We Are the Ants

  “Thank God.”

  “Thanksgiving was kind of a mess at my house, and I lost my phone.” I hoped if I were vague, she’d drop it, but Audrey was tenacious.

  “Diego called me, freaking out. He told me what happened, and he was scared he’d messed things up, but I thought maybe you’d . . . Jesus, Henry, I was worried sick.” She glanced around the room, but we were the only people in it other than Ms. Faraci, whose head was cocked to the side slightly. She appeared to be grading papers, but her pen hadn’t moved since I’d walked into class.

  My cheeks burned as I wondered how much Diego had told Audrey. “I’m not going to hurt myself, Audrey. Everything’s just complicated.”

  “You can’t disappear like that.”

  “It’s not like the sluggers gave me a choice.”

  Audrey fell silent while I stewed. I was tired of apologizing for things that were beyond my control. I didn’t ask to be abducted. I didn’t ask for Diego to kiss me. I didn’t deserve any of it. I only wanted to lie low until the end of the world.

  “Diego really likes you, Henry. I knew he liked you.”

  “Aren’t you smart?” A mob of students entered the classroom as the warning bell rang, and Marcus was among them. I tried to shush Audrey, but she wasn’t listening.

  “Have you talked to him yet? He went crazy when you disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” Marcus stood over my desk, flanked by Adrian and Jay. “Abducted again, Space Boy?” His red-rimmed eyes held no laughter. They were hollow. He was hollow.

  I tried to ignore him, but Audrey snapped. “Thank God aliens never abducted you, Marcus. I’d hate for you to represent our entire fucking species.”

  “Is there a problem?” Ms. Faraci asked from the front of the room.

  “Did you hear what she said to me?”

  Ms. Faraci glanced from me to Audrey to Marcus and offered a shrug. “I did not, Mr. McCoy. But if I hear you call anyone Space Boy again, you’ll find yourself in Saturday detentions for the remainder of the year.”

  • • •

  It would have been best if I’d faced Diego at lunch and gotten it over with, but instead I hid in an empty classroom and watched him wait by my locker, pacing back and forth, checking his phone every few seconds. After ten minutes passed he punched the locker door and left.

  Regardless of what he said, I doubt he believed my stories about the sluggers. Who would? Maybe it’s for the best that they abducted me before things between us got serious. There’s so much I don’t know about Diego. Jesse used to say I was oblivious to the world around me. I thought he was referring to things like poverty and hunger and wars in countries I didn’t know the names of, but now I think he was talking about himself. I didn’t know what had been going on with my own boyfriend, and we’d spent nearly every waking second together for more than a year. I’ve only known Diego for a few weeks.

  Despite my brother hating me and my mom waiting to yell at me and the whole end-of-the-world thing, all I could think about was Diego. It was ridiculous. I hated movies and books where people ignored bullets whizzing by their heads and zombies chasing after them so that they could make out, but I finally understood. Kissing Diego dominated my every thought. I tried to think about something else, but I always returned to him, and I wasn’t sure what to make of that.

  Instead of going straight home, I took a detour to the beach and sat on the rickety staircase to watch the tide go out. The ocean retreated, exposing the bones of the shoreline. It was one of those days that was neither rainy nor sunny. A layer of clouds muddied the sky, bleeding the surrounding color, leaving everything monochrome and drab. If this was how dogs saw the world, it was no wonder they humped anything they could mount. It was probably the only thing that kept them from committing doggy suicide.

  The steps creaked behind me, and I scooted to the side to let whoever it was pass, but they didn’t.

  “I figured I’d find you here,” Diego said. “Also, I already tried everywhere else.”

  Diego Vega was the person I most and least wanted to see. He sat down beside me, leaving space between us that hadn’t existed the last time we were together, and it was all I could do not to push him to the ground and kiss him until he knew I was sorry. He handed me my cell phone.

  “Was it a dream?” I asked.

  “Was what a dream?”

