“I knew you were a ballet chick, but this is badass! What show is this?”
“The Nutcracker. I played Clara for the South Texas City Ballet.”
Hannah picks up another photo, and I move behind her to get a better view. Oops. Big mistake. Her body is just millimeters away from mine, and my chin is so close to her neck I want to lean down and …
I close my eyes, gathering the strength to step to the side, but she moves at the same time and I end up bumping against her. For a split second, her whole back is pressed against my whole front. Electricity surges through me.
I set her aside gently, but my palms burn where I’ve touched her. I’m buzzing.
If I’m not careful, I’m going to get hooked on this feeling. Like I always do when there’s something new and beautiful to touch.
Maybe it wouldn’t do any harm if we became the sort of end-of-the-world companions who make out every now and then.
Nope.
Nope, nope, nope. I clearly need to be reminded that it would be a very, very, very bad idea.
Every hookup I’ve ever had has ended in flames. There’s always a lot of tears from them, and total confused bewilderment from me. I still can’t tell you what I did wrong. I just always seem to fall short of the mark.
So no matter how good it would feel to give in and turn my charm onto full beam and take this from friends to friends who maybe kiss, I CANNOT go there.
I take another step away, putting lots of cold air between our bodies. I focus on the next frame. In this photo, the girl next to Hannah has bright red hair tied up with a black bandanna.
“That’s Astrid,” Hannah says. “My best friend.”
I recognize her from school. “The English chick, right? She seems cool. She’s not a dancer, though, is she?”
“God no. She kind of doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life.”
“Well, who does, really?”
Hannah shrugs, but I can tell she doesn’t agree with me. She’s the kind of girl who has a plan.
“Astrid’s amazing. And loud. You’d like her.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Hannah, are you implying that I’m loud?”
She flushes with embarrassment, so I let her off the hook with a wink—Oh, for fuck’s sake, stop winking at her—and pick up another picture.
This photo is of her and her parents. She must be about ten. Her mom is all haughty and angular-looking. Her hair is slicked up into a bun just like little ten-year-old Hannah’s, even though they’re on a beach. Now I know where Hannah gets her long neck.
Her dad looks cool. His dark hair is wavy and chin-length, and he’s one of those guys who has a perpetual five-o’clock shadow. Sadly, I’m not one of those guys. His nose is exactly the same as Hannah’s, and his smile is huge and warm.
“What’s that thing you’re holding?” I squint at the photo. It looks like a big matted ball of hair, almost as big as Hannah’s head.
“Um. It’s a stuffed sloth. He’s named David Lee Sloth.”
“Come again?”
“It’s my stuffed animal,” she says, blushing ferociously.
“Wait … is he seriously named after David Lee Roth? As in the lead singer of epic eighties hair band Van Halen and one of my top-five rock-god idols?”
“Like I said. My dad loves classic rock.”
“Your dad and I would so get along.”
Not sure about her mom, though. She looks a little snobby. I’m not the kind of guy moms want their daughters running around with. Yet another reason why I’ve got to shake off this urge to get closer to Hannah. We’d never work. Humans want to think we’ve come a long way since the Victorians raised their noses at the lower classes, but we haven’t. People like Hannah’s mom don’t understand that some people will be poor no matter how hard they work—like Asher’s parents.
Hannah takes the family photo and puts it facedown. “No more photos tonight, please.”
Oh, right. She’s probably missing them. I wonder how I’d feel looking at pictures like this. Not that there are any in our house. My mom’s not the type to have kitschy scrapbooks of our baby years. I’m lucky to have a few grainy cell phone pics of my first steps or my first day of kindergarten, and Joe has even less. The only thing on our walls is peeling wallpaper.
Hannah pads over to the kitchen table and takes an oversized cardigan off the back of a chair. It’s the definition of cozy, fluffy with stripes of rose and cream, but there’s a sense of familiarity when she slides it on.
I’m sure I’ve seen her wearing it before.
