Any Second

by Kevin Emerson

  Maya moved beside Eli.

  “Please,” he said, waving her away again. His eyes darting back and forth, his hands shaking. The gun shaking.

  She stepped closer.

  “Come on!” Graham shouted.

  A glimpse of movement through the windows: police with rifles moving across the courtyard. Lights flashing as more cars arrived out front, more officers, the crowds of students streaming between them to safety. Maya reached for Eli’s hands, for the gun, but he flinched away from her.

  “Eli, you have to put it down,” she said, her voice trembling. “The police will think you’re the threat.”

  “I am, I—”

  “No, you’re not,” she said.

  “Do it!” Graham shouted. Maya saw him glance at the courtyard too.

  “This isn’t you. It’s him. He’s manipulating you and that sucks and it isn’t fair and”—Maya raised her voice toward Graham—“he’s an ASSHOLE and—”

  “Shut up! I’ll blow you up! Everyone! I—”

  “Then go ahead!” Maya whirled at him. “Go ahead and do it, Graham, if that’s what you want!” She motioned to Eli. “But he’s not going to become a murderer just to fulfill your sick fantasy.”

  “It’s not a fucking fantasy!”

  Maya looked back at Eli. Finally, his eyes meeting hers…

  He lowered the gun. “I’m not a weapon.” He slid it onto the table and sank back against the windows, staring at the floor, shaking.

  Outside, the police officers had overturned picnic tables. Training gun sights.

  In the corner of her eye, a crying girl looking up at her from beneath a table, eyes pleading.

  She turned to Graham. Had to move fast, and she thought about him, and looked at the pipe in his hand…and this part would forever be a blur, but she took a step around the table toward him. The cafeteria was the DOL and here she was once again, moving in the wrong direction, directly toward death.

  “You’re right,” Maya said to Graham. “It’s not a fantasy.”

  Graham’s eyes somewhere behind those dark eyeholes.

  A step closer: she could see him trembling too.

  “But he’s not going to shoot you, so you’re actually going to have to deal with it.”

  “With what?”

  “The pain,” Maya said. “You’re hurting, and that’s what’s real.”

  “I’m not—”

  “It’s lonely and it’s hard, and you don’t get chosen, and people let you down,” she said, “but it’s more than that. It’s empty. The whole big universe and we barely mean a thing.”

  A step closer.

  “You don’t know,” said Graham.

  “You’re right. I don’t know about you. I’m talking about me. I feel alone. I feel like, what’s the point? Like there’s no meaning at all. When I was a kid my life felt so real and permanent and steady, like everything orbited around me, and then suddenly you realize that it doesn’t, that you so don’t matter. That maybe no one really gives a shit, and maybe they never really will. Maybe it’s always going to be just you, and that feeling never goes away.”

  A red light flashed in the corner of Maya’s eye. A laser sight, dipping and darting around, choosing its victim. Danced off her, danced off Graham, buzzed Eli.

  “You have to put the bomb down,” said Maya. “Before they make you.”

  “Let them,” said Graham.

  “Come on, Graham!” Maya shouted.

  “It’s never going to get any better. You just said it! It’ll never change. And now there’s going to be nothing! They’ll arrest me and my life will be over.”

  “Maybe you’re right, but you don’t know.” Maya pointed at Eli. “He almost killed me. And when people asked me how I had the courage to stop him, I felt so stupid because I didn’t remember having any courage. I just remembered being scared and not wanting to die. But I remember something else now. Just before I grabbed his hands, I thought he sounded sad. Like whatever he was about to do, he didn’t want to do it.”

  “So?”

  Maya shrugged. “I don’t think you want to do this.”

  “You don’t…” The pipe shook. Graham shook.

