We Are the Ants

  Diego elbowed me in the ribs. “Problem?”

  “No.”

  The lights dimmed, the projector lit up the screen, and I ate popcorn, but I don’t remember anything about the movie. I spent two hours watching Marcus and Adrian out of the corner of my eye. When the show ended, I waited in my seat until only Diego and I remained in the theater.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Want me to slash their tires?”

  I tried to laugh it off, but there was a scary intensity to Diego’s voice that made me think he wasn’t joking. “No. It’s nothing. Really.”

  Diego nodded, but I doubted he believed me.

  We walked next door to Barnaby’s, an old-style arcade, where we played Skee-Ball and avoided talking about what had happened in the theater. Finally Diego said, “Listen, if you’re going to let that guy ruin our night, I’d rather go home.”

  His bluntness caught me off guard, and I felt like an asshole. I rolled the last ball and walked away without bothering to see where it landed. Diego followed me to a table that reeked of fries and grease and baby wipes, and sat across from me.

  “It’s always been like that,” I said. “People calling me names, making me feel like I don’t belong. Before Space Boy, it was fag or knob gobbler or the Ass Pirate Roberts. My personal fave was Henry Diarrhea.”

  Diego raised an eyebrow. “Henry Diarrhea?”

  “I had a nervous stomach in middle school.”

  “Oh.” He tried to catch my eye. “Those names, they’re not who you are.”

  “I’m Space Boy. I’ll never be anyone else.”

  “You’re whoever you want to be.”

  “Come on,” I said. “That’s bullshit and you know it.” A mother with young kids scowled at me from two tables over.

  Diego leaned his head back and sighed. I figured I’d finally done it. I’d convinced him I was damaged goods, not worth the time or effort he’d invested in me. In a way, I was relieved. I could stop pretending the possibility existed that we might have a future. My future died with Jesse, and I was killing time while the rest of the world caught up.

  “Before I moved to Calypso,” Diego said, “I spent one year, ten months, and ninety-three days in prison.”

  That was definitely not what I’d expected Diego to say, and I was sure I’d misheard him. “What?”

  “Juvenile detention, actually.” Diego’s eyes, so like the slugger’s skin, grew distant and hard. “I should have told you sooner. I wanted to tell you.”

  I had so many questions, but the first one to come out was, “Why?”

  “It’s complicated.” Diego traced lines on the table with a dab of partially dried ketchup. “I was thirteen and angry and everything was so fucked up. I’ll be on probation until I’m twenty-one. No drinking, no drugs—I can’t even get a speeding ticket, or they’ll lock me up again.”

  I’d sensed darkness in Diego, a stifled rage hidden behind broad smiles and laughter, but I’d have believed Audrey was a criminal before Diego Vega. His confession clobbered me like a sucker punch. I felt as blindsided as I had in the days after Jesse’s suicide, when I began to learn how truly broken the boy I thought I knew everything about had been. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because the past isn’t important. History is just a way of keeping score, but it doesn’t have to be who we are.”

  “Great,” I said, laughing at the absurdity. “I’m Space Boy, and you’re a criminal.”

  Diego squeezed my hand. “We’re not words, Henry, we’re people. Words are how others define us, but we can define ourselves any way we choose.”

  I pulled my hand away. “Is that why you dress so oddly?”

  “Part of it,” Diego said. “Compared to other kids, I wasn’t in juvie for that long, but it felt like forever. Being inside, it strips you of your identity. I was who the lawyers and the judge and the guards told me to be. Now I can be whoever I want, and I’m still struggling to figure out who that is, but the point is that the choice belongs to me.”

  Maybe he believed that, but it sounded to me like a lie he fed himself so that he could wake up in the morning believing he could change. That people would let him. “Can you take me home?”