I cock my head. “Were you wearing that earlier? At the bookstore?”
She shakes her head no. I don’t know why I asked. I know she wasn’t. She’s been in her leotard thing all day.
“Why?” she asks.
“It looks familiar. I must have seen you wearing it at school or something.”
“I got it for my birthday a few weeks ago. I haven’t worn it to school yet.”
I’m more disturbed by this fact than I should be. I can’t pinpoint why. I just know that I’ve seen it, and I don’t understand how.
I take another hot gulp of tea to wash away the weird feeling.
Suddenly I realize that I’m starving. “Do you have any snacks?” I ask.
“Oh, sorry! We should eat something. Yes.” She beckons for me to follow her. “Help yourself, there’s stuff in the pantry—”
Her words cut off as soon as she realizes she shouldn’t have opened the pantry door. She tries to hastily close it, but I grab her hand in a silent wait—I want to see.
The door is covered with neatly arranged Post-it Notes. At first I think it’s a crazy wall, but there aren’t any crisscrossing red strings or creepy newspaper articles. Each one has a single idea written on it:
Evacuation. Ghost. Zombies. Nuclear fallout. Hurricane. Dreaming. Virtual reality. Aliens. Rapture.
We just stand there, frozen, staring at the words. I’d almost forgotten the emptiness outside her house. The seriousness of the situation looms up every now and then, hollowing me out, dropping dread through me.
“Are these your theories about what’s going on?”
Hannah nods.
I study the Post-its. There’s one at the very top, above all the rest, four letters written in neat block capitals.
DEAD.
I dredge up a smile. “You said we weren’t dead.”
She shrugs. “I don’t feel like we are, but maybe it makes the most sense. Actually, after the wind …” She steps forward and takes Evacuation and Hurricane and moves them up to the top. “Maybe we really did get left behind. Someone will figure it out soon and come back for us.”
It’s been five days, so that seems unlikely, but I don’t want to be a bummer and say that out loud.
She chews on her thumbnail. “I get a little messed up if I think too much about what’s happening, so I only let myself look at this for fifteen minutes right after breakfast. I guess I felt like I should do something. Like I should be thinking about it all the time and trying to figure it out. But it’s stupid, I shouldn’t have made it. It gets me worked up every time I look at it. My thoughts start spiraling.”
This creepy little collection of Post-it Notes means she’s more shaken than she’s letting on. I could sense it, sort of, the tight coil of something under the surface, hidden beneath all her ballet poise and her perfect hair.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?”
“We’ll think about it after breakfast tomorrow, right?”
“Right.” She gives me a tiny twang of a smile, just a high faint note on the E string.
“I think I’m done with my tea,” I say, helplessly, all trace of hunger gone. The word dead fills up my stomach better than food ever could.
We start walking toward the sink at the same time. My hip bumps against hers, and her cardigan slips off her shoulder. Before I can stop myself, I’m pulling it up for her, and my fingertips glide along the perfect curve o
f her shoulder. She shivers, and we both freeze.
The corner of her mouth quirks up, soft and sad. Everything about her looks soft.
“You know, you’re different than I thought you’d be,” she says. Now that it’s late, her voice is like smoke, velvety and low. I’m not going to lie, it’s doing something to me.
“Right back atcha, Ballet Chick,” I say quietly.
And then she looks up at me with misty, grateful eyes, and I know I’m in trouble.
I stiffen. This is bad.
She’s getting attached to me. This has happened before. Those other times, those other girls, I thought things were casual, just FeelGood fun, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t dredge up anything more for them. They accused me of leading them on, of treating them like emotionless hookups, all sorts of things.
I’ve got to shut this down.
“Hey, don’t get attached to me, okay?” I mean for it to sound jokey, but it comes out harsher than I wanted it to.
She takes the smallest step back.
“I’m like a pathological flirt,” I continue, “so don’t read into anything, okay? My friends say I’ll flirt with anything with a pulse.”
