Away We Go (7 page)

A FEATHER ON PLUTO

Zach and I both had towels distinguishing us as humans of high caliber wrapped around our waists. The bathroom mirror was flecked with toothpaste.

Zach brushed his teeth, spat his toothpaste out. “You leave your room open this time?”

“No idea,” I said, trying not to stare. “I'm functioning at twenty-five percent capacity right now. I need at least three cups of coffee before short-term memory comes online.”

“I prefer tea,” he said. “Or hot chocolate,” he added with a wink.

A week or so had passed since Polo Club's first meeting. I'd refrained from texting, or messaging him on AwayWeGo, at great expense to my sanity—if I ignored him, he would realize he needed me, and in a world so full of shadows that flickered and were gone, I needed to be needed, to believe I had more substance than that. While waiting for him to come around, I'd busied myself with busying myself. Marty had asked me to audition for a play he'd written, which the Westing Theater Troupe was putting on in April, and all my time whispering lines to myself at Richmond had paid off.

“So, I assume my speech at Polo Club—”

“Your
rousing
speech,” I corrected.

He nodded with enthusiasm. “I assume my rousing speech—thank you again
,
by the way—”

“You're welcome.”

“—has been the obvious highlight of your Westing experience so far?”

“Not really,” I said, with as straight a face as I could manage. I took a shy step toward him.

“Wow.” He laughed, set his toothbrush down. He crossed his hands over his chest. “Honesty isn't always the best policy, Noah.” He averted his eyes as he said that last part.

“Polo's too bourgeois for me,” I explained. “I prefer acting. How do you feel about Romeo and Juliet? Star-crossed lovers and all that.”

“I think amorous relationships between the electors and the elected are complicated enough without involving astrophysics. The electors are all ra ra ra twinkle dinkle little star ra ra ra—”

“Sorry,” I said, cupping a hand to my ear. “What was that?”

“Ra ra ra twinkle dinkle little star ra ra ra,” he said to humor me, and chewed at the inside of his lip as I chanced yet another step. He was the only boy I'd ever met who wouldn't actually look at you while flirting.

“Did I tell you I'm going to be Peter Pan?” I asked him.

Zach raised his eyebrows, so I explained about how Marty had won the annual MacGregor Playwriting Contest for
Away We Go,
his modern take on
Peter Pan,
and had offered me the main part.

Zach squinted, tilted his head to the side, gave me a thumbs-up. “I've often thought about what Peter Pan would look like if he were a Polo-playing Westing student brushing his teeth in one of our bathrooms, and I have to say, you're
exactly
like I pictured him, right down to both your chest hairs. The vice president is invited to the grand premiere, right? 'Cause if said vice president hadn't saved you from being locked out, why, we would have proceeded down a completely different causal line. Butterfly effect, you know.”

“I could've ended up as Wendy.”

He tapped his temple a couple times, to indicate he'd thought of everything.

Just then the bathroom door swung open, and Nigel stepped through.

Nigel glanced from me to Zach to me.

I realized with horror that I had a raging erection poking at one of the yellow polka dots decorating my towel. My stomach compressed into a single dense point—a black hole, an infinitely dense polka dot of sexual frustration.

Nigel looked at my face, then at my towel.

I looked at his face, then at my towel.

“Yo brosefs, there's some fun been going on up in
here
!” he said, clapping us both on our shoulders. “
Somebody's
for real gonna need a new towel soon.” He threw himself into a stall, and proceeded to narrate his history of irritable bowel syndrome, but we weren't listening.

“Come to dorm tea this Thursday?” Zach asked me, but didn't wait for my response.

He'd pushed through the exit, gone, and I was left thinking about Earl Grey versus English breakfast.

“Yo, brosef,” Nigel said from his stall. “Hand me some toilet paper? I'm out over here, man, and these here are about to be some desperate times. I can feel it in my bowels.”

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

It was Zach.

Get there early. Sofa spots limited. ;]

I spent the next day and a half thinking about that winky face.

I had never met someone who used a bracket in lieu of a parenthesis.

