We Are the Ants

  Mom rolled her eyes, which she knew Nana hated, and blew a cloud of smoke into the air. “Mother, you need someone to look after you.”

  “I can look after myself.”

  “Before I moved you in with us, you were eating rancid meats and hadn’t paid your water bill in three months.”

  Nana crossed her arms over her sagging breasts—fucking gravity. “I had water.”

  “Because you ran a hose from Mr. Flannigan’s house through your kitchen window!”

  “I am not an invalid, Eleanor.” She spoke with a quiet fury, her anger reducing to a hard crust you’d need a hammer to chip away.

  Mom laughed in her face. “When was the last time you showered? Or brushed your teeth?”

  “That’s irrelevant.”

  “I’ve got two children, Mother, I don’t need a third.”

  “I would rather die than live in one of those places.”

  They glared at each other across the table. The air between them a toxic cloud of cigarette smoke and resentment. I was certain they’d forgotten I was there, and the intelligent decision would have been to sneak away, but I was thinking with my rumbling stomach rather than my brain.

  “Nana doesn’t belong in a nursing home, Mom.”

  “Mind your own business, Henry.”

  Nana stood and shuffled to the fridge. “Go to your room and wait for your father to get home.” She lingered before the open doors, staring at the shelves of food.

  “Daddy’s gone,” Mom said, her fight evaporating. “He’s been dead a long time.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say,” Nana mumbled. “I think he’d like pot roast for supper.”

  Nana’s forgetfulness was cute at first—she’d call us by the wrong names, mix up our birthdays, send us Christmas cards in the middle of summer—but it isn’t cute anymore. Sometimes she looks at me, and I see nothing but a deepening abyss where my grandmother used to be. She’s becoming a stranger to me, and I’m often nobody to her. Then she’ll turn around ten minutes later and tell me I’m her favorite grandson. Nana’s doctors believe her memory will continue to deteriorate. Good days outnumber the bad now, but eventu­ally only bad days will remain.

  “I’ll come home right after school,” I said. “Don’t put her in a home.”

  Nana unloaded butter, tomatoes, and a package of chicken thighs onto the table. Whatever she was cooking, it wasn’t pot roast.

  Mom fumbled with her cigarettes and lit another. “What­ever. It’s not like we can afford it anyway, especially with the way you and your brother eat.” She glanced at the shoe box of unpaid bills. “Waiting tables isn’t exactly the path to riches.”

  “Get a new job then,” I said. “You studied cooking in France. You should be running a restaurant.”

  “Henry—”

  “Come on, Mom. You know I’m right. I bet there are tons of restaurants that would hire you. If you’d just try to—”

  “Henry,” she said. “Shut up.”

  Charlie and his girlfriend, Zooey Hawthorne, barged into the kitchen, carrying grocery bags, oblivious to the tension that clung to the walls like splattered grease. I never thought I’d be glad to see Charlie.

  “Who’s hungry?” he asked, dropping his bags onto the table, which pushed Nana’s growing collection of odd ingredients aside. “Zooey’s making pasta carbonara, and I thought Nana could bake an apple pie.”

  Zooey kissed Nana’s cheek and led her away from the fridge. “You have to give me your recipe. It’s so yum.” Zooey is taller than Charlie, slender, with skin like a buckeye, and spacey brown eyes. Way too good for my dipshit brother.

  I was still waiting for Mom to pick up our argument from where we left off, while Charlie and Zooey unpacked groceries like we were some kind of happy family. Like this was normal.

  “I’ll skip the food poisoning tonight,” I said.

  Charlie grabbed my arm, squeezing hard, and pulled me into an awkward hug. It threw me off-balance. Charlie doesn’t hug me—we don’t hug each other—it isn’t our thing. Wedgies, wet willies, dead legs, and broken noses—those are our things. “Family dinner, bro.”

  Mom shook her head. Her shoulders were slumped and her back bowed, giving her the impression of having a hump. “Charlie, I don’t think tonight—”

  “We’re pregnant.”

  Zooey and Charlie snapped together, linking hands and sharing a goofy grin. She rubbed her still-flat belly and said, “Ten weeks. I wasn’t sure at first, even after I took a dozen home tests, but I went to my gyno and she confirmed it and . . . we’re pregnant!”

