Leo laughs. “People usually do one leg at a time and look totally ridiculous. But I guess you can do cool jumps and stuff.”
“You said you wouldn’t watch!”
“Yeah … I lied. Are you okay, though? Didn’t that hurt?”
“A little. Nothing compared to pointe shoes,” I say, tucking a few strands of hair back under the bobby pins holding everything tight to my head. “Hold on, do you just leave your keys in your car, unlocked like that?”
“No one’s stolen it so far. Who’d want such a piece of crap? But now there’s not anyone around to steal it anyway.” He nods his head at the empty street. Right, of course.
Even with the windows down, Leo’s car is sweltering. My seat belt buckle is molten, but I manage to get it fastened.
“So how bad do pointe shoes really hurt?” Leo asks. “Is their reputation deserved or is it all hype?”
“Deserved. Even when everything is going well, I still have to take painkillers.”
“Going well” means calluses and bunions, maybe a few corns. “Not going well” means bleeding, pothole-like ulcers, or awful-smelling infections. I cross my feet and tuck them under the seat, even though my toes are safely out of sight in my Converse.
“I thought maybe after you got used to them it would be like wearing fluffy bunny slippers,” he says.
“Definitely not.”
“Damn.” He stares at me with something that looks suspiciously like admiration.
Then the moment breaks, and his hand lands with a thump on the seat right next to my ear. He cranes his head to look behind us, and the car lurches backward. I grab the panic handle on the roof. Instead of concentrating on my imminent death, I zero in on Leo’s cheek, which is suddenly very close.
And just like that, all I can think about is how much I want to touch him.
Which I don’t get. At all. I’m used to being physically close to boys. Ballet is a contact sport. When my leotard gets drenched through with sweat, it’s a mix of mine and my partner’s. During lifts, their thumbs dig in so hard they go up under my rib cage. I’ve become desensitized to their hands everywhere. I’ve never given it a second thought, never cared about them touching me or me touching them.
When Leo pivots to look out the front window, he catches me staring. I snap my face away, studying the suddenly very interesting door handle.
As he shifts from reverse to first gear with a clunk, I suddenly feel like I should know if he’s with someone. If he has a girlfriend, it would make the thoughts I just shoved away a million times more embarrassing.
I could just ask him. But the thought of opening my mouth to say, Uh, do you have a girlfriend? seems so pathetic and obvious. Besides, I think I already know the answer. If he says yes, it’s unlikely to be anything serious. Guys like Leo don’t stay with one girl for very long. And if he says no—if he is single—he wouldn’t want me. And I don’t want him. I’ve just been alone too long.
I press my lips together. I won’t ask. It doesn’t matter what the answer is, either way, the plan is the same: Don’t think about him like that.
Ugh. I’m annoyed with myself. I’m doing exactly what I vowed not to do. Stupid pretty boys.
As Leo navigates the one-way streets that lead to the highway, I don’t know where to look or what to say. I just met this boy—I shouldn’t be going somewhere alone with him.
But as we pass silent houses and deserted playgrounds, I remember that our circumstances are pretty unusual. It’s going to have to be okay.
Leo taps his thumbs on his thighs, drumming out a song. His rings flash in the afternoon sunlight, and for the first time, I notice the tattoo on his arm. I can only see a sliver of it peeking out from the edge of his sleeve, sharply etched black lines hinting at more. I’m not usually into tattoos, but not being able to see the whole thing makes me want to know what he’s inked onto his skin.
“Mind if I put on some music?” he asks.
“Go ahead.”
I immediately regret my answer, because he takes his hands off the wheel and starts rummaging around under his seat. He’s using his thigh to steer.
If there were any other cars on the road, I’d be hyperventilating. He doesn’t have his seat belt on either, which sends another hiccup of wrongness through me, but I don’t say anything. I don’t want to sound like some killjoy helicopter parent.
Leo finally fishes out a battered zip-up CD case. I relax a little bit when Leo puts his hands back on the wheel.
