Текст книги "The End Is Nigh"

Автор книги: Jack McDevitt

Соавторы: Nancy Kress
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

lot

of friends. It’s what I do.”

“Bullshit.”

“Believe it, or don’t.” Lucy shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve got our story. ‘Phoenix’s Last Stand.’ You wouldn’t believe how they’ve got themselves set up. They’ve got war rooms. They’ve got ammo dumps. This isn’t some cult militia, it’s more like the army of the apocalypse. Way beyond preppers. These people are getting ready for the end of the world, and they want to talk about it.”

“They want to talk.”

“They’re

desperate

to talk. They

like

talking. All they talk about is how to shove Texas back where it came from. I mean, you see the inside of their houses, and it’s all Arizona for the People, and God and Santa Muerte to back them up.”

“They willing to let me take pictures?”

Lucy gave him another smug look. “No faces. That’s the only condition.”

Timo grinned. “I can work with that.”

Lucy set her beer down. “So what’ve you shot so far?”

“Good stuff.” Timo pulled out his camera and flicked through images. “How about this one?” He held up the camera for her to see. “Poetry, right?”

Lucy eyed the image with distaste. “We need something PG, Timo.”

“PG? Come on. PG don’t get the hits. People love the bodies and the blood.

Sangre

this,

sangre

that. They want the blood, and they want the sex. Those are the only two things that get hits.”

“This isn’t for the local blood rags,” Lucy said. “We need something PG from the dead guy.”

She accepted the rifle from a hairy biker dude sitting next to her and sighted out at the dimming landscape beyond. The sun was sinking over the sprawl of the Phoenix basin, a brown blanket of pollution and smoke from California wild fires turning orange and gaudy.

Timo lifted his camera and snapped a couple quick shots of Lucy as she sighted down the rifle barrel. Wet girl trying to act dry. Not knowing that everyone who rolled down to Phoenix tried to show how tough they were by picking up a nice rifle and blasting away at the furry critters out in the subdivisions.

The thought reminded Timo that he needed to get some shots of Sumo Hernandez and his hunting operation. Sucker had a sweet gig bringing Chinese tourists in to blast at coyotes and then feed them rattlesnake dinners.

He snapped a couple more pictures and checked the results. Lucy looked damn good on the camera’s LCD. He’d got her backlit, the line of her rifle barrel across the blaze of the red ball sun. Money shot for sure.

He flicked back into the dead Texan pictures.

“PG, PG… ,” Timo muttered. “What the fuck is PG? It’s not like the dude’s dick is out. Just his eaten-off face.”

Lucy squeezed off another shot and handed the rifle on.

“This is going to go big, Timo. We don’t want it to look like it’s just another murder story. That’s been done. This has to look smart and scary and real. We’re going to do a series.”

“We are?”

“Hell yes, we are. I mean, this could be Pulitzer type stuff. ‘Phoenix’s Last Stand.’”

“I don’t give a shit about Pulitzers. I just want good hits. I need money.”

“It will get us hits. Trust me. We’re onto something good.”

Timo flicked through more of his pictures. “How about just the beads in the guy’s neck?” He showed her a picture. “This one’s sweet.”

“No.” Lucy shook her head. “I want the CAP in it.”

Timo gave up on stifling his exasperation. “PG, CAP. Anything else, ma’am?”

Lucy shot him a look. “Will you trust me on this? I know what I’m doing.”

“Wet-ass newcomer says she knows what she’s doing.”

“Look, you’re the expert when it comes to Phoenix. But you’ve got to trust me. I know what I’m doing. I know how people think back East. I know what people want on the big traffic sites. You know Phoenix, and I trust you. Now you’ve got to trust

me

. We’re onto something. If we do it right, we’re going to blow up. We’re going to be a phenomenon.”

The hairy biker guy handed the rifle back to Lucy for another shot.

“So you want PG, and you want the CAP,” Timo said.

