by Joe McKinney
“Philip Morris must be giving out vacations if you vote yes on a pro-youth smoking bill,” I joke.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t even chuckle. Sometimes Peter is lacking in the humor department. “Anyway, I don’t know about tonight. I’ll be in late, but maybe I’ll come to your apartment so I can see you first thing in the morning. I miss you.”
“Sure. Good. Just let yourself in whenever,” I squeak, painfully aware that I don’t miss him back. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“See you then.” The phone clicks off.
I can see him standing at the airport. He’ll slip his phone into his designer-name-I’ve-never-heard-of coat pocket and rake a hand through his dark hair. Then he’ll stride off to find the most important-looking person at the airport and convince them his flight has priority over Air Force One.
My stomach stops roiling now that I get to put off the breakup. When I get home tonight I’ll pretend I’m really tired or drunk or something. I know I’m being spineless, but I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings, even if I don’t like them very much. Or, in Peter’s case, when they pretend they don’t have any. But, mainly, I’m chicken.
I’ve spent the past year convincing myself that Peter isn’t as superficial as he seems, but now I’m not so sure. Honestly, at first I kind of liked how easy it was to date him. He didn’t push me to talk about my feelings. He couldn’t compare me to the person I’d been two years before. When I met him I was coming out of a two-year fog. But as the fog has cleared and I’ve become more like the old me, he’s never given me more than a glimpse of something real.
In true passive-aggressive fashion I’ve been waiting for him to break it off. I’ve gotten more and more distant and even blatantly annoyed with him. This approach obviously hasn’t worked. I need to imagine the after, not the part where I do it. I just need to do it fast.
Nelly’s voice floats over the wall. “You’ve got to rip him off you like a band-aid.”
“How do you read my mind, Nelly? It’s so freaking creepy!”
“Sounds like you got a reprieve. More time to drink. Practice, I mean.”
James enters holding an unlit cigarette and his iPad. He reminds me of a praying mantis: all long, skinny legs and arms. He spends all his time folded over a computer or tablet, smoking madly. I imagine him making the moves on Penny and smile.
“Hey,” I say.
He plops down and hands me his iPad, which is open to a blog page. “Look at this, Cass. It’s about Bornavirus LX. It’s more serious than they say.”
My family’s dinner table was a place where Roswell and Peak Oil and the New World Order were debated with enthusiasm. I’ve found a kindred spirit in James. He loves that kind of stuff.
I read aloud. “As the LX virus has spread it appears to have mutated. The last reports received suggest it may be only a matter of hours from infection to the final stage.”
“In the final stage the person goes crazy,” James says. He tucks his light brown, jaw-length hair behind his ear. “Then they attack, which is how a lot of people are getting infected. It’s in the saliva and blood. One site says they’ve been showing the same footage of Chicago for twenty-four hours because Chicago’s a wasteland. I know a couple of bloggers out there and their sites have been down for the past day.”
A graph estimates that fifty thousand people in New York City will be infected as of noon today.
“That’s crazy,” I say. “Fifty thousand? There’s no way they could hide that many sick here. And they’re still telling us it’s not serious?”
He fiddles with his cigarette. “I know. They wouldn’t quarantine major cities if it wasn’t serious. The hospitals are filling up faster than they can handle.”
I think of Penny’s mom, Maria, who’s a nurse. She’d know what’s going on.
“Yeah, well, I definitely wouldn’t put it past the government not to tell us anything until we’re fucked.” I sigh. “I have to finish this newsletter. My computer is being a pain.”
Any mention of a computer problem lights a fire under James. He nudges me out of the way and pokes around on my computer.
He shakes his head. “Dude, look at your desktop. Sure you don’t want another shortcut on it?”
I don’t mention that I recently cleared it and thought it was neat.
I pull up a piece of his hair and peer under it, choosing to ignore his defamation of my character. “Are you coming out tonight?”
“Ah, yes, tonight.” His smile lights up his face. “The priming for the great break-up.”
“Nelly, you have a gigantic mouth.” I know he’s listening. “No, I got out of that. Tonight is just good, old-fashioned fun.”
Nelly’s voice comes over the wall. “And coming up with Cassie’s breakup tactic, James. Maybe you can help. Cass’s gotten herself mixed up with the wrong guy, as we all know.”
“Will ‘You never get off that computer and I can’t stand it’ work? That’s the one that I know best,” James asks with a grin.
“How about ‘You care more about that Hot Pocket than me!’ ” Nelly calls.
James laughs as he finishes whatever magic he’s worked on my computer. “Girls are more trouble than they’re worth. I’d like a Hot Pocket, though. It’s been years.”
“Penny’s coming tonight,” I say innocently. He ducks under his hair. “And you, Nelson,” I point my finger at the cubicle wall, “are not one to talk about wrong guys. How many boyfriends have you had since I’ve known you?”
There’s no reply. I smile in triumph. James is already engrossed in his iPad.
“Wow, I have to see this,” he mutters, and wanders out.
Chapter 3
A little while later I whisper over the wall Nelly and I share. “I have gossip you don’t know. Ha ha.”
“Get your ass over here right now,” he commands.