“I know they’re old school, but CDs still sound way better than the compressed files on my phone,” he explains. After flipping through the pages and basically not looking at the road for many seconds at a time, he slides a CD in. The rest of the car may be a hundred years old and the air-conditioning doesn’t work, but the sound system is full of pulsing lights and looks expensive.
I recognize the opening riff of Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City.” It’s old rock and roll, one of the tracks my dad plays on repeat when he spends Saturdays in our garage, motorcycle parts everywhere, hands covered in grime and oil.
I grew up listening to a discordant mix of my mom’s classical music (Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and Stravinsky) and my dad’s classic rock (Van Halen and Aerosmith and Bon Jovi).
This exact song featured heavily in the rotation when I was in middle school. Every morning, my dad drove Astrid and me to school on his way to work. I’d be taming flyaways into a bun with bobby pins and hair gel, and Astrid would be air-drumming and headbanging next to me in the back seat, saying, You have to burn this CD for me, Conrad. My dad would laugh and turn the volume up. He’s always had a soft spot for Astrid—I think he always felt like she was his weird little British second daughter.
I think of the three of us, stuck in traffic in a city of two million people, and smile.
Leo catches it. “Like the music?” he asks.
“Who doesn’t like Guns N’ Roses?” I say.
He does a double take. “I didn’t expect you to know the band, Ballet Chick.”
I bite down the urge to say something cliché and flirty, like, There’s a lot about me you don’t know, but it doesn’t seem right coming from me.
Instead, I tell him that my dad listens to this kind of stuff all the time.
“My best friend and I were Axl Rose and Slash for Halloween two years ago,” I add. I don’t mention that it was Astrid’s idea, because I like the awestruck look on his face. His eyes are sort of glazed over, like he’s picturing it.
“Uh. Which one were you?” he asks.
“Axl. Bandanna and torn jean shorts and all.”
“That’s—” He clears his throat. “Sorry—I—just let me pick my jaw up off the floor. I’m used to girls starting to listen to eighties rock to get my attention, not finding out that they know about it already.” He narrows his eyes. “Wait. Are you fucking with me?”
“I am most definitely not—um, messing with you.”
Leo laughs, a whole-body, bright jolt of a thing, and then he’s singing along to “Paradise City,” wailing like a true rock star, giving Axl a run for his money.
I laugh too, feeling everything in me loosen. I let the rhythm settle into my body, into the tap of my foot on the floor mat, into the nod of my head. I’m not going to headbang like Astrid, but I wouldn’t be my dad’s daughter if I didn’t know how to jam a little bit.
Leo smiles and shakes his head, like he doesn’t believe I’m doing this. The sizzle of pride that jolts through me is new—I’ve caught him off guard.
This is kinda fun.
I pull my legs up onto the seat to sit cross-legged, sliding my hands under my thighs.
That’s when my fingers encounter something hard and plasticky, melted into the seat’s fibers.
I get a topsy-turvy feeling. Because somehow I know exactly what this hard plasticky thing is.
I know if I move my leg, I’ll see a spot of blackened gum in the shape of Italy. But how could I possibly know that? I’ve never
been in Leo’s car.
Part of me doesn’t want to look. But I have to see if I’m right.
When I shift my leg, sure enough, there’s the gum.
I swallow hard. It’s in the exact shape of Italy I knew it would be in.
I’m digging how loose Hannah is in the seat next to me. She’s swaying, looking so fluid as she finds the subtleties in the rhythm most people wouldn’t be able to find. I don’t know why I didn’t expect it from a ballerina, but it makes sense. She’s trained to hear the undercurrents and to move with them.
The song finishes, and the next track starts. I reach out and turn down the volume. It’s a sad, slow ballad, and I don’t want us to come down from this high just yet.
I was wrong about her only listening to Tchaikovsky. If she can identify my favorite songs by their opening chords, maybe there’s more to her than meets the eye.