“Yeah. The CAP is why he died,” she said absently as she sighted again with the rifle. “It’s what he wanted. And it’s what the Defending Angels need to protect. It’s what Phoenix has that Texas doesn’t. Phoenix is alive in the middle of a desert because you’ve got one of the most expensive water transport systems in the world. If Texas had a straw like the CAP running to some place like the Mississippi River, they’d still be fine.”

Timo scoffed. “That would be like a thousand miles.”

“Rivers go farther than that.” Lucy squeezed off a shot and dust puffed beside a prairie dog. The critter dove back into its hole, and Lucy passed the rifle on. “I mean, your CAP water is coming from the Rockies. You’ve got the Colorado River running all the way down from Wyoming and Colorado, through Utah, all the way across the top of Arizona, and then you and California and Las Vegas all share it out.”

“California doesn’t share shit.”

“You know what I mean. You all stick your straws in the river, you pump water to a bunch of cities that shouldn’t even exist. CAP water comes way more than a thousand miles.” She laughed and reached for her beer. “The irony is that at least Texans built where they

had

water. Without the CAP, you’d be just like the Texans. A bunch of sad-ass people all trying to move north.”

“Thank God we’re smarter than those assholes.”

“Well, you’ve got better bureaucrats and pork barrels, anyway.”

Timo made a face at Lucy’s dig, but didn’t bother arguing. He was still hunting through his photos for something that Lucy would approve of.

Nothing PG about dying

, he thought.

Nothing PG about clawing your way all the way across a thousand miles of desert just to smash up against chain link. Nothing PG about selling off your daughter so you can make a run at going North, or jumping the border into California

.

He was surprised to find that he almost felt empathy for the Texan. Who knew? Maybe this guy had seen the apocalypse coming, but he’d just been too rooted in place to accept that he couldn’t ride it out. Or maybe he’d had too much faith that God would take care of him.

The rifle was making the rounds again. More sharp cracks of the little .22 caliber bullets.

Faith. Maybe Old Tex’s faith had made him blind. Made it impossible for him to see what was coming. Like a prairie dog who’d stuck his head out of his burrow, and couldn’t quite believe that God had put a bead on his furry little skull. Couldn’t see the bullet screaming in on him.

In the far distance, a flight of helicopters was moving across the burning horizon. The thud-thwap of their rotors carried easily across the hum of the city. Timo counted fifteen or twenty in the formation. Heading off to fight forest fires maybe. Or else getting shipped up to the arctic by the Feds.

Going someplace, anyway.

“Everybody’s got some place to go,” Lucy murmured, as if reading his mind.

The rifle cracked again, and a prairie dog went down. Everyone cheered. “I think that one was from Texas,” someone said.

Everyone laughed. Selena came up from below with a new tray of bottles and handed them out. Lucy was smirking to herself, looking superior.

“You got something to say?” Timo asked.

“Nothing. It’s just funny how you all treat the Texans.”

“Shit.” Timo took a slug from his beer. “They deserve it. I was down there, remember? I saw them all running around like ants after Hurricane Violet fucked them up. Saw their towns drying up. Hell, everybody who wasn’t Texas Forever saw that shit coming down. And there they all were, praying to God to save their righteous Texan asses.” He took another slug of beer. “No pity for those fools. They brought their apocalypse down on their own damn selves. And now they want to come around here and take away what we got? No way.”

“No room for charity?” Lucy prodded.

“Don’t interview me,” Timo shot back.

Lucy held up her hands in apology. “My bad.”

Timo snorted. “Hey everybody! My wet-ass friend here thinks we ought to show some charity to the Texans.”

“I’ll give ’em a bullet, free,” Brixer Gonzalez said.

“I’ll give ’em two!” Molly Abrams said. She took the rifle and shot out a distant window in the subdivision.

“And yet they keep coming,” Lucy murmured, looking thoughtful. “They just keep on coming, and you can’t stop them.”

Timo didn’t like how she mirrored his own worries.

“We’re going to be fine.”

