We All Looked Up (21 page)

Or not. The photograph was pixelated and dark. All Peter could make out was a nondescript road and a chain-link fence topped with coils of barbed wire. It could have been taken anywhere. For now, the best he could do was drag it into iPhoto, raise the brightness and contrast a bit, and print it out.

And it was a good thing he did. Just a couple of hours later, the power finally died for good. The timing couldn't have been worse: only a handful of people were likely to have downloaded Eliza's attachment, and probably none of them had bothered to print it. Which meant it all came down to him. He needed to show the picture to someone who really knew Seattle, down at the street level. And there was only one person he knew who fit the bill.

“I think I'm going to turn in early,” he announced.

His mom was running around the house, lighting candles and putting batteries in flashlights. “Really? You haven't even had dinner.”

“I'm just super tired all of a sudden. I'll see you in the morning, okay?”

“Okay. Sweet dreams.”

He gave it half an hour or so, then stole quietly out the front door.

His street was darker than he'd ever seen it; the houses looked derelict and dead. He was already sitting in the driver's seat of the Jeep when he remembered the curfew. Crap. The last thing he needed was to get hauled off to prison himself.

It was nearly an hour later when he let his old twelve-speed drop onto the lawn outside the ma-in-law. It didn't look like anyone was home. The doorbell only clicked—no power. He knocked. Silence. He knocked again. This time he thought he heard something. Or maybe that was just the wind in the trees. He put his ear to the door. No, there was definitely someone moving around in there . . .

The door swung open, and Peter found himself face-to-face with the barrel of a gun. “Don't shoot!” he said.

Andy squeezed the trigger.

A bright orange Nerf dart bounced off Peter's forehead and landed, suction cup down, on the tile walkway.

“Got you,” Andy said, then turned and retreated into the house. “Come in, I guess.”

A
ndy

ANDY HAD ALWAYS SUSPECTED THAT
Peter might be a member of his karass, so he wasn't completely surprised to find him standing out on the doorstep in the dark. The only problem was that he didn't really like Peter. They'd always inhabited different dimensions of the social universe, seeing each other not quite as people, but as blurry people-shaped shadows floating around the periphery of classrooms and dances and parties. More to the point, they were obviously competing for Eliza, and Peter, having already made out with her once, was winning.

“So you know what happened at the riot, right?” Peter asked, stumbling around the underlit room (just a single flashlight on the coffee table, pointed straight up) until he fell into the beanbag chair.

“Yeah. They got Eliza.”

“Not just her. My sister, too.”

“And Bobo,” Andy said,
while we're talking about people other than the one we're really talking about.
“So what?”

“Well, I got an e-mail from her. From Eliza, I mean. Just a few hours ago. I thought you might have gotten it too.”

“I didn't check my messages today,” Andy lied. He felt as if someone had poured a cold glass of water directly into his chest cavity.

“Well, I don't know how she managed it from inside, but she attached this picture. I brought it with me.”

Peter flattened a piece of paper out on the table next to the flashlight. It was a photograph of a nondescript street, probably unrecognizable to anyone without a deck.

“That's the old navy base, out at Sand Point,” Andy said.

“You're sure?”

“Definitely. We used to go out there to skate, before they fenced it off.”

“Holy shit! This is great!”

“How so? You planning a jailbreak?”

“I was thinking more like a protest.”

“And who's coming? The web's down, yo.”

Andy enjoyed the look of disappointment on Peter's face, his heroic locomotive stopped in its tracks.

“But you've got friends, don't you?” Peter asked. “Maybe you can talk to that Golden guy, who put the rally at Cal Anderson together.”

Andy laughed. “If you want to talk to Golden, you can do it yourself.”

“I can't. He hates me.”

“Well, he doesn't like me much either. Bobo's his point guy.”

Peter threw up his hands. “So you just wanna do nothing? Do you even care that our friends are locked up?”