Who knew Thursday Tea nights in Clover were the place to be? Faces sipping from mugs crowded the multipurpose room. I'd arrived early enough to guarantee myself a coveted sofa spot, thanks to Zach.

“I would've defunded them,
too,
” a wiry blond-haired guy named Matt said of F.L.Y.'s op-ed in the
Westinger,
in which F.L.Y. advocated students rushing the main gate. The editorial came out this Monday. By today, the student council had defunded F.L.Y. and threatened to do the same to the
Westinger
if the editorial board didn't resign.

“We didn't have a choice,” Zach said, rubbing at his eye. “The administration would've replaced the whole student council if we hadn't yes-sirred along with it.”

“That's some workers-of-the-world-unite shit they were on about,” a guy in a beanie said, radiating the scent of weed. Zach smiled at him encouragingly, so he went on, “which is
fucked up,
right? But if we don't have free speech, then what's the admin hiding, know what I mean? When I called my parents on the home hotline”—this prompted groans from all around. Nobody wanted to admit they believed in secret hotlines that connected youths in recovery directly to their parents—“I
did,
okay?” the guy in the beanie insisted. “And they told me—”

“They loved you?” someone suggested.

“That the hope of hearing your voice again was their only reason for living?” another piped in.

“
Hey.
Fuck you guys. Matt's voice is my reason for living,” said a third.

Laughter.

“Guys, don't be cruel,” Zach said, leaning forward slightly, so his elbows rested on his knees. He averted his eyes. People shifted uncomfortably, tried to stifle their grins. “Matt's a nice kid, and has excellent taste in tea.”

“All I'm saying,” Matt said, gesticulating wildly, ignoring Zach's kindness, “is maybe I don't want to be a lab rat with my last memories downloaded on a chip that some fat-ass gets to pop in his fat head so he can whack off to my girlfriend while they dissect my body for the benefit of science so some rich dude's Pomeranian can have my spleen and live to a hundred seventy-three doggie years. I mean, Jesus holy-in-heaven Christ. Free speech, man. My parents are fucking
taxpayers.
”

Everyone laughed, then promptly forgot Matt and his beanie had ever existed, except me, because Zach had called Matt a
kid.

I was supposed to be Zach's kid.

“You should've resigned instead of going along with it,” a girl with blue highlights said, her eyes boring into Zach.

“Instead of being the admin's
bitches,
” Matt said, and I wanted to punch him.

Zach paled a bit, then smiled. I was about to come to his defense when he said, “As the vice president, I advised the president to do just that. I said it would make a strong statement. He accused me of ulterior motives. Clearly, someone's forgotten his obligation to the people.”

Just like that, he had everyone laughing; everyone's faces, it seemed, were fixed in orbit around him, even the girl with blue highlights had softened, and I felt cold and distant and free-floating, like a feather on Pluto—why had he invited me here, only to ignore me?

I brought my mug to my lips and drank. I went from cold to hot, my forehead sweaty, my shirt sticking to my back. Why did Matt have to bring up that shit about becoming a lab experiment? I'd read on AwayWeKnow about scientists from places like Harvard and MIT trying to save kids by preserving their memories, their identities in code, ones and zeroes. There
was an AwayWeRead book,
The Peter Pan Project,
about a scientist at UC Berkeley who uploads one infected child's memories into a robot which can then answer simple yes or no questions about the dead boy's childhood, his favorite candy (Twizzlers), his favorite sport (soccer).

On the AwayWeRead
Peter Pan Project
discussion forums,
anonymoose
had speculated about digitized memories being sold to the highest bidder, any adult on the outside who wanted to relive their adolescence, while
latexluvin
added that PPV was an Illuminati population-control plot.
Kyle2.0
asked if androids dream of electric sheep.

I thought of a robot Zach, answering my questions.

Did we meet at Westing?
Yes
.

Did we share the same bed?
Yes
.

Do
you love me?
. . .

Are you still in there?
. . .

Zach?
. . .

