Before We Go Extinct (14 page)

She starts talking again like she never stopped, like the whole interlude of getting up the steps and into the hammock didn't happen. “He's actually probably going to dump me at the end of the summer, if he hasn't already. But that's okay. He's normal. He's a normal guy who likes, I don't know, soccer and video games and drinking and doing stupid stunts with his friends and whatever normal people do. Normal is so boring. You know? No. I don't know either. Normal can be good, I guess. I think if you were normal, you'd have different expectations. If you were normal, you'd be disappointed less often. I basically wasn't in love with him, but I kinda had a crush on
normal
. Do you know what I mean? I don't think I know about love, not really. It seems stupid, but then I see my mum and your dad and…” She pauses. “I guess that's weird for you, if he didn't mention it. Men are such idiots, actually.”

I want to ask her why she thinks she isn't normal, because from where I'm lying, she's the only normal person around. But my voice isn't willing to play along, the inside of my mouth is sand and seaweed and the ocean and the tide, but it isn't making words. Not yet. Not right now.

“Talking around you is exhausting, it turns out,” she says, stretching. “I'm going to quit. If you don't answer, I don't talk. I've already said way too much. Shooting star!”

I've missed it, but I look up anyway. We lie in silence for a while, our breathing synching, which is nice. The night is freckling up with stars, more stars than I've ever seen. I get caught up in looking at those stars but I don't forget she's there, warm and present beside me. She smells like sunscreen and something sweet: honey or vanilla or cake. Do all girls smell like cupcakes? What is it with that? Do they do it on purpose? As it gets darker, more and more stars appear, so that it looks like there is star dust behind the star fragments behind the stars themselves. It's flat-out amazing.

“At least half those stars are probably ghosts, if you think about it,” she says suddenly. “That's maybe partly why I'm so into them. The stars. And ghosts. Listen. Think about this: a lot of them have already burned out, they aren't even
there
right now. But we can see them like they are there. We see them, so they exist, right? But they don't! They are long gone! Mind-blowing, right? There is nothing actually there, only dark space. So if you think about it”—her voice speeds up—“why is it so weird that some people can see
people
that are gone? Like ghosts? Why is it so strange to imagine that they leave a mark? Like it's taking longer than normal for the fact of their death to travel to our eyes? Do you believe in that kind of stuff? I guess you aren't going to answer. But you could nod. Or
something
. God, this is sort of annoying, Snort. I wish you'd say something.”

I try to speak. I want to say something, but my voice is gone again, a crackling dead leaf where a sound should be. I cough instead.
Crackle crackle.
I nod, shrug, shake my head. Do I believe in ghosts? Would I want to?

No. Yes. I don't know.

“Sorry,” she says. “I get a little … Mum says I'm overly imaginative. Which is good, because I'm a writer. I'm going to be a writer. I'm writing a book. About the stars and stuff. When I say it like that, it doesn't sound good. But it is. I like it, anyway. Probably no one else will ever read it. Maybe you'll want to.”

I smile, as much as I can. Because I do want to, actually. I want to read Kelby's book.

“If you laugh at me, I'm going to—”

I laugh a little bit, and she raises her hand and punches me in the arm, which hurts more than I would have thought, so I move quick and the hammock flips, spilling us out on the deck in a tangle of arms and legs and bodies. Which is nice, honestly. Except for the bruising.

“Shit!” she yells from under me.

Charlie sits bolt upright on the couch. “You swore!” he says. “I'm going to tell Mum. You're going to get it.”

Kelby crawls away, gets up, dusting off her knees. (She's right about her knees, I am in love with them. Maybe. A little bit, anyway.)

“Charlie,” she says. “If you tell, then I am
not
taking you out tomorrow. Or ever.
Never
. Got it? Just don't. I will put a spider in your bed, kid, I swear.”

“Okay, okay,” he says amiably. “Hey, can
I
swear?”

“No,” she says. “You're too young.”

“Then I'll tell,” he says, sort of sadly. “I'm not really scared of spiders anyway.”

