We Are the Ants

  “I miss spending time with you, Henry.”

  “Publicly humiliating and attacking me was a bizarre way to show it. A box of chocolates might have been more appropriate.”

  “I’m sorry.” The funny thing is that I believed him. Jesse had faked being happy, Diego had hidden his past from me, but Marcus had always told me the truth. Even when he beat me up, it was honest. He pulled a flask from his pocket and offered it to me. When I didn’t take it, he drank from it first and offered it to me again. Drinking was the last thing I needed, but I didn’t want to feel anything anymore, so I accepted the flask. I don’t know what it was, but it burned my throat.

  I sat down on the grass and buried my face in my hands. “Why are you being nice to me, Marcus? Why now?”

  “Do you want to know the truth?” He passed me the flask again, and I swallowed a couple of gulps, feeling the alcohol loosen my limbs and my brain.

  “Sure.” I was only half listening. I could still hear the distant sounds of the carnival, but it occurred to me how isolated we were.

  Marcus sat across from me and pulled his feet in so he was sitting cross-legged. “I’m not strong like you, Henry. My parents expect me to be their perfect son; my friends expect me to be Mr. Popular. It’s so hard to be everything to everyone. I feel stretched thin sometimes. You’re the only person who doesn’t expect anything from me.”

  I sat up and tried to clear my head, but my thoughts were stuck in a pool of tar, and I couldn’t pull them out. “You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  Marcus sat forward, his eyes were unfocused and red. “I knew in the beginning I was just not-Jesse to you. You needed someone to take your mind off of Jesse, and I was not-Jesse. But I fell for you, Henry, and I thought you’d fall for me too.”

  “You. Attacked. Me.”

  Marcus crawled across the grass until his face was so close to mine that I could smell his rancid breath. “I fucked up.” Marcus brushed my lips with his, and I didn’t turn away. “Is this all right?” Here was Marcus offering to be not-Jesse for me again. All I had to do was accept, and I could blunt the pain of living for a little while longer.

  I looked at the stars, wishing the sluggers would abduct me so that I didn’t have to make a choice. That’s what this was all about, after all. Making choices. Diego had made a choice. My mom had made a choice. Charlie had made a choice. Even Jesse had made a choice. It had been a selfish, stupid, heartbreaking choice, but one he’d made for himself.

  Marcus pushed himself onto me, the weight of his body against mine made it difficult to breathe. A rock dug into my back while Marcus kissed my neck, his hands pulling at the button on my jeans. I didn’t have to choose. I could close my eyes and let it happen the same way I was going to sit back and let the world end. Marcus rubbed his hips against mine and struggled with my zipper.

  I didn’t have to choose. It was easier not to choose.

  “I can’t . . .”

  “What’s wrong?” Marcus cupped my head with his hand and stroked the side of my face with his thumb, kissing me hard, desperately.

  “Stop.” I wedged my hands between our chests and tried to shove Marcus away. “I don’t want to do this, Marcus.”

  Marcus stopped kissing me. “You’re a fucking tease, Henry.”

  “Get off me!”

  Marcus grabbed a handful of my hair and slammed my head into the ground. The world melted and blurred. There were so many stars. Too many. There shouldn’t have been that many stars in the sky. I tried to name them, but there were constellations I’d never seen.

  Torpid from the booze and dizzy from hitting the rock, I tried to fend off Marcus, but he was yanking my jeans down around my knees. This was another slugger hallucination. Only an hour ago I was laughing with Audrey, I was seeing myself the way Diego saw me. Somewhere along the way I’d stumbled into this nightmare world where Marcus was on top of me, panting in my ear and telling me what a fucking loser I was. How he was going to fuck Space Boy, and no one would believe me because no one believed loser space boys.

  I pressed my head against the rock, digging it deeper into the cut on my scalp, clutching the pain, using it to drag me out of the fog. I elbowed Marcus in the face and scrambled to my feet, pulling up my pants and sprinting toward the flashing lights and laughter and nauseating smell of popcorn.