It was a reasonable question, but it only pissed Andy off more. Why had Eliza reached out to
Peter
, of all people? They weren't even friends! In fact, considering the whole Stacy slut-shaming fiasco last year, Eliza should have hated him. It was so unfair.
Life
was so unfair.

And maybe that was why Andy did what he did next—to strike a blow against the injustice of the universe. He sighed theatrically. “Maybe you're right. I mean, I wouldn't really be much of a boyfriend if I didn't at least
try
to get her out.”

Someone with a little more cunning in him might have played it cool, but Peter wouldn't have known cunning if it came up and stabbed him in the back. He looked dumbfounded and perplexed and rejected all at once. Andy crumpled the guilty feelings up and kicked them into a dark corner of his brain. Even though Eliza wasn't his girlfriend, she
was
his friend. And the important thing here was to keep his
friend
from wasting her last few weeks on the planet with some cookie-cutter jock moron.

“How long have you been going out?” Peter asked.

“Just a couple of weeks.”

“That's great. She's great.”

Like that, it was done. Just one more lie in a world full of them. Between that and stealing the guitar, Andy was really knocking it out of the park these days, morality-wise. Whatever. None of that stuff mattered anymore. All that mattered was the quest.

Unfortunately, Andy had more to deal with than just his conscience. From the top floor of the split-level came a single loud cough. Peter jumped to his feet.

“Who's here?”

“No one,” Andy said.

“So I'm no one now?” Anita came down the stairs, looking a little ghoulish in the shadows cast by the flashlight.

“Anita?” Peter said, now doubly confused. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” Anita said. “For my sins.”

It was true, though Andy hadn't really thought about it that way before. Anita hadn't been back to her own house since that day they'd picked up her stuff together. The cops had come looking for her once (her mom got Andy's last name out of the Hamilton yearbook), but Andy said that he hadn't heard from her in a week, and eventually they went away. And in spite of everything that was going on, the two of them had managed to have a pretty good time together—­playing music, watching TV (until the power went out), eating a lot of canned soup. It was a bit like it had been with Bobo back in the day, before Andy broke the pact. Like he and Anita had become roommates in some shared mental space.

She climbed over the top of the couch and rolled down onto the cushions. “So what have you two been talking about?” she asked innocently. But Andy knew she'd heard everything, including his lie.

“Peter got an e-mail from Eliza. Now we know where she is.”

“Wow,” Anita said, putting a hand on Peter's arm. “She sent you a message from jail? She must really like you.”

“I guess so,” Peter said.

Anita glared knowingly at Andy. But was she going to give him away?

“Anyway,” Andy said, “Peter thought we should stage some sorta protest, but I don't think we can get enough people to show up for it to matter.”

“Sure we can! We know just the right people.”

“I'm not talking to Golden, if that's what you mean.”

“Not Golden. Better people.
Hippie
people.”

“Oh yeah . . . them.” Andy had almost forgotten about Chad and his little commune. If anyone would know how to put a protest together, they would.

“We'll head over there first thing tomorrow. Peter, why don't you come here as soon as you wake up and we'll go together.”

“Sure. Good call.” Peter stood up and went to the door, but he hesitated before opening it. “It's been really nice to see you guys. I've been on my own with my parents, and I think it's making me a little crazy.” Even in the dark, Andy could see the sympathy flashing in Anita's eyes.
Don't do it
, he wanted to say.

“You wanna hang out here for a bit?” she asked. “You can even stay over if you want.”

“Really? Thanks. I mean, if it's cool.”

He was looking at Andy. Nobody spoke for a good five seconds.

“Of course it's cool,” Anita said. “I'll go get you a beer.”

Andy could remember watching a movie in European history class about this one Christmas during World War I when the two sides declared a truce and partied together between the trenches. Hanging out with Peter felt a little bit like that, like fraternizing with the enemy. They played Sorry!, a mindless dice-rolling game, and talked apocalypse: the kids who'd left town and the kids who'd stayed, the unlikely couples forming in the shadow of Ardor for want of better prospects, the surprising tribulations of impending doom.