  It was raining over the ocean, the wall of it so heavy that it appeared nothing existed beyond. The world consisted of only me and Diego and the beach. Maybe that’s all it ever was. “Thanksgiving? Your bedroom?”

  Diego shook his head. “Was it them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I asked. I begged them to send me back, but the sluggers aren’t keen on taking commands.” I wished I knew how to make Diego believe me; I wished the aliens had abducted him, too, so we could have watched the stars together. “Maybe it was for the best, though.”

  “How do you figure?”

  Finding the words to explain to Diego that I couldn’t be with him—that no sane person should want to be with a disaster like me—was one of the most difficult things I’d ever done. But Diego remained silent until I was ready to talk. “In case you haven’t heard: the world is ending. I can’t start something with you knowing it can’t last.”

  Diego tensed like he was afraid to move. “If you’re not over Jesse, if you need more time to grieve, tell me.” He caught my gaze for the first time since joining me on the staircase, and utterly disarmed me with the intensity behind his hazel eyes, like the endless fire of the Crab Nebula burning in space.

  “I hate Jesse,” I said. “And I love him. I’ll never be done grieving for him.”

  “You miss him—I get that—but the world doesn’t stop because he’s gone.”

  He was wrong. The world had stopped. The world had stopped and it was going to end, but I didn’t tell Diego that; Jesse was just a name to him. “Tell me why you moved to Calypso. You hardly talk about your family, and when you do, it’s all horrible.”

  “That’s because it’s not important, Henry.” Diego rocked back and forth on the step. “This is confusing for me, too. You’re not the only one with a past, but unlike you, I don’t live in mine.”

  “I like you, Diego—so much, it scares me. But what does it say about me that I can like you as much as I do and still not want to press the button?”

  “We can forget it happened,” Diego said.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Then where does that leave us?”

  Diego ignored the past, and I believed we had no future. It was impossible to look at him and not want to kiss him. It was impossible to look at him and not know the world was going to end and drag us to hell with it. It was impossible to look at Diego and be anything but honest. “I don’t know.”

  It wasn’t the answer Diego wanted—I could see it in his bent back and slumped shoulders—but it was all the truth that was in me. The world wasn’t worth saving without Jesse in it.

  “My mom’s going to kill me.”

  Diego kept his hands in his pockets as we walked up the stairs, like he didn’t trust himself not to touch me. “Do you want me to drive you home? Your mom might not freak out with me there.”

  The offer was tempting, but Diego’s presence would only delay my mother’s wrath, and time had a way of concentrating her anger. “I’ll walk.”

  “Try not to get abducted.”

  “Funny.”

  We lingered at Please Start. Diego sat on the rusted hood and traced lines in the dirt, while I kicked at the gravel on the side of the road. Maybe we were both thinking about that kiss on his bedroom floor. I certainly was. Making out with Marcus had always felt like a race to the finish line, but with Diego I felt like I’d already won.

  • • •

  The house felt lonely inside. Mom’s car was parked in front of the duplex, but it didn’t feel like anyone was home. Nana wasn’t on the couch, and it looked
abandoned without her sitting on it, reading while she watched the twenty-four-hour Bunker live feed.

  “Hello?”

  Smoke drifted into the living room from the kitchen, a spectral finger beckoning me onward. Mom sat at the kitchen table, still in her uniform, the black apron stained with salad dressing and other unidentifiable food particles. She looked a little like a slug herself, flabby and limp, leaning on the table with her face buried in her hands. The only sign of life was the lit cigarette smoldering between her fingers.

  “Mom?”

  “Sit.” She took a hard drag from her cigarette, the cherry flaring, and lit the end of a new one off the old before stubbing it out. I chose the seat across from her, hoping to stay out of arm’s reach. “I can’t do this with you, Henry. I need you to be okay.”

  I’d expected anger, rage. I’d come to the table, garbed in heavy plate armor capable of deflecting my mother’s barbed and poisonous words. I was not prepared for this. The emptiness of her voice. “Mom—”

  “I put Mother in a home.”