She inhales sharply, hurt flashing across her face. She takes my mug and goes to the sink, keeping her back to me.
“I think everything’s already set up in the spare room,” she says briskly. “My mom likes to be prepared. I’ll get you some bandages for your cut.”
Oh. Right. I slide a hand over my ribs and the duct tape tugs on my skin. I’m going to have to deal with it before I get some sort of infection. I groan. Asking Hannah to help me with that now is impossible.
We trudge upstairs in a cloud of awkwardness, and she opens the first door in a whole hallway of them.
The guest room is like something out of a catalog, all cream and ivory, expensive headboard and textured wallpaper. I’m going to get it dirty just by being in it.
“There are towels in the bathroom,” Hannah says crisply. “I think the remote for the TV is in the bedside table drawer. Hope you sleep okay.”
She won’t meet my eyes, and it’s making me ache. I’ve screwed everything up. She turns to go.
“Wait, Hannah—what time do you usually get up?”
“I’ve been setting my alarm for six thirty.”
“Riiiight … why?”
“That’s what time I usually get up for school.”
This girl is a piece of work.
“Hannah. There’s no school in the afterlife.”
“I know, I know. But I need to do barre and stuff, so …”
“Well, I’m not going to set my alarm, but wake me up if you need me, okay?”
“Okay. Good night,” she says.
“Night.”
Everything in me is gasping to say, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, but she’s gone.
I close the door. My jaw is tense and burning with prickly heat. I feel weird inside, like something’s squirming around in me. What the hell’s wrong with me?
I flop onto the enormous and very clean-smelling bed. It has about fifty decorative pillows on it. The cool air conditioner hums, and the lamps glow. There’s a boring but pretty painting of a lake on the opposite wall, and my throat is still warm from the tea.
I rub shaky hands over my face. I wish I hadn’t shut her down. Everything was so … I had to do it, though, right? If I’d let her carry on looking at me like that, like I was some sort of person worth getting attached to, we wouldn’t be in separate rooms right now.
The chemistry is intense. There’s no denying it. But we can’t act on it. We can’t let these looks and touches become more, because I’ve never hooked up with someone and had it not turn into a giant mess.
There’s a Leo Sterling formula to dating. Here’s what will happen: It will be amazing in the beginning. Like can’t-keep-my-hands-off-her amazing. Maybe even better with Hannah than it’s ever been before, based on how every time she touches me it’s like getting drunk.
But eventually I’ll fall short of her expectations. With the other girls, it always started with a small sadness. They’d want to slap a label on us, which I sometimes reluctantly agreed to, or a declaration I couldn’t give them. It would turn into a crack that ruined their self-esteem, and before long, it’d be an outright disaster, them sobbing, You led me on and Why can’t you give a shit about anyone but yourself?
I’ve been with a lot of girls, but I’ve never told anyone I loved them. Because I haven’t. It never seems to go deeper than the FeelGood for me. Makes it kind of hard to write love songs.
Hannah’s the only other person in the city. If that happens with us, Hannah will leave, and I’ll be alone again.
I can’t lose her.
Being alone—it’s like death to me. Before Hannah found me … I was barely here. I need other people around me or I start going nuts.
So no matter how enticing she looks or smells or moves, I can’t act on it. I just can’t. It will bring whatever this fragile thing is between us tumbling down over our heads.
I grab a pillow and shove it over my face to stifle my groan.
Starting tomorrow, I’ve got to start doing a better job of not thinking about touching her. No flirting. No seducing.
We have to be Just Friends.
It’s a new tactic for me, but I’ve got to try it.
I peel my shirt off and miserably start to pick at the edge of the duct tape.
I’m such an idiot. Such a pathetic, stupid idiot. Leo’s shutdown stings in my throat like the worst kind of heartburn. Don’t get attached to me.
Why does he have to be so charming and smiley and UGH.
I throw myself down on my bed. The worst part is that I knew this would happen. I was prepared, I had my shields up, and he battered through them so easily.