  Marcus screamed my name. He tackled me by the bleachers, and I fell on my wrist. It bent back in a way wrists weren’t supposed to bend, but I ate the pain, swallowed it down with blood, and became stronger. I kicked like an animal until I connected with something that made him howl. And then I ran again. I didn’t look back this time either.

  I spotted Ms. Faraci standing by the candy apple booth.

  “Henry?” Ms. Faraci dropped her apple and brushed my hair from my eyes. It was sticky with blood. The color drained from her face. “Henry, what happened?”

  Now that I was safe, I finally looked back. Marcus wasn’t there, but Diego was. He trotted toward us, panic in his algae eyes. “Henry, I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” He saw me cradling my wrist, touched the blood on my ear. He saw my pants undone, hanging off my hips. “What happened?”

  “Were you attacked again?” Ms. Faraci asked. She guided me to a quieter spot behind the roasted nuts tent. The smell made me want to vomit.

  Diego followed us, his eyes an expressionless wasteland.

  “Henry? Tell me what happened.” Ms. Faraci grabbed her cell phone out of her purse. “That’s it. I’m calling an ambulance.”

  “It was Marcus McCoy.”

  Ms. Faraci dialed 911.

  “What was Marcus?” Diego’s voice was flat; he hardly sounded like the boy I knew.

  “I need an ambulance and police at Calypso High School. One of our students has been attacked.” Ms. Faraci regarded me like she was afraid I was going to shatter to pieces in front of her.

  “What did Marcus do?”

  I couldn’t look Diego in the eyes. “It’s not your problem.”

  “Did Marcus hurt you?” I nodded. “Did he . . . ?” Diego glanced at my jeans, and I fumbled with them but couldn’t button them because my wrist was swollen and useless.

  “He tried.”

  Diego’s mouth twisted.

  Ms. Faraci touched my shoulder, and I jumped. “It’s okay, Henry. You’re okay. The police are coming. Let’s get you somewhere safe.” She put her arm around my shoulders to lead me toward the school.

  “Come on, Diego,” I said, but Diego was gone.

  • • •

  I sat on the back of an ambulance while the cops questioned me and paramedics pressed gauze to my head. My wrist was definitely broken, and I probably had a concussion. I told the police officers everything, including who had attacked me in the showers. The paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital, but I refused to go until someone found Diego. Audrey stayed with me, holding my good hand. She hardly said a word.

  A crowd of onlookers had gathered around the emergency vehicles, and my mom shoved them aside to get to me, not caring who she elbowed. “Henry! Henry, what the hell happened?” She was wearing pink pajamas, and her hair was pulled back with an elastic band.

  I smiled weakly and tried to assure her I was okay, but what she really needed was a Xanax. “Someone attacked me,” I said. “He tried to . . . He tried to rape me.” None of this would have happened if I hadn’t run from Diego. “I needed to be alone, so I went to the football field.”

  “Young man,” said the red-haired paramedic with bloodshot eyes. “We need to take you to the hospital.”

  “Not until they find Diego.” I turned to Audrey. “You have to find him.”

  “I’m not leaving you.” Her voice was so fierce that I didn’t even try to argue.

  The paramedic was about to explain for the fifth time why I needed to go to the emergency room, when two cops led Diego through the crowd, his hands zip-tied behind his back. Dried blood stained his face and was streaked across his s
hirt. I jumped off the edge of the ambulance and ran to him.

  “Diego! Are you okay?” I looked for the source of the blood but couldn’t find any injuries.

  “Don’t worry,” Diego said. “It’s not mine.”

  16 January 2016

  We stayed at the emergency room until nearly two a.m. A chatty doctor put four stitches in my scalp and a cast on my wrist. When we got home, I passed out on the couch with my phone beside my head so I wouldn’t miss it when Diego returned one of the hundred texts or voice mails I’d left for him. I just needed to know he was okay. Audrey messaged me that Marcus had been released to his parents, who immediately checked him into a drug-and-alcohol treatment facility.

  Mom peeked in on me repeatedly throughout the night. At around eight in the morning, I sat up and said, “I’m not sleeping.”

