Away We Go (8 page)

Westinger.
page 7

FUCKING POLO

For a time Zach and I managed to avoid each other, which was quite impressive, considering we lived in the same hall and saw each other once a week at Polo. We never fully committed ourselves to the effort, though—that way, we had the recourse of plausible deniability if one of us worked up the courage to say,
Hey, what the fuck, man.

I was watching the year's first snowfall through the window of my twentieth-century lit class when my phone buzzed. I checked it under my desk while my professor lectured about how Cheever's “The Swimmer” is a quest narrative through 1960s American suburbia, as if any of us had any idea of what that meant, really.

can u meet me on the path bw Gall & Caf

Coming
I responded.

halfway ;]
he said.

So I ditched.

Down the steps of Bullsworth and into the academic quad, filled with brown and golden leaves half hidden by fresh snow. I stepped on a crumpled copy of the
Westinger
strewn on the ground, caught a glance at a headline that read “Director Speaks Out: Westing's Mission to Help, Not Curtail Liberty.” A tangle of boys played football, leaves and fresh snow crunching beneath their sneakers.

The football sailed past my head, bounced off Lombardy Hall's brick facade. I headed up past Lombardy, onto the nearest
of the cobblestone paths that ran between the cafeteria and Galloway, whipping my phone out, checking to see if Zach had messaged to explain, elaborate, but nothing.

I saw him from afar, on a bench in a small clearing off to the side.

“Hi, Noah,” he said, raising his hand in a tentative wave.

“Hi, Zach,” I said.

“I wanted to show you something,” he said, rising.

“And here I thought you missed me.”

He froze momentarily, turned so he stood in profile, brushed a hand through his hair.

“Of course I've missed you. I'm crazy about you, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

He looked at me, but tentatively, like a scientist who'd just encountered a strange and erratic new species.

“I wanted to show you something. Okay?”

I sighed. “Okay.”

He led me into the woods, ducked under a branch, and another, jumped over a stump. He was rushing, leading me—I realized—to one of the traps we'd set with Polo Club. Together with the rest of the club in a conference room on the second floor of the library we'd pored over maps of the neighboring Vermont countryside, discussed which berries and mushrooms were edible, practiced tying knots, making fishing poles and nets and traps.

Dread squirmed inside me, but I couldn't stop now.

I noticed the smell first.

The squirrel was a ruin. Some other animal—badger, maybe—must have gotten at it while it was stuck.

I studied Zach, and he studied me studying him, and I said, “I'm sorry.”

He nodded, as if I'd passed some sort of test. The shadows of branches played against his skin as he talked. “You know it's funny. I—when I was a freshman here I found this, umm, wounded rabbit. God, I couldn't get it out of my head. It was a baby. I came back with a box for him. He was upright now, so I reached to touch him, to see if he was okay. I had gloves on, these plastic cleaning things. He almost let me touch him, but then he bolted—didn't get far, sort of flopped on his side.” Zach hesitated, bit his lip. He looked self-conscious, like I'd caught him being himself. “God, I don't know why I'm telling you this.” He cleared his throat and went on. “I grabbed him and put him in the box and took the box back to my room, set it on my bed. That's when I straight-up panicked. I didn't know what to do with him. I thought he'd die for sure. Didn't know the first thing. So I started petting him, right? Crazy, right? Talking to him. He was in the corner of the box. He let me pet him. He had no fight instinct, Noah. He could've bit me or clawed at me—he had no fight instinct
.
” He threw me a sheepish glance. “Maybe that's what I like about you, kiddo.”

My mouth worked, but my brain wasn't cooperating. “What you like,” I repeated. A snowflake landed on his brow and melted. The squirrel's guts hung out of its body. Zach frowned at the branches crisscrossing above our heads, as if they were responsible.

He walked this way and that, aimlessly.

I wanted to offer something, but what? A eulogy? What did Zach expect from me? What did he want?

You were a good squirrel, until you got caught up in one of our traps and got disemboweled by a badger. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, requiescat in pace.

