We All Looked Up (14 page)

Three days later Peter stood waiting outside the Hamilton refectory, shaking with fear. But it wasn't Golden he was afraid of, and it definitely wasn't Bobo. It was a slight brunette girl in a pale-green tank top. She waved at him from across the quad, flipped her hair over her shoulder, and smiled—totally oblivious.

Could love really disappear so quickly? Or did that mean it had never been there in the first place?

There was no safety left in the world. If Peter hadn't known it before his run-in with Golden, he definitely knew it now. And after another weekend of sleepless nights spent imagining his last few moments on Earth, he realized that when he looked up at Ardor as it came streaking down through the atmosphere, turning scarlet with the heat of entry, it wasn't Stacy's hand he wanted to be holding. Whether the asteroid blazed past them like a bad overhead pass, or landed like a huge fist wrapped in chains of fire, Ardor had already delivered its stale but necessary message: Life was just too goddamn short.

“Hey, baby,” Stacy said, then noticed the lattice of scabs on his face. She reached up to touch his cheek. It was the very same spot she would soon slap with all her strength, reopening most of the tiny wounds, leaving a checkerboard of blood on her palm. “Is this why you haven't been answering your phone? What happened?”

He took hold of her hand for what would turn out to be the last time. A few days later, she and her parents would decide to leave Seattle for their family cabin on Lake Chelan. She wouldn't even bother to call him to say good-bye.

“A lot,” he said. “And we need to talk about it.”

A
nita

“ELIZA?”

Anita looked up from her book—Immanuel Kant's
The Critique of Pure Reason
.

“No, I am not Eliza.”

Andy blinked like a baby bear coming out of hibernation. He was still wearing the clothes he'd worn at the concert, and his hair was an avant-garde sculpture, all curves and sudden outcroppings. “You're Anita,” he said.

“Well done. Now get out of bed and take a shower before you kill somebody.”

Andy sniffed at his armpit and grimaced. “Good call.”

Anita retreated into the living room, where she'd spent the night on a couch that sagged so deeply it might as well have been a hammock. A couple of times in the middle of the night, her hand had fallen into crevices that somehow managed to be both sandy and moist at once. Now, in the cold light of day, she removed the cushions, fluffed them, and swept away the dust, pennies, and crushed Skittles that had collected underneath.

After ten minutes or so (oh, to be a boy!), Andy emerged from the bedroom in a pair of jeans scribbled all over with colored marker and a T-shirt bearing a portrait of George W. Bush above the words
The Decider
.

“My head feels like a My Bloody Valentine song,” he said. “Coffee time.”

They drove to a nearby Denny's and were seated in a booth with a panoramic view of the parking lot.

“So that was something else last night,” Anita said.

Andy ran his hands through his hair, transforming the sculpture (which had survived his two-minute shower practically unscathed). “I really left Eliza a message?”

“Oh, you wish it were just a message. This was a monologue. This was an epic poem.”

“Jesus.”

“Hey, if I got something like that, I'd be flattered. Or disturbed. Definitely one of the two. What's your thing with her, anyway?”

The waitress, a matronly sixty-something with bleached-blond hair and exposed roots, dropped off Andy's coffee. “Thanks, Claire,” he said. Anita wasn't sure if it was really sweet or really sad that he was on a first-name basis with the Denny's staff. He blew on the top of his coffee, sipped it. “I don't know. Eliza's cool.”

“That's your whole reason? She's cool?”

“Stop grilling me, yo! Anyway,
I
should be the one asking questions here.”

“Why's that?”

“Because
you're
the one being a weirdo.”

“No, I'm not,” Anita said, but she was secretly pleased. It made for a nice change to be seen as a weirdo for once, instead of some uptight mega-prude.

“Yeah, you are. Like, what are you doing here right now? Since when do you go to punk rock concerts and biker bars and spend the night at some boy's house? That's not the Anita Graves I know.”

“So maybe you don't know Anita Graves.”

“I know the Anita Graves I had to work with on that physics project back in the day.”

“If I remember correctly, you didn't do much of that project.”