  “I told Mom to have you neutered,” I said, and Charlie boxed my ear.

  “Show some respect, kid.”

  “Kid?” My brother is a kid. Sure, he can drink, smoke, and kill during wartimes, but he’s still a dumb kid. He pees on the toilet seat and doesn’t know how to operate the washing machine, and it was only a couple of months ago that he shoved a peanut M&M so far up his nose that we had to take him to the emergency room to have it extracted. Charlie has no business having a baby when he’s just a baby himself.

  But Charlie and Zooey stood in the middle of the kitchen, smiling and smiling, waiting for someone to congratulate them or tell them they were ruining their lives. The longer they waited, the more strained their smiles became, cracking around the edges. They might have waited forever if Nana hadn’t broken the silence.

  “Young man, do your parents know you’re having a colored girl’s baby?”

  “Nana!” I said, mortified by what she’d said but laughing at her the way you’d laugh at a toddler screaming “fuck!” in the middle of a crowded department store.

  Charlie and Zooey latched on to Nana’s anachronistic racism and wrung out a chuckle that turned into a torrent of laughter. We were so busy being mortified by what Nana had said and uncomfortable at our own response that we didn’t notice Mom crying until she said, “Oh, Charlie.”

  • • •

  The pasta carbonara smelled delicious, but I didn’t expect I’d get to eat any because of the yelling and fighting and Charlie’s occasional hysterical outbursts. Once the shock wore off, Mom got around to listing the various ways Zooey and Charlie were ruining their lives, and Charlie’s only defense consisted of shouting loud enough to drown her out.

  I could have settled the argument by informing them that I wasn’t going to press the button. If the world needed someone as pathetic as me to save it, we were better off dead. Nana wouldn’t be shipped off to a home, and Charlie and Zooey wouldn’t be saddled with a little parasite neither of them was ready to care for. I’d be doing them a favor. Only, I’m still not sure what I’m going to do.

  I found a bag of stale potato chips under my bed and munched on the crumbs. I was too worked up to sleep, but not bored enough to do homework, so I killed an hour on the Internet, which is how I ended up stalking Marcus’s SnowFlake page. It was flooded with comments about the party, and it looked like he was going to be hosting more than just a few friends. Based on what I read, I guessed he’d invited every kid at CHS. Well, almost every kid.

  Marcus probably hadn’t even waited an hour after I’d turned him down before organizing the party.

  Fuck it.

  I shut off my computer and flopped across my bed, letting my head fall backward so that the blood rushed to my brain. The pressure increased, and I counted the quickening thud-thud-thud of my heartbeat. I wondered how long I’d have to stay upside down before I passed out. How long after that before I’d die. I wondered what Jesse had thought about after he’d stepped off the edge of his desk and dangled on the end of the rope. Charlie has a buddy who works for Calypso Fire Rescue, and he said Jesse’s knots were the best he’d ever seen. A perfect noose on one end, and a textbook clove hitch on the other. Once Jesse took the plunge, he couldn’t have changed his mind even if he’d wanted to.

  I wonder if he thought of me in his final seconds. Or about his mom and dad, or his dog, Captain Jack, that he had put to
sleep only a few months earlier. Maybe random thoughts invaded his brain the way they often do right before you fall asleep. Thoughts like how he’d never taste chocolate again or about the homework he’d neglected to finish. I doubt he thought of me at all.

  If I die before deciding whether to press the button, will the sluggers abduct someone else and force them to choose, or will they let the world end? I should ask.

  No . . . fuck it.

  I’m being stupid. If Marcus doesn’t want to be seen with me, why kiss me at all? I remember the first time it happened. I’d hung around after Faraci’s class to ask her a question about our lab. I went to the restroom after, and knocked into Marcus on his way out. I thought he was going to rearrange my face, but he kissed me. It was the first time since Jesse had died that I’d felt anything. I knew, even then, Marcus was never going to be my boyfriend or write me sappy love letters. I’ll never have with him what I had with Jesse—I doubt I’ll have that again with anyone—but I want to be more than Marcus’s stand-in. To him, I am the cheap pair of sunglasses you buy on vacation because you know you won’t care if you break or lose them.