Birds flitted above us in the trees and I wanted to say
something to make things better between us, something romantic and stupid, about how some birds mate for life, but which ones?—my lack of ornithological knowledge was holding me back. You had to know everything about everything, didn't you, in order to say the right thing at the right time, in order to draw the right metaphor out at the right moment and turn that moment into poetry. Maybe that was why the world had poets and playwrights. To give us back all the words we'd squandered.

“I like that I couldn't imagine you hurting someone,” Zach said quietly. “Anyone,” he amended. “I guess I like that you're not into competition. That you're different. My mom was always drilling into me about sports and grades and being popular, how I was born with every opportunity, so there's absolutely no excuse for being second best. Ra ra no gold medals for second place, Zachary, ra.”

I heard, in the distance, the sound of students, teachers, their approaching steps, fragments of conversation punctuated by laughter. Why was he telling me this? We cuddled, he pushed me away, invited me to tea, told me about a girl he liked, and now what? Parental-story-sharing time? Did he not think I could be the best? Did he not think I could protect him?

“I could've beat you in that race,” I said. “If we raced now I would beat you.”

His mouth worked, but formed no words. The students and teachers had passed. It was quiet again.

“I don't know about that,” he said. “I feel terrible and now I'm making you feel terrible. Aren't I?” He massaged his temples, took a couple steps away from me, meandered back. He squinted through the patchwork of trees at something only he could see.

“Is it—are you afraid? I'm afraid, too, Zach.”

He shook his head, pressed a hand gently to my shoulder. “That's—that's not it, Noah. Please try to understand. I've missed you, that's all. And I thought you'd understand. I thought I'd bring you here and—I don't know what I thought. I don't know about Addie. We—I spent the night, and then she asked for some space. She said she needed space.”

“That sounds familiar, Zach.”

He looked pained, but went on. “We just don't have a lot of time. And I don't think I feel that way about you. And maybe she doesn't feel that way about me. That's what's been running through my head. And then I found the squirrel and,
God,
I don't know. I just wanted to save her. I thought if we find out where the sick kids go—”

Ever since I'd started avoiding Zach, I'd made up for it by hanging out with Alice, who was always trying to save me, worrying about my level of alcohol consumption, what I did on Friday nights.

“Maybe she doesn't want to be saved,” I said. “Why do you need to save her?”

“Everyone wants to be saved, kid,” he said in surprise. “It's just a question of who's doing the saving.”

His hand dangled at his side. I could reach out and hold it. I could push him against a tree and kiss him, or punch him. I took a step toward him, and he tensed. That killed me, so I stopped.

“Noah,” he said.

“We—”
Cuddled
was the next word I had in mind, but it sounded ridiculous. Unable to capture what I mean. Unable to capture the closeness of two people. “That night. We
raced.
”

“It was fun,” he admitted.

“We could just have fun,” I said, trying not to beg. “It wouldn't have to be anything. Just fun.”

He shook his head, sad. “It's not a good idea, Noah.”

That's when I heard the sound of an engine making its way along the forest path. Zach squinted through the trees at the source of the sound, and when he made out the construction truck, a change came over him.

“Noah,” he said. “Don't you wonder where those trucks go?”

OPINIONS

Director Speaks Out: Westing's Mission to Help, Not Curtail Liberty

those among you who complain of the infringement of rights. But the Internet is filled with a proliferation of insensitive material, and in the past, when Internet access was unrestricted, cyber-bullies targeted recovering youths. As for contact with parents, do students remember when parental contact was left unchecked? Do students desire a repeat of Houston? At any other high school in America, many students here would have hanging over them the very real probability of expulsion. Yet Westing has only ever expelled those found guilty of committing sexual and/or violent offenses. We have been lenient and liberal in our policies, transparent about hospice care in the tertiary clinics and next steps in the recovery process. Restrictions are in place for the protection of students

Westinger.
Page 2

SEVEN WEEKS BEFORE THE CATACLYSMIC, FIERY, KIND OF CLICHÉD END OF ALL THINGS (OR NOT)

BLESS YOU

I wake.