  “You’re right, I don’t. All I know is it’s really hard. That we’re all doing the best we can and sometimes it’s still not enough. The universe doesn’t care. It has no plan, or vision, or message. Everything in our lives, everything that feels so important, any second it can just be gone. I mean, you could do that, right now. End a hundred lives. The universe literally doesn’t care if you do or not. And even if you don’t, tomorrow it could be an earthquake or an asteroid. Everything is so close to happening all the time. It’s all so fragile.” Maya shivered, tears streaming down her cheeks. “And then there’s all the good things that don’t happen. The things we want most that just don’t quite work out. Those things feel even worse, because what if they never happen?”

  Graham made a sighing sound. “You don’t know.”

  Maya took another small step. She could almost reach him now. Grab that pipe. Graham seemed to sense it and took a small step back.

  The red light danced over them again. Settled on Graham for a moment. His arm, his shoulder, his cheek.

  Shit. Running out of time. “Okay, here’s the thing: the universe may not care, but maybe we can. If we really are this close to the edge all the time, then we have to be the ones to see each other and forgive each other and accept each other like there is literally no tomorrow, and believe me, that sounds really scary, and I bet people haven’t done that for you, not nearly enough. Sometimes I feel like it would be easier to just die, because it’s a huge risk, opening our hearts up. Those are the real bombs, and mine feels like it’s going to explode, like it already has, so many times.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’ve got the scars to prove it.” Maya reached up and pulled off her hat. “I’ve been tearing myself apart. Can barely stand to look at myself. But I’m not going to give up. On me. Or on you. Or anyone.”

  The mask twitched as Graham looked at her. Then down at his own chest, where the red light was buzzing like a curious bee.

  His shoulders hitched. “I didn’t even have anything,” he said in a choked whisper. “They came to search my house….I wouldn’t even have been awake yet if you didn’t text me,” he said to Eli. “Then I heard them at the door and ran out the back. I never even…” He turned the pipe over in his hand. “Now my life is over and I’m going to go to jail because of you!” He wagged the pipe at Eli.

  Maya exhaled hard. Focus! The pipe didn’t seem to have any wires or electronics. Just a length of metal. Nothing else in his hand. She could have been wrong—could have been a cloud of atoms by now, smeared across torn walls.

  But she wasn’t. She was alive. Again.

  The red dot still dancing over Graham. “You have to put it down,” said Maya. “They think it’s real. What you’re feeling definitely is, but not that bomb, right? Graham, don’t die for something fake. Live for something real.”

  “Like what?” he said quietly.

  “For me, it’s giving myself to the world, to the moment. I don’t know what it is for you. But there’s only one way to find out. Please?”

  “Fuck.” Graham slumped. The pipe dropped. It clanged to the floor and rolled, coming to rest against a table leg. He leaned against the table. “What am I going to do now?”

  Maya took one more step. Touched his hand for just a moment. “Try to get better. It’s possible. There are people who can help.”

  She turned to Eli. He locked eyes with her, then faced the window and put his hands up.

  Maya got out her phone. “We should all text,” she said to anyone around her. “To let them know it’s safe to come in.” She sent a message to her mom:

&
nbsp; Tell the police it’s safe to come in.

  Put her phone away before she could see a reply. The sound of messages being sent all around the cafeteria. Then she moved to the windows and started waving her arms. The officers stood cautiously, motioning to one another. One of them seemed to be getting a call.

  She heard soft thudding—Graham running for the lunch line doors. He reached them and started tugging on the handles.

  The doors to the main entrance burst open and a line of helmeted officers rushed in, guns up. The barrels found Eli, his hands still high…swung around to the rest of the room.

  “He’s over there!” a kid shouted.

  The first officer rounded the corner, gun raised. “Freeze! Down on the ground!”

  Graham kept rattling the door.

  “Graham, stop!” Maya shouted. She turned toward the officer. “He doesn’t have anything!”

  “Hands up! Now!”

  Graham slowly turned around and put up his hands. Dropped to his knees.

  More officers coming in, radios squawking.

  Maya stepped toward Eli, her whole body hitching, shaking, releasing.

  Eli wrapped his arms around her. She felt his heart hammering, hers too, drums sending code to each other:

  I got you.