“Okay, Ballet Chick,” I say. “Give me some stats: What’s your favorite album?”
“Um … have you heard any Orff? Carmina Burana? Or ‘Dance of the Knights’ from Romeo and Juliet ?”
“Wait—is that the song that goes like this?” In my deepest voice, I start humming “Dance of the Knights.” It’s all dark and murderous, full of power and drama.
Hannah brings her hand up to her mouth to hide a smile. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
I ham it up, DUN-DUN-DUN-ing louder and louder until finally she breaks and laughs out loud. Success! See? I’ll get that power chord smile eventually.
“I can’t believe you know it,” she says after I warble the last low note.
I grin. “Prokofiev, right? I heard it on a TV show.”
I have kind of a freaky memory for music, and if I dig something, I google it. Still, it’s pretty heavy for classical music. My eyes shift to her lacy cream leotard, her neat little twisty updo. It’s not the kind of music I was expecting from her. Just like I wasn’t expecting her to know who Axl Rose was.
When she told me she’d dressed up as him for Halloween, my brain went to all sorts of places it shouldn’t have. Her leotard and yoga pants are tight enough that it’s not a big leap to imagine what her long, sculpted legs would look like in short, frayed shorts. The way her stomach would look in a cutoff T-shirt.
I clear my throat, determined not to let my thoughts go any further down that road.
“Well, my favorite album is the Scorpions, Love at First Sting, 1984. Next question: If you were an animal, what would you be? And not the one you want to be—the one that’s the most like you already.”
“I’m not sure,” she says. “Maybe an owl?”
“Hmm. I don’t know.” For all her composure, the outward things like her unbelievable posture and that maddeningly uptilted chin, there’s something wound up under the surface that I didn’t see in the school hallways. Owls are calm, right down to their bones.
Maybe I’m just getting the wound-tight vibe because we’re the last boy and girl in the city. I don’t know what she’s like when there’s a normal amount of people in the city.
“What’s your animal?” she asks.
“Capuchin monkey. You know—one of those little black-and-white shrieky ones.” It’s specific, but I’ve given it a lot of thought. I’m always moving, I’m impulsive and loud and reckless AF.
I turn a corner too fast, and my guitar case tips over in the back seat. The headstock jabs into my elbow—the one I need to shift gears—but before I can deal with it, Hannah twists in her seat to move the case out of my way.
She takes a look at the angle of my arm with a little quizzical frown. Then she gently lifts my elbow, slides the lid of the center console forward, and sets my arm back down.
“Better?” she asks.
I look down.
I’ve been driving this car for two years, and I had no idea you could move the top of the console. It makes it ten times more comfortable to use the gearshift.
“Yeah, actually. Thank you.”
I drum my fingers on the wheel. I’m not sure what to say next. Like when she fixed my guitar strap, I’m a little thrown by the way she so easily figured out what I needed before I even knew I needed it. When you have a mom like mine and a dad who’s not really in the picture … let’s just say I’m not used to being … taken care of like that. The only person I have who’d do something like this for me is Asher, but we’d make a bro joke about it afterward.
I hit eject on Guns N’ Roses and fumble around for the Scorpions CD.
“This is the album with ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane,’ right?” she asks. “ ‘Still Loving You’ is my favorite on this one.”
I grin. God, she’s cute when she spouts track names.
“You,” I say, taking my eyes off the road to give her a conspiratorial glance, “are full of surprises.”
My voice comes out lower than I’d intended, and I’m leaning into her, my shoulder touching hers.
Shit. I’m flirting with her. With my track record, it’s probably a pretty bad idea for me to start hitting on the only other person around.
Maybe there’s no danger here. She’s gorgeous, but there’s no chance of her being into a guy like me. I can’t help but wonder what kind of guy she’d be interested in.
I coast through the next intersection without stopping. Hannah pulls out her phone, and I get the feeling she’s trying not to watch my driving. What’s the point of stopping? There aren’t any other cars on the road.