  “What?”

  Mom sucked on the cigarette like it was the only thing anchoring her to the world. “My mother is sick and I put her in a home, my oldest son dropped out of college to have a baby out of wedlock, and I can barely gather the strength to get out of bed in the morning. I need you to be okay.” Mom looked me in the eyes, but I didn’t see my mom anymore. I saw a woman struggling and failing to hold the tattered shreds of her life together. “Are you okay, Henry?”

  After the first abduction, my mom sent me to one doctor after another. She never believed the various diagnoses—she hadn’t believed I was being abducted by aliens either. When they said I was depressed, she refused to let them medicate me. When they said I had avoidant personality disorder, she told them I just hadn’t learned to be comfortable in my own skin. She didn’t believe the psychiatrists, she didn’t believe in aliens, but she always believed in me. Through everything, she held fast to the notion that I didn’t need help, that all I needed was time to figure out who I was. I’m not sure if she was right, or if I would have been better off on pills or locked up in a mental hospital, but her belief in me was absolute. If I told her I was still being abducted, that I’d been fooling around with the same boy who attacked me in the showers, that the world was ending and I could prevent it, but that I wasn’t sure I wanted to, it would have destroyed that belief, and it was the only thing holding her together.

  I reached across the table and rested my hand on hers. I’d never labored under the false notion that my mom was infallible. I knew that my mom was a human being, frail and confused, but I’d always thought she was just a little less confused than everyone else. She wasn’t, though, and that’s the moment I knew it.

  But in the end, it wasn’t her belief that kept me from telling her the truth. It wasn’t her frailty. It was the certainty that we’d all be dead in sixty days. It was the knowledge that none of our choices mattered, that all our pain and all our suffering would end with the world, and we’d be free of those burdens. No faulty memory, no baby, no shitty job, or dead boyfriend. Just the perfect peace of nothingness. That’s what I believed.

  “I’m okay, Mom.”

  5 December 2015

  Audrey’s bedroom hadn’t changed much in the year since I’d seen it last. More pictures of Jesse were framed and hung on the walls or arranged on her desk and nightstand and dresser, but it was still the pink, obsessively organized room where I’d spent dozens of afternoons and evenings hanging out with her and Jesse.

  “Are you even studying?” she asked without looking up from her chemistry book. “If you’re not going to do the extra credit for Faraci, you need to ace every test between now and the end of the term.”

  My book lay open in front of me, still on the same page I’d opened it to an hour ago. The science was easy; it was concentration that eluded me. “When the world ends, grades won’t matter.”

  “What if the world doesn’t end on January twenty-ninth?”

  I leaned against Audrey’s bed and looked at the ceiling. She had glow-in-the-dark star stickers plastered up there, clustered together in constellations she and Jesse had named. They’d been stuck up there so long, they hardly glowed anymore. “Then it’ll end some other day, and my chemistry grade still won’t matter.” I stretched and grabbed her laptop off the edge of the bed.

  Audrey peeked up at me. “What’re you doing now?”

  I checked my SnowFlake page, but no one had posted anything not related to Space Boy. Audrey had fixed Jesse’s profile, but I didn’t have the nerve to look for myself. “I think I want to find my dad.”

  “What? Since when?”

  “Since now.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  I shook my head. “He split while Charlie and I were at school, and we haven’t seen him since. I don’t think he’s ever paid child support.”

  Audrey tapped her pencil on the inside of her book. “Is this some end-of-the-world thing? You want to find your father and reconcile before your alien friends nuke the planet?”

  “I don’t think so.” It had seemed like a good idea a few minutes ago, but I wasn’t sure how to explain it to Audrey. “Jesse killed himself without leaving a note.”

  “What’s that got to do with your father?”

  “He left me too, but he’s still alive to tell me why. I think he’s still alive.” Charlie was right: my father hadn’t abandoned us; he abandoned me. I needed to know why. I needed to know what was wrong with me that made everyone want to leave.

