We Are the Ants

  “Honestly? It’s weird. Sometimes there are too many people and I just want to find a quiet closet to read in. Other times I want to surround myself with as many people as possible. But I love the beach. I’m there so often, my sister jokes about buying me a tent so I can sleep there.”

  “Keep the zipper locked or you’ll wake up being spooned by a bum.”

  “So long as I get to be the little spoon.”

  Diego’s laugh made me smile in spite of myself. Maybe I’d been wrong to fear the party. I’d been there an hour, and not only had it not turned into a disaster, I was actually having fun.

  “You’ll have to work that out on your own.” I finished off my beer and set the cup down on a bookshelf ledge.

  We lingered in that awkward stage of a conversation where there was no logical next topic but the silence hadn’t yet grown uncomfortable.

  “If you knew the world was going to end, and you could press a button to prevent it, would you?”

  Diego raised his eyebrow. “Is there something I should know?”

  “It’s a hypothetical question.”

  “Then hypothetically, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not keen on dying.”

  The girls at the pool table squealed with delight, razzing the losers. I tried to block them out. “But you’re going to die anyway.”

  “Sure, when I’m old.”

  “You could die at any time. A freak lightning strike could fry your heart, or you could drown in a molasses tsunami.”

  Diego’s face was difficult to read. He seemed to take my question seriously, but I hoped he wasn’t going along with it while he devised a way to escape. “If I don’t press the button, I’m definitely dead. At least if I press it, I’ve got a chance at a long life. I like having choices.”

  Having choices is the problem. Everything would be easier if someone told me what to do: push the button, stop seeing Marcus, get over Jesse. The problem with choices is that I usually make the wrong ones.

  Diego reached out and brushed a stray lock of hair off my forehead. “Sorry, that was driving me crazy.”

  “Great, now everyone’s going to figure out my secret identity.”

  “Space Boy?” Diego said, smiling. “They already know.”

  My smile disappeared, and my defenses snapped up. I shoved my way past Diego without a word. His apologies bounced off my back because I was fucking bulletproof. I needed to leave, to escape the house and party and all those artificial people, but the front was crowded, so I stumbled onto the patio, where it was quieter and I could breathe.

  “Space Boy!”

  Marcus and a mixed group, some of whom looked familiar, were sitting around a patio table by the hot tub. Natalie Carter lounged across his lap. The moment he said my name, I became visible. People who hadn’t noticed me before were suddenly glaring at me like I was covered with festering sores. They parroted “Space Boy” and invented semicreative variations of their own. None stung as badly as when Diego had said it.

  “Who the fuck let you in?” Marcus’s voice was cough syrup, but his words were acid.

  “Front door was open.” A burning pang began in the center of my chest and spread to my limbs. Marcus was treating me like I was nobody—less than. I wondered how his friends in the hot tub would react if they found out what we’d done where they were lounging.

  Marcus elbowed Adrian Morse. “We need to start charging at the door. Keep out the trash.”

  I’m sure when Adrian’s mom looks at him in the mornings or brushes his sweaty hair off his forehead while he sleeps through a fever, she thinks he’s a nice boy, but when I look at him, all I see is a demented thug with an inferiority complex and hardly a thought of his own bouncing around in his empty head. “I can get rid of him.”

  “If only getting rid of your herpes was as easy,” I said.

  Adrian stood, but Marcus pulled him back. There was a dangerous gleam in Marcus’s eyes, a flicker that scared me. “Fuck it. I’m feeling charitable. Space Boy can stay. Maybe he can phone home and convince the aliens to join the party. If you do, ask them to bring ice. We’re running low.”

  I had no intention of remaining at the party. All I could think about was how I’d been so wrong. I never should have come. Once Marcus was done torturing me, I planned to leave and never speak to him or anyone else again.

  “But first,” Marcus said, “you have to take a shot.”

  From where Marcus’s friends sat and stood on the patio, drinking and smoking and judging, I felt their contempt. It burned through my skin, melted the fat from my body, chewed through my muscles until I was nothing but a ­skeleton—­bleached bones held together by duct tape and the tattered remnants of my pride.