My own phone is in Thunderchicken’s cup holder, silent as a tombstone. That first day, when I woke up downtown and heard a quiet so deep I thought I’d gone deaf, the first thing I did was call my best friend, Asher. Then my mom, then my older sister, Gem, even though neither of them are very reliable about answering my calls at the best of times. My fourteen-year-old brother is going through his grumpy-little-jerk phase, but I called him too, and the diner where my mom waitresses when she feels like going to work, and my dad’s broke-down pawnshop. I ran down my list of contacts, calling every single person on it. My calls went straight to voice mail every time. My social media apps wouldn’t refresh either. Last time I checked, they were still stuck, frozen on five days ago.
There’s nothing fresh on the news websites either, no breaking headlines or military-issued crisis instructions. On the radio, there’s nothing but music. No breaks between songs, no traffic reports, no weather updates. Normally that would be a dream come true, but now it’s just creepy.
Just for shits and giggles, I press the button on the side of my phone. As expected, there are no new notifications. My stomach sours. I shouldn’t have looked.
“Have you tried calling people?” Hannah asks quietly.
“Yeah. But no one ever answers.”
“Same here. 911 never picks up either. I try them every few hours.”
I tried them too—but only once, because it got so bone-shakingly terrifying that first night. I didn’t know what I’d say when they answered. But no one did. It just rang and rang and rang.
“Leo? Should we be … I don’t know, looking for people?”
I shrug. “I did, a little bit. The first day.”
I could only take about an hour of searching before it started freaking me out. The slow crawls through downtown were the worst. In the suburbs, I could almost pretend it was normal, just a hot day where everyone was staying inside to keep cool, but the downtown sidewalks should have been jumping with life.
“I drove down to the coast to see if there was a storm gathering offshore,” Hannah says. “I drove west too, thinking maybe it was just Houston that evacuated, but San Antonio was empty too.”
Wow. She’s really put some effort in.
“I just—don’t you feel like we should be doing something?” she asks.
“Uh, we can if you want to.”
The truth is, I really don’t feel like I should be doing anything. What else are we supposed to try? We have zero clues about what happened to everyone else. We can’t do anything if we don’t have any leads.
>
God, we really need a change of subject. I guess I should have seen this conversation coming—find someone else in an empty city and you’re bound to have a little meeting to compare notes. But I am seriously not interested in talking about being the last two people in Houston, because then I have to think about being the last two people in Houston. And any form of thinking makes me want to crawl out of my skin.
“I’ll keep a lookout as we go,” she says, like that’s some kind of solid plan. “Maybe someone will be at the music festival place. We found each other, so maybe we can find some other people too.”
She stares with laser focus out the window, scanning the edges of the road.
Okay. I’m going to have to take some drastic measures here. Time for some next-level distraction tactics.
I check my fuel gauge. It’s nearly full.
Let’s see if a little bit of speed-limit breaking can make her stop asking me about the emptiness.
Leo maneuvers onto the feeder and picks up speed. Merging always makes me nervous, but with no other cars, it’s easy. In front of us, the empty highway stretches west as far as I can see. There are herds of billboards on both sides of the road, blending into two long collages of logos. Personal injury lawyers, ads for new subdivisions, a giant foil-wrapped burrito. We’re the only car on all twelve lanes of the highway.
I cross my arms over my chest. We shouldn’t be out here. What if something awful is coming and everyone evacuated to outrun it? None of it adds up, though. The skies are still clear. And my mom and dad would never leave without me.
My fingers stray back to the hard patch of gum and acid rises in my throat again. How did I know what it would look like? What could that even mean?
Leo nudges my elbow, knocking me out of my thoughts.
“Hold on tight,” he says, grinning.
The gas pedal thunks as it hits the floor of the car.
The sudden acceleration pastes me against the seat. Air rushes in, oscillating in the space of the car, whooshing and clapping at my ears. I try to roll up the window, but it won’t budge.
You & Me at the End of the World Page 4