“I figured everybody would be super sociable, you know?” Peter said. “Like we'd all come together or something. But it hasn't been like that at all.”

Apparently, his best friend had moved away, and his ex-girlfriend (the famously lustworthy Stacy Prince) refused to speak to him. Funny, it had been the exact opposite for Andy. Without Ardor, he wouldn't have made friends with either Anita or Eliza. Maybe the asteroid was turning the whole world upside down. The popular shall become unpopular. The freak shall inherit the Earth.

They stayed up talking for hours. Peter passed out first, on the carpet underneath the coffee table. Andy felt giddy and detached with sleeplessness.

“You shouldn't have said what you did,” Anita whispered, “about you and Eliza.”

“It was the only way to make him back off.”

“What if he mentions it to her?”

“Why would he? Besides, he probably won't see her again anyway.”

“Sure he will.”

“What? You think this protest idea could work?”

Anita turned lengthwise across the couch, putting her legs over one of the arms. Andy could feel the warmth of her head against his knee. “You remember that morning with Chad, with the tea?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“I saw things that day. Things I still can't put into words. Connections, you know? I felt that karass you're always talking about. We're all in it. You and me. Him.” She pointed at Peter, sprawled out on the carpet like a giant fallen from his kingdom at the top of the beanstalk. “Misery and Eliza. Even Bobo.”

“Wow. Even Bobo? How drunk are you right now?”

“I'm being serious. Chad said we had to have faith. So I'm going to. We'll get them out.”

She didn't say anything after that, and a few minutes later, her breathing turned deep and even. Andy felt a fresh wave of shame wash over him. He didn't deserve Anita, who had kept his secret safe from Peter, who was so willing to help out even though there was no one in the detention center she particularly cared about saving (in spite of Andy's best efforts, she and Eliza had yet to really
bond
). She'd revitalized his music and made him feel like something other than a slacker and a misfit. Along with the quest, Anita had given him a reason to keep getting out of bed every morning. And why? What was in it for her? What reason had he ever given her to be so good to him?

He fell asleep with these questions orbiting endlessly around his head, like a hundred tiny asteroids.

The next morning, the three of them drove across the bridge to Chad Eye's house. Everything outside looked pretty much the same as it had the first time, clean and quiet and still.

A stranger answered the door-gong in only his underwear. He was very pale and very hairy and still half-asleep.

“Hello?”

“Hey, we're looking for Chad.”

“Hold up one second.” He walked away, scratching at his bare stomach. Through the open door, Andy saw that the house was a total wreck. Clothes and empty food containers were strewn all over, and a bunch of people were asleep on the floor of the foyer. Before, the place had felt like a Buddhist temple. Now it felt like an expensively decorated squat.

After a minute, a couple of familiar faces came to the door: Sunny, the dreadlocked blond girl, and in her arms, Chad's philosophical beagle, Sid.

“Hi,” she said. “I'm Sunny.”

Andy shook her ring-heavy hand. “Yeah, we've met.”

“Oh yeah?” She nodded as if Andy had just told her something particularly interesting. “Cool!”

“So is Chad around?”

Sunny frowned. “Didn't you hear? He got busted at the riot.”

“Seriously?”

It was terrible news. If Chad was in jail, who would be putting together the Party at the End of the World?

“This is perfect!” Anita exclaimed.

Everybody, Andy included, gave her exactly the sort of look that such an outburst deserved.

“I just meant that that's kinda why we're here. We need your help. A lot of our friends got taken away that day too. We're planning a protest at the detention center where they're being held. It's only for juveniles, so it wouldn't mean freeing Chad directly, but if we can get amnesty for the kids, it might start something bigger.”

“Actually, that's not a bad idea,” Sunny said. She leaned forward, dangling a single dreadlock in front of Sid, who batted it away. “Between you and me, we could really use a cause right now. It's gotten a little depressing in here. We can make, like, a festival out of it.”

“Sounds great,” Anita said.