  Jay Oh flicked a bottle cap at me that bounced off my chest and skittered across the table. “What would aliens want with a jizz stain like him? Aren’t there better people to abduct?”

  “Better looking, certainly,” Marcus said, which earned him a kiss from Natalie. He kept his eyes on me while she sucked his lips.

  And I stood there and took it because I was an object. We were all objects to Marcus McCoy.

  Marcus began chanting, “Shot, shot, shot!” and it was taken up by the drunken horde surrounding me. Adrian set up a round of shots, sloshing a dark brown liquid into the glasses, spilling some over the sides. Marcus watched me with a manic, sweaty grin.

  Adrian finished pouring and rolled his eyes. “Space Boy’s a little bitch. He won’t—”

  I grabbed the nearest shot glass and threw it back. The liquor tasted like pureed licorice and blood. I shivered as it hit my empty stomach. When I finished, I downed a second shot. “Thanks for the drink.” I tossed the glass onto the table and left.

  Their laughter hounded me, but I refused to look back. The world was going to end, and none of this mattered. I tried to convince myself I was all right.

  But I was so far from all right.

  • • •

  I was too drunk to walk home, and I couldn’t find an empty room to hide in, so I ended up sitting by the edge of the lap pool, obscured by fake rocks and palm trees. The pool was far enough from the house that I wasn’t worried about being found, but still near enough that I could hear their laughter. I couldn’t escape it. I couldn’t escape being Space Boy.

  The moon was hardly a scratch in the sky, but underwater lights illuminated the tiled bottom of the pool. All the way down to the deep, deep end. It had to be eight or nine feet. I bet I’d sink. It would have been easy to roll over the side, fully clothed, and let the weight of denim and cotton drag me to the bottom while my last breaths escaped my lungs. The world was spinning around me, so maybe the alcohol in my blood would prevent my survival instinct from kicking in, and I could drown peacefully without all that unnecessary flailing and screaming.

  It didn’t matter why the sluggers had chosen me, only that they had. Hell, why wait for the world to end at all?

  Diego was wrong. Pressing the button wouldn’t give me choices. Only this. Only humiliation. Loneliness. Death was easier. I could lean forward and let my weight carry me into the water. Gravity would do the rest. Everything would end, and all I had to do was let it happen.

  The moon grew brighter and multiplied the shadows. They encircled me, blotting out the light. I shook my head to clear the vertigo. I needed to piss, but I didn’t want to go back inside. I could always piss in the pool.

  My breath caught in my throat, and the hairs on my ears rose. I tried to look around but couldn’t. I tried to call out, but no words escaped my lips. I was paralyzed.

  Oh, I thought as the moon’s light blinded me, and the shadows grasped at me with green-brown fingers, I didn’t expect to see you here.

  World War III

  North Korea fires the first missile. After years of threats and insane posturing, it’s Fox’s early cancellation of Bunker that provokes North Korea’s supreme leader to action. He demands to view the finale, but is ignored. If Fox
won’t resurrect Firefly, they’re certainly not going to bring back Bunker.

  The North Korean missile detonates prematurely, but the aggressive act puts the world’s nations on high alert. The leaders of the European Union recommend diplomacy. China and Russia deploy their military forces to strategic positions throughout the world while suggesting that the US capitulate to North Korea’s demands.

  Dennis Rodman travels to North Korea as an unofficial ambassador on a mission of peace but is taken into custody the moment he disembarks from the plane. A video of him being torn apart by a pack of starving house cats is the most popular video on YouTube for seven hours, before it is displaced by an elderly woman who inhales helium and sings Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

  Despite stern warnings from the United Nations Security Council, North Korea fires a second missile, striking Osaka, Japan. Thousands die. Japan and the United States declare war on North Korea. The joined forces of Russia and China advise that retaliatory attacks against North Korea will not be tolerated.

  The United States Armed Forces invade North Korea on 29 January 2016 at 20:03 GMT. Russia responds by launching a nuclear missile at Universal Studios Florida, proclaiming that if they can’t visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, no one can. The United States obliterates Moscow and urges all patriotic Americans to boycott vodka.

