We All Looked Up (30 page)

A
ndy

ALL THE WAY BACK TO
the independent, as Bobo bitched about Peter (the asshole who sucker punched him) and Anita (the prude who wussed out at Target) and Eliza (the tease with the big ego), Andy felt the bonds between him and his “best friend” disintegrating, like the single sugar cube Anita always took in her coffee. He'd been so sure that he'd fucked up at the navy base too deeply to ever be forgiven, but then his whole karass had shown up at Northgate. Anita and Eliza had hugged him (and was it just his imagination, or had Anita's hug been particularly drawn out?), and even Peter, who had more reason to hate him than anyone, had made it clear he didn't hold a grudge.

Andy didn't have a lot of experience with forgiveness­—Bobo had never pardoned his breaking of the pact—so he'd never realized how powerful it could be. It made him want to be a better sort of person, the kind who
deserved
forgiveness.

So now he had a new quest. He would find Misery and he would get her home, whatever Bobo had to say about it.

“I'm gonna go see if she's feeling better,” Bobo said, once they were back at the Independent.

Andy followed him up the stairs. “Actually, I think I'll come along with you. I haven't seen Miz in forever.”

“Can you maybe wait until later? I could use some time on my own with her right now.”

“What for?”

“Just leave it alone, okay?” Bobo shouted, his words ricocheting off the cement walls of the stairwell. Andy's heart began to pound like a kick drum in his chest. For the first time in his life, he felt afraid of Bobo.

“What's going on, man?”

Bobo threw his hands up in frustration—and did he notice Andy flinch? “I don't know. I mean, I'm not supposed to say.”

“Not supposed to say what?”

“I can't tell you in here. Anyone could be listening. Come on.”

Up on the roof, Golden's perpetual party had dwindled down to a dozen people congregated around the one working heat lamp, like hobos warming their hands at a trash fire.

Bobo led Andy to a cold, quiet corner of the roof. “Okay. You ready for the truth?” He took a deep breath. “Misery's pregnant.”

Andy's heart began hammering again. Not because he believed Bobo—the explanation was way too long in coming and way too soap opera to be real—but because of what the lie signified. If Bobo was willing to go this far just to keep Andy from talking to Misery, then something seriously fucked up had to be going on.

“Wow,” Andy said, playing along as well as he could. “How long have you known?”

“A few weeks. She wanted to get it dealt with, but all the Planned Parenthoods shut down. That's why she left home. She felt like she couldn't hide it once Eliza moved in.”

“She must be freaking out. I should talk to her.”

Bobo shook his head. “Nah. She'd be pissed if she knew I told you. And besides, she's exhausted, like, all the time. I'm sure she's asleep right now. I'll try and get her to come out tomorrow, though, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good. Now let's drink a couple of beers and forget about all this shit.”

Only there wasn't any beer left—just a few cans of room-temperature Sprite—and Andy wasn't about to forget anything. He was a sleeper agent, secretly working for Team Karass, waiting for just the right moment to activate.

And he didn't have to wait long. They'd only been up on the roof for an hour or so when some guy Andy didn't recognize burst out of the stairwell.

“Hey, Bobo!”

“What's up?”

“Golden says you should come downstairs. He's got something for you.”

“Hopefully it's more weed,” Bobo said. Andy had to grit his teeth to smile. “You wanna come along?”

“Nah. I'll hang up here.”

“Cool. See you in a bit.”

Andy gave it a couple of minutes, then headed straight for Bobo's apartment on the sixth floor.

He wasn't sure what to expect, but he had a distinct horror-movie feeling as he walked the long
Shining
-esque hallway. The door nearest the window had been kicked half off the hinges. On the ground, a latch and a padlock, still clamped shut. The room beyond the door was a wreck—mirrors shattered, sheets shredded, furniture in splinters—as if a wild animal had been imprisoned there.

There was only one explanation. Somehow Bobo had tricked Misery into coming to his apartment, and then he'd locked her in. Maybe he'd wanted to punish her for dumping him, or maybe he'd really thought that he could convince her to forgive him, if he could only get her to listen.

Andy was disgusted that someone he'd once called a friend could do something like this. But at the same time, he also felt strangely relieved. Ever since the night the pact went wrong, he'd been suffering under a lead weight of self-reproach. Now, at last, he was free to hate his best friend. And he did. As deeply and purely as he'd ever hated anything, he hated Bobo. It felt good, to finally arrive on the same page as the rest of his friends—Misery, Anita, Eliza . . .

And Peter.

The final piece of the story fell into place. The busted-in door. The “something” Golden had waiting for Bobo downstairs.