“Because you’ve got Santa Muerte and a whole hell of a lot of armed lunatics on your side,” Lucy said with satisfaction. “This story is going to make us. ‘The Defending Angels of Phoenix.’ What a beautiful scoop.”

“And they’re just going to let us cover them?” Timo still couldn’t hide his skepticism.

“All anyone wants to do is tell their story, Timo. They need to know they matter.” She favored him with a side-long smile. “So when a nice journo from up north comes knocking? Some girl who’s so wet they can see it on her face? They love it. They love telling her how it is.” Lucy took a sip of her beer, seeming to remember the encounter. “If people think you’re wet enough, you wouldn’t believe what they’ll tell you. They’ve got to show how smart and wise they are, you know? All you need to do is look interested, pretend you’re wet, and people roll right over.”

Lucy kept talking, describing the world she’d uncovered, the details that had jumped out at her. How there was so much more to get. How he needed to come along and get the art.

She kept talking, but Timo couldn’t hear her words anymore because one phrase kept pinging around inside his head like a pinball.

Pretend you’re wet, and people roll right over

.

• • • •

“I don’t know why you’re acting like this,” Lucy said for the third time as they drove out to the see the Defending Angels.

She was driving the beast, and Timo was riding shotgun. He’d loaded his gear into her truck, determined that any further expenses from the reporting trip should be on her.

At first, he’d wanted to just cut her off and walk away from the whole thing, but he realized that was childish. If she could get the hits, then fine. He’d tag along on her score. He’d take her page views, and then he’d be done with her.

Cutting her off too soon would get him nothing. She’d just go get some other

pendejo

to do the art, or else she might even shoot the pictures herself and get her ass paid twice, a prospect that galled him even more than the fact that he’d been manipulated.

They wound their way into the subdivision, driving past ancient Prius sedans and electric bikes. At the end of the cul-de-sac, Lucy pulled to a halt. The place didn’t look any different from any other Phoenix suburb. Except apparently, inside all the quiet houses, a last-battle resistance was brewing.

Ahead, the chain link and barbwire of the CAP boundary came into view. Beyond, there was nothing but cactus-studded hills. Timo could just make out the Texan on the far side of the CAP fences, still dangling. It looked like the dogs were at him again, tearing at the scraps.

“Will you at least talk to me?” Lucy asked. “Tell me what I did.”

Timo shrugged. “Let’s just get your shoot done. Show me these Angels of Arizona you’re so hot for.”

“No.” Lucy shook her head. “I’m not taking you to see them until you tell me why you keep acting this way.”

Timo glared at her, then looked out the dusty front window.

“Guess we’re not going to see them then.”

With the truck turned off, it was already starting to broil inside. The kind of heat that cooked pets and babies to death in a couple hours. Timo could feel sweat starting to trickle off him, but he was damned if he was going to show that he was uncomfortable. He sat and stared at the CAP fence ahead of them. They could both sweat to death for all he cared.

Lucy was staring at him, hard. “If you’ve got something you want to say, you should be man enough to say it.”

Man enough? Oh, hell no

.

“Okay,” Timo said. “I think you played me.”

“Played you how?”

“Seriously? You going to keep at it? I’m on to you, girl. You act all wet, and you get people to help you out. You get people to do shit they wouldn’t normally do. You act all nice, like you’re all new and like you’re just getting your feet under you, but that’s just an act.”

“So what?” Lucy said. “Why do you care if I fool some militia nutjobs?”

“I’m not talking about them! I’m talking about me! That’s how you played me! You act like you don’t know things, get me to show you around. Show you the ropes. Get you on the inside. You act all wet and sorry, and dumbass Timo steps in to help you out. And you get a nice juicy exclusive.”

“Timo… how long have we known each other?”

“I don’t know if we ever did.”

“Timo—”

“Don’t bother apologizing.” He shouldered the truck’s door open.

As he climbed out, he knew he was making a mistake. She’d pick up some other photographer. Or else she’d shoot the story herself and get paid twice for the work.

Should have just kept my mouth shut

.

