We All Looked Up (8 page)

A
ndy

THEY MET UP TO WATCH
the speech at Andy's place, A.K.A. The Ma-In-Law, which everyone agreed was the sickest crib in the greater Seattle area. Basically, after his parents split, Andy's mom married some dude named Phil, who worked for Microsoft and made bank. Phil had a couple of other kids from a previous marriage, both of whom were already done with college and making bank themselves, so he figured he was more or less done with being a dad (a conclusion Andy's
actual
dad had come to right after the divorce). Meanwhile, Andy's mom just wanted to chill out and spend Phil's money in peace. Their house, a big old wood-frame built in the sixties, had a separate apartment below it, which Andy's mom called a “mother-in-law apartment” (now simplified to “the ma-in-law”). It was a split-level deal, with kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom upstairs, and the small bottom floor devoted to passive entertainment: a couch, a couple of beanbag chairs, and a TV with a PS4.

Everybody else was already there by the time Andy got home (Bobo had a key, and basically came and went like an honorary roommate). Kevin and Jess were in the beanbags, passing a pipe back and forth.

“Yo, Andy,” Jess said. “You drinking or smoking?” He was wearing a backward baseball cap and a Nets jersey, holding the pipe in one hand and, in the other, a can of Monster that was probably spiked. Jess was biologically a girl, but he'd started dressing like a dude last year, and told everyone he was now a “he.” After high school was over, he planned to get a job and save up for gender-reassignment surgery. For now, he was taking some kind of testosterone supplement every few days; a couple of thick black hairs had begun to grow on his chin. Whatever, Andy figured. To each his/her own.

“Maybe in a bit.”

“Hey, Andy.” Misery was stretched out along the couch like a cat, a thin belt of white skin visible below the hem of her T-shirt. She'd dyed her hair orange a couple of days ago, and it made her look like a Creamsicle.

“Hey, Miz. Where's Bobo at?”

“Kitchen.”

Andy climbed the half set of stairs. Bobo was standing in front of the stove, reading the instructions on the back of a package of maca­roni and cheese.

“Hey, man. You making dinner?”

“I'm straight-up sick of this,” Bobo said, holding up the box. “Let's order.”

“I'm broke.”

“So hit up Kevin.”

“Dude, you do it. I feel like shit when I ask him.”

“You drink his beer same as me.”

“I know, but—”

Without warning, Bobo whipped the box of mac and cheese straight at Andy's head. It slammed into the wall and exploded into a firework rattle of uncooked shells, peppering Andy's neck like shrapnel.

“I said go hit up Kevin,” Bobo repeated.

Andy groaned. “Fine. But I'm not cleaning this macaroni up.”

“That makes two of us, yo.”

Andy crunched over the pasta on his way back downstairs.

“Hey,” he announced, as if he were talking to the whole room. “Cupboard's bare up there. Maybe we should order some pizza or something. Anybody wanna make the call?”

Kevin, who was holding down a massive hit from the pipe, raised his hand. His parents were totally loaded and, unlike Andy's stepdad, were happy to spread the wealth around. They owned a car dealership in South Seattle, and their last name, Hellings, adorned the plastic license-plate frames of half the cars in the city. In other words, Kevin was
set
. Bobo said that if they all played their cards right, they could be mooching off him for decades. Andy felt bad about it sometimes, but every friendship involved some kind of transaction, right? They let Kevin hang out with them, and in exchange, he kept them in video games, Dick's burgers, and weed.

“I'm on that shit,” Kevin said, finally exhaling. He was one of those guys who got mystical and hazy when he was high, and his conversation with the pizza place was one for the ages: “Do we want pepperoni? Oh, man, I don't even know. Hold on. Guys, do we want pepperoni? No, we don't want pepperoni, even though I have no idea why, because pepperoni is delicious. Actually, I'm going to ask one more time. Guys, do we really not want pepperoni? No? Man, that's
crazy
.”

Andy sat down at the absolute edge of the couch, so that he wouldn't be in contact with any part of Misery's body, but she scooched over and clung onto his arm.

“You making a move on me?”

“I'm kinda freaking out,” she said.

The television displayed an empty podium with the blue crest of the president of the United States of America behind it. A couple of premature flashbulbs went off.

“Bobo,” Andy shouted, “it's about to start!”

“Coming!”

Misery leaned the other way as soon as Bobo sat down, leaving Andy's left side cold.

“What do you think he's gonna say?” she asked.

“The usual,” Bobo said. “Move along. Nothing to see here. I don't even know why you guys wanna watch. There's this movie on Netflix where these people get stuck on a chairlift and die. It's sick.”

“This is history right here,” Kevin said. “Don't you wanna be informed?”

“Sure. But it'll be up on YouTube in twenty minutes, and that way we can skip the boring parts.”

Some hipster-looking dude with glasses came up to the podium only to say, “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States of America.” Then he stepped aside for good old Obama, climbing to the stage with his wife and children in tow. Andy dug President Obama; there were pictures of him smoking a blunt in college, and he wanted to help out poor people and immigrants and shit. Plus, the guy always looked chilled out, even when he was angry; his anger was the anger of someone who was mostly angry because he had to get angry.
I'd rather just shoot some hoops and light up
, his expression seemed to say,
but a bunch of uptight assholes are making me act all serious and presidential
.

“There's something weird about him today,” Jess said.

It was true. The president didn't project the same cool, I-got-this-covered attitude that he usually did. The giveaway was right there on his face: no smiles. No smile for the crowd. No smile for the camera. No smile for his family even.

