by Patrick Ness
It’s already pretty crowded when we get there, even though it’s two full hours before the actual graduation part. We’ve got some sort of practice to get through first, though how hard can it be? We find Mel and Steve in the sea of sweating black robes. Jared and Nathan are with them. Henna hugs everybody.
“Hey,” I say to Jared.
“Hey,” he says.
Everyone’s looking at us. “Oh, for God’s sake,” Mel says, grabbing each of us by the arm and pushing us towards the edge of the crowd. “Go. Work it out. It’s our last day.”
So we do. We walk away from the main field where graduation practice is starting – seriously, practice – and we head around to the back of the gym, away from where any teacher might spot us and drag us back.
“I’m sorry,” Jared says, first thing.
“I’m sorry, too,” I say.
“I didn’t mean those things. I really didn’t.”
“You did, but … I kind of deserved them.”
“I kind of deserved them, too.”
We don’t say anything else for a minute.
“Is that it?” I ask, actually curious.
“I guess so.”
“Are we okay?”
“Doesn’t really feel like it, does it?”
Another long pause.
“I slept with Henna,” I say.
He smiles, amazed. “You did?”
“Yeah. And we figured out we really are only just friends. It’s been kind of … kind of great, actually.”
“See?” he says. “There’s a secret you kept from me.”
“I’d have a lifetime to go to catch up with you.”
He looks away, trying to shove his hands in his pockets through his graduation robe. It doesn’t work. “Yeah,” he says. “I know. But Mikey, I fight with everything I’ve got to have a normal life. No one will ever let me. Except you. You’ve been the guy who saved me. Lots of times.”
“You could tell me anything, Jared. Anything.”
He winces, briefly. “It has nothing to do with not trusting you. It’s to do with what something becomes once you tell it. It’s like it’s truer. And it’s got a life of its own and it rushes out into the world and becomes something you can’t control.”
I wait for him to keep going. He does.
“I don’t want to be an indie kid, Mike. I should be one. I’m gay. I’m part God. Jared isn’t even my first name–”
“Mercury,” I say, out loud for maybe the first time in ten years. He winces again. I really can’t tell you how much he hates it.
“What chance do I have with a name like that? I just want a normal life. I want things that are mine. I want my own choices, not ones made for me even by people who mean well or are my friends.”
“I wouldn’t have made any choices about Nathan for you, one way or the other.”
“I know. I do know that. I was wrong and I’m sorry.” He shrugs. “But I finally meet somebody and now what? We’ve got the summer, but I’m moving away. All of us are.”
“Mel’s doing the same thing with Steve.”
“I know.”
I wait. And wait some more. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”
He takes a deep breath. “Mike, what would you say if I could–”
And we hear the moan from the bushes.
There’s a row of ferns and shrubs behind the gym, mainly so the huge back fence with barbed wire on top looks slightly less like a huge back fence with barbed wire on top. The moan that came from them wasn’t words; it was just a moan, low and guttural and wet-sounding.
“What was that?” I say, thinking of the mountain lion again, thinking also that we haven’t yet seen the big finale for whatever mess the indie kids are mixed up in, so maybe there are more blue lights to come.
We hear it again. “There,” Jared points, already moving over. I’m sweating like crazy in this stupid gown, and I can feel my clothes sticking to me as we cross into the sun again, over to the shrubs. We start pushing back leaves and branches, looking for where the noise came from, then right at my feet–
It’s a boy. It’s an indie kid.
“Oh, shit,” Jared says.
I yank back the branches to get them out of the way. The indie kid is on his stomach, his head is turned to the side, and we see the blood that’s come out of his mouth and down his chin. It’s congealed, like he’s been here for an hour or two. Jared motions for me to help turn him over. The indie kid calls out in pain when we do, though he’s barely conscious.
We see why. “Oh, my God,” I say.
The indie kid is all in black, like we are, but these are just his normal clothes. His shirt has been all torn up, and there are terrible, terrible wounds on his chest, all bleeding badly, like he’s been stabbed over and over again. I’m amazed he’s still alive, and I think he just barely is. His eyes are only half-open, and he doesn’t seem to know who we are or that we’re even here.
“I know him,” Jared says. “He’s one of the Finns.”
It is one of the Finns. I recognize him, too. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
I stand to get my phone out from under my robes. “We’ve got to get some help.”
“I don’t think we have time,” Jared says, pushing up his sleeves.
“Can you heal him enough?” I ask. “Enough to keep him alive until–”
But Jared just gives me a look, one I can barely describe. It’s regretful and sad, but it’s also stern, like he has no choice.
“Jared?” I say.
He puts his hands on the indie kid.
Light comes from his palms, but it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen from him before. It’s much brighter, much bigger, and seems almost alive, snaking around the indie kid’s body, disappearing into his wounds, into his mouth and eyes, too. Jared seems to be straining with effort and when he opens his own mouth to gasp, light pours from that, too. There’s a sound that’s half airplane engine, half windstorm–
And then it all stops.
“What the hell was that?” I ask.
Jared looks at me, grim. “The something else.”