Through the window, I watch a construction truck roll along a path leading to the northeast section of the wall. The construction workers have been working at the wall all month, but nobody ventures close enough to see why.

Beside me, Alice is asleep again, her chest rising and falling, contentment written on her face. Garbage duty really takes it out of you. I brush a hand through her hair. So many gray strands. One, two, three . . . The meds fuck everyone up differently. Seven, eight, nine. . . I get to twenty-three grays until I can't take it anymore, so I roll out of Alice's bed, leaving her to frequent whatever happy places there are to be found in the crevices of her mind.

The Polo key is still in my hand. I slip it into my mouth again.

My computer waits on the kitchen table, by a bowl of unfinished cereal that's gone untouched for several days. Whatever milk was once there has probably turned to yogurt. AwayWeGo calls to me—I try to resist, fail—while I wait for a plateful of hot dogs and bland potatoes to be sufficiently nuked so as to approach edibility, only to realize I don't want to go through the effort of chewing. Marty's probably still out Russian-ing it up in the library. I
could
send him some annoying texts of the
Are you jacking off to Turgenev again?
variety. Again. I could, but shouldn't, so I do.

He gives me the silent treatment.

I spit the key out onto a paper napkin, get up, and excavate a bottle of vodka from inside a box of Capt'n Crunch labeled Noah Falls. Alice is sleeping and happy, and I, too, want some of this happiness business I keep hearing so much about. Unlike Alice, I rarely find fulfillment in my dreams, though once I dreamed of Zach and me walking through some nameless gray city, holding hands. No, it didn't turn into a wet dream. Not this one, at least. All we did was hold hands; in the dream I did not have leprosy, did not have to moisturize five times a day.

I pour myself half a cup of the vodka, drop in a couple ice cubes, sniff, and wince.

I'll never understand why Marty and Alice do what they do. What good is all that work when you'll probably go away long before you finish your footnotes, have your name listed on AwayWeGo alongside your already departed friends and peers, right beside this month's list of Age of Rome's high scores?

Speaking of Age of Rome
,
I load the game up to distract myself from the mediocrity of my dinner.

No, Age of Rome, I don't want you to challenge my AwayWeGo friends to beat my campaign score.

No, Age of Rome, I don't want you to post my battle results to my AwayWeGo profile.

No, Age of Rome, I don't want to give you my Social Security number.

By the time Marty stumbles back to the apartment, I have Jerusalem under siege and I'm in quite good spirits, but I've barely touched my food. I tried to buy Jerusalem. When that didn't work, I sent my trusted General Flavius Something-or-other to sort the bastards out. Noble Flavius died on the way to the Holy Land. His son Decimus has taken the father's place and
seems the capable sort, judging by the one-square-inch picture of him in the corner of my screen.

“Marty-guy!”

“Oh,” he says from the foyer. “Hello, Noah.” Always so formal, Martin, with his hellos and good-byes. You'll never get a “see ya later, alligator” out of him, tell you that much.

“Come 'ere, I need your help.”

He surveys my screen with a slight frown.

“Egypt's got a couple armies closing in on you—”

“We're not at war with Egypt, though. Egypt and I are bros.”

“And they've got a navy right near your harbor.”

“I'm not at war with Egypt, though,” I say. “I just paid them fifty thousand florins the other turn . . . Fifty thousand florins, Martin. Fifty thousand florins don't grow on trees.”

That's when he notices my bottle of vodka.

He shakes his head, smiling reluctantly. “Should've known.”

“You and me, Marty-guy. Two sides of the same coin. Like, you're heads and I'm tails. Together we're worth twenty-five cents.”

“Noah.”

“What?”

“Screen.”

I turn my attention back to the screen. My virtual enemies are pouring out of the gates of Jerusalem in hopes of catching me by surprise and—
largely
—succeeding. I throw Marty a death glare.

