by Patrick Ness
“We don’t judge you.”
To my surprise, she snorts. “Yes, you do. I judged my parents. That’s what young people do, isn’t it?”
Her parents live in North Dakota. I’ve met them about four times in seventeen years of life. I wonder if she just kept on judging them.
“I do all this for you guys, you know,” she says. “I know you think it’s just ambition and power-seeking, and well, for goodness’ sake, I’m a politician and I wouldn’t be a politician if those things weren’t there, too, but it’s not just that.”
I don’t know what to say. She never talks like this. Never hints that there’s anything behind her motivations other than pure, patriotic public service. “Are you feeling okay?” I ask.
“The thing is, I’m not even surprised you’d ask that. We’ve forgotten how to talk to each other, haven’t we? Funny how things evolve and evolve and then one day, you look up and they’re different.”
“You don’t believe in evolution.”
She laughs. Actually laughs. “Well, not politically, I don’t.” She looks over at me again. “I wonder what you think of me. Really. What kind of a person am I when seen by you?”
I keep quiet, hoping like hell this is a rhetorical question. It is.
“I am feeling okay,” she says. “But I’m also stepping into the big time, son. This isn’t local government with all its little tyrants and petty feuds. This is national office.”
“Which has big tyrants and dangerous feuds.”
“Absolutely,” she sighs. “I thought it was all over with the Lieutenant Governor’s race, that I’d be in local office forever. Maybe end up on a school board some day or a state commission for something or other. But all of a sudden, in the space of a few weeks, here it all is. The big show.”
“If you win.”
“I will.”
Yeah, she probably will.
“What do you do when your dreams are about to come true?” she asks. “No one ever tells you. They tell you to chase them, but what happens when you actually catch one?”
“You enjoy it. Do your best, try not to be a dick.”
“Language.” But she’s not upset. “I really do this for you guys, though, whatever you may believe. They’re my dreams, yes, but they’re dreams of a world I can make better for you.”
“Us specifically? Me and Mel and Meredith?”
“Your generation. I know you guys face some tough things.”
“Do you?”
“I want to help with that.”
“Do you?”
“Quit saying that. I was a teenager once, too. I know what goes on.”
“You do?” I risk.
She frowns at me. She looks in the rear-view mirror, checking out for Mel in the car behind us. “I saw stuff you wouldn’t believe,” she says, under her breath.
My ears prick. “What stuff?” I ask, carefully.
She just shakes her head. “The world isn’t safe, Mike. It just isn’t. I wish it was, but it’s not. I worry for you and Mel. I worry myself sick for Meredith, that the future’s going to have enough for her to be happy and protected.”
“You need to let her go to the Bolts of Fire concert.”
“I know. She deserves it. She’s going to miss you two so much.”
I leave that alone, because it doesn’t feel like it belongs to her. Trees pass us by in the night. I watch them, looking for strange blue lights, I guess, but not finding any.
“What stuff did you see?” I ask again. “When you were a teenager?”
“Nothing,” she says, too quickly. “Are you ready for your finals?”
“Yes. What do you mean, nothing?”
“Mike,” she says, warning. “The mistake of every young person is to think they’re the only ones who see darkness and hardship in the world.”
“That’s what the cop said,” I mumble.
“What cop?” she snaps.
“On TV,” I say, pleased at myself for thinking so fast. “The mistake of every adult, though, is to think darkness and hardship aren’t important to young people because we’ll grow out of it. Who cares if we will? Life is happening to us now, just like it’s happening to you.”
“What’s happening to you now?” she says, her voice changing, alert as a meerkat.
“Mom–”
“Tell me. Are you okay?”
“I didn’t mean–”
“I think you did mean,” she says. “Teens argue with their parents. That’s the law of nature. Doesn’t mean we stop caring about you. Doesn’t mean we stop being parents.”
“Dad stopped. A long time ago.”
There’s a really, really dangerous silence at this. I find that I don’t actually care.