  China, taking advantage of the chaos, launches its full arsenal of nuclear weapons at key US targets, initiating a full-blown thermonuclear war that ultimately renders the planet a desolate wasteland incapable of supporting life.

  The only survivors are the contestants of Bunker, forgotten by Fox producers after the show’s cancellation. Unaware of what has occurred on the surface, they eventually run out of food and draw lots to decide who they’re going to eat first.

  14 September 2015

  I woke up laughing. For a few disorienting seconds, I thought I was still on the spaceship. The sluggers had shown me a projection of the earth exploding again, along with the big, red button, but they hadn’t shocked or blissed me. They simply offered me the choice and waited to see what I would do. Maybe that’s why I was laughing. Averting the apocalypse shouldn’t be so easy. It should require elaborate schemes hidden from the public to keep them from panicking. It should demand sacrifice and tearful good-byes and Bruce Willis.

  Obviously, I didn’t press it.

  When I regained my senses and realized I wasn’t on the sluggers’ ship anymore, the laughter died in my throat. My back was damp, and something sharp dug into my hip. My hair, my boxers, and my chest were wet. I stank like stagnant canal water. When I sat up, I spit, in case some of the water had gotten into my mouth.

  The moon was dark, and clouds obscured the stars. I had no idea where I was. I remembered being at Marcus’s party, sitting by the pool—then I was on the ship—but I had no idea how I’d ended up floating on a sea of sandspurs and goose grass. The sluggers had stolen my jeans and Jesse’s shirt, but at least they’d left me my boxers. A teenage boy running around Calypso in his underwear is odd, but a teenage boy running around Calypso naked is a felony.

  My legs trembled as I stood, and I listed dangerously. I focused on the horizon like Jesse had said to, but without the moon, the sky and ground bled into one another. Eventually, my eyes adjusted, and I was able to pick out a few distant shadows. I set sail for those.

  I walked for ten minutes, carefully picking my way through the weedy field, forced to stop occasionally to pluck a spiny sandspur from the tender skin between my toes, cursing the sluggers for never dropping me off anywhere interesting. I hope before the world ends, they drop me off somewhere I’ve never been—Paris or Thailand or Brazil. Anywhere has to be better than Calypso.

  The shadows turned out to be jungle gym equipment. Towers and monkey bars, the various structures connected by wooden bridges. I didn’t recognize the playground, but I did recognize the Randy Raccoon mascot painted on the wall of the nearest building. This was my old elementary school. It had changed since I was a boy. There used to be a metal geodesic dome that I’d climb to the top of and leap from, trying to break my ankle so I’d be sent home. I wasn’t Space Boy back then, I was Hillbilly Henry because of a cowboy hat I’d worn every day for weeks. I don’t even remember where I got it, but I hardly took it off. Not until Matt Walsh stole it during recess and pissed on it. No one but me had seen him do it, and Mr. Polk—my third-grade teacher—accused me of peeing on it myself and trying to blame Matt. When my father picked me up from school and asked me where my hat was, I told him I lost it. He spanked me so hard with a wooden spoon, the handle broke.

  Ben Franklin Elementary was too far from home to walk, so I trudged to the front of the school. I was exhausted, my legs ached, and my head felt like the sluggers had unspooled my brain through my ears and then stuffed it back in wrong so that it resembled a bowl of gray linguini. Needless to say, I was overjoyed when I saw a pay phone next to a wooden bench near the student drop-off area. The phone booth was decorated with faded stickers for bands I’d never heard of and brands that sounded only vaguely familiar—relics of rebel kids long since assimilated into adulthood. I picked up the receiver, trying not to imagine the hundreds of snot-nosed brats that had probably groped it, and prayed it still worked. The dial tone was the most beautiful sound I’d heard in ages.