Andy sprinted back down the hallway, took the steps two at a time, moving so fast that he wouldn't even have noticed them in the lobby if they hadn't called out to him.

“Andy!”

It was Eliza and Anita.

“Hey!” His happiness at seeing them transformed immediately into fear for their safety.

Eliza grabbed hold of his wrist. “Is Peter here? Have you seen him?”

Andy knew that if he told her what he'd seen, she'd insist on coming downstairs.

“You need to leave, Eliza. Go back to Peter's house. I promise I'll bring him and Misery as soon as I can.”

“We're not going anywhere.”

“You don't understand. It's dangerous here.”

“We don't care.”

Every second he wasted arguing with her was a second he wasn't helping Peter. “Then just go up to the second floor, okay? Apartment 212 should be unlocked. It's where I sleep when I'm here.”

“Is Peter there?”

“He will be.”

Then Andy was off again, through the door and down the stairs to the fitness center. He caught Bobo and Golden just as they were coming out of the bathroom.

“Andy, my man!” Golden clicked the clasp of his necklace back into place. “You just missed the show!”

“What show?” Andy had directed the question at Bobo, but his former best friend didn't say a word. He looked as if he'd just been through a war. “Bobo, you okay?”

“Don't worry about him,” Golden said. “He was a fucking champ in there. Unfortunately, we
have
lost track of his lovely little girlfriend.”

“Have you seen her?” Bobo whispered.

“No.”

Golden thumped Bobo on the back. “Then she's probably long gone. Oh well. Let's get you a drink, slugger. I keep the good stuff in my room.”

“I'll meet you up there,” Andy said. “I'm just gonna take a piss.”

“Watch out for the occupied stall,” Golden said. He laughed, and for once, Bobo didn't laugh along with him.

Andy already knew what he would find, even before he saw the wide swathe of smeared blood leading from the sauna to the bathroom. Peter was inside the rightmost stall, propped up against the toilet seat. He'd been fucked up in a way that Andy had only seen before in movies. One eye was swollen shut, and the other flew at half-mast. Dried blood caked the bottom half of his face. He wasn't wearing a shirt, and there were black bruises all over his ribs, each one haloed with a speckled starburst of vermillion. A string of gory perforations wrapped around both of his wrists. Worst of all was the wide patch of raw, ravaged flesh on his right bicep. At the edges, Andy could make out the flecks of black ink that had once been a tattoo.

Peter looked up at him, no emotion readable in his tumid features.

“I'm here to help,” Andy said, and knelt down. They stood up together, as gently as Andy could manage. Peter groaned with each step. It took fifteen minutes just to get him back up to the lobby.

“Peter, I need you to stay here, okay? I'm going to get the girls, and then we can leave.”

“Eliza's here?” Peter said.

“Yeah.”

“Then I'm coming.”

“But you—”

The whip crack of a gunshot from somewhere overhead. Andy had forgotten that Golden's apartment was also on the second floor. He'd
just
sent Anita and Eliza up there. . . .

He ran for the stairway, Peter limping along just behind him. As he reached for the door, it swung open from the inside. Golden came out, hunched over, holding tightly to a ruby wetness around his belly. He breathed out a constant stream of obscenity as he stumbled past them, oblivious to anything but pain, and out of the Independent.

Andy mounted the stairs in great blind leaps and threw open the door to the second floor.

Blackness, then a nebulous prickle of stars shining through the window at the end of the hallway. A couple of them disappeared, blocked out by someone's silhouette. What if it was Bobo? What if he had the gun? Andy ran at the shadow, full-tilt, taking it down to the ground with him. Hands clawed at his face, knees slammed around the sensitive target between his legs. He was about to start throwing punches himself when something caught his attention: a scent, of all things, familiar even in these unfamiliar surroundings.

“Anita,” he said, trying to pin down her surprisingly strong arms, “stop mauling me!”

“Andy?”

He took his weight off her, put out a hand to help her up. “I'm so sorry. I didn't know who it was—”

He hadn't planned to do it. He'd only been trying to get her to her feet. Only they were closer together than he realized, and her face was coming right up at his face and in that split second he knew he had to, because what if they never got another chance? The kiss didn't last more than a few seconds, but that was time enough to open his mouth and breathe in a wisp of her breath. Time enough for everything terrible that had happened up to that moment—Bobo and Golden and even Ardor itself—to float a little ways out into space, for a few precious seconds.

“Is that Andy?” some other voice said. An orange-tipped ball crouched in a doorway just a few feet away.

“Misery?” Andy said. “Thank God.” He reached out and hugged her in along with Anita.

“Who's out there?” Peter called from the stairway.

“It's Anita,” Andy said, “and Misery, too.”

