Away We Go (4 page)

THE NEXT BEST THING

Breakfast meant something to me in the days before Westing or Richmond, days of blurred faces and muted words. I would make my way down the stairs of our house on Sunday morning to the smell of syrup and butter. Grandma and Grandpa used to cook breakfast for us on Sundays. Grandma liked to chase Grandpa around the kitchen with a wooden spatula.

They must be dead by now.

There's a path I love that starts at the lake, arcs behind Galloway, and ends at the rear of the cafeteria. On a whim, I drop by the campus store in Galloway to buy Marty a present to say I'm sorry for always being late, something silly, and then I'm running for the cafeteria, the cobblestones under my feet wet from the morning drizzle. They look like glass. If not for the shade from the evergreens, I might catch my reflection in them. For no reason at all, I close my eyes. Sometimes I do this. Walk with my eyes closed. The sound of an engine interrupts my Zen. I open my eyes, step off the path. A Westing security officer whizzes by in a cart. The Believers are waiting on the cafeteria steps, holding their
The End Time Is Your Time
signs. A pretty boy with unruly hair flashes a smile at me, and while I'm momentarily taken off guard, shoves a flyer in my face.

In the cafeteria, I crumple the flyer and decide I'm not hungry, in spite of my stomach's grumbling protests to the contrary. I find Marty at a table off to the side, hunched into
himself, as if to minimize the space he takes up in the world. Of course, he doesn't notice me. He's bent over a copy of
War and Peace,
scratching absentmindedly at the dark caramel skin of his forehead.

I clear my throat.

He looks up from the book and says, “Oh,” by which he means, “You're here.”

I offer him his present—the Westing basketball cap I bought at the campus store—as a “token of our undying friendship.” An inside joke, seeing as how we're both such tremendous sports buffs, he and I. Drinking five shots of vodka is an act of great endurance, right?

He laughs.

“It's a bit sweaty,” I say, “but what's a little exchange of bodily fluids between friends?”

He dons the cap frontward, which is ridiculous. I reach over, adjusting it so that it's backward.

“There,” I say.

“I feel so cool,” he says.

I'm so happy I want to hug Marty. He reminds me that things don't have to be complicated.

“I disapprove of your life choices,” I say, indicating the sandwich on his plate.

He gives me a cheeky grin. “You've made your feelings about sandwiches clear before.”

“That they're culinary atrocities?”

“Uh-huh.” He takes a bite.

“That those who eat them are heretics?”

“Urh-hurh,” he says through a full mouth.

My eyes narrow. “You got it on purpose, didn't you?”

His face lights up, and he nods enthusiastically.

“You don't even
like
sandwiches, do you?” I say.

Marty swallows. “I think they're efficient.”

I roll my eyes. “Martin, dear,
please.
Someone who's worried about efficiency wouldn't be reading
War and Peace.
Tolstoy should've edited that monster down into a short story.”

Marty pales visibly. “I'm going to pretend you didn't say that,” he whispers.

“I tried to read it once myself. I got seven pages in before deciding war and peace were both interminably boring.”

He swallows. “It really picks up after the first four hundred pages.”

“I'm sure.”

“Well,” he starts, hesitates, before blurting: “I think Shakespeare is overrated.” He waits for my reaction.

I shake my head sadly, because there is no accounting for poor taste. “Martin, dear Martin. ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.'”

The words sound all wrong as they leave my lips, much sadder, more serious than I meant them to be. We're silent for a time. He adjusts his glasses, which are thicker now than they were before, despite the drugs the doctors inject into his eyes every month. He shoots me a look of feigned reproach. He reads, “‘One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line dividing the living from the dead lies uncertainty, suffering, and death. And what is there? Who is there?—there beyond that field, that tree, that roof lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to know.'” He pauses, licks his lips. “‘You fear and yet long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must be crossed and you will have to find out what is there, just as
you will inevitably have to learn what lies on the other side of death. But you are strong, healthy, cheerful, and excited, and are surrounded by other such excitedly animated and healthy men.'”

He is expectant. I meet his gaze, and in his gaze I see the walls of Westing, equipped with state-of-the-art motion sensors, patrolled by guards. I see the fields and trees and roofs lit beyond the walls, the parents beyond them, parents whose letters Marty, unlike me, answers.