“Your father…” she starts, but she doesn’t finish.
“He checked out after he stole all that money from Uncle Rick,” I say. “He never checked back in. Mel loves him, still. So where did he go?”
“And why can’t I bring him back? I don’t know. I wish I did. He was there tonight.”
“He was about forty per cent there tonight, and the sad thing is, we all thought that was a victory.”
She doesn’t say anything to this, just stares ahead into the darkened road. I feel bad now for wrecking the mood on her big announcement night, though I’m still wondering what she saw as a teenager. Was that the time of the undead? No, that was a bit later. But was there something, in her teenage years? Why have I never thought that she might have seen all this stuff, too?
“You didn’t say what was happening with you,” she says. “I need to know. I want to know. Not for the campaign. Because I’m your mother.”
I don’t answer her. I don’t want to.
But then I do.
“I think I need to see a psychiatrist again,” I say. “I think I need to go back on medication.”
There’s the smallest of pauses, like she’s slotting the information into some grid in her head. “The compulsive stuff?” she asks.
“Yep.”
“It’s gotten that bad?”
“It’s gotten really, really bad.”
I watch her absorb this. I watch her nod. “Okay.”
“‘Okay’?” I say, surprised.
“Of course,” she says, also surprised. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Well … the campaign, for one–”
“Didn’t you hear me? Weren’t you listening to that ferocious mama bear crap?”
“I assumed that was something the party wrote for you in case you got asked about Mel.”
“Well. Okay. That’s true. But–”
“Lieutenant Governor would have been the big time, too. And that’s when everything went to hell. You can’t blame us for being a little weirded out by it.”
“No,” she says, after a second. “No, I can’t. Is it because of the campaign? Your … trouble?”
“I don’t think so. It started before Mankiewicz died. This isn’t me trying to tell you not to run. I think it’s just … life and graduation and everything changing.”
And zombie deer, I don’t say. And kids at my school dying. And Henna and her spirit of exploration.
“We’ll work it out,” she says. “I promise. I’ll talk to my team and work something out.”
“Why does your team need to know?”
“They need to know everything a journalist might find out. That way they can protect us.”
We’re nearly home, and I don’t say anything more. I certainly don’t ask what it might be like for families that don’t need protection from their parent’s jobs. Strange. It feels like we’d almost got somewhere, but then missed it. I’m surprised at how disappointed I feel.
When I go to bed, there’s a text from Jared. Not bad in a suit there, Mikey.
I text back. You saw it? Was it gruesome?
Jared: All politics is/are gruesome.
Me: Will you have to be at your dad’s?
Jared: He doesn’t get a press conference. He’s
announcing on Twitter.
Me: Oh. Sorry.
Jared: Don’t be. Makes him seem like the undergod.
Me: Did you just type undergod?
Jared: Underdog.
Me: Does anyone use Twitter any more?
Jared: UNDERDOG.
Before I put my phone away, I text Mel. You all right?
Counting the days, she texts back from her bedroom.
Me: Dad was okay.
She doesn’t answer.
Me: I like Call Me Steve.
Mel: Me too.
I put my phone back on my side table to go to sleep, but it buzzes again.
Mel: What’s going to happen to Meredith when we go?
Me: She’ll be better than all of us. The only one who won’t need therapy.
Mel: I don’t trust ANYONE who doesn’t need therapy.
Me: You don’t trust anyone period.
Mel: I trust you.
CHAPTER THE TWELFTH, in which Satchel’s love for the Prince grows real and true and like nothing she’s ever known before; second indie kid Finn feels her distance and is hurt, but she tells him, “No one can provide the heart its own peace; you have to find it yourself”; Dylan, to her surprise, is the one who gives her space; even better, no one else has died; they follow the Prince’s instructions on where and when to be, and all danger is avoided; Satchel and the Prince kiss again, but he respects her too much to demand more.