“No. I’m busy.”
“You are no such thing. You barely even work. You just design newsletters and organize artsy crap for the community.”
I smile. “Well, all you do is act all charming and get people to give us money. And—”
“And that’s how you get paid. So get your ass over here or I’ll purposely pull in less this year so you lose your job.”
I laugh and head into his cubicle, where he sits with a smug smile. “So, James and Penny kissed last night.”
He rubs his hands with glee and I grin back. “When a bunch of us went out last week they talked all night,” he says. “I thought I saw a spark. I forgot all about it because we’d given up on them ever getting together.”
“Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us there. James says he doesn’t want a girlfriend, but—”
“But what?” asks James, who leans against the cubicle entry and smirks.
“But there are certain people I don’t think you’d kiss if you weren’t interested in them, like girlfriend-interested,” I say, and tug on the sleeve of his t-shirt. James doesn’t exactly dress up for work.
“That sentence made almost no sense,” he says, in an attempt to deflect the accusation, but his face is scarlet.
I bounce up and down like a three year-old but don’t want to scare him off, so I change the subject. “Hey, any more news on Bornavirus?”
Nelly gives an exaggerated shake of his head. “Y’all and your conspiracy theories. Now what, this is a government plot to overthrow society as we know it and implement a new world order?”
James rolls his eyes. “Dude, no. It may be some sort of disease or weapon gone awry. But, whatever it is, it’s everywhere in the world. They’re saying to get to a hospital if you’re sick, but they won’t say if they can actually cure it. And no one can find anyone who was sick and got better. Some cities in China are already under martial law. They’re shooting people on sight.”
“Really?” I ask.
“They’re always shooting people on sight in China, my friends,” Nelly says. “Oppressive government, remember?”
Ne
lly is the foil to our belief that someone, somewhere, is up to something that they’re covering up. James and I would have packed up for the apocalypse ten times by now, had Nelly not brought us back down to reality.
“True,” James admits. “But here’s footage of a city in Germany, taken hours ago.”
James hands us his iPad. Soldiers hold back bystanders while they fire on a group of advancing figures. They drop to the ground as the onlookers scream, but it’s shadowy and hard to see, so Nelly is unimpressed.
“Let’s see what they’re saying on the news,” Nelly suggests with a sigh. He steers us to the conference room. “The only way I’m going to get any work done today is if I can stop you two before Cassie has us living in her bunker until this blows over.”
“Hey,” I say, “don’t make fun of my bunker!”
“You have a bunker?” James asks. “How do I not know you have a bunker?”
“It’s just my parents’ house upstate. It’s still full of food and stuff. Like a year’s worth.”
James whistles. He knows that my parents were weekend homesteaders and had lots of food, but I guess I never mentioned all the stuff is still there.
I miss the log cabin after my dream last night. It’s secluded; my parents always half-kidded that it would be the perfect place to ride out the apocalypse. It was a place where I would read for hours in the hammock under the trees, make a salad from the garden five minutes before dinner and spend all summer playing with my little brother, Eric, and our closest neighbors.
It’s also the place where Adrian and I sat and waited for my parents to arrive, one Friday night in April three years ago. They never came. They never knew Adrian had proposed the night before. They would have been ecstatic. They loved Adrian almost as much as I did.
***
Adrian and I had sat in the warmth of the wood stove. He leaned back on the couch and leafed through one of my dad’s solar power catalogs. My feet were still freezing from falling into a creek on our hike and I plopped them in his lap.
“Hey, handsome,” I said, and wiggled them for a foot massage.
His dimple showed. I loved the way it made him look like a little boy, even with the dark stubble that was back by evening.
“I don’t know,” Adrian said, picking up our previous thread about the wedding. “I kind of like the whole obeying part of the vows.”
I rolled my eyes, not even rising to the bait.
“I already obey you.” He smiled and held up my foot to prove his point. “It’s about time you started doing the same. Or at least take it into consideration when I tell you not to leap from one rock to the next because it’s slippery. I’m just trying to keep you dry.”
He was referring to earlier, when I had eschewed his outstretched hand while crossing the creek. I could jump to the next rock just fine, I said, right before I slid off it.
“Do you know Laura Ingalls told Almanzo Wilder she wouldn’t have the word obey in their vows? She said she wouldn’t be able to obey anyone against her better judgment.” When I first read that as a little girl I’d been so impressed.
“Your hero. But you misjudged those rocks. And your, um, athletic ability.”
His mouth curved up. He was one of the only people in the world who found my clumsiness endearing.
“I am the very picture of grace.” I wiggled my feet. “Back to work!”
He picked up my foot and kissed it before giving a little bow and obeying.
When headlights finally shone through the front window I jumped up. My parents might have been cell phone-hating hippies at heart, but they always called. I was uneasy enough to have a mini lecture prepared.
I stepped out on the porch and was surprised to see Sam, the sheriff. His hands shook as he took off his hat. The beam from the motion-activated light left his face in shadow. It’s never good news when the sheriff comes to your house and removes his hat. I hadn’t had personal experience with it before then, but I was pretty sure of that. I backed into the doorjamb as if I could escape what he was going to say.