He shrugs. “I tried to warn you—”

A half hour and two shots later, I have a Pyrrhic victory on my hands. Jerusalem is mine, but the great legion that Rome sent forth is largely gone. Within three turns, Jerusalem falls to Egypt, Egyptian navies blockade my ports, and the accursed
Gauls, whose forces I never quite finished off, descend on me from the north in my moment of weakness.

I enlist mercenaries who turn on me.

I build ships that cannot breach the Egyptian blockades.

I send out diplomats who are turned away.

The fate of my empire appears increasingly bleak, so I drink increasing amounts of vodka to compensate, until it increasingly occurs to me that Marty-guy's sobriety is an unacceptable state of affairs that must be rectified with all due haste.

“Hey Marty-guy,” I say, cupping a hand to my ear. “You hear that?”

“Huh?”

“That's the sound of one guy. Drinking alone.”

He undergoes a very brief internal struggle, because he cares that Alice doesn't like drinking. “Okay,” he says.

“Alice is sleeping,” I point out, as if this should assuage any possible guilt.

I pour him a shot.

Just then, as the combined might of the Gauls, the Parthians, the Egyptians, and the Carthaginians storm the gates of my Rome, I get a pop-up message:

Mom's voice, her laugh, that red door, how hot the metal knob got on stifling summer days. A diorama we once made together for school. It had something to do with a giraffe.
Should I buy her a thank-you card with her own money? Is a giraffe diorama worth $7.99 and a son's discomfort?

“It's not just Alice, though,” he says, and I know he means our parents. What would they think of us? Marty worries about stuff like that.

As for me, I X out the pop-up immediately and don't speak for a time. I do nothing as my Rome is sacked and burned, and a part of me wants to cry, for all those imaginary empires we work so hard to build on the backs of virtual slaves and micro-transactions, gifts from parents we last saw when we were nine, empires that in the end must succumb to the eternal return of the game-over screen, until Marty gently pries the shot I poured for him out of my fingers and downs it with admirable form.

This is his apology for bringing up the parents.

He's the best, like that.

He coughs, throws me a look of reproach, coughs again. “
Christ,
Noah.”

“You need to drink more,” I say. “Like Tolstoy, it gets better the more you put into it.”

“I can't believe you just compared—”

“Believe it, Marty-guy. Believe it.”

I try to sound cheery. There's no point in being sad. But every couple weeks, my parents send me Age of Rome florins or Pirate World booty and that kills me. They even donated an extra shipment of Growth Hormone to my Factoryfarmville factory farm the other day. Why do they keep sending me these things, when I never send them anything in return? When I never open their letters?

Marty watches me pour him a second shot. I spill a bit of vodka on the table. “Here,” I say, handing him the shot glass. He toasts me, but his eyes are sad.

“Close your eyes, please,” I say, and the wonderful thing about being drunk together is that he listens without so much as raising a question. I wipe away my tears and we go out to have an adventure, because there's something about having a BAC above .15 that makes everything possible, including but not limited to acute alcohol poisoning. We take my vodka with us, of course, passing it back and forth. Security patrols clack by in their hard plastic boots. They won't bother us unless we get too close to the lamp-lit walls. We cut through the residential quad until we reach the lawn in front of Galloway, the parking lot empty save for a handful of cars, overnight workers at the Wellness Center, probably—there's a figure standing at a window on the third floor, the floor that girls at Westing sometimes go up to, and for two weeks afterward aren't supposed to take baths or have sex or use tampons.

Marty takes another gulp of vodka.

He's caught up with me enough that it doesn't matter he's not caught up with me. He gazes up at the stars transfixed, and I think of Whitman's learn'd astronomer, a dissident student fleeing the lecture hall, fleeing a reduction of the world to equations and formulas, and instead, looking up in perfect silence at the stars. Alice wanted to teach me the constellations, but I told her all I saw were a whole lot of balls of fire. Which of us was right? Are the stars mythic Greek figures, or simply a bunch of hot air? Are we atoms, or do we have souls? If you don't know which story is right, then how is it possible to know whether you should be sitting in the lecture hall or standing outside with your head tilted skyward, praying in Church or huddled over a physics problem set?