The word “finals” makes it sound like a bigger deal than it is, at least for us. We’re all College Prep, so most of the hard work had to be done early enough to prove to colleges we’d be worth indebting ourselves forever to them. The “final” for US History was just that Civil War essay, for example, which we all managed to get turned in on time, splitting the questions so me and Mel didn’t do the same one. The rest of our major tests have at least two of us in each class, so lunches turn into study sessions. For me, my only real worries are Calc and English.
“What is the limit as x approaches one of one minus x-squared over x to the fourth minus x?” I read.
“Iambic pentameter,” Mel says.
“You are?”
“Minus two-thirds,” Henna answers.
We look up to Jared. “Yep,” he says.
“It’s not iambic pentameter?” Mel says.
“You’re definitely bic pentameter,” Henna says. “In those shoes, anyway.”
“Because they look like four feet?” Mel says.
“Can I squeeze in?” Nathan says, appearing at our table.
Why does he do that? Always arrive late? He never comes with anyone, just wanders in after we’re all together. What’s he up to?
“I brought that essay I did last year on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” he says, handing it to me. Me and Mel are the only two in AP English, and that awful, awful book is one of our exam texts, so he’s really helping us out here.
“Thanks,” I say, a bit surly.
“Don’t be too thankful, I only got a B and I still don’t have a clue what the hell the book was about.”
“No one does,” Mel says. “I think that’s the point.”
“Did you even finish it?” I ask her.
She hesitates. “Ish.”
“Listen–” Nathan says.
“This is…” I say, flipping through his essay. “Long.”
“They called it Core College in Tulsa,” he says, “and they really weren’t kidding. Listen–”
“Let me see,” Mel says, reaching over for the essay.
“Is this right?” Henna asks Jared, showing him some Calc work. He scans it in an instant.
“All fine,” he says. “I don’t know why you’re worried, Henna. You’re as good as me.”
“Meredith isn’t even as good as you,” she says, frowning at her paper.
“Guys?” Nathan says.
“Crap,” Mel says, reading his essay. “This is really smart. Like really smart. So much smarter than me.”
“I doubt that,” I say.
“What is this word even?” She points on the page, holding it up.
“Ossification,” Nathan says.
“What kind of sixteen-year-old writes ‘ossification’?” Mel says, her voice ticking up in slight panic. “Why do I not use ‘ossification’?!”
“I was seventeen, actually. I’m eighteen now.”
“Me, too,” says Henna.
“Me, too,” says Jared.
“I’m nineteen,” says Mel, “and I know nothing of ossification.”
I’ll be eighteen in June. Jared is only two months older than me, but I’d sort of forgotten that this was the two months where I’m at least a whole year younger than everyone else. Including, it seems, Nathan, who’s still trying to ask us something.
“I’d like to paint the bridge,” he says and everyone looks at him, shocked. “If you guys would do it with me.”
It’s a senior tradition to paint the railroad bridge near the school. Buses, students and staff all drive under it every morning to reach the school gates. Most of the things written there are boring (“Gina, Joelle, Stefanie, Friends 4Evah” (yes, seriously, 4Evah)), stupid (“Here I paint all broken-hearted” and then they didn’t leave enough room to finish the poem) or vulgar/threatening (“Andersen sucks dicks”; Andersen being our wildly unliked shop teacher and basketball coach who probably never, in fact, engages in the behaviour in question). The tags get painted over by other boring, stupid, or obscene tags in a matter of days, but it’s tradition, as if that alone is reason enough. Slavery and buying your wife were traditions, too.
It’s also technically illegal, of course, so it has to be done at night, usually deep in the darkest part. We were never going to do it anyway – we’re exactly the sort of nice kids who would consider it too stupid to bother; Jared didn’t even do it with the football team when we beat our district rival in the last game (to finish the season 2-7, woohoo, go team) – but with all the blue-eyed cops, the blue-eyed deer, and indie kids dying from probably blue-eyed causes, it was definitely out of the question.
Until Nathan suggested it.
“You’re not even from here,” I said, over that study lunch, but I was already too late. I could see the eyes of the others light up.