“And Eliza?”

“I thought she ran out of the apartment with me and Misery,” Anita said. “But I lost track of her in the dark.”

“Eliza!” Peter cried out, then lost his voice in a coughing fit. The rest of them took up the call: “Eliza! Eliza!”

After a few seconds, the door to apartment 212 squeaked slowly open. Moonlight followed her out into the hall, illuminating the bare skin of her shoulders and stomach, reflecting off the lacy fabric of her bra. At first Andy thought it was just a trick of the light—that rusty shadow stretching across her abdomen and darkening the top of her jeans. But when he got closer, he recognized it for what it was.

“What happened, Eliza?”

“I'm sorry,” she said, “but I had to.”

“Had to what?”

She said it again, desperate this time, almost hysterical. “I had to!”

A
nita

THE FREEWAY WAS BUSIER THAN
she'd seen it in weeks, and almost every car was headed in the same direction. If one of them got in an accident, there might even have been a traffic jam, just like in the good old days. Anita could remember hot summer afternoons gridlocked on I-5, air conditioner and KUBE 93 blasting.

Was it really possible to feel nostalgic about traffic jams?

“Do you think it's for the party?” she asked. “I mean, it's not supposed to be until tomorrow, but maybe they all wanna get there early.”

“I don't know,” Eliza said, distracted. “Can you drive any faster?”

“I'll try.”

They'd been slow to get on the road. After Peter had torn off in the Jeep, Eliza had marched straight into the house and demanded the keys to Peter's mom's Jetta, but all she got in response was a barrage of anxiety-ridden Mom questions:
Why isn't Peter here? Is he with Samantha? Why doesn't he ask me for the car himself? What are you going to do with it? Is it safe
?
Eliza raised her voice, and then Peter's mom raised her voice back, and then Peter's dad made both of them even angrier by refusing to take a side. While everyone else was arguing, Anita rifled through the drawers near the kitchen sink until she happened upon a familiar VW logo.

“Never mind, Mrs. Roeslin,” she said, dragging Eliza out of the house. “We'll just walk.”

Just past the turnoff to 520, Seattle opened across their windshield like a pop-up picture book.
My city
,
Anita thought. It was a shame that she'd never gotten to explore the wide margins of the planet—Paris and Rome and Timbuktu. But on another level, it made for a sweet sort of intimacy to have only lived in one place: geographic monogamy. She saw everything differently now, from the polychromatic nightmare of the Experience Music Project—a museum designed as an homage to Jimi Hendrix's melted guitar, but that better ­resembled what a kid would vomit up after eating a box of crayons—to the iconic Space Needle, looking even more solid and monumental now that those elevators weren't constantly inching up and down its sides like little golden pill bugs. So many memories: field trips to the Pacific Science Center, nights spent studying in the huge glassy greenhouse of the Seattle Public Library, austere family dinners at the expensive restaurants around the Market. She couldn't help but love it all now—even her parents, who'd been swept up in the general reminiscence and imbued with the golden light of retrospect. It occurred to Anita that hatred and dislike and even indifference were all luxuries, born of the mistaken belief that anything could last forever. She felt a pang of remorse. In spite of everything, she hoped her mom and dad were doing all right.

The white tablet of the sun sank beneath the watery pinkness of the horizon.

“I'm gonna miss this shit,” Eliza said.

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

The sky gave up its last bit of light just as they pulled up in front of the Independent. Stepping out of the car, Anita glanced up at Ardor. They'd all learned where in the sky to find it, just a few stars below the trough of the Big Dipper. It would never look particularly big, Anita could remember hearing, because it
wasn't
very big. More like a bullet than a bomb, they'd said. But a bullet could kill you just as easily as a bomb.

The lobby of the Independent was a throwback to another age. It would have been a particularly shabby sort of chic, if not for the piles of trash and the foul, enigmatic odor.

“Where are we?” Eliza asked.

“Feels like hell.”

A door on the other side of the lobby swung open. Someone came sprinting out so fast that Anita raised her fists on instinct.

“Andy!”

He screeched to a stop like some kind of cartoon character.

“Is Peter here?” Eliza immediately demanded. “Have you seen him?”

“You need to leave, Eliza. Go back to Peter's house. I promise I'll bring him and Misery as soon as I can.”

“We're not going anywhere,” Eliza said.

“You don't understand. It's dangerous here.”

“We don't care.”

Andy sighed. “Then just go up to the second floor, okay? Apartment 212 should be unlocked. It's where I sleep when I'm here.”

“Is Peter there?”

“He will be.”

“Did he seem weird to you?” Eliza asked, after Andy had disappeared through some door marked
FITNESS CENTER
.