  Audrey shut her book and crawled over beside me. She slid the computer into her lap and started searching. It didn’t take her long to figure out there was nothing to find. My father’s trail ended with the divorce. “Well,” she said after an hour, “we know he’s probably not dead and hasn’t been arrested in the last three years.”

  “But?”

  “He hasn’t filed his taxes or gotten a job, either.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The IRS would have taken his tax return for child support if he’d filed and, if he had a job, the state would have garnished his wages.”

  “He could be working off the books.”

  Audrey sighed and passed the laptop back to me. “That won’t make him any easier to find.”

  “Forget it. It was a stupid idea.”

  Before Audrey could respond, Mrs. Dorn popped into the doorway, carrying a tray of assorted cheeses and two ­bottled waters. She was a more polished version of her daughter, but lacked Audrey’s intensity, which she claimed to have inherited from her father. Mrs. Dorn had practiced ballet for most of her life and still moved as if dancing.

  “Henry, dear.” Mrs. Dorn set the tray on top of Audrey’s television stand when I got up to hug her. “Boy, have I missed you. Your hair’s getting so long!” She held me at arm’s length, eyeing me critically the way only a mother could. “I don’t like it.”

  “I missed you too, Mrs. Dorn.”

  Audrey gave her mom a sour look. “We’re studying, Mom.”

  Mrs. Dorn threw the look back at Audrey. “I just wanted to see Henry, sweetheart.”

  “You’ve seen him. Now go.”

  “I heard you’re working on a book.”

  “Gave up,” Mrs. Dorn said. “As it turns out, writing is hard. But I do have an idea for an automatic doggie bath.” She launched into a detailed description of her doggie bath concept, which sounded more like doggie torture, while Audrey and I snacked on cheese. She probably would have talked forever if Mr. Dorn hadn’t come home. Audrey and her mom went downstairs to greet him, leaving me alone.

  I opened Audrey’s laptop to hunt for my father again, but I typed Diego’s name into the search box instead. Less information existed about him than about my father. Then I remembered that his sister had called him Valentín. That search returned few results, but I found an article dated three years earlier about the trial of a Brighton, Colorado, boy arrested for as
sault. The details were vague, and the majority of the article was hidden behind a paywall.

  “Sorry.” Audrey shut the door behind her and flopped onto the floor. “Dad’s been harassing the neighbors again.”

  I showed Audrey the article. “What do you think it means?”

  Audrey took a minute to read it. “I don’t know. It might not even be about him.”

  “How many Valentín Vegas do you think live in Colorado?”

  “Good point.”

  “Maybe this is why he moved to Calypso.”

  “Have you asked him?”

  I nodded. “He won’t talk about it.”

  Audrey took the laptop from me and shut it. “I’m sure he has his reasons. You’re making this into something it’s not.”

  “That’s what I used to tell myself about Jesse.”

  “Diego’s not Jesse.”

  “Nobody is.”

  18 December 2015

  An object must travel at approximately 11.2 kilometers per second to break free of Earth’s gravity. This is known as escape velocity. Escaping the pull of a town like Calypso requires much higher velocity but is easier with money and a car.

  The days between Thanksgiving and Christmas break passed in a blur of exams, aliens, Diego, and Audrey. I haven’t been abducted since the barbecue, but I’ve been thinking about the sluggers more than I care to admit. I want to believe the sluggers told me about the end of the world and gave me the choice to prevent it for some purpose other than because they simply want to see what I’ll do. That they chose me for a reason and not at random. But if that’s true, then it would mean they’d considered what would happen if I do decide to press the button. It would mean the sluggers had thought about my future beyond January 29, 2016, which is something I’ve been afraid to do.

  If the world is irreparably fucked, it doesn’t make sense for the sluggers to give us a second chance. If my life is meaningless, it makes no sense for the sluggers to spare it.

  Unless that’s part of the experiment. They want to see if I’m willing to endure a lifetime of misery simply to keep breathing.