me to a movie night in Violet Hall. I'd been avoiding her, but now I messaged to ask if it was too late to take her up on her offer.

She texted back in record time:

ome quiccckkk, it's only just starting. i saved u a seat : ) : ) : )

FRONT FOR THE LIBERATION OF YOUTHS IN RECOVERY

Think you're free?

Then WHY are your e-mails, texts, and phone conversations monitored?

WHY is your Internet access restricted?

WHY can't you call your family and friends outside?

WHY are you trapped behind motion-sensing walls?

Think you're free?

Think again.

“We declare our right on this earth . . . to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”

—Malcolm X (assassinated in 1965)