  Fuck it.

  Nothing matters. If I don’t press the button, the world will end in 140 days. Marcus’s party, Charlie’s baby, Mom’s job, Nana’s memory. None of it matters. The sluggers didn’t give me a choice, they gave me freedom.

  So what if Marcus hadn’t invited me? He hadn’t not invited me. No matter what happened, I could always let the world end and the universe forget. It would forget the party and Calypso and Earth. It would forget Charlie and Zooey and Marcus and Mom and Nana. It had already forgotten Jesse, and if I let it, it would forget me, too.

  I could write my name across the sky, and it would be in invisible ink.

  • • •

  I showered and dressed, settling on jeans and a short-sleeve plaid shirt I’d borrowed from Jesse once and never returned. It had looked better on him, but that was true of everything. My hair was hopeless, so I did my best to make it appear purposely messy.

  My stomach roiled as uncertainty gnawed at my apathy-­fueled courage. I doubted Marcus would be thrilled I was crashing his party, and I wasn’t sure whether I was going because I didn’t care or because I was hoping to prove that Marcus did.

  Mom, Charlie, and Zooey were still talking in the kitchen; at least they seemed to have agreed upon a temporary cease-fire, probably thanks to Zooey, who’s far more level-headed than either my mom or brother. Nana was reading a book on the couch and watching Bunker. I waved when I left, but she didn’t notice.

  Audrey Dorn was waiting in the driveway in her cobalt blue BMW, a present from her parents on her sixteenth birthday. She smiled when I climbed into the car, and leaned toward me like she was going to hug me, but hesitated and reversed course when she saw the look on my face.

  “Thanks for the ride.”

  “I was surprised you called.” Even wearing Jesse’s shirt I felt underdressed compared to Audrey. She was wearing jeans too, but hers probably cost more than my mom made in a month, and her silver halter top sparkled like the noon sun on a calm ocean. “You used to hate parties.”

  “I still do.”

  “Did Marcus invite you?”

  “No.”

  Audrey mmmhhhmmmed at that, which made me regret calling her. I wouldn’t have, but Marcus lives on the other side of Calypso, and it was too warm outside to walk. She put the car in gear and sped off. At least she hadn’t pestered me about why I was going.

  “You ready for the chem exam?” Audrey asked. I’d never driven with her, and it was a strange experience. She drove with both hands on the wheel, checked her mirrors religiously, and always used her turn signals. She even kept the music so low I could barely hear it.

  “No.”

  “I’d heard Faraci was supposed to be an easy A.”

  “Joke’s on you. Maybe she’ll zone out and accidentally mix sodium phosphide with water and kill us all with phosphine gas.”

  Audrey giggled, but it sounded forced and more like a hiccup. “I’ve missed you, Henry.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. Audrey was doing me a favor driving me to Marcus’s party, but I’d only called her out of desperation. Sometimes I wondered if I was being too hard on her. We’d both lost Jesse, and most of the time I thought we were both to blame for his suicide. But it was easier to stay mad at her, and it wasn’t like she didn’t deserve it. I pulled a ten-dollar bill from my pocket and stuffed it in the cup holder. “For gas.”

  We drove the rest of the way in silence.

  • • •

  Marcus lives in a mansion. Not one of those faux McMansions that everyone seems to live in these days, but an actual mansion with two garages, twelve bedrooms, a formal dining room, and a kitchen the size of a tennis court, which is ludicrous to me since, as far as I know, Mr. and Mrs. McCoy never cook.

  Audrey drove past the security gate and parked on the side of the winding driveway. Sloppy rows of expensive cars sparkled under the decorative lights strung from the palm trees that kept vigil over the yard.

  I was a fraud; I didn’t belong. No one had invited me, and no one would miss me if I fled.

  “If you’re having second thoughts, we can grab a bite at Sweeney’s instead.” Audrey was in my head, and I wanted her out. “I haven’t eaten there in ages.”