THE END TIME
IS YOUR TIME
MAKE IT COUNT

Start BELIEVING today.
Wake up to a new TOMORROW.

This Message Brought to You by the

WESTING BELIEVERS

Meetings Every Thursday: Bullsworth Auditorium

Join us online at AwayWeGo.com/groups/believe

WHO WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE

After breakfast, I drop Marty off at the Westing Library, which looks like something out of Tolkien's Middle Earth, all towers and parapets. Inside, urinals and books are strictly segregated.

“I'll be in here for a while,” Marty says.

“More of the Russians?”

He gives me a sheepish shrug. “You can never have enough dead Russians in your life.”

“Got to go to work now,” I say. “Might drop in to annoy you later, Martin dear.”

I go to work in the sense that I show up three times a week for two hours a pop to get trained for a job I've yet to undertake. The money I make from that plus my requisite student stipend—provided by my parents—goes into an account. I can then buy foreign-made shirts and mugs with the Westing logo stamped onto their fronts—a gold
W
over an impressionistic rendition of Galloway Hall. Oh, yes, and alcohol, too. Alcohol most definitely. I don't know how it gets smuggled in, but I'm sure glad someone figured it out.

It was Alice's idea to become orientation leaders for the newsies, the incoming students that will be arriving in the fall. The only thing we're leaders of at the moment, however, is “community building” and listening studiously as administrative authorities lecture us on the dangers of drinking, drugs, and
unprotected sex, presumably so we can pass all this information onto the newsies. Nobody ever bothers to mention the little matter of showing up as a name under DEPARTEES.

Today Alice and I are assigned to community-build the garbage out of the academic quad. We take it room by room, bin by bin.

“You wouldn't know a girl named Addie, would you?” she asks me.

Cold wells up inside me. “Umm, yeah. Why?”

“Addie and I have the same advisor, so we see each other sometimes, during his office hours. . . . She told me you're friends with her boyfriend. Zach, I think his name was. You do polo together. I didn't know we had polo.”

The cold circulates through my body.

“Noah?”

“We watch vids of old polo games. From the library. Sometimes we climb onto each other's backs and pretend to be riding horses. Mostly guys, so it's pretty homoerotic, riding each other around. Zach's my favorite polo steed.”

“I can never get a straight answer from you,” she says, pretending to be cross.

Ha. A
straight
answer.

“I'm a complicated person,” I explain.

She rolls her eyes. “But—so you know him?”

“Yes—umm, yeah. We're—friendly, yeah. We lived in Clover together. We had a race.”

“A race? I thought you
hated
races.”

“‘Hate' is a strong word.”

“When I mentioned you going out for track you gave me that thirty-minute lecture about how beating other people is a—”

“Contrived attempt at finding meaning in a nihilistic void
of nothing!” I finish, with enough glee that Alice shoots me a worried look.

“Yes,
that,
” she says, and I can tell she's making a concerted effort at not rolling her eyes again.

“This race was different,” I say, glancing out a window onto the academic quad. She looks at me strangely, like she's trying to read my expression. In the quad, a pair of students sit on a bench, smoking, a guy and a girl. I watch their lips move, invent their words:
I love you so much, Jenny. Oh, I love you so much, too, Michael. Look how happy we are. Let's make everyone who's not in love feel shitty about themselves. Give me a smooch. Smoochysmoochysmoochysmooch.

“What about him?” I ask, finally. “Zach?”

“He's sick, Noah,” she says, quiet. “I mean,
really
sick. Addie said she didn't know how much longer—she thought your favorite polo steed, he might be happy to see you.”

“He asked for me?” My voice sounds too pained, too desperate. I don't know why, suddenly, I'm panicking. I've only
just
seen Zach. He told me about baby heirloom tomatoes. The key he gave me is heavy in my pocket.

“You should visit him, Noah. He's your
friend.
He deserves that.”

I try not to look at Alice. “I've been meaning to,” I say, which is not exactly a lie, but not exactly a truth either.

