Away We Go (2 page)

A YEAR AND A HALF BEFORE THE CATACLYSMIC, FIERY, KIND OF CLICHÉD END OF ALL THINGS (OR NOT)

AWAY TO WESTING

I was fifteen years old.

It was a dreary March day, a year and a half before the world was supposed to end. And the closest person I had to family wanted me gone.

Alex and I spent most of our time in a converted bathroom that the administration of the Richmond Youth Recovery Center for Boys had stuffed with books and called a “library.” Nobody cared enough to dispute the title. The library's reading selection ranged from
The Little Engine That Could
to
On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason,
and while the stalls and the sinks had been ripped out to make way for bookshelves, a lone urinal had inexplicably been left standing against the far wall, so half the library's visitors were boys whose interest in relieving their overfull bladders far exceeded that of engaging with the world republic of letters. We were settled in a corner of the library, passing a cig between us. Footsteps pattered down the hallway. Alex brushed a lock of brown hair away from his eyes, handed the cig to me, and asked me what I thought about Director Mary's latest spiel.

I sucked in the smoke, held it in my throat as long as I could.

“
Noah,
” he said. “You even listening or those ears just for show?”

“Huh?” I croaked.

I had been studying his perpetually dirty nails.

“You know, No,” he said. “What Mary Poppins said about taking the NAAPs and getting the
fuck
out of here, son.”

“You mean you were actually at assembly?” I said in mock disbelief.

Alex took offense. “Fuck no, No,” he said. “But word gets around.”

I shrugged. “Well,
Al.
Even if we take the NAAPs, and honestly I'd rather take a nap instead—”

“Oh God,” he said, feigning an allergic reaction to my punniness, gasping for breath.

I nudged him with my shoulder gently. “And even if we take the NAAPs, and get like perfect scores, the chances of getting into Westing are
minute.
”

“Look at you. Using words like ‘minute,'” Alex said. “You definitely don't belong here.”

“There's no point, man,” I said. “We're going away in a few years max, no matter if we're at Westing or Richmond.”

“Richmond's library”—Alex pointed to the far wall—“has almost as many urinals as books. I hear Westing is like a fucking castle. Gothic architecture and shit. And stained-glass windows, son.”

“The chances are
minute.
” I wanted to tell him his nails were disgusting. I wanted to kiss him.

“I'll NAAP if you will,” I finally offered, and waited for him to take me up on it.

When he met my eye, it was with a pitying look, the kind that says:
Have you always been slower than a tertiary-stage relay team, or is this a new development?

“It would be pointless for me,” Alex said. “There are kids who've never shown up to class who have higher GPAs.”

“Maybe if you do really well on the NAAPs—”

“Please, son,” Alex said, rolling his eyes. He didn't say it, but he meant:
Grow up.

“Then I'm not applying. Or taking the test.”

“I'd do it if I were you.”

I opened my mouth to ask him if he meant that, if he'd really leave me behind, but I stopped myself.

I didn't want to know.

There was no more talk about the NAAPs. I didn't study or take the prep classes. But a few weeks later, on a muggy Saturday in mid-April, Alex shook me awake at nine a.m., pulled me half naked out of my bunk bed, and made me dress myself.

I was in a semi-comatose state and thus did not muster much of a protest. Eventually, I caught a glimpse of the time on our wall clock and asked desperately, “What's going on?” I hadn't gotten up at nine a.m. on a Saturday since before my balls dropped. Usually I skipped breakfasts on the weekends (if the weekdays were anything to go by, I wasn't missing much) and went straight from bed to lunch.

Alex didn't answer. He was bent over, rummaging through my footlocker. He tossed a pair of socks over his shoulder, not looking. They hit me in the face.

“What the fuck,” I said.

A pair of jeans followed.

“What the fuck.”

He turned, saw the jeans and socks on the floor. “Hurry up,” he said.

“What—”

“Trust me, son.”

“But—”

“Don't be a bitch.”

After I dressed myself, he grabbed me by the arm and led me through our dormitory, crammed with the bodies of over two hundred snoring boys, down a number of gray and peeling hallways, and into our gym. He practically threw me into one of the few remaining chairs.

“Sit,” he ordered.

Before I could say a word, he told me, “Stay.” He exchanged a few words with the proctor at the front of the class. I counted maybe twenty other boys who'd come to take the test. He returned with “a present.” He deposited this present, which looked suspiciously like an NAAP, on my desk. Frowned at me. Said, “Oh yeah.” Thrust his hand in his pocket, took out a dull pencil, and placed it next to the test packet masquerading as a present.

I waited for him to change his mind. Maybe he'd sit down to take the test with me. But instead he gave me a two-finger salute, turned on his heel, and left.

A couple weeks after that Saturday on which so many hours of sleep were stolen from me, the teachers posted our scores on the gym wall.

I got a 150. Better than anyone else at Richmond. Still, it wasn't good enough, not for a place like Westing, the only recovery center of its kind in the entire National Recovery Program. Supposedly a prototype for the next generation of recovery centers, for now it was where America herded away its best and brightest to recite Eugene Onegin, live in progressive coed dorms that challenge the gender binary, and, eventually, disappear like all the other infected kids. The official story was that kids too sick for regular recovery centers got transferred to tertiary care clinics, but Alex
maintained the government probably shipped us off to Area 51 to be dissected by aliens—a popular theory.