“Exactly,” Nathan said. “I’m not from anywhere. I’ve got nothing. No traditions. No friends except you guys, and you,” he said to me, “don’t even like me.”
I waited too long to protest.
“I just,” he said, shrugging, “I want something I did in high school to be … high school-y. So I can look back in fifty years and say, ‘At least I did something stupid and young as proof that I was there.’”
And that kinda cracked it. Henna agreed immediately, Mel said his story made her sad but not doing it would now make her sadder, and Jared said, “Why not?”
“Because zombie deer,” I say now, shivering even though it’s not actually all that cold, even in the middle of the night. We’re in my car again, parked a block away from the rail bridge. “And cops with murder in their eyes. And actual dead people.”
“There’s enough of us,” Jared says, squashed in the back seat with Nathan and Mel. Henna gets the passenger seat because of her still-broken arm and because she’s Henna. “We’ll be careful and we’ll be all right.”
Nathan holds up his backpack. “I got five cans. One colour for each of us. Nearly got arrested.”
“Nearly doesn’t count,” I say.
“Silver, gold, blue, red and yellow.” He looks at me in the rear-view mirror. “You get yellow.”
“Are we going to do this or not?” Mel yawns.
“I vote not,” I say.
“Enough, Mikey,” Henna says, scornfully enough to make my stomach hurt. She gets out of the car. The back seat follows her and I’m last, looking like I’m pouting as I accept the can of yellow paint.
The bridge isn’t actually all that big, crossing just two lanes of an old logging road. There are embankments either side
leading up to it, and people sometimes paint the concrete ledges of these, too. We don’t. We don’t want to waste any time. I follow Henna up the right embankment where she’s walking with Mel. Jared and Nathan head up the other side. The idea is you stand on the bridge and lean over the top, writing whatever you want from above.
There’s a lot of shaking of paint cans, a lot of the metallic pinging sound of the ball-bearing they leave inside to stir the paint.
“We don’t have white,” I whisper, loud enough for everyone to hear. “You’re supposed to have white to paint over what went before.”
“Not if you’re creative enough,” Nathan says. He’s already reached the far end of the bridge, and with his can of gold paint, he turns a shoddily painted cardinal – our sad school mascot; I’ve never seen a live one the whole of my life I’ve lived in this state – into, I’ll admit it, a fairly nifty-looking bumblebee. I see Jared nod in appreciation, and my irritated stomach growls some more.
Mel’s got the dark blue and has made her way to the middle of the bridge, leaning over decisively and painting “A Year Too Late” in puffy blue letters over some streaked puffy pink ones that obviously got rained on.
“Do you really believe that?” I ask her.
“Oh,” she says, “I had no idea this was about what we really believed.” She pops the cap back on her paint can, takes out her phone, and starts texting Call Me Steve, who’s on nights.
I lean out over the bridge to see what Nathan’s finishing up. The bumblebee now flies away from a golden arm that it’s just stung. “Leave Your Sting Behind”, he writes.
“Bees die when they do that,” I say. Henna nudges me, annoyed.
“It’s a metaphor,” Nathan says.
“Metaphorical bees die, too.”
Jared’s at work with the silver paint, covering up a heart celebrating the no doubt eternal love of Oliver and Shania. He takes the gold paint from Nathan and sprays a circle and some markings against the still-wet bed of silver.
“What’s that?” Nathan asks.
“Kind of my own personal tag,” Jared says.
I don’t recognize it, but I can see a line of cats stopped just outside the streetlight down the road. I wonder if it’s a kind of standing blessing for them, as long as it lasts. They don’t come any closer, and I also wonder if they know Jared doesn’t want them to. No one’s told Nathan that anything’s different about Jared. It’s a pact we all silently keep. Who’d believe us anyway? Indie kids are dying before their eyes and no one’s even guessing at what’s probably the real reason. These Immortals that Meredith found. Or not. But it sure as hell isn’t accident or suicide.