“Exactly my point. You were, like, seriously . . .” He tightened his hands into fists, then shook them a little.

“Spastic?”

“High-strung. You wouldn't smoke a single bowl with me that whole week.”

“I'm not into drugs.”

“Yeah, but even when I wanted to, like, take a snack break, you acted as if I said we should drop out of school and go score some heroin or something. And aren't you going to Harvard next year?”

“Princeton. Conditionally.”

Andy laid his hands out on the table, like he'd just proven something. “There you go. So why are you suddenly spending your time with a fuckup like me? Is this just an asteroid-coming-to-kill-us-all thing?”

Anita shrugged. “Maybe. I mean, probably. But that doesn't make it a bad idea. You know, I think I'm the only person out there who's actually been happier since we all heard about Ardor. It was like a wake-up call, you know? I've spent my whole life doing the stuff I was supposed to, and all because I thought that people like you, people who just did whatever they wanted, were the dumb ones. But now I'm thinking, who's dumber? The guy who does his own thing, or the girl who does someone else's thing?”

“So what's your thing?”

“I want to sing,” she said, without hesitation. “That's why I came out to your show.”

“You want to join Perineum?”

Anita laughed. “No! God, no!”

“Well, you don't have to be a dick about it.”

“Sorry. I'm just not really much of a punk girl. But the song that
you
sang? That was amazing! I mean, I couldn't believe my ears.”

Andy smiled into his coffee. He clearly wasn't used to praise. Anita wondered if that was how kids became slackers. Nobody ever built them up when they succeeded, so they started to wonder why they should bother trying in the first place.

“Which song was it?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Which one did I play?”

“Seriously? You can't remember?”

Andy shook his head sheepishly, and then both of them were laughing. Their food came: hash browns and wavy bacon strips and flapjacks with a swirly flame of butter in a little paper cup. Anita couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten at Denny's. It was delicious.

“So can I ask you something else?” Andy asked, his mouth full of food.

“Sure.”

“Why were you crying that day, in the library?”

Anita had never told the truth about her family to anyone other than Suzie O, but maybe that was just because no one had ever asked. “In a nutshell? Because my dad's an asshole, and my mom just goes along with him on everything. They have these huge expectations of me, but even when I meet them, they still aren't happy. I thought getting into Princeton would change things, but it's only made everything worse.”

“My parents don't expect anything out of me,” Andy said.

“That must be nice.”

“You'd be surprised.”

The waitress came and refilled his mug. “I can't believe you can drink so much coffee,” Anita said. “I get jumpy after my first cup.”

“I've built up an immunity.”

“Sometimes I worry I don't have enough vices to be a musician. My uncle plays saxophone for a living, and I've watched him drink ten cups of coffee in one go. Also half a bottle of bourbon. Maybe it's time I developed a drug habit or something. Or started sleeping around, like—” She cut herself off, but it was too late.

“Like Eliza?”

“Sorry.”

“It's fine. She does have a bit of a rep.”

“You're not just interested in her because of
that
, are you?”

“No! I like her. For real. And I just needed
something
, you know? I needed to need something.”

“I totally get that,” Anita said. “I need some things too. From you.”

“Like what?”

“First thing, I want to make music. I can sing. You can play. Deal?”

“Deal. What else?”

“I need you to help me plan a party. Which means you'll have to come to student council.”

Andy mimed hanging himself from a very short rope. He spoke while swinging slowly to and fro. “I guess I can do that. For a party.”

“Thanks.” She took a deep breath. “And there's one more thing.”

“Hit me.”

“I sorta need to move in with you.”

That Wednesday, Anita dragged Andy along to the eighth-period discussion group, so as not to lose track of him before student council. She worried he might act out like he had in assembly (or else fall asleep), but actually, he got along just fine. He hadn't done any of the reading, of course, but that did nothing to diminish his passion for argument. They spent the hour debating between something called the “categorical imperative,” which said that you shouldn't do anything that you didn't believe ought to be a law, and “utilitarianism,” which was the theory that the best choice in any situation was the one that would lead to the most happiness for the most people.

Andy raised his hand. “So if I, like, kicked someone in the nuts, but it made a lot of other people laugh, that might be all right?”