“Okay, fine,” she says. “But just once.”

“Fuck,”
he says, looking really pleased with himself. “Wooo-hoo! Stupid! Shit!”

“Stop,” she says. “Time's up.”

He grins. One of his teeth is broken off at the bottom, making him look like a hapless kid from an old 1950s sitcom. He runs down the stairs and scrambles up an arbutus tree that curves out from the bank, hanging low over the beach below.

“His favorite tree,” she tells me. “Mum gets weird when we swear. She's kind of religious,” she adds. “I'm not. In case you're wondering.”

I nod again. The nodding is getting boring and I really want to talk and I hate that nothing comes out, that my voice is blocked off by the lump that's always in my throat, and here I am in the middle of nowhere in this surreal place with a girl—a pretty girl—and I'm mute. Dumb. Useless.

And she's right about the stars. Most of them are long gone, yet there they are, shining through the tiny pinprick holes in the whole big stupid universe.

“Sorry,” I whisper.

But I don't think she hears me. The word is too small, a feather on my tongue and the wind blows it away before it makes a sound.

 

24

The next morning, the sky is a white-gray haze of heat and the air is still. Even the trees seem to have rolled up their shadows, leaving the ground painfully exposed. Instead of being warm, the sandstone burns my bare feet. Sunlight glares through the glass, the reflections stab my eyes like blades.

Dad is worried about fire. “This whole island could go up like a giant bonfire,” he says. “Let's go up to the site.”

I walk with him up the steep trail to where the hotel's foundation looks like it was dropped from outer space. It doesn't fit here. The salal is growing over it like it is trying to reclaim its space. Moss creeps up the support beams. Lichen. Stuff I can't name. I'd ask Dad, but I'm not sure I want to get him started. Blackberry brambles are hugging some low walls like they are stretching to see over the top. Predictably, the unfinished building reminds me of all the other unfinished buildings, which takes me right back to the forty-second floor. Whoopee. I brace myself for the ride. My stomach clenches.

Then, nothing.

Or at least, a wave of nausea, but nothing more. I clear my throat. I think of The King, lying in his coffin, neatly, like he did on the ground beside the roller coaster, but of course, he's not lying like that in his coffin. He's in pieces.

He's fallen apart.

Now I'm dizzy.

Now I feel it.

It's like poking a bruise, pressing harder and harder, making sure it still hurts.

Pink mist.

I gag, and spit into the bush.

“You okay?” says Dad.

I nod, lying. Yes, no, I will never be okay again.

I pull my phone out of my pocket and type,
pink mist
. Then I delete it. I don't have anyone to send that to. I don't have any way of explaining. I take a picture of my bare feet on the path and send it to Mom.
Swooooop, swoooooop
, all the way to Antwerp, where the show's hero will try to woo the women by making them bungee jump from a famous landmark and pose in front of tourist attractions in their bikinis, blinking up at him and crying into the camera about love. What do they know about love? I loved The King. I love Daff.

But actually, I don't know anything about love, either. I shiver, thinking about the hammock last night and Kelby lying next to me and all those stars.

Dear Sharkboy, wear shoes! You're going to get athlete's foot. Love, Mom,
she writes. I grin.

It's not a public pool
, I type.
It's the freaking forest.
Then I delete it.
Love you, too, Mom.
I send it and pocket the phone. She won't answer. She answers once, and then that's it. The conversation is over. She has abs to delineate with airbrush tools, after all.

I take a photo of Dad, sweating through his shirt ahead of me, the sun glaring down on his bald spot, which practically
twinkles
in the light, and send it to The King.
Spray hair in can, it's what's for Father's Day
, I type.
LOL.

Then I miss him so hard I have to stop for a minute. Bend over. Pretend to brush something off my foot, the pain deep in my stomach like a fist.