The indie kid takes a deep, choking breath and sits up, surprise leaking out everywhere on his face. He stares at me and Jared like we might be ghosts. “Jared?” he says. “Mike Mitchell?”
“That’s us,” Jared says.
The indie kid looks down at his shirt, torn, dark with blood–
But not a single wound anywhere.
“I don’t think this was supposed to happen,” the indie kid says, amazed. “I think I was supposed to die.”
“You’re welcome,” I say.
“Thank you,” he says.
“Everyone’s supposed to die,” Jared says. “You just weren’t supposed to die right now.”
The indie kid takes a deep breath. “I think you’re wrong about that.” He smiles, shaken. “But I’m glad you are.”
“What happened?” Jared asks.
The indie kid looks at us, remembering. “The Immortals surprised us. They came through the last fissure–” He jumps up, suddenly. “Satchel!”
Jared and I look at each other. “We didn’t find a satchel,” I say.
“No, no.” The indie kid stands. “I can help her now. In fact–”
He runs off towards the parking lot, fast as he can.
“Where are you going?” I shout after him.
“Home!” he shouts back. “I can get something from there! Maybe we can force the fissure to close!”
“Can we help?” Jared says.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to! But thanks!”
He turns and keeps running. We watch him go. “Doesn’t he want to graduate?” I say.
Jared shrugs. “Indie kids,” he says, as if that explains everything.
So here’s what it is. The Gods want Jared to go full-time. With his grandmother retired in her realms and his mother AWOL somewhere raising money for snow leopards, the Gods feel the position ha
s gone unfilled for too long.
They’ve wanted this for quite a while now, it turns out.
“That’s where I’ve been on those Saturdays,” Jared says, as we line up, two-by-two, to proceed to our seats. Jared and I have decided, screw it, we’re going to walk together, and so are Mel and Henna. What rebels we are. (Still, though.) “Except for the ones lately with Nathan.”
Nathan, being a late transfer in, is way down the line from us, paired up with this Estonian exchange student who, I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know went to our school.
“I kept saying no,” Jared tells me, as “Pomp and Circumstance” starts to play over the football field where all our families are seated, waiting for us to arrive. “And I had intended to keep saying no. They kept offering me stuff to make me change my mind, but I always turned them down.”
We’re in the first third of the line and so we start filing onto the football field behind the top students, including our valedictorian, a girl called Bethany who has to give a speech and looks like she can’t stop swallowing from nervousness.
“So what happened to change things?” I ask.
“The mountain lion,” Jared says, serious. “I couldn’t save her. I never want that to happen again. I said I’d consider doing it if they gave me full power to heal anyone I wanted to.”
“So that’s what you did to Finn?”
Jared nods, then looks me in the eye. “I was still thinking about it. It’s my whole life changed, after all, and I was going to see what you thought of this final offer. But by using it just now, I kind of accepted the deal anyway.”
We reach the back rows of seats, heading down the centre aisle. I see Mom and Meredith. I wave. I wave at Mr and Mrs Silvennoinen, too. I see Mr Shurin. He waves with an agonized expression on his face. I find myself waving back.
“What does this all mean?” I say. I’m already realizing, though. “You’re not coming to college with me, are you?”
“Wrong,” Jared says, then laughs at my expression. “That was my condition. I want to go to college. I want to see what that’s like. But after that…”
“After that, you’re a full-time God.”
“Looks that way,” Jared says. “I’ll ascend after I get my degree.”
“A God with a degree in Mathematics?”
“A God of cats with a degree in Mathematics.” Jared shakes his head. “My usefulness will know no bounds.”
We head down our row after Henna and Mel, who have let us be, let us keep talking. We wait, standing, for everyone to arrive.
“Will we still be able to be friends?” I ask him.
He just looks at me.
The Frenchly Canadian voice of our Principal booms over the field, sounding as bored as ever. “Graduates,” he says. “Take your seats, I suppose.”
You don’t need to hear the ceremony. God knows I don’t hear much of it. The Principal purposely gets a few English clichés wrong to raise some gentle laughter. (“It will be, as one says, up to you to take the cow by the bell.” See? Gentle.) Bethany gets through her speech without fainting. The jazz band plays a horn-heavy version of Bold freakin’ Sapphire.
I sit there, feeling like someone’s tipped me out of a helicopter into the middle of the ocean.
Jared. Gone. Four years from now, sure, but gone. He won’t even be on the planet somewhere like his absent mom. He’ll be in his realms. Literally unreachable.
“I hate it, too, Mikey,” he says to me while they start handing out diplomas. “Do you know how lonely Gods are?”
“Then why do it?”
“Because Finn would be dead if I didn’t.”
And what can I do but nod?
Before I know it, Mel’s name is called and she stands to go to the front. I rouse myself to cheer and then I really do cheer, because Mel made it. Hell, we all made it. At least this far. Mel was supposed to walk with Jared, so they call his name next and I cheer again even though it feels like my chest is going to explode. Henna moves over next to me and when they call her name, she hugs me, whispers in my ear, “I’m not going to Africa,” and heads up the aisle to get her diploma, smiling back at me. Mel and Jared have waited for her just off the stage and even though they’re not supposed to, they do the same when my name is called.