“If you want I could come with you. I don't know him, but—”

“No,” I say, too quickly. I can tell she's hurt. “It's something I need to do alone. Anyway, it's not like we don't see each other. Polo Club's just on hiatus.” Another half-truth. I don't tell her our hiatus has been going on for, like, eight months. I don't tell her we're waiting for Zach to fall sick, sick enough to be taken away. Then we'll find out. We'll find out where all the sick kids go.

“I know you don't want to hear this, but it could help to see someone,” she says.

Aha. Of course. Enlisting me in Westing's counseling services is her latest Noah Salvation Initiative. Before this, she'd tried dragging me to chapel, then to Bible study, where I posed queries like “If God is omnipotent, why did he need to rest on the seventh day? Imagine if he'd powered through. We might've had unicorns.” I was encouraged to limit my participation in future meetings.

“It could help you work through your feelings,” she continues.

“You're right,” I say. “I don't want to hear it.”

Guilt simmers inside me. She and I take out the trash in silence after that. Once we finish with Gates, we move on to Lombardy. Maybe I'm feeling guilty for being brusque with her. Maybe I'm lonely. Maybe it's the tertiary care informational flyer I find under a chair in a corner of the room. Or maybe it's as simple as I don't want to pick up garbage anymore.

Regardless, I kiss her. My hands are inside her shirt, her right nipple hard under my thumb.

“Not here,” she whispers.

“‘Here,' ‘there,' it's all arbitrary anyway.”

In a world without objective meaning, in a world of cosmic emptiness, a lab table is as good as a bed.

But Alice doesn't understand.

“Not here,” she insists, and breaks away from me.

With a sigh, I return to picking up trash.

Each lakeside apartment houses three to five students. Apartment 112 belongs to me, Marty, and Alice. I wanted Zach to be our fourth, to apply with us at the end of spring semester, when all the new students ditch their obligatory newsie-year doubles and triples for suites, singles, and Lakeside Apartments. But Zach already had a single and anyway, it's hard to arrange living with someone if you never bring it up to him.

The mere thought makes me panicky.

In Alice's room, I press my lip to hers. The lake outside glistens in the bright of the afternoon, and my head is full of Zach. Alice breathes into my shoulder, the smell of garbage hanging onto us, faint but discernible, and there before me is the blue of Zach's eyes, the warmth of his hand on my shoulder. Afterward, lying naked in bed together, I watch her doze. My pants are on the floor by the bed.

I reach into a pocket and draw out the key.

How many times did Zach hold it?

I lean back onto the bed.

A quick glance at Alice assures me she's asleep, so I bring the key to my lips, pop it into my mouth, and taste the metal, and after a moment, something more, the faint imprint of his touch.

She wakes with her head on my chest. When she speaks into me it tickles. After two hours of garbage duty, I have to admit, that's nice. Nicer than sex, maybe. But I can't understand a word she says. I turn briefly away, pretend to rub at my mouth so I can spit the key into my palm.

“What?” I say.

“I said you seemed a little distracted. You get this faraway look in your eye.”

“Is this a gentle way of critiquing my performance?”

“No,” she says, too quickly. “You're not mad, are you?”

“For you not letting us do it on a lab table with a board full of chemistry equations as our background? Why would I be mad?”

“We have to keep it together, Noah,” she says, tracing the outline of my ribs with her index finger. “Once you stop caring about where you have, well, you know, soon enough you stop caring who you have it with. Stop caring about anything at all. . .”

“But the nihilistic void of nothing—” I start to protest.

“—is not something I want to bring into bed with us,” she says, elbowing me playfully.

I laugh. “Abuse!”

“You know,” she says, after a time. “You know, I was thinking maybe we could have a picnic sometime soon. Next week, maybe. Get some sandwiches together and take them over to the lake. I know you love any excuse to eat sandwiches. We could ask Martin to come. What do you think?”

“Okay,” I say.

I wrap my arms around her in a tight hug, and the metal of the key digs into my palm. But all I can think is that she is not Zach. She is not Zach she is not Zach she is not Zach, and I would rather be held than hold. It makes you feel like you add up to more than the nothingness inside you.

It makes you feel like you'll never go anywhere, and that is the only therapy I need.

I close my eyes with the hope that I'll dream of him.