Amparo would have told him he was both dumb and a sucker. Should have at least worked Lucy to get the story done before he left her ass. Instead he’d dumped her, and the story.

Lucy climbed out of the truck, too.

“Fine,” she said. “I won’t do it.”

“Won’t do what?”

“I won’t do the story. If you think I played you, I won’t do the story.”

“Oh come on. That’s bullshit. You know you came down here for your scoop. You ain’t giving that up.”

Lucy’s stared at him, looking pissed. “You know what your problem is?”

“Got a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“You’re so busy doing your poor-me, I’m from Phoenix, everyone’s-out-to-get-me, we’re-getting-overrun wah-wah-wah routine that you can’t even tell when someone’s on your side!”

“That’s not—”

“You can’t even tell someone’s standing right in front of you who actually gives a shit about you!” Lucy was almost spitting she was so mad. Her face had turned red. Timo tried to interject, but she kept talking.

“I’m not some damn Texan here to take your water, and I’m not some big time journo here to steal your fucking stories! That’s not who I am! You know how many photographers I could work with? You know how many would bite on this story that I went out and got? I put my ass on the line out here! You think that was easy?”

“Lucy. Come on…”

She waved a hand of disgust at him and stalked off, heading for the end of the cul-de-sac and the CAP fence beyond.

“Go find someone else to do this story,” she called back. “Pick whoever you want. I wouldn’t touch this story with a ten-foot-pole. If that’s what you want, it’s all yours.”

“Come on, Lucy.” Timo felt like shit. He started to chase after her. “It’s not like that!”

She glanced back. “Don’t even try, Timo.”

Her expression was so scornful and disgusted that Timo faltered.

He could almost hear his sister Amparo laughing at him.

You got the eye for some things, little bro, but you are blind blind blind

.

She’ll cool off

, he thought as he let her go.

Except maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe he’d said some things that sounded a little too true. Said what he’d really thought of Lucy the Northerner in a way that couldn’t get smoothed over. Sometimes, things just broke. One second, you thought you had a connection with a person. Next second, you saw them too clear, and you just knew you were never going to drink a beer together, ever again.

So go fix it

, pendejo.

With a groan, Timo went after her again.

“Lucy!” he called. “Come on, girl. I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry…”

At first, he thought she was going to ignore him, but then she turned.

Timo felt a rush of relief. She was looking at him again. She was looking right at him, like before, when they’d still been getting along. She was going to forgive him. They were going to work it out. They were friends.

But then he realized her expression was wrong. She looked dazed. Her sunburned skin had paled. And she was waving at him, waving furiously for him to join her.

Another Texan? Already?

Timo broke into a run, fumbling for his camera.

He stopped short as he made it to the fence.

“Timo?” Lucy whispered.

“I see it.”

He was already snapping pictures through the chainlink, getting the story. He had the eye, and the story was right there in front of them. The biggest luckiest break he’d ever get. Right place, right time, right team to cover the story. He was kneeling now, shooting as fast as he could, listening to the digital report of the electronic shutter, hearing money with every click.

I got it, I got it, I got it

, thinking that he was saying it to himself and then realizing he was speaking out loud. “I got it,” he said. “Don’t worry, I got it!”

Lucy was turning in circles, looking dazed, staring back at the city. “We need to get ourselves assigned. We need to get supplies… We need to trace this back… We need to figure out who did it… We need to get ourselves assigned!” She yanked out her phone and started dialing madly as Timo kept snapping pictures.

Lucy’s voice was an urgent hum in the background as he changed angles and exposures.

Lucy clicked off the cell. “We’re exclusive with

Xinhua

!”

“Both of us?”

She held up a warning finger. “Don’t even start up on me again.”

Timo couldn’t help grinning. “Wouldn’t dream of it, partner.”

Lucy began dictating the beginnings of her story into her phone, then broke off. “They want our first update in ten minutes, you think you’re up for that?”

“In ten minutes, updates are going to be the least of our problems.”

He was in the flow now, capturing the concrete canal and the dead Texan on the other side.