I stand, I turn to my mom and Meredith – the former taking photos, the latter screaming like I was in Bolts of Fire – and I wave again. I step up onstage, still feeling at sea, feeling like I’ve just lost sight of shore and though I’m swimming okay for now, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep it up.
“Congratulations,” the Principal says, shaking my hand.
I take my diploma from him.
And that’s it. That’s how simple it is. I graduate.
I see my friends clapping, waiting for me. They hug me as a group when I get there, a whole bunch of arms around me. The four of us, my friends.
At the end.
Jared hugs me individually, too. “There’s something more,” he says. “Something good but big. If you’ll let me.”
“We’re kind of holding up the line here,” I say, stupidly, still reeling from all this new info.
“I don’t care.” He takes hold of my shoulders. “I can finally heal you, Mikey,” he says, in the middle of all this graduating. “The OCD. The anxiety. Everything.”
“But you can’t. That’s always been too complex–”
“I can. That was another of my conditions if I took the deal.”
I don’t know what to say to this. Henna and Mel are still there, watching, other graduates trying to squeeze around us, a number of them just staying and hugging their own friends because why the hell not? The music from the band is loud and endless.
“Could you heal Mel?” I say, not even knowing I was going to say it. “Could you make it so she’s okay forever?”
Mel starts to cry when I say that, but in a good way, even though it’s clear she’s not at all sure what we’re talking about. Jared just smiles. “See, Mikey? This is why you’re never the least wanted. Not ever.”
I see a teacher finally wading his way over to us to get us out of the way, as more and more students are hanging around beside us in front of the stage, waiting for even more friends, waiting to have last conversations.
Or first conversations, I guess. The first conversations of the new life.
“I waited for this,” Jared says. “I asked for years and they said it was too much for my realm. It would give me advantages over too many other Gods, but I kept saying no.”
“Until you finally said yes,” I say.
“Until they finally said yes.”
I think of his resignation about healing the indie kid, how he had no choice but to take the deal. He must read my thoughts.
“I thought it would be you,” he says. “I thought it was you I would heal completely first, not Finn. But healing you meant I had to take the deal. Had to leave. And it was either seeing you suffer or leaving you behind.”
“And now since you’re leaving anyway…”
He shows me his palms. They light up. “This is how much you matter to me, Mikey.”
I look up in his eyes. The day is hot, the crowd around us getting bigger, louder, that damn music still parping out from the eleventh grade brass band. Henna and Mel watching us. Even Nathan finally coming through the now quite uncontrollable crowd. My mom and sister out there somewhere. The future swirling in.
Suddenly a little less worrying.
“That’s all I ever really wanted to know,” I say, realizing right that second that it’s absolutely true.
And then the girl I saw coming out of the gym after prom runs down the graduation aisle, not in a cap and gown.
“Everybody get out of here!” she screams, loud enough to be heard over all the noise. “The school is about to blow!”
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST, in which they blow up the high school.
We watch the school burn, despite the best efforts of every fire truck
within fifty miles.
The explosion took out nearly everything, including half the football field and nearly all of the parking lot. Most of our cars were destroyed, so no one’s been able to quite get home yet. Blue lights flashed through the initial explosions – including a pillar that reached all the way up to the clouds – but then they stopped and it was just a ridiculously huge fire.
One that, as far as we can tell, didn’t kill anyone. Not even any indie kids.
When that girl told everyone to run, everyone did, even the adults, who you would have thought would assume it was a prank. But maybe they really could sense that there was something wrong going on in the town. Or maybe they remember more about their own teenage years than they ever let on.
Even my mom, carrying Meredith, found us in what turned out to be our second stampede of the month.
“Should we take her seriously?” she asked.
“We really should,” Mel said, dragging her along.
Everybody ran. Everybody got to a safe distance. Everybody was able to watch as the gym exploded in a wave so strong, it still knocked us back.
And that was the end of our high school. Which was only eight years old, because it had replaced the last one that had been blown up to destroy the soul-eating ghosts. The circle of life, I guess.
There are small hills to one side of the school. They’re fairly wooded, but you can still get a good view of the fire through the trees. There’s also a fast-food place at the bottom of the other side, down from the Mexican place where we ate lunch so many times, and after everyone realized we weren’t dead or likely to be, a lot of us were hungry. We got burgers and fries and climbed back up the hill to watch the blaze. We’re surrounded now by students in their caps and gowns, parents in suits and dresses, a few news crews – who are talking to my mother, but she’s keeping them a safe distance from me and Mel and Henna and Jared and Nathan and Steve and Meredith (who my mom left with us) – as we sit and eat and watch our high school burn to the ground.
“Well,” Mel says, taking a bite of a chicken burger, even eating the bun, “at least we got our diplomas.”
“I’m sure everyone else will have theirs mailed to them,” Jared says. He’s unzipped his gown and is wearing it like a cape. Still got the cap on, though. We all do. Because why not? We graduated.