“My fellow Americans,” he said, “I come to you today in humility, and in hope. A lot of people have been saying a lot of things over the past couple of days, and I'm here to separate the rumors from the realities. As most of you know, an asteroid called Ardor was spotted in the sky a few days ago. It was our own astronomers at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California who first located the asteroid, though since then the study of Ardor has been a truly international effort. Folks, there's no easy way to tell you that the most recent estimates made by scientists around the world put the asteroid roughly on course with our own orbit.”

The press room exploded with noise, and Obama waited patiently until it died down. “Now, I promised, when I was sworn in as your president, that I would be as transparent with you as possible. But when you're dealing with these kinds of velocities and distances, it's impossible to determine anything for certain. Truth is, we aren't gonna know more for a while, maybe not until Ardor is right on our doorstep, which I'm told should be somewhere between seven and eight weeks from today.”

The First Lady, standing statue-still behind the president, appeared to be weeping. Andy looked around his little apartment—suddenly everything seemed to have changed. Who were these strange people? Were they really the best friends he'd ever have? Misery was shaking, her eyes wide and wet.

“Holy shit,” Kevin said. “Holy shit.”

The president went on. “I can't sugarcoat the result of a collision. The asteroid is almost eight miles wide at its thickest point. If it lands, it will unleash the force of more than one billion nuclear bombs. But this collision is far from assured, and two months is too long for us to be holding our breaths, or acting as if our lives were no longer of consequence. When this danger passes us by, as I know it will, we cannot afford to have let fear run our country, or ourselves, for even a single day. The only thing we can do now, the only
American
thing to do, is to continue on with our lives, hold our loved ones close, and trust that God will keep us safe. Thank you all, and God bless the United States of America.”

A veritable strobe light of flashbulbs went off as Obama walked away from the podium. Andy realized that Misery was holding on to his hand so tightly that the tips of his fingers had gone white. This was real. This could really happen.

“What are our chances?” some reporter shouted, but there was no one left onstage to answer. Meanwhile, Kevin had pulled out his MacBook and was scouring the web.

“What are they saying online?” Misery asked.

Kevin didn't answer, only clicked and swiped and typed, opening up a dozen tabs in his browser. Why was it, Andy wondered, that no matter what color appeared on the screen, computer monitors always shone with the same shade of blue-white light—the exact color of Ardor? The panes of Kevin's glasses reflected two squares filled with tiny text.

“What are they saying?” Misery asked again, and there was a desperate edge to her voice that sent a shiver down Andy's spine. “Kevin, what the fuck are they saying?”

“I was hoping to find something different,” he said, looking up from the screen. “They're saying two-thirds.”

“Two-thirds? Like, sixty-six percent?”

“Yeah.”

“So two-thirds we all live, and one-third we all die?”

Kevin hesitated, checked the screen again, then slowly shook his head. “The other way,” he said.

Misery stood up, turned around in place like some kind of cornered animal looking for a way out, then fell down onto her knees and put her head in her hands. Nobody went to comfort her.

“Does it bother you?” Bobo asked.

“Does what bother me?”

“You know. Dying a virgin.” He laughed.

Everyone else had left about an hour ago. Soon after that, Andy's mom had paid a rare visit to the ma-in-law to announce that she and Phil would be leaving first thing in the morning for Phil's cabin in eastern Washington, where they'd wait out “all this hysteria.” Andy told her that he'd sooner jump off the Space Needle than spend his last days on Earth cooped up in the middle of nowhere with her and Phil. She called him an ungrateful little punk, then slammed the door.

“It's been nice knowing you!” Andy shouted after her.

He and Bobo turned out the lights, but they were both way too keyed up to fall asleep. So they nuked a bag of popcorn and played a couple wordless hours of PS4, instead.

“Suck it,” Bobo said under his breath, racking up yet another kill. He was kicking Andy's virtual ass.

“How can you focus on this?” Andy asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I'm losing my shit over here. How are you not?”

“I don't know. I guess the idea of death doesn't really scare me.”

As if on cue, Bobo's avatar took a plasma ball to the face. Half the screen went black. Bobo threw the controller down and leaned back on the couch.

“Aren't you gonna respawn?”

“Nah. You kinda blow tonight. It's no fun.”

Andy kept playing on his own for a while, until he noticed that Bobo had pulled back the sleeves of his hoodie. A thin pink line ran upward from each wrist, disappearing under the black fabric bunched around his elbow. Andy felt something clench up inside him. He looked away.

“You have to do that?”

“Relax, man. I'm proud of 'em.” He admired his scars. “We could try it again, you know. If shit gets real.”

Andy didn't say anything.

“I don't blame you,” Bobo said. “So you pussed out. I get it. It was a big thing.”

“I didn't puss out.”

If only they'd been in the same room, everything would have been different. But when they made the pact, they decided to do it separately and alone, synchronizing the alarms on their phones like something out of a James Bond movie. Andy couldn't even remember now why he'd agreed to it. Bobo had just broken up with Misery (temporarily, as it turned out), and his dad was in some kind of alcohol treatment facility, so he had plenty of reasons, but Andy hadn't been going through anything worse than the usual shit. Crazy as it sounded, he just didn't feel right saying no. He called Bobo's cell as soon as he realized he couldn't go through with it, but there was no answer, so he called the police. Later on, a paramedic told him it had come down to just a few minutes. “You're a hero,” the guy said.

But Andy knew that wasn't true. He'd abandoned his best friend. He
had
pussed out.

Bobo finally pulled his sleeves back down, like dropping a curtain on the past.