  With a cup of coffee in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other, Mom sat beside me on the couch. She fidgeted with the cigarette like she was dying to put it to her lips and light it, and didn’t seem to know what she was supposed to be doing. Finally she set the mug on the coffee table and hugged me so tightly that I thought she was trying to break my spine.

  “Why didn’t you tell me it had gotten so bad?”

  “You needed me to be okay.”

  “I didn’t know. . . .” Mom hugged me again, and this time I hugged her back. I tried to be strong, I tried to hold myself together, but I couldn’t do it anymore. I told her everything. About the sluggers and the end of the world and the button and Marcus and my guilt over Jesse’s suicide.

  “It’s my fault Diego’s in trouble,” I said. “All of this is my fault.”

  I expected my mom to tell me that it wasn’t my fault and that nothing was broken we couldn’t mend, but there were lines on her face I’d never seen before, like she’d aged a decade overnight. “Tell me why you didn’t press the button.”

  “Who cares about the button, Mom? Diego’s in jail because of me!”

  “This is important, Henry.”

  “Mom!”

  “Henry.” Mom’s bottom lip trembled. “Do you wish you were dead?”

  We slammed doors in my family. We beat each other up and we asked questions we didn’t want answers to and we wielded silence like a dagger. I wasn’t sure how to respond to her blunt honesty except with honesty of my own. “I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to live, either. I don’t know why anyone would. This world is so fucked up, Mom, I think we’d all be better off if I didn’t press that button. Everything, everything just hurts too much. And I miss Jesse, and I tried to be okay. I thought Marcus could help me forget, and Diego could replace Jesse, but I miss him so much.”

  Mom was quiet for a long time. Her silence stretched across the morning and led me back through the past hundred days, and I knew what she was going to say before she finally said it. “I think you need help, Henry.”

  “I don’t need help.”

  “Then answer me truthfully: Are you okay?”

  I was confused and woozy from the pain medication. I didn’t have time for doctors or therapists; I needed to know what was happening with Diego. He was still on probation, and I didn’t know what being arrested for beating up Marcus would mean for him. All I had to do was tell my mom I was okay, and she’d believe me. I could go to the police station and explain everything. All I had to do was say three little words, and I could fix all that I’d broken. But I was broken too, and I didn’t know how to fix myself.

  “I’m not okay.”

  19 January 2016

  Miranda, one of the moons belonging to Uranus, features a patchwork of ridges and cliffs, grooved structures called coronae, and massive canyons up to twelve times deeper than the Grand Canyon. Some scientists have theorized that Miranda’s piecemeal structure is the result of a massive impact that broke the moon into several pieces that—held together by her gravity—were reformed into something entirely unique. I feel as broken as Miranda, but I can’t begin to guess at what’s holding me together.

  Audrey and I walked through what passed for a garden at the Quiet Oaks Inpatient Treatment Facility. Most of the plants were stunted or dead, and cigarette butts poked out of the dirt like signposts. There wasn’t much for the patients to do between therapy sessions other than smoke or write or fuck with the nurses.

  “You should see what happens when I try to take a pudding cup out of the kitchen. One step off the linoleum, and Katy starts screaming about breaking the rules. That sets Matthew off. All he ever does is drone on and on about how cruel we are to eat in front of him. And I have to wear socks around Brandy, or she tries to molest my feet.”

  “Sounds . . . fun?” Audrey laughed. I wondered if the hospital she’d been at was like mine, and if she’d been afraid they’d never let her leave.

  “It’s really not.”

  Nurse Curtis watched us from the door to make sure Audrey wasn’t sneaking me contraband. They took my shaving razors and my shoelaces. The only thing I was allowed to keep was a pencil so I could keep writing in my journal. “Are you doing . . . better?”

  Better was such a relative word. I wasn’t even sure what the baseline to measure better against was. “Dr. Janeway put me on antidepressants. They take time to work, I guess. I think she wants me to let Jesse go, but I haven’t figured out how I’m supposed to do that yet.”

  Audrey sat on one of the faded plastic patio chairs, and I sat across from her. “Is that progress?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, how am I supposed to say good-bye to Jesse?”

  “You don’t,” Audrey said. “Not really.”