The dogs leaped and jumped, tearing apart the man who had come looking for water.

It was all there. The whole story, laid out.

The man.

The dogs.

The fences.

The Central Arizona Project.

A whole big canal, drained of water. Nothing but a thin crust of rapidly drying mud at its bottom.

Lucy had started dictating again. She’d turned to face the Phoenix sprawl, but Timo didn’t need to listen to her talk. He knew the story already—a whole city full of people going about their daily lives, none of them knowing that everything had changed.

Timo kept shooting.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paolo Bacigalupi is the bestselling author of the novels

The Windup Girl

,

Ship Breaker

,

The Drowned Cities

,

Zombie Baseball Beatdown

, and the collection

Pump Six and Other Stories

. He is a winner of the Michael L. Printz, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards, and was a National Book Award finalist. He currently lives in Western Colorado with his wife and son, where he is working on a new novel.

Sarah Langan – LOVE PERVERTS

On Display at the Amerasian Museum of Ancient Humanity, 14,201 C.E.

I’m checking my Red Cross crank phone when Jules walks up. We’re the last American colony not to get implants, which places us pretty firmly in the technological third world. My pipeline town in Pigment, Michigan might as well be a flood plain in Bangladesh.

“Ringing mommy dearest?” Jules asks.

“The Crawfords remain indisposed,” I tell her.

“Sucker-boy,” Jules says, not in a mean way, though she’s capable of that. She’s got Schlitz-sticky hair down to her hips and her cheeks are covered in glitter from last night’s rave. Colony Fourteen’s heat and electricity got shut off last week, so her nips push through the spandex cat-suit she’s wearing, hard as million year-old fossils. We’re all about energy conservation here at the dawn of apocalypse.

“I’m just curious,” I say. “I mean, I don’t even know if they made it to Nebraska.”

Jules hip-checks my locker so it rattles. She’s got this rage she doesn’t know she’s carrying—it’s made her heavy-footed and graceless. “Here’s what you do…” She pretend-cranks a gear at her temple. “You just delete. Done! They’re dead.”

“Yeah. Okay,” I say. Like that’s possible. They’ve been my parents for seventeen years. Not to mention my baby sister Cathy, who they totally don’t deserve. And by the way, I know it’s whom. I’m just not an asshole, like you.

“Chillax! You think too much. I did the same thing with my ex until I figured it out. Then I just pretended he died and it was his robot clone I had to sit next to in Mrs. Viotes’ art. Delete!”

“Colby Mudd?” I ask.

“Don’t even say his name. Can you believe he’s still here? I mean, half the town is dead, but he’s still noshing turkey jerky? Jeez! My God! What does he see in that spoiled princess? You’re bringing me down. Point is, fuck your family! I’m your family!”

“Sure. I’ll just change my last name or some nonsense. How was the rest of last night?”

Jules blushes, giggles. Glitter abraids the whites of her eyes, making them red.

“That good?”

I left around midnight. Home brew drugs are for hicks, case in point: As soon as Avery Ryan from the bowling team broke out the meth, everybody went native. They dragged this black-light-painted hunk of granite to the middle of the factory floor and prayed to it like it was weeping Jesus on the cross. For the big finale, a mirror-clad priestess offered herself up. She shattered her mirrors against it, cutting herself bloody. Then everybody started screwing. Clothes off in negative-ten degree weather, spilled corn whisky turned black ice on the floor. Kids, grown-ups, pipeline scabs and militia, all partying together like some prediction straight out of Revelation.

I mean, what the hell?

Growing up, my dad’s job in resource excavation took us all over, and every place was the same: falling apart. It got a lot worse two years ago, when an astronomer played with some numbers and reconfigured Aporia’s trajectory. He predicted a direct hit somewhere near Chicago. We’d all known a big one was due, give or take a billion years. But nobody could agree on what to do about it. Since the Great Resources Grab of the ’20s, the colonies weren’t talking to each other. Asia was all messed up. And you know the French. I mean, they see a problem and they step over it and blame the dog.

