The Rest of Us Just Live Here (26 page)

“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!”

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.

“Think Dad can get us some cars for the summer?” I ask.

“As payment for missing the ceremony?” Mel says. “Oh, yeah. Henna and Jared and Nathan, too. Though, actually, if he’d come today, he might not have been able to run fast enough, so maybe it’s for the best.”

“I can’t believe they blew up the school,” Nathan says, his head resting on Jared’s stomach.

Henna drinks the last of her soda. “I know. It felt so inevitable, you kind of thought it would never actually happen.”

“As long as they rebuild it by the time
I
graduate,” Meredith says.

“I’m sure they will, Merde Breath,” Jared says. “They can only have really good insurance, you’d think.”

“Don’t call me that,” Meredith says.

“You know we mean it with love, don’t you, Bite Size?” Jared asks her.

“Yeah,” she says, smiling. “That’s why I keep hoping you will. So I can keep saying, ‘Don’t call me that.’”

“Weirdo,” Mel says, affectionately, and hands some more fries to our sister.

The sun’s still out, but it’s late afternoon. We’ve been here a couple hours, and the fire guys are still no closer to having it under control. Fortunately, the school’s in the middle of a huge clearing, so there’s not much chance of the forest catching. That would
really
suck.

Instead, it’s like a town-sized picnic. We wave to people we know as they walk by or come up to us and chat. We’ve all found our parents and figured out we’re all safe. I even let Mr Shurin give me a hug. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” he said.

“You don’t need to,” I said back.

He let us be and started walking the couple miles back to his house, his car having been toasted, too. I feel bad for him, despite also wanting to kill him for involving Mel. But he’s not a loser. He’s never been a loser. And his only family is leaving for college. And after that, leaving forever, as far as I understand it. What’s he going to have left?

What are any of us?

“You okay?” Jared says, frowning at me now.

“Just thinking,” I say.

We’re lying on a grassy stretch. Graduation robes turn out to make decent picnic blankets, though I doubt we’ll get our deposits back. Jared gently scoots Nathan off his stomach. Nathan takes the hint and turns his full attention to Henna. Which, all right, is nice of him.

“I really could, Mike,” Jared says. “Heal you.”

“I know. I saw it with Finn.”

“I want to. I’ve always hated seeing you suffer.”

I look at him. I don’t answer. He straightens up suddenly. “Oh, my God,” he says. “I’m such an idiot.” He turns to Henna. “Can I see your arm?”

Surprised, she holds it out to him. “Why?”

I’m still a little surprised myself she doesn’t know already. Then I’m kind of pleased. No one else knew. He told me first.

“Do you mind if I totally heal this?” Jared asks her.

“Can you
do
that?”

“I can now.” He puts his palms on her cast. The white lights shoot out briefly one more time and stop. Henna flexes her hand at the end of her cast and frowns.