I saw a movie once where the people in the film got to take a pill and it would erase a person from their memory entirely and every memory associated with that person. If I could do that, would I? I think maybe I would. I would lose a lot, but then I'd be free because seriously, my hands are shaking and my breath is rasping and I am thinking of the words I don't want to think of
death love decomposing
, a trifecta of Things I Don't Want to Think About. Not now, not ever. So I do the only thing I can think of and that is to start to climb. I pull myself up the timber frame.

“Hey,” Dad says. “Careful there, kiddo. It ain't a jungle gym.” He looks around. “Though it's not much good for anything else, I guess,” he mutters. He reaches for a beam, does a couple of pull-ups. He's not in bad shape, for a dad. “Feels good!” he says. “I should do this more often.”

I look away, blinking. Sweat and everything pouring into my eyes and stinging. Who said my dad could be
fun
? Who said my dad could be
normal
?

The wood of the building is hot and dry because everything has become hot and dry. I center myself over a beam and wobble. Only ten feet off the ground and the vertigo has grabbed me tight. I try to remember why I liked that feeling. I try to remember how to find my center. I try. Everything is trying. There is nothing but trying.

What did The King's dad used to say? Oh, yeah.
There is no
try,
there is only
do,
you fucking imbecile.

I force myself to concentrate. Ahead of me there is a gap of maybe five feet before the building continues. A wider timber on what was obviously going to be a grand ceiling. The dining room maybe? The wide timber is twelve inches wide, which—in parkour—is a joke. It's not even hard. To jump from this beam to that. It's like parkour for preschoolers. Anyone could do it.

But can I?

I do a lap around the beam structure that I'm standing on. It's wobbly but I try to trust. Everything about parkour is obvious when you're doing it, the moves rush at you in the split second before you perform them. The secret is not hesitating.
He who hesitates is lost
, Mr. Bills in English Lit class wrote on the wall in black Sharpie. Then beside it in red, with an arrow pointing back at the quote,
#truefact.

I make my focus smaller. I feel the wood under my feet, the air on my face.
#justbe
I don't look at my dad, who is digging something in the ground around the back of the building. The structure itself is small except in this context, it's huge. In New York, this would be tiny. But here, in the woods, it looks like a behemoth. And building this without roads or power or machinery seems ridiculous and impossible, like the pyramids or the Notre Dame Cathedral or Easter freakin' Island.

Some of the beams I am lightly running on now aren't level. A few buckle in the middle from age—this thing was started a bunch of years ago—and probably because they were built wrong to begin with and maybe because the island itself is rejecting it, pushing the building off itself.
Abscissing
it. I climb up, the highest point being only about twenty feet of skeletal structure but right away I'm dizzy and I drop back down, a quick flip to the ground, my heart hammering.

Maybe this kind of thing isn't fun for me anymore. Maybe it never will be again. And anyway, it's something guys do together, not one guy alone.

One guy alone just looks stupid, cartwheeling on a splintering timber, his hands slivered and slick with sweat.

But I have to. That's the thing. I've got to do it, for no other stupid reason than because I can't give this one to The King. He doesn't get to take this with him.

I climb back on.

I run.

“Hey,” says Dad. “You're going to fall, kiddo. No hospitals here, you know.”

(And there I am again, “Hey, Chief Not Scared of Heights, you're going to fall.” And that
what
, stretching so thin, like jungle vines that will never reach the ground.)

I jump.

My hands flap at the air, like they can keep me up. Feathers now, I think. There aren't feathers. Well, duh.

I miss, but not by much. Enough that I can grab the beam with my hand, splinters ripping into my palms before I drop off, wiping them on my shorts, pretending that's what I meant to do.

Dad stares at me. “Kids these days,” he says. “I guess I'm getting old because that just looked idiotic to me. I'd ask if you were okay, but I guess you are, if this is what you do for fun.” He shakes his head. “When did I become such an old man?” He raises his fist to the heavens and mock shouts,
“Git off my lawn, kid!”

I grin, in spite of how I really feel. My hands are burning. There's a sliver or something in my foot that is throbbing with every beat of my heart.