  “It’s not much farther,” Maya said, looking back over her shoulder.

  “Cool,” said Eli, red-faced, hair plastered to his forehead despite the brisk breeze.

  “You okay?”

  “Great.”

  They climbed through the sweet-smelling spruce, stepping carefully on the slick rocks, breathing hard, legs burning. Both in shorts, sweatshirts, and knit hats, Maya’s with rainbow stripes and a pom-pom, Eli’s with a Seahawks logo. Another minute, and they crested the ridge. The land beyond fell away in sweeps of red-leafed meadows, down into branching valleys of pine. In all directions, rocky peaks, sugarcoated with the first snow, shimmering in angled sun.

  An unlikely November day, sure to be the last before the sheeting storms and the piling drifts.

  “Okay, now we just follow this for a bit.” Maya led the way along a narrow trail through tufted grass, loping up and down over the gradually ascending spine. They climbed around a mud hole. Scrambled up a scree slope. The wind increased, at times nudging them. The shadows damp and frosty, but the sun warm on their faces as they climbed up and up, and you could see it getting closer, the moment where the ridge met sky and there seemed to be nothing beyond it but puffy clouds.

  Maya dropped to her knees and crawled the last twenty feet across the bare rock, her hands tingling, and then lay flat. Eli crawled beside her and did the same. They inched forward until they could just see over the edge.

  “Whoa,” Eli said.

  The cliff face dropped away, a sheer, dizzying free fall hundreds of feet, the scree slopes so far below that the air gathered a haze between here and there. In the distance, the gray snake of highway droning. Beyond that, more mountains, and even farther, the crown of Rainier, its glaciers sparkling.

  “Rampart Ridge,” said Maya. “I told you.”

  “Cool,” said Eli.

  Melissa had agreed to drive them to the pass but had opted for a walk on the low trail around an alpine marsh.

  They’d talked nonstop on the hour hike to the ridge:

  About how Graham had been suspended for a few weeks, pending an evaluation. About the upcoming school board hearing on whether he should be expelled. Parents were up in arms about it, up in arms about Eli too, now that his identity had been revealed.

  About how, so far, Eli was staying where he was. It wasn’t exactly comfortable at school. He still spent his days mostly alone, but at least now he had Maya to talk to at lunch and in the halls.

  About how Maya had declined the renewed calls for interviews after word got out, after the narrative was shaped that she’d single-handedly thwarted a second would-be bomber. About the perception that she was some sort of trouble-smelling sleuth, and the predictable blowback that somehow she was responsible for both events.

  About how she had agreed to do an interview with Tamara at Chalk, who actually wanted to know about the year in between, not just the beginning and the end. Tamara wanted to use Maya’s new profile picture, the one with the savaged hair, as the cover image for the story. She’d called the photo “Brave.” Maya had said okay.

  About how Eli was trying out for basketball.

  About how Maya had decided it wasn’t too late to look into a few colleges, especially ones with good music departments. Or maybe a program abroad next year. She was starting to imagine futures, more and more all the time.

  About how this past week they’d both still had nightmares, flashbacks, lost moments.

  But maybe fewer.

  A gust of wind so strong that it shifted them on the rock. Then a calm eddy.

  “Ready for your lesson?” said Maya. She pushed back from the edge, sat cross-legged, and pulled two pairs of drumsticks from her backpack.

  Eli sat across from her. He clicked the sticks against the rocks. Little echoes flying free.

  “Today we’re going to do paradiddles,” said Maya. “Do what I do.” She tapped her sticks slowly, waiting for Eli to learn the pattern and lock in. After a minute, they were synced up, and Maya started to throw in accents, tap other parts of the rocks, getting different tones. She let herself go, playing further and further off the beat, until Eli’s rhythm started to fall apart. She rejoined him, locked it in, and then went exploring again.

  After that, they put away the sticks and demolished a sleeve of Pringles.

  “Want to stand?” said Maya, licking her fingers.

  “Okay.”