I couldn't breathe. Every moment I spent with Zach I wanted to both be nowhere else and anywhere else. I wanted to feed him strawberries and jump out the nearest window. I was almost at the exit when he caught me by the arm. I wasn't expecting the touch and briefly experienced a mild form of cardiac arrest.

“Hey,” he said, “didn't know there were going to be so many people tonight. Maybe because we have Earl Grey this time?”

I tried to play along. “That's why I came.”

“To watch me drink Earl Grey?”

“Yes,” I said. I didn't have the energy to lie.

He frowned in thought. “You've been quiet tonight.”

It hadn't occurred to me till now. I thought to apologize for not coming to his defense.

“Groups,” I started. “Groups aren't really my thing. I get lost in them.”

A girl heading for the exit cleared her throat. Zach and I stepped out into the hall to let her pass.

“I don't know who to be in a group,” I went on, staring after her. “I know who to be when it's one on one. Or when someone's written the lines. I just think we're the most ourselves when we're alone.”

He bit his lip, glanced inside where people were still milling. Our spots on the sofa had been taken.

“How 'bout a game of pool?” he offered.

So we took the elevator down to the basement. In the game room's poor light, Zach assembled the balls into a neat triangle.

“None of that stripes and solids polarizing factionizing nonsense,” he said. “Why divide the balls into opposing groups? God, why create false dichotomies? They're all balls. Let them be united in their common ball-dom. Let's just hit them in. But if you hit the eight ball in, we both lose, obviously.”

“Obviously,” I said, with zero idea of the actual rules.

So I aimed for the eight ball. After I'd hit it in three times, he asked me if I was okay.

I leaned against the table, regarding Zach's silhouette in the half-light. “I was thinking about what Matt said. And about Polo. Do you think something's going on at Westing?”

What I wanted to ask, but didn't: Why did you invite
me
to Polo, and not Matt?

For a time, Zach didn't speak. “There's got to be, Noah,” he said, softly. “It's terrible, but I want there to be. Is that terrible?” He spoke more quickly, grew more excited. “I'd rather have my head sliced open and my memories extracted and sold on AwayWeSellTheDeepestMostIntimatePartsOfYourSoul
than just, nothing. There's too much secrecy for nothing. Am I terrible?”

“Only a little,” I said.

“I just think—there's this girl I know, Addie, who lives in Violet. This isn't the way I thought I would bring it up, but I've kind of wanted to talk to you about this.”

My throat constricted. “About what?”

“I was just thinking last night about what if she disappeared, you know? And I saw her name on AwayWeGo and wouldn't know where she went. If we figure out what's going on, we could save her, kid. We could save
everyone
. And I feel that way about you, too. I want to save you. And I want to save Addie. But differently. Do you know what I mean? That's what I realized. I want to save you differently.”

I blinked.

“Noah?”

I felt like a wisp of a feather on Pluto.

“Can you not call me kid?” I asked, sharp. A second later, mumbling at my sneakers, both of which stared up bleakly at me: “I don't really understand. Was it Nigel?”

He shook his head. “That's not—that's not it.”

He didn't elaborate, so I said, “It's been a long day,” which it hadn't been. I'd only been up for eight or so hours. “I think I'm going to bed now.”

If I didn't agree, we would still be whatever we were before this conversation. That was how it had to work.

“Noah, I don't want to lose you.”

“I think I'm going to bed now.”

“Noah?”

“It's been a long day.”

He started after me, but stopped himself.

OPINIONS

Action Necessary to Secure Civil Liberties of Youths in Recovery

a society that discriminates against a segment of its population that numbers in the hundred thousands? A segment of the population that has been herded away, shut behind sophisticated, motion-sensing walls, whose communications are monitored and circumscribed, as if this supposedly free nation were the USSR. Why can students receive letters from parents and not phone calls or e-mails? Are a few regrettable incidents just cause for the total infringement of our civil liberties? Westing was pitched to its students as a “one-of-a-kind” institution, devoted to battling for improved conditions for all youths in recovery, but the function it really serves is to give governmental repression a kinder face. The beneficiaries are those students whose high NAAP scores apparently qualify them for a better quality of life than other youths in