Anyway, some private multinationals got together, which goes to show you they’re not all bad. They tried redirecting Aporia by attaching rockets. They tried spattering its far-side with black paint, so the sun’s rays altered its trajectory. They tried opening a black hole, which wound up swallowing most of Long Island before it collapsed.

Then President Brett Brickerson, the former child actor from

Nobody Loves an Albatross

, got on the Freenet last month and announced that we had one last hope: shooting a nuke rocket at it, head on. He laid down Martial Law in all of America’s sixteen colonies. Pipeline towns like Pigment saw the heaviest military occupation. It’s supposed to be our job to siphon every last drop for the rocket.

Pretty soon after that, the refinery guys striked. They said the government wasn’t playing fair. President Brickerson accused them of holding the entire planet hostage. Next thing, they were all dead and buried in mass graves. The scabs took their place—guys from all over, paid in gold bars. Like the hired guns, they did whatever they wanted, to anybody they wanted, for the simple reason that nobody was around to stop them.

The locals started leaving for Antarctica and Australia. The ones stuck here once the law clamped down got hysterical, suicidal, and shot, not necessarily in that order. “What’s the point of going on like this?” I overheard my mom asking my dad, which I found pretty insulting. I mean, I’m the point, right? Me and Cathy. We’re the whole goddamned point.

The stores sold out of supplies and the school’s cafeteria just served jerky and canned corn, a donation from the heartland. You can’t be seen on the streets without the militia messing with you for vagrancy. Non-compliants hide in their shelters at the old Chevy Factory. It’s quiet during the day, while everybody sleeps off their rave.

Last night’s theme was cosmic mirrors, hence the shattered priestess. I didn’t bother with that nonsense. I just wore my uniform: jeans and an ironic Dead Man’s Plaid t-shirt, plus two denim jackets since some burnout stole the winter coat out of my locker. Jules wrapped herself in tin foil and glitter, teeth chattering the whole walk there. Some of the really popular kids showed up in fancy stolen cars they’d made the underclassmen push. Total

Mad Max

shit.

Used to be, only the locals knew about the raves. But then the militia and scabs started showing up. They’re bad people. I read my Faulkner and I know what you’re thinking: nobody’s absolutely good or absolutely bad. But ask yourself this: what kind of sociopaths occupy America’s fourteenth colony, imprisoning its citizens inside ground zero, under the pretense of “maintaining order for urgent oil extraction?”

Let me explain something to you, because I’m taking basic physics this year, so I know. Aporia is one mile-wide and more dense than iron. Nukes will crack her, but at this point, she’ll hit Earth no matter what. Only, if she breaks into pieces, she’ll be more democratic about impact. She’ll slide into the President’s bunker in Omaha, or the shelters in Rio, or the Sino-Canadian stockpiles under the glaciers. So what do you think? Do you think that’s the plan?

Or do you think President Brickerson and all the other world leaders are lying, and there is no nuke rocket? Do you think the governments and corporations joined forces, and built escape shelters? Do you think the pipelines are heading straight for those shelters, for use after the apocalypse, for the lucky survivors with tickets to the show?

Thanks, Mr. President.

Thank you, too, dear reader.

No, wait. Scratch that. Fuck you, dear reader. Seriously, Fuck you.

So, yeah, back to the militia and pipeline scabs. What kind of morons suck the oil from a dying civilization’s veins for a few worthless pounds of gold? They show up at high school parties and screw girls thirty years younger. Screw guys like me, too, when they can get me loaded enough. How many prisons did they crack open to staff this operation? How many pedophile dormitories did they raid? You think I’m kidding, but seriously, who else do you think they could get?

So yeah, I read my Faulkner. But did that dude ever live in Pigment three days before human annihilation?

I used to be so into the zombie apocalypse. I figured I’d be this hero in a society risen from ashes. Me, the phoenix of the new world order. But the real thing sucks. Because I’m going to die, and I can’t figure out which is more cowardly; resigning myself to that fate or fighting against it.