  We didn’t talk on the drive, and I hated Marcus for fucking up the night. If I’d never seen him, I would have enjoyed the movie with Diego and we would have kissed and he wouldn’t have told me about being in juvie and I wouldn’t have been sitting in his car wondering what he’d done to deserve being there and what other secrets he was keeping from me. I understood he had his reasons, and it shouldn’t have mattered what he’d done in the past, but it did. The past overshadowed everything I thought I knew about Diego. It made me think maybe he had smashed Marcus’s car windows. And if he was capable of that, what else was he capable of?

  Diego parked Please Start in front of the duplex. “I’m sorry, Henry. I should have told you the truth.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve really fucked this up, haven’t I?”

  I brushed my hair out of my eyes and tried to look at him, but when I did, I was too tempted to forget the past. It didn’t matter that history was our way of keeping score, since the points didn’t matter, but I couldn’t just ignore it. “Diego, I like you but . . .”

  Diego ran his thumb down the side of my face. His touch was soft, and I wanted him to kiss me so badly. “I spent nearly two years locked up in juvie, dreaming about the outside world. I thought about my choices, about the things I’d done and the things I hadn’t. I’ve never been to Paris or water-skied or fallen in love. When they let me out, I swore not to waste one second of my life. My counselor used to tell me that we remember the past, live in the present, and write the future. Even if the world ends next month or in a million years, we can still write our future, Henry.”

  “I want that to be true.” I leaned my forehead against Diego’s, felt his breath on my nose.

  “Do you hate me now?”

  “Kind of the opposite.”

  23 December 2015

  Audrey and I braved the mall two days before Christmas. It was a demonic landscape of strollers and shoppers and bad holiday music that made me want to cut off my ears so that I would never again be forced to endure Wham! singing “Last Christmas.” We killed time at the Apple store, waiting for someone in a blue shirt to acknowledge our presence while hordes of tiny, teething infidels ran screaming around us.

  “Why do people who so obviously hate children have so many of them?” Audrey asked. I stuck out my tongue when she took my picture with one of the display phones.

  “Because they hate everyone else more. Their bratty kids are their revenge on a society that has denied them the riches they so rightly deserve.” As if to emphasize my point, an exhausted father watched his little angel pull a laptop off the table and throw it onto the ground with dead-eyed glee.

  “You complete me, Henry Denton.”

  The mobs of people were making me claustrophobic, and I wanted them to die slowly of plague almost as much as I wanted to get the hell out of there. I felt as if each person within visual range were slowly draining the life from me. We were all connected, and the more of them there were, the more I wanted to crawl under a table and cry. “Can’t you buy the computer online?”

  Audrey shook her head. “It won’t arrive in time, and I promised Mom I’d pick it up for her. Remember when she called the UPS guy a heartless, baby-killing Nazi because they lost the knives she ordered from Amazon?”

  “Oh, I remember.”

  “Christmas makes her insane.”

  “I still need to find a gift for Diego.”

  A blue-shirted employee passed within arm’s reach, and Audrey pounced on her, ignoring her protests. I wandered toward the front of the store while I waited for Audrey to finish.

  I don’t know how long he was standing there, but I noticed Adrian Morse on the other side of the store. He was wearing a blue shirt and grinnin
g. I’d always assumed he was rich like Marcus, and it surprised me to find him working in the Apple store. A moment later every demo computer screen, monitor, phone, and tablet blinked, and their displays lit up with the picture of me covered in paint wearing the alien mask. Most of the shoppers were confused, but a few began to laugh. My face was hidden by the mask in the photo, but Adrian wasn’t the only CHS student in the store, and they recognized me immediately.

  I drew breaths in ragged jags, my heart raced, and my skin burned. The world went waa-waa-waa at the edges, and the floor seemed to tilt to the side. I tried to find Audrey, to focus on her and regain my equilibrium, but the crowd had swallowed her up.

  “Oh my God. Is that him?”

  “Space Boy?”

  “What a freak.”

  “Really thinks aliens took him?”

  “The mask’s an improvement.”