“He's always a little weird. But I'm sure he knows what he's doing. Come on.”

They'd made it halfway across the lobby when something creaked over by the couches. A mop of orange hair lifted itself up from behind a patchy velvet settee: Misery. There was something deathly serious in her expression.

“What the hell are you doing over there?” Anita asked.

“You can't go upstairs,” Misery said.

“What? Why not?”

She came out from behind the couch. Shadows slid off her skin, revealing where her pale arms had been studded with bruises, each one a little watercolor painting of a sunrise. She'd aged five years since the last time Anita had seen her.

“Bobo,” Misery said, then shook her head. “He locked me in. And Andy must have known about it. They're in on it together. They have to be.”

“Andy would never hurt you, Miz,” Anita said.

“Oh yeah? He hurt Peter.”

“I know. But that was a mistake.”

“If you're wrong, and we go up to his apartment, he could lock all of us in. Or worse.”

“He won't.”

“How do you know?”

Because he's not Bobo
, Anita wanted to say, but she didn't want to hurt Misery's feelings. Bobo's capability for cruelty had always been there, pooled just beneath the surface, like tattoo ink. But Andy was different. He was good. If there was one thing in the world that Anita knew for certain, it was that. She shrugged. “I just do.”

“Me too,” Eliza said, and Anita was grateful for that.

Together, they climbed the stairs to the second floor and entered apartment 212. It was decorated like a cheap hotel room, with the usual twin beds spread with the usual pinkish-red quilts laundered to a thready pulp, the usual two-seater couch, and the usual pointlessly gigantic flat-screen television on the wall. The only light came in through a semitransparent shade over the window. Anita pulled it open.

A lone white speedboat cruised Puget Sound like a symbol of something. Almost everything else that moved was moving south, toward Boeing Field. Cars passed behind the big sports arenas at the edge of the city as if crossing over into another world. Once upon a time, the Kingdome had sat over there, wide and squat as a cupcake, its segmented white top like the ribs of some enormous umbrella. Anita had only seen it in pictures; they'd knocked it down and replaced it with some other expensive athletic monstrosity when she was only three. Now Ardor would probably knock that one down too. There was some cosmic justice for you.

Anita turned away from the window. Misery lay across the bed with her head in Eliza's lap. She had a tragic grace to her, pallid perpendicular lines for limbs and a faraway, traumatized stare. Strange to think that Bobo wouldn't have done what he did if he hadn't found her beautiful. Beauty always made a target of its possessor. Every other human quality was hidden easily enough—intelligence, talent, selfishness, even madness—but beauty would not be concealed.

“Do you ever wish you didn't look the way you did?” Anita asked.

“All the time,” Misery said. “I hate the way I look.”

Anita smiled at the misunderstanding. She could remember what it was like to be sixteen—so uncomfortable in your body that sometimes it didn't feel like your body at all. Even at eighteen, she was only just beginning to be able to look at herself in the mirror without totally freaking out.

“No, I don't mean like that. I just meant—”

“Having to be afraid,” Eliza said.

“Yeah.”

No need to say more. No need to describe all the things you had to do to keep the eyes away. No need to discuss how hard it was to get the attention of the person you
wanted
attention from without being seen as desperate for
everyone's
attention. No need to catalog all the walls you had to put up; not just the walls that protected you from physical danger—though there were plenty of those, too—but the walls you had to build around your heart. They said no man was an island, and Anita figured that was probably true. But women were; they had to be. And even if someone bothered to sail over and disembark, he'd soon discover that there was always a castle at the center of the island, surrounded by a deep moat, with a rickety drawbridge and archers manning the battlements and a big pot of oil poised above the gate, ready to boil alive anyone who dared to cross the threshold.

“Boys never understand anything,” Anita said, and though it didn't technically follow from what they'd been talking about, it was the kind of statement that was always appropriate—at least in a roomful of girls.

“Tell me about it,” Eliza said.

“They understand boobs,” Misery said sarcastically.

“That's the worst part. They actually don't.”

And there in the darkness of the hotel room, scarcely more than twenty-four hours before the maybe end of the world, the three of them managed to laugh together. It turned out that no amount of terror could stop the great human need to connect. Or maybe, Anita thought, terror was actually at the heart of that need. After all, every life ended in apocalypse, in one way or another. And when that apoca­lypse arrived, it would be pretty cold comfort to think:
Well, at least I don't have that much to lose
. You didn't win the game of life by losing the least. That would be one of those—what were they called again?—Pyrrhic victories. Real winning was having the most to lose, even if it meant you might lose it all. Even though it meant you
would
lose it all, sooner or later.

And so they waited, together, for whatever was coming next.