  “Me neither.” In fact, I hadn’t been to Sweeney’s since the last time Audrey, Jesse, and I had gone together. We’d shared a tower of onion rings and celebrated Jesse being cast as Seymour in the CHS production of Little Shop of Horrors. Jesse sang all the time. He was singing the night I realized I loved him. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn he’d been singing when he died.

  “Henry?”

  I shook Jesse from my thoughts. “If you knew the world was going to end, and you alone had the power to prevent it, would you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean?”

  A shiny black pickup truck parked beside Audrey’s car, and four girls from our class spilled out, chatting and smiling, probably sharing the delusion that they were going to have the best night of their lives. “Give me one reason why you think humanity deserves to live.”

  I recognized the look she was giving me. The poor-­pathetic-­Henry look that made me want to gouge out her eyes with a plastic knife. “If this is about Jesse—”

  “Forget it.”

  “What?”

  “Do you honestly believe any of this is important? That in a hundred years, one of your great-great-great-whatevers is going to write about how you went to a party, got hammered, and tried to avoid being groped by every boy with hands? None of this matters, Audrey. We’re all fucked.” I opened the car door but didn’t get out.

  Audrey’s bottom lip trembled, and tears welled in her eyes. It was a dirty trick, and she knew it. “I miss Jesse too, but you deserve better than Marcus McCoy. Please tell me you get that.”

  “If I really deserve better, then maybe Jesse shouldn’t have killed himself.”

  I was out and walking toward the house before Audrey could kill the engine and follow. Calling her was a mistake, and I vowed to walk home before asking her for another ride.

  • • •

  The two-story tall front doors of Marcus’s house were wide open and welcoming. Couples and crowds flowed in and out—their cheeks flushed, pleasantly drunk—stumbling and stoned or just laughing at some joke I’d never hear. I was worried as I entered that they’d see me and cringe, wonder who let Space Boy in, but no one noticed me. I snagged a beer from the kitchen and wandered through the house. I knew the rooms; the rooms knew me. Marcus and I had made out on that leather couch, I’d gone down on him under that baby grand piano, he’d chased me through the library and caught me on the stairs. We’d fucked on that counter and that floor and in that bathtub. After all we’ve done, I’m still his dirty secret.

  Marcus fucks Henry. In the grammar of our relationship, I am th
e object.

  I chugged my beer and grabbed another.

  “Henry Denton?”

  Diego Vega was standing with his back against a wall, holding a bottled water. He said something to the girl standing near him and met me at the keg. He was wearing faded jeans and a thin orange hoodie that made him stick out like that one dead bulb in a string of lit Christmas lights. When he reached me, he gave me a stiff one-armed bro-hug.

  “Only in school a week and already at the coolest party in Calypso. I’m impressed.”

  Diego buzzed with energy, like the physical confines of his body couldn’t contain him. “I’ve never been in a house this big.”

  I sipped my beer and tried to think of something witty to say. I hadn’t expected to see Diego, but I was glad he was there. “They’ve got two pools.”

  “What?” Diego cupped his hand to his ear. Someone was blasting shitty power-pop in the other room, and it was drowning out our voices.

  “Come on!” I pulled Diego away from the kitchen, toward the family room. I was hoping it would be empty, but there was a group playing pool. It looked like girls against guys, and the girls were kicking ass. The music wasn’t as loud, though. “That’s better.”

  Diego took in the room. Shelves stuffed with books were built into three walls, and a TV dominated the fourth. “How rich is this guy?”

  “Marcus?” I shrugged. “The McCoys are super rich. His dad’s an investment banker or something.”

  “Who?”

  “Marcus McCoy? The guy who lives here?”

  Diego smacked my chest. “That’s his name! He’s in my econ class. It’s been driving me crazy.” He had dimples like quicksand, and his hazel eyes reminded me of the sluggers’ skin. “Anyway, I was hoping I’d run into you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Why?”

  Diego shrugged. “You’re the only person I’ve met who hasn’t asked me what kind of car I drive.”

  “Well, then you’re the only person at this party who actually wants me here.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “That’s because you’re new.” Diego had an honest face, but I found it difficult to believe he’d come to the party to see me when I was practically invisible to everyone else. “How’re you liking Calypso?”