I can’t believe I thought he might like me too.
I’m suddenly exhausted. I need to get up and brush my teeth.
It feels weird being in my bedroom knowing that Leo’s the only other person in the house. I know he can’t see through the walls, but I try to brush without getting a toothpaste mustache, and I change into my pajamas with my closet door closed. He’s a whole room away, and I’m still aware of him.
I pull one of my mom’s old warm-up tops over my head, and for a second, it feels like she’s here.
When I climb onto the white four-poster bed I’ve had since I was three, I start to feel a little better. My room is the only place I let my imagination peek out. Everyone assumes it will be all neat and pink, with cartoony ballet shoes everywhere. Instead, it’s a den of fairy-forest magic, strung with fake ivy garlands and Christmas lights. A gauzy mosquito net curtain makes my bed feel like an elven bower.
Once I’m snuggled under the covers, I plug my phone in and start an email to my dad. I’ve written him one every day. He’d love to hear about SpandexFest and the tour bus and Galaxe. Maybe I won’t tell him about almost getting killed by objects flying in the wind.
I hit send and click my phone off. I try to shift into the mood for sleep, but my mind refuses to settle. I grab David Lee Sloth and pull him tight to my chest.
Even though I know better, I can’t stop thinking about how it felt when Leo pulled my cardigan up on my shoulder in the kitchen.
I’m trained to be exquisitely aware of my body. I know how every muscle links with the next and how to move them, like my body is one long bowstring that can pluck itself. When he touched my shoulder, though, everything was all over the place. The bunch-and-release feeling under my ribs had to be a muscle contraction, but it made no sense—I didn’t tell anything to flex. Words and looks shouldn’t be able to make things in another person move.
It’s surreal that it’s been less than twelve hours since I saw Leo in the music store. My body is humming, the way it does when I nail a double pirouette, and it’s been like this all afternoon. For a little while, Leo distracted me from the weirdness of this world with no people. I should be focusing
on where everyone went, not thinking about his smile when we topped eighty in Thunderchicken. The warm brush of his arm when we were sitting on the edge of the stage downtown. How animated he got when he was talking about writing music.
That reminds me—that book I wrote in fifth grade. Flower Magic. Before today, I hadn’t thought about it in years. Now I’m desperate to see if it’s as ridiculous as I remember it.
After Flower Magic, I didn’t stop writing altogether—but I did stop showing people what I’d written. There are other stories, hidden in summer notebooks at my grandma’s house.
And then I did stop writing altogether. Freshman year. When I started training at the Academy.
I slip out of bed, shivering in the air-conditioned cold, and cross over to my bookshelf. I reach behind the alphabetized paperbacks, my fingertips stretching for the book I threw behind them seven years ago in a fit of ashamed anger.
There—I feel an edge. I fish it out.
The corner is bent from when my mom shoved it into her glove box, and there’s an oily stain on the cover. The glue in the binding is crispy now, crackling in a dozen places when I open it.
I lean back against the wall and start reading.
It doesn’t take long. When I’m done, there’s a tiny kernel of pride glowing inside me. It’s actually not bad for a ten-year-old.
The thought makes me brave. Strings of words have been hovering around me all day. Simple descriptions of the things I saw at the abandoned carnival, echoes of the words Leo and I spoke out loud, things his songs made me think about. They’ve been circling all afternoon, nudging into my thoughts.
I reach over to my desk for a spiral notebook.
In the moonlight, I pull the words out of the air and write them down.
* * *
With Leo in the house, I sleep hard enough to dream.
In my dream, I’m riding in Thunderchicken, but in that vague way that dreams have, sometimes I’m gliding like a ghost with no car around me. The streets of downtown Houston slide under my feet in stripes of gray and orange.
I pass under the same set of traffic lights again and again. Each time I go through the intersection, the lights change from green to yellow to red. Green, yellow, red. Green, yellow, red.
You & Me at the End of the World Page 9