  I fled the store, not caring where I went. I rounded a corner and blew through a side door into a dark labyrinth that led into the bowels of the mall. It reeked of trash and cigarette smoke. The taunts couldn’t follow me there. I steadied myself against the wall. A kid in a hairnet, carrying a bag of garbage, trudged past, nodding in my direction before disappearing down the maze of walkways.

  This part of the mall was quieter. Some doors were labeled with store names, others with numbers. Being in that store with all those shoppers laughing at me dragged me back into the gym showers. I felt my knobby wrists rubbing together painfully, felt my groin ache and the hair on my legs yanked off when Coach Raskin removed the tape. Marcus and his friends hadn’t victimized me once; they did it every time they called me Space Boy or left a mask on my desk or paraded that fucking picture around for the world to see. I was tired of being the victim, but I didn’t know how to be anything else.

  I’m not sure how long Audrey had been calling, but I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket and answered it. She was frantic, so I rejoined her at the food court. The moment she saw me, she threw herself at me, crying. Her heavy shopping bag whacked me in the back, probably leaving a bruise.

  “Sorry for running off.”

  Audrey’s tears quickly became rage. “Don’t you dare blame yourself.”

  “It was Adrian.”

  “I saw him.” An evil grin lifted her lips. “But he won’t cause problems anymore.”

  I waited for Audrey to spill, but she was savoring her victory. “Are you going to fill me in or what?”

  Audrey pulled me out of the way. The mingling smells of fried rice and pizza and burgers made me hungry. I hadn’t eaten all day. “I may have e-mailed an anonymous tip to Principal DeShields from one of the phones in the Apple store.”

  “Wait, what?”

  Audrey couldn’t stop smiling the whole time she recounted her story. “I cornered Adrian’s manager and explained what Adrian had done, but he didn’t take me seriously. He’s one of those dicks who calls everyone ‘bro,’ even girls, and he was never going to take my word over Adrian’s.” Audrey glowered, still fired up. “So I confronted Adrian myself.”

  A supernova occurs when the gravitational force of a star’s core becomes greater than the star’s energy output. The core collapses in on itself, ejecting the outer layers in a display of light and energy greater than that which the sun will produce over its entire lifetime. Adrian never stood a chance.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “You should have.” Audrey gave me her Hell-yes-I-did-just-go-there stare, so I kept my mouth shut. “It was easy. I set a display phone to record video and confronted him about the picture. I’d only planned to use it to get him fired, but then the fool blabbed about actually snapping the picture. He went on and on about how much you struggled. I pretty much lost my shit.”

  My knees felt weak, like I’d stood up too fast. The blood rushed to my head, and the world turned to static. I leaned against the wall until it passed. “Did you really record him saying that?”

  “Yep!” Audrey had never looked more proud of herself. “Then I saved the video and e-mailed a copy to Principal DeShields. I’m sure she’ll know what to do with it.” She stood on her toes and kissed my cheek. “Merry Christmas, Henry.”

  I knew there would be repercussions, but I didn’t care. Adrian was going to get what he deserved. I wish that made me feel some sense of relief or closure, but the victory was hollow. No matter what Principal DeShields did to Adrian, I’d still be Space Boy. Nothing could change that.

  Despite the crowds, neither of us was ready to go home, so Audrey and I grabbed slices of greasy pizza, had our picture taken together with Santa, and each bought toys for the donation tree in the center of the mall. It was nearing closing time, and I still hadn’t found a present for Diego.

  “I’m terrible at gifts, Audrey.”

  Audrey tried to reassure me. “Pshaw. What are you talking about? I love my talking Gollum doll. Nothing says best-friendship like an emaciated demon who hides under your pillow snarling, ‘My precious!’ even after you remove his batteries and drown him in a bucket of water.”

  I laughed so loud, it sounded like a seal barking. I don’t know why I’d bought that doll except that Audrey once said she loved The Lord of the Rings. It was so creepy, I hid it in Charlie’s closet until I was ready to wrap it. “Did Jesse ever show you the smittens I got him for his birthday?”