  I shook my head. “Dr. Janeway and I talk about the aliens a lot. Jesse too. Sometimes we talk about Marcus, but I don’t really like to, and she’s cool about not pushing me.”

  “Speaking of Marcus. Principal DeShields expelled him.”

  “Seriously?” Without any concrete evidence, the police were reluctant to charge him with attempted rape. It didn’t matter how many times I repeated my story to the cops; they couldn’t hide their skepticism. Marcus was right: no one believed loser space boys. But it didn’t matter. I’d made a choice.

  Audrey’s tentative smile morphed into a grin. “The police searched him and found a handful of OxyContin in his pocket. Since he was on school grounds, that was all the excuse DeShields needed to give him the boot.”

  “I hope he gets help.”

  “I hope he gets what’s coming to him.”

  He probably wouldn’t. He’d probably still get into a good college, end up rich like his parents, and have everything he thought he ever wanted. But it was like Ms. Faraci had said: Marcus didn’t matter to me.

  “Have you heard from Diego?”

  Audrey hesitated, and I knew she had. Mom had driven me to his house on our way to Quiet Oaks the morning after the winter carnival, but he hadn’t been home. I’d left a note on his front door, begging him to call Audrey or Charlie or my mom, but it had been three days and he hadn’t called. I’d even used the calling card Marcus had given me, and called Viviana from the hospital, but she hadn’t answered.

  “He’s in Colorado.”

  My heart was beating so hard, I thought it would explode. “Is he . . . ?”

  “His sister is with him. He’s got to go before a judge for violating his probation, but since Marcus’s family isn’t pressing charges, he’s hopeful the judge will be lenient.”

  I raised my eyebrow. “Marcus isn’t pressing charges? Diego broke his nose.”

  “Don’t forget about the tooth.” Audrey chuckled. “Their darling boy tried to rape another boy at a high school carnival. It’s not the sort of thing his parents want to draw attention to.”

  “Did Diego give you a number?” The hospital had a pay phone for patients to use, and I wanted to call him so badly. I didn’t expect things to go back to the way they were, but I was hoping he’d still be my friend.

  Audrey shook her head.

  I’d figured as much. Even though Diego had risk
ed being locked up in juvie for me, I wasn’t sure I could fix the damage I’d done.

  “Just focus on getting better, Henry. That’s what’s important.”

  21 January 2016

  On my fifth day in Quiet Oaks, Dr. Janeway took me on a field trip. It was my idea, but she agreed without hesitation. It was one of those nice Florida days that makes you forget about the months of steamy air teeming with blood-hungry mosquitos. A salty breeze blew in from the ocean, and it was cool even in the sunlight.

  Dr. Janeway remained in her car, giving me enough distance to feel like I was on my own.

  Jesse Franklin’s headstone was simple and uncomplicated. I think maybe people thought that’s how Jesse was, but there was so much under the surface that no one, not even I, knew about. I wish I had.

  “Now that I’m here, I don’t know what to say.” I stood over Jesse’s grave, my hands folded in front of me. “Apparently, letting the world end is sort of the same as wanting to kill myself, so I guess I’m just as screwed up as you.”

  It hurt to imagine Jesse all alone under the ground. I wasn’t sure whether I believed in heaven or hell or reincarnation. All I knew was that Jesse was gone and that I’d loved him.

  “Dr. Janeway says I’ll never really know why you took your own life. I hope you knew that I loved you so fucking much. Maybe we don’t matter to the universe, Jesse Franklin, but you mattered to me.”

  • • •

  Mom and Charlie visited me yesterday, but I think it was difficult for Mom to see me in the hospital. I think blaming ourselves for situations we have no control over must be genetic. Maybe the sluggers should pay her a visit.

  Zooey was waiting for me when I returned from the ceme­tery with Dr. Janeway. It hurt to see her without her round belly. Part of her was missing, but only those of us who knew her could see it.

  “Hey, Henry.”

  “Checking in?” Zooey didn’t laugh at the joke. “You look good.”

  I didn’t know what else to say. The truth was that she looked tired, worn-down, and worn-out. Maybe she knew I wasn’t being entirely honest, but she said thanks, anyway.