“Cassie? Cassie, your mom and dad were in an accident on the other side of town.”
Sam walked toward me, his hands out in a supplicating gesture. His face was haggard when he stepped into the rectangle of light the open door threw on the ground. Like gravity was working overtime on his jowls and the corners of his eyes. I gripped the door. Adrian put a hand on my shoulder.
“Are they okay, Sam?” he asked. “Where are they?”
Sam shook his head and blinked. “I’m so sorry. Cassie, I’m so sorry.” He gripped the hat in his hands so tightly that his knuckles were white. “They both died at the scene. It looks like they slid on a patch of mud. They hit a tree.”
“Okay,” I said, and walked back in the house on shaky legs.
I sat down on the couch. Adrian sat next to me and took my hand. He was crying, I noticed, as he tried to hug me. I sat there, wooden, wondering what I was supposed to do or say next. It was like I had forgotten how to be human. I couldn’t remember what people did in these situations.
“Okay,” I repeated helplessly. “Sam, what should I do?”
I wondered if Sam thought I was cold because I wasn’t crying. He and my parents were friends. They would talk gardens and hunting while relaxing with a home-brewed beer on the porch.
There was nothing but pity in his eyes, though, when I looked up. He’d been the bearer of this kind of news before, and it occurred to me that if I was the only recipient who was numb and dry-eyed then maybe he wouldn’t look so sympathetic. Then I wondered why I was thinking these ridiculous thoughts instead of feeling anything.
“You’ll need to come down to the hospital, Cassie. I’m sorry. You can take your time.”
I got up immediately because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, and walked out the door with Adrian’s arm around me. I’ve gone back there once, to scatter my parents’ ashes on the land they loved and planned to live out their lives. I haven’t seen it since.
***
The news blares in the conference room.
“…not to panic. They say that there is much false information on the internet and to visit the CDC’s website for information concerning Bornavirus LX. There are a suspected few thousand cases in New York City right now, the CDC states.
“If you have a high fever or joint pain or have come in contact with someone you think may be infected, please go to the nearest hospital for treatment. Doctors say that antiviral medication must be administered immediately for optimal effectiveness.”
I raise an eyebrow at James.
“First I’m hearing of it,” he says.
“Stay tuned to New York One for updates on Bornavirus LX. There will be a live statement by the Board of Health in one hour.”
Nelly turns to us. “See? A few thousand cases, not so bad. We’ll just steer clear of crazy people and get some drinks.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t go out.” I feel a pang of foreboding. “Even if it’s nowhere near as bad as those sites are saying, I’m sure it’s worse than ‘authorities’ are saying. Maybe we should hang out at my house.”
“No!” Nelly grimaces. “We are not ruining Friday evening!”
I punch him. “Thanks. I didn’t realize my house was second only to hell.”
“You know what I mean. How about we go to Paddy’s, and we can always walk the four blocks to your house if we think we should. Which we won’t.”
“That’s fine with me,” James says. “I don’t imagine it will be so bad that we can’t go out. And the only thing that would keep Nel from going out on a Friday night would be a nuclear bomb detonation.”
Nelly nods emphatically.
“Fine, you win,” I say. “Maybe I’m being a dork.”
There’s just too much of a disparity between what we’re hearing unofficially and officially. The difference between fifty thousand and a few thousand is huge. Someone is wrong, or they’re lying.
Chapter 4
&
nbsp; I catch Penny in the upstairs kitchen on her break from the preschool, where she’s lead teacher.
“So, you’re really going to break up with Peter this time?” she asks, her joy at the news unmistakable.
I groan. Nelly must send out emails or texts or something.
“I’m going to kill Nelly. I would have told you in the next three seconds anyway. I decided this morning. At this rate I won’t even have to do it, he’ll hear the news before I see him.” I wish. “Yeah, I’m going to, but not tonight. He’s stuck in D.C.”
Penny squeezes my hand; she knows how much I’m dreading the breakup. “Who else is coming for drinks tonight?” she asks, suddenly intent on the refrigerator’s contents.
“Well, James is coming. I just saw him. He said you’re a great kisser.”
A blush spreads under her honey-colored skin. “No, you didn’t say anything.” Then she freezes and her brown eyes widen. “Did you?”
“Of course not!” She pretends to throw her water bottle at me and I duck. “I’m just bothering you because you didn’t tell me right away. Jerk.” I sit and pat the chair next to me. “So? Tell.”
The pink creeps up her neck again. “Okay, okay. I don’t know. Last night he asked if I wanted to hang out and we had coffee and then we kissed. I guess I kind of already liked him a little. It’s weird, because we’ve been friends for so long.”
“He likes you too-oo,” I sing, and rub her shoulder.
She leans forward eagerly. “Really?”
“Totally. He blushed when I—”
Penny shakes her head, and I shut my trap as James walks in and heads to the refrigerator. She looks down at my feet and changes the subject.
“Can you even walk in those gigantic, one-inch heels?” she asks with a laugh, because she knows I can’t.
“It’s been a challenge.” I wiggle my toes. “I think I’m getting blisters. April may be too early to be out with sandals on. My feet are icicles.”