  Maya reached over and took his hand. They locked eyes, and she nodded. Got to their knees, slowly to their feet, a balloon-headed feeling as the precipice yawned away beside them, beckoning.

  They turned to face it, holding each other’s hand so tight.

  Eli leaned and peered down the impossible face.

  “Doesn’t it feel like we’d definitely be able to fly?” said Maya, the urge strumming her nerves like guitar strings. What sense did it make, your body urging you to do something that would kill you? Was that a memory from some flying ancestor? A genetic wish for her great-great-grandchildren?

  “Definitely,” Eli agreed. “All the way back to the city.”

  “Around the world.”

  They were quiet. A vulture floated past them at eye height, rocking on the wind.

  “Not today,” Maya called to it.

  “Whisper of the pine trees,” Eli said.

  “Slickness of the rocks.”

  “Sweet smell of the dirt and trees.”

  “The sense of geologic time turning right beneath our feet. Ages and epochs and here we are.”

  “The silence,” said Eli. “Like we’re the only people on the planet.”

  “The hum of the highway letting us know there will still be fast food on the way home.”

  Eli smiled. “We should write this down.”

  “Maybe later.”

  Another chilly breeze curled around them.

  “Have there been any leads?” Maya finally asked.

  “No.”

  There had been no sign of Gabriel on the anniversary. No sign of him at the nursing home. No missing kids. No bullets, no bombs. “What happened with that tip from Oklahoma?”

  “Nothing. It was a dead end.”

  “Are you worried he’s still around?” Maya hated asking it. Knew it triggered memories she could never quite fathom.

  Eli dug into his pocket and produced the small wind-up robot. Turned it over in his fingers. “Today is a good day to live,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Maya asked.

  Eli’s jaw moved, like he might rep
ly. Instead, he flung the robot out into space. It sailed, arced, fell and fell, out of their view. There was no sound of its landing.

  “Fuck Gabriel,” he said.

  Maya cracked up. “Definitely fuck him.” She pulled on his hand and the move made them stumble, and the breeze gusted, and for a spine-freezing moment they teetered on the edge.

  Breaths held.

  Stepped back.

  Eli exhaled slowly. “Let’s go check out those little lakes we saw.”

  “One more minute.” Maya put her arm around him and gazed out over the bright world. The billions of trees, the million-year-old mountains. She watched the glints of cars on the highway far below and wondered if anyone looked up and saw the two of them, standing here, perched on the edge.

  Two dots, moving closer.

  This was a difficult book to write, not just because of the subject matter and the research it required, but also because really digging into Maya’s and Eli’s heads meant digging into my own, though I put them through far worse than anything I’ve experienced. Still, my biggest thanks go to my wonderful family: Annie, Willow, and Elliott, who had to live with me while I inhabited this story, and who were endlessly patient, understanding, and supportive. Thanks also to my brilliant first readers: Annie (again), Amanda Maciel, Liz Gallagher, Sara Zarr, Mel Barnes, and Erica Silverman. Their insights and encouragement always seemed to come right when I needed them most. Thank you to my excellent editor, Phoebe Yeh, who believed in this story when it was just a few raw chapters and who pushed me to make it far better than I’d thought it could be, and to Elizabeth Stranahan and the rest of the team at Crown Books and Random House for bringing this book to the world. Thanks as always to my agent, Robert Guinsler, and everyone at Sterling Lord, Literistic, who have believed in me and my career through many chapters. Thank you to the teachers, librarians, and independent booksellers I’ve been lucky to meet and who do such great work. And to my readers, who inspire me always.

  Kevin Emerson is the author of numerous novels for young adults and children, including Breakout, Last Day on Mars, and the Exile series. His books have been published in ten countries. A former science teacher, Kevin is also a singer and drummer. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two children. He has won a spelling bee and lost a beauty pageant, and he once appeared in a Swedish television commercial. Visit Kevin on Twitter and Instagram at @kcemerson or on his website kevinemerson.net.