I stumbled through the cafeteria crowds, everyone soaked in sweat, because the AC wasn't working again. I wanted to tell Alex the good news:
I'm staying, bitch.
His chosen table had a crack down the middle and graffiti of the
Suck my dick
variety covering every bit of the surface. He was picking at one of the slightly green gelatinous globs that passed for mac and cheese at Richmond. A small plastic bag lay next to his plate.

“Yummy,” I said as I sat down across from him.

“If you say so,” he said, biting absentmindedly at a dirty nail.

“What's in the bag?”

He reached in to produce a chocolate bar. Wiggled it. He must've bought it from one of the dealers; probably paid a fortune for it, too. Anything from outside cost a fortune. He slid it over to me.

“Your congratulatory feast.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, son. Don't ruin it.”

“I didn't get a one sixty. Not even close.”

“You beat the next closest guy by five points,” he said. “If anyone gets in from here, it'll be you.”

“I'm telling you it's not good enough.” I'd felt relief when I saw my score. I could barely remember my parents, my brother, so their loss was like the loss of a dream you forget upon waking. But Alex was as solid as the ground beneath my feet. “I'm not applying.”

“Yeah, you are.”

“What is wrong with you?” I said, my frustration finally spilling out.

“What is wrong with
you
?” He was angrier than I'd ever seen him.

“Westing can suck it,” I replied, inspired by the graffiti.

Alex closed his eyes. He spoke in a tone of forced evenness. I had to lean in to hear.

“Oh, No. My bro.” He opened his eyes and flashed me a thin smile. “It'll be good for you there. Trust me. If you don't want to do it for yourself, do it for me.”

“And besides,” he continued, “at Westing you'll be able to get some pussy.” He said this with a decisive air, as if he felt that should settle the matter once and for all. But I didn't
want
pussy. Without access to girls, guys at Richmond sometimes took to experimenting with each other. What Alex and I had done, I'd liked.

“And Noah?”

“Yeah?” I was using my sulky voice.

“For your essay?”

“Yeah?”

“Write it on your acting.”

I pictured the Westing admissions committee, a group of old prunes I'd never met sitting in suits at a glass conference table, all quiet and regal and trying not to pass gas, weighing the decision of whether to admit Jacob S. or Sarah P. with such gravitas you'd have thought the papers in their lined, neatly manicured hands contained an imprint of the applicants' souls.

Instead of writing the essay to them, I wrote it to Alex. In reading my essay to Alex, the admissions committee read of me performing plays real and imagined in closets and bathrooms, and on the roof of Richmond at half past two on many a winter morning. “‘To be or not to be?'” I once asked the dark and snowy sky. I hadn't merely said the words. I'd stood at the edge of the roof and meant them.

In late July, a few weeks short of my sixteenth birthday, I heard back.

We spent my last night at Richmond on the roof, looking out at the fields beyond Richmond's walls. It was a brisk night in early September, one of the first autumn nights, and what I wouldn't have given for a five-minute run through the surrounding countryside, a chance to dash headlong into that wind. Just thinking about it made me dizzy with excitement—I could hardly remember a time I wasn't surrounded by walls. I said so to Alex.

“I mean, sure, I'd probably trip and fall on my face, but up to that point it would be sweet.”

He didn't respond at first. “I wonder why they don't round us all up and shoot us. Instead of sticking us in centers. Burn the bodies. Stop PPV from spreading once and for all. That would be best.”

When I didn't answer, he added, “Better than being some alien lab experiment.”

“If I was an alien and you were my lab experiment, I would send a probe to Uranus.”

“Stop,” he said, pretending to be annoyed, but he couldn't keep from laughing.

At Richmond, we had little connection with the outside—no Internet, no cable, a bin of old movies to watch on a TV more ancient than our parents. But we could see that despite our being “in recovery,” more kids kept showing up at Richmond, red-eyed and fresh from their diagnoses. These fresh faces brought news of the government's billion-dollar National Recovery Program, recovery centers like Richmond cropping up all over the country. There were whispers of medication shortages and internment camps—sorry, improvised mass recovery clinics—at the same time that the government was reportedly
spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Westing. A kid named Jeremy Bertram claimed his dad was a tertiary care researcher who had pioneered a medical procedure that had cured several infected kids of PPV, whereas Jason Waters maintained tertiary care clinics were slaughterhouses in which infected kids rolled down an assembly line until a man in a rubber suit shot them in the forehead. Sanjeev Kapoor told us about how in Mumbai, parents wouldn't let children outside—those who had money sent their kids into the country, away from the cities. A devout Catholic boy appropriately named Christian wouldn't shut up about an attempt on Pope John Paul III's life; despite the fact that the gates of heaven were cracked wide for His Holiness, Pope John Paul apparently proved remarkably resilient to assassination, because the would-be assassin—Marco Rinaldi—had the distinction of being the only man in history to have been head-butted repeatedly in the face by Christ's acting representative on Earth.