Mr. McArthur considered. “Assuming that we could quantify the enjoyment versus the . . . groin pain? Then yes.”

“And even if Ardor wiped out ninety-nine percent of the people on the planet, it could be a good thing, if the survivors and their kids and stuff ended up way happier?”

“Yep.”

Andy sat back in his seat, shaking his head. “That's some fucked-up shit right there.”

In this brave new post-asteroid world, you could actually get away with talking like that in front of your teachers.

After class, Suzie O gave Andy a fist bump. “Anita, are you responsible for bringing this malcontent here?”

“Guilty. He's my end-of-the-world project.”

“Hey, Suzie,” Andy said, looking down at the carpet, “I'm sorry about last time, in your office. I was being messed up.”

“Don't mention it. Emotions ran high. Anyway, I hope you keep coming to our little meetings here. You had a lot to add.”

“Thanks. It was actually way less boring than I thought it would be.”

“Andy!” Anita said.

But Suzie only laughed. “From anyone else, that would be faint praise, but from Andy Rowen, for whom almost everything is boring, I think it's a pretty serious compliment.”

“Exactly,” Andy said, grinning. “Suzie, you just get me.”

After a snack break in the lunchroom (during which Andy introduced Anita to the peanut butter and Ruffles barbecue-flavor potato chip sandwich), they headed to student council. It was the first meeting since the announcement of Ardor, and the council had already shrunk from eight members down to five. Unfortunately, Krista Asahara was not among the absentees.

“What's
he
doing here?” she asked, pointing at Andy.

“I invited him,” Anita said. “We're short today anyway.”

“Our bylaws say we need two freshmen and another sophomore.”

“I think the bylaws are moot at this point. And Andy is here because he and I have put together some new ideas for Olot that we want to share with you.”

“Olot?” Damien Durkee asked. “Are we even still doing that?”

“Of course we are,” Krista said. “The students need it, for morale.”

“Actually, we had a different plan,” Anita said. “The dance is scheduled for three weeks from now, but we want to hold it the night before Ardor comes.”

Krista looked horrified. “We don't even know when that is!”

“We will.”

“But how could we plan it? It's totally unfeasible!”

Andy leaned onto the back two legs of his chair. “Hey, Krista, no offense, but you're being, like,
super
annoying right now.”

“I'm not sure that's a helpful comment,” Anita said, trying to hide her smile.

“Sorry. It's just, she's whining so loud, and it's, like, right in my ear. Besides, all we have to do is throw the party in a place that we can use whenever we want.”

“Olot is held in the gym,” Krista said. “Or is it annoying for me to mention that?”

“This isn't fucking Olot anymore! It's the Party at the End of the World! And it doesn't happen in the gym, because it's too
big
for the gym, yo, because everyone is allowed to invite whoever they want. Invite your whole family. Invite strangers in the street. Invite your dealer. It's the fucking Party at the End of the World.”

“This is crazy,” Krista said, looking to the rest of the room for support. “Peter, you can't approve of this, right?”

But Peter didn't answer. He was staring out the window, totally unaware of what was going on inside the room. There was a weird pattern of red marks on his cheek, as if he'd fallen on a tennis racket strung with razor wire. Rumors were he'd broken up with his ­girlfriend this week. Maybe she'd gone at him with her perfectly manicured nails.

“Peter!” Krista said.

He blinked back into his body. “Sorry, what's happening?”

“They want to cancel Olot and replace it with some random party!”

“Oh yeah? Right on. Olot's the worst.”

Krista was totally speechless, and for the first time, Anita actually felt bad for her. What was a suck-up to do when the whole hierarchy of the universe broke down?

“Let's vote on it,” Anita said. “All in favor?” Hands up in the air from everyone, even Krista, who knew a lost cause when she saw it. “The Party at the End of the World passes unanimously.”

“Fine,” Krista said, already adapting herself to the new status quo. “So who's gonna DJ this super-party?”

Andy slammed his hand down on the table. “No goddamn Top Forty R and B, I'll tell you that much. This party has to be more than the same old shit.”