At my locker, glittering Jules grins. It’s eerie. Why’s she happy? “Last night. After you left. Here’s what happened,” she says, then lifts her fuck finger at me, holds it. Then her index and thumb rise as she mouths:

one, two, three

.

“What?” I ask, but I already know. Jules is such a wreck.

“A three-way,” she says. “One of ’em stuck a rifle up my cooter!”

“I guess you can scratch that off your bucket list.”

“Right on the dance floor. Everybody was clapping. Don’t give me that

concerned dad

look, Crawford, he shot it empty first…”

“Discharge.”

“Vocab king!” She winces, lowers her voice. “I think Colby was there… Like, clapping.”

“He’s not worth you.”

“Jeaaa—lous?” Jules grinds me in her gauze-thin cat-suit.

“Don’t,” I say. She grinds even freakier, which means she’s pissed off. Because a machine gun up your hole probably sounds okay when you’re high, but not the next morning when your female parts and what-have-you probably hurt. But there’s no point talking about it. Aporia’s hitting in less than three days, so who wants to spend the time crying over sexual violation by blunt object?

I realize I’m mad, too. At myself, for leaving her alone with those scabs. At her, for being so stupid. At colony fourteen, for buckling so easily. At everybody. Especially the people on the other side of my crank-phone, who won’t tell me where they are, or how I can find them, or even if my baby sister—whose stuffed bunny they forgot—survived the trip.

“Faggot,” Jules sneers. She’s gone completely radioactive. It’s about the machine gun. It’s about the asteroid. It’s about her denial-blind mom and sister who think Aporia’s a hoax. Mostly, it’s about me. Because I love her in every way but the way she wants.

“Don’t be mean to me,” I tell her. “You’re my only friend.”

“I’m not mean; I’m honest! You’re a faggot orphan and once your family got their tickets, they threw you away,” she shouts with veiny-necked rage.

“You’re trash. Your sister’s a stripper. You’re dumb as… toast?” I shout back. This last part isn’t true. She’s one of the sharpest people I know.

Nobody’s listening, not even the militia or my old gym teacher or Colby Mudd, who trifled with Jules to make another girl jealous, and she’ll never see that, because she uses men like spikes to stab herself against.

“They’re

not

trash. One of ’em said he’d marry me!” Jules flashes her hand. She’s wearing a small, yellow-gold engagement ring. It had to have come from a dead body. Some salt-of-the-earth old lady, a suicide pact with her true love after fifty good years.

“God, Jules.”

The homeroom bell rings. The halls clear like mopped-up jimmy sprinkles. Front and back door militia in desert fatigues bang the butts of their guns against cinderblock. They’re like orangutans at mealtime.

“It’s jewelry from a man,” Jules says, and I can tell she hates it, and the hand that wears it, and herself.

“Throw it away, Jules. It’s garbage!” I tell her.I’m so upset about all this that I go a little crazy. I imagine cutting her up. Peeling her skin off and poking out her eyes.

Jules squeezes out a pair of tears. “You’re just mad because someone loves me, and nobody loves you.”

And the guns are banging, and my homeroom teacher is waving for me to come in. Only it’s my gym teacher, because my real homeroom teacher is gone. Faces keep dropping away. No one knows what happened to them. It’s like a visual representation of Alzheimers. “That’s an awful thing to say,” I tell her.

Jules starts laughing.

I’m walking away. The sound of her gets louder as it echoes.

“Hospital tonight?” she calls.

I hate her.

“Sorry, Tom Crawford,” she calls. “I suck, literally. I’m a spooge-whore-bitch.”

I keep walking with these iron-heavy feet, imagining the whole world on fire. I am the asteroid. Dense and without feeling. I am the destroyer of all in my path.

She flings the ring so it skates past me down the hall. I turn back and there’s Jules. She fluffs her hand out in pretend-pompousness as she bows, then blows me a kiss. “I’m your dumb-as-toast best friend.”