  “What the hell is a smitten?”

  “It’s a mitten that two people can wear while holding hands.” Audrey turned red; I thought she was choking on her tongue. “Come on! I thought it was cute!”

  “We live in Florida!” Audrey linked her arm through mine and pulled me toward the coffee shop. “Tell me what you know about Diego.”

  “He’s a good kisser.”

  “Yuck. Other than that?”

  The more time Diego and I spent together, the less I felt I knew about him. Every layer I peeled back revealed a hundred more. “He likes to read. He’s an artist. He doesn’t drink.”

  “That’s a list of stuff,” she said. “What do you know about him?” Audrey ordered us coffees while I tried to come up with an answer. I knew loads about Jesse—he loved baths but hated hot tubs, he listened to self-important indie music, cologne made his eyes puffy, he never washed his jeans—but Diego was an enigma. Even though he’d finally fessed up about being in juvie, that had only raised more questions.

  I wracked my brain for something. “He’s sweet,” I said. “He’d give you his last dollar. Nothing scares him. He cuts a path through this world like he’s got a plan, but I’m pretty sure he’s making it up as he goes along.” I sat down on the ledge surrounding one of the fountains with my head bowed. “I don’t know, Audrey.”

  “Stop stressing. You’ll figure something out.”

  “I shouldn’t even be doing this.”

  Audrey sat beside me and rested her head on my arm. “Doing what?”

  “Looking for a gift for Diego, thinking about Diego, imagining that we might have a future together. Even if the world doesn’t end, he’d still end up abandoning me.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Jesse did. It’s my fault he’s dead.”

  Audrey slapped my shoulder. “Are you soft in the head?”

  “Jesse always said I didn’t love him the way he loved me. He must’ve been right; otherwise, he wouldn’t have killed himself.”

  She took my hand and kissed my fingers. My knuckles were still scabbed from punching the drywall with Charlie. “Jesse didn’t die of a broken heart, Henry; he died of a broken brain.” I tried to interrupt, but she cut me off. “It took a lot of therapy for me to understand that Jesse committed suicide because he was sick. It wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t his fault, and it sure as hell wasn’t your fault.”

  “I should have been a better boyfriend.”

  “Depression isn’t a war you win. It’s a battle you fight every day. You never get to stop, never get to rest. It’s one bloody fray after another. Jesse g
ot worn down and didn’t think he could fight anymore.”

  “Why? Why did he do it, Audrey?” My voice caught in my throat, and tears weren’t far behind, but I didn’t care. Fuck it, and fuck them.

  “I don’t know.” Audrey shook her head.

  To Jesse’s parents, I was just some boy their son was dating. I’d eaten dinner with them a couple of times, but the conversations were awkward and unmemorable. “Sometimes I think about going to their house and asking to see Jesse’s room one last time. He had to have left something behind explaining why he killed himself.”

  “What if he did? What then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would it make you feel better?”

  “No, but at least I’d know the truth.”

  Audrey said Jesse’s suicide wasn’t anyone’s fault, but I think we all shared the blame. Me, Audrey, Jesse’s parents, the kids at school. Sometimes when a star collapses, it becomes a fiery supernova, but other times the core density is so great that it quietly consumes itself, forming a black hole, its gravitational pull so terrible that nothing can escape, not even light. You can’t see a black hole, but if you look closely, you can witness its effect on those objects nearest to it—the way it changes the orbits of solar systems or draws off a star’s light a little at a time, sucking it down to its dense center.

  Maybe we couldn’t have stopped Jesse’s collapse, but we should have seen it happening. If I can figure out why, I can stop it from ever happening again.

  Audrey tossed her empty coffee in the trash. “You want to get out of here?”

  “I still don’t know what to get Diego for Christmas.”

  “You’ll figure it out, Henry.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Audrey took my arm and led me toward the parking lot. “Then give him the gift every horny teenage boy wants for Christmas.”