I ask these questions of Marty, and his response is “What?” Impressively, he manages to slur the one syllable.

“What do you mean, ‘what'?”

“I mean—what do
you
mean?”

“Well, which part didn't you get? The Whitman reference? That was very Westing of me, wasn't it? There's also an implied part, but I'm not sure what I implied.”

“It's like you're talking Japanese. Never mind.”

“So I'm talking English?”

“No. Yes. I mean—you're talking Japanese. I just don't want to offend the Japanese. I have a Japanese friend, you know.”

“But, Marty,” I say, “if I'm talking Japanese, then how do you understand me enough to know you're not understanding me?”

“I'm, uh, taking an intro class.”

That explains absolutely everything. For a few minutes neither of us speaks, until, I don't quite know why, but I tell him, “I miss your play.”

I haven't acted in a while. Sometimes I think it's for the best—I act plenty as Noah, no need to take on other personas when I have my hands so full with this one. But during the spring, in Marty's take on
Peter Pan,
I became the boy who would never grow old. The play took place in a quarantine ward in an unnamed children's hospital. There was a corridor with two entrances, a door on the right and a door on the left. Doctors entered in the morning and exited in the evening through the door on the right, which was guarded by soldiers, soldiers with guns. Sick children were wheeled out in stretchers through the door on the left. The doctors would return with empty stretchers. Peter and Wendy, like all the children on the ward, were afflicted with an unspecified disease, but whenever they got scared, about their disappearing friends, about the world outside, which magazines from a magazine rack reported was full of things like the Iranian Nuclear Program and the unlikelihood of Europe meeting its
climate goals, they read
Game Informer
instead, and when
Game Informer
wasn't enough, they escaped to Neverland by drawing a blanket over themselves at precisely 2:33 in the morning and sharing Skittles. The Skittles were the key, the incantation, Neverland was impossible without them. Once in Neverland, they could play all the games that
Game Informer
talked about, months before their release dates.

“Do you think Alice liked it?” he asks.

The question takes me by surprise. I respond automatically, but gain confidence as the words spill out of my mouth. “Of course she did. Anyone with half a brain liked it. More than liked it. And Alice has two halves of a brain. One full brain, Marty-guy. She was all over it.”

Marty looks like he wants to say something, but before he can, he erupts into a coughing fit, stumbles over to a nearby bench.

“Bless you,” I say, ridiculously.

“I'm energy, you know,” Marty says. “So much energy. The Buddhists say that I have the universe in the tip of my finger, in case you were wondering, and Tolstoy says religion is our relation to the infinite world.” To clarify, he adds, “Tolstoy wasn't a Buddhist.”

“Which finger?” I drop into the seat next to him.

“What?”

“Which finger is it that you have a universe in? I mean it's definitely not your pinky.” I take his hand in mine to illustrate my point. “Your pinky is—it's too small Marty. It's unrealistic to think. Now, your index finger maybe,
maybe,
but your pinky—”

“The universe was smaller than my pinky,” he protests. “Right after the big bang. Right after the big bang, it was so small a million universes could've fit into my pinky. Not to mention my index finger.”

“It's a damn fine index finger,” I say. “For fitting universes in . . . I just wish those fingers would write another play.”

“There's no point,” he says despondently. His glasses have fallen askew. “I didn't want to write a play, anyway. I wanted to write something holy. About parents and walls and killer comets. I wanted to make someone love me. Do you think you can write something to make someone love you?”

“I don't know,” I say quietly.

“I wanted to
see
them. . . The way people look at you when they love you
—
nobody's ever looked at me that way, so I wanted to see—” He doesn't finish, but he doesn't have to. Every week at checkups, Marty stares at the eye chart and hopes it hasn't gotten blurrier. For now, the meds help, but he is afraid of when they won't.