  My finger hovered over the numbers. It was late, but I didn’t know how late. It had been eleven or twelve when I was sitting by the pool—those shots had skewed my perception of the passage of time—but the sluggers could have kept me for an hour or five. Waking up my mother was out of the question, and Charlie would sleep through the end of the world, so I knew he wouldn’t answer his phone. I didn’t know my father’s number or if he even still lived in Florida, and Audrey was the last person I wanted to see. I only knew one other number.

  The first indignity was having to call collect. Pay phones should be free. If you’re desperate enough to need one, it’s probably an emergency and you don’t have change. It’s not like boxer shorts come with pockets. I hadn’t even known that you could make collect calls until Jesse explained it to me one morning after the sluggers had dropped me off near his house. The information had seemed about as useful as Latin, until the first time I actually needed to use it.

  I pressed zero and followed the prompts, first dialing Marcus’s number, then speaking my name into the receiver, and, finally, waiting.

  The second indignity was hearing Marcus ask who it was three times and then pause, as if he were actually considering whether to accept the charges, before muttering a weary yes. His voice was drowsy and annoyed. “Henry?”

  “Were you sleeping?”

  “Obviously. It’s, like, three in the morning.”

  I forced a laugh. “I figured you’d be drinking until dawn.”

  Marcus paused. “Drinking? What the fuck, Henry? I’ve got school tomorrow. So do you.”

  School? Seriously? The sluggers had kept me on their ship for at least two whole days. I hate when they do that.

  The third indignity was listening to Marcus speak to me in that condescending tone, knowing I couldn’t tell him to eat a dick because I needed him to pick me up, and having to pretend it was Sunday when my brain was telling me it was still Friday.

  “I wouldn’t have called if it weren’t important.”

  “Couldn’t you have called someone else?”

  “No.”

  The silence on Marcus’s end of the line worried me that he’d hung up, but he coughed, and the phlegmy noise was a relief. “What’s the big emergency?”

  “I’m at Ben Franklin Elementary, and I need you to pick me up.”

  “Funny.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  “Dude, that’s way out by Beeline. What’re you doing there?”

  The fourth indignity was that Marcus already knew the answer but wanted to hear me say it. “Can you get me or not?”

  Part of me wanted him to refuse. To hang up the phone and fall b
ack to sleep, wake up the next morning believing my call had been some crazy, late-night, Chinese-food-fueled dream. But he said, “Give me a few minutes to get dressed.”

  • • •

  No one memorizes phone numbers anymore. They call “Mom” or “Dad” or “Assface.” The entries in their phones are completely divorced from the ten-digit numbers that make calling people possible.

  I tried to bring my cell phone onto the ship with me a couple of times. I’d slept with it clutched in my hands, stuffed in my underwear; I’d even duct-taped it to my thigh once. The sluggers had ditched the phone but left the tape. I’m not ashamed to admit that I screamed when I pulled it off the next day. I thought if I could sneak my phone aboard, I could snap some grainy photos, record some video, maybe grab GPS coordinates to prove I wasn’t lying. As an added bonus, I’d be able to call for help if the sluggers dropped me off far from home.

  I finally gave up and memorized the numbers of everyone I knew worth calling. The list was short.

  Marcus zipped into the parking lot in a sleek black Tesla. His poor taste in music reached me before he did; the car vibrated from the bass, and Marcus sang loud and proud.

  When he pulled to a stop in the loading zone, I caught my reflection in the car’s tinted windows before Marcus pushed open the door. My hair was tangled and stiff from the dried water, my chest was streaked with mud, and I was wearing the boxers with the kissing whales Jesse had given me for our first Valentine’s Day. I’m pretty sure whales don’t actually kiss.

  “Looking hot, Space Boy.” Marcus, of course, looked perfect. His hair had just the right amount of wave in the front, and he was dressed in khaki shorts and a V-neck T-shirt. He didn’t look at all like someone who’d recently rolled out of bed.

  “Can you not call me that?” I started to climb into the car when Marcus shouted, “Whoa, whoa! Hold on.” He dug around in the backseat and retrieved a towel for me to sit on, and one of his track jerseys to wear. It was crusty and reeked of salty sweat, but it still smelled better than I did. “Thanks.”