We All Looked Up (15 page)

“What do you suggest?”

“I'm glad you asked—” Andy was interrupted by the plinky sound of a digital marimba. He pulled a busted-up Nokia from his pocket.

“We turn off our cell phones in student council,” Krista said.

But Andy was just staring at the screen, eyes wide.

“Didn't you hear me? We turn off our phones—”

Andy looked up at Anita. “It's her,” he said. “She's calling me.”

It was another couple of rings before Anita realized who Andy was talking about—Eliza, responding to the legendary voice mail he'd left on Friday night.

“Help me! What do I do?” Andy was looking at the phone as if it were a magic lamp that had just offered him three wishes, only he had to decide on all of them in the next three seconds.

“Answer it, genius! And don't be a freak.”

“Right.” He stood up so fast that he knocked over his chair.

“So?” Krista said, after Andy had left the room. “If we can get back to business here, tell me—what's our entertainment going to be if not a DJ? You have an in with the Seattle Symphony or something?”

“No,” Anita said, and she felt like she'd been waiting her entire life to say it. “I'll be the entertainment.”

E
liza

ELIZA ADJUSTED THE ANGLE OF
the laptop screen, centering herself in the frame. Seeing your own face as other people saw it was a bit like repeating a word over and over again until it lost its meaning and became just a collection of sounds. If Eliza looked in the mirror for too long, she wouldn't see a human being anymore, just some weird space alien, all bushy eyebrows and wide mutant nose and creepy pygmy ears.

“Still there, Eliza?”

Out from the laptop speakers zinged the super-peppy voice of Sandrine Close, editor of
Closely Observed
, a popular website devoted to young photographers and their work. Sandrine, a gorgeous twentysomething hipster with fireball-red hair, had invited Eliza to “appear” on the site for a live-streamed video interview on the subject of
Apocalypse Already
. She wore a pair of stylish emerald-­green glasses that came to points at the corners and a matching blouse that revealed a plunging triangle of pale skin, the final vertex of which was cut off by the bottom of the frame.

“Yeah.”

“You ready to go?”

“I feel a little underdressed.”

“You look great. All right, it's six. We're going live in three, two, one . . .” Sandrine smiled hugely. “Hello, Observers! I'm here with a very special guest, photographer and blogger Eliza Olivi. We've been featuring Eliza's work for the past week, but if you haven't visited her blog,
Apocalypse Already
, you can click the link farther down the page. Eliza has been photoblogging about the effects of Ardor on Seattle, using her own high school as a metaphor for society at large. And if I may say so, it's brilliant.”

“Uh, thanks.”

“So, Eliza, you've certainly blown up fast. Tell us what that's been like.”

“It's surreal. I mean, everything is pretty surreal these days, so I guess by that standard, it's kinda normal.” She laughed, but was thrown off by the fact that she couldn't tell if anybody was laughing with her. “I never expected anyone to care about what I was doing. Maybe they wouldn't have, if not for those pictures of Andy.”

“Andy is the boy who was assaulted by the police officer?”

“Yeah.”

Sandrine glanced down at a piece of paper hidden offscreen. “So do you see what you're doing primarily as an aesthetic or a political activity?”

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

“Like, the photo you call ‘Friendly Forks.' Some commenters are seeing it as a piece about the empty nobility of volunteerism in a world on the brink of destruction. Other people think that it's been staged, with a handsome young model and a set, as a purely formal exercise.”

People really thought Peter was a model? Eliza imagined he would have found that funny, though she didn't really know anything about his sense of humor. They still hadn't actually spoken to each other, but since the day she took that photograph, she'd felt something brewing between them—a destined collision, or a doomed one. Either way, the symbolism wasn't lost on her; the only question was which of them was the world-destroying asteroid, and which the blue planet peacefully minding its own business.

“First of all, none of my photos are staged. And as for what it all means, I try not to think about it too much. I mean, sure, I want to help publicize the stuff that the police or the government or the school wants to keep private, but that's only a part of it. Like, people have always said that photography is an attempt to capture something fleeting. And suddenly everything is fleeting. It's like Ardor is this special tone of light we've never had before, and it's shining down and infusing every single object and person on the planet. I just want to document that light, before it's gone.”

“Isn't that a lovely thought?” Sandrine said. “Moving on. With the National Guard being called in to help L.A. and New York, to say nothing of the bombings in London and across much of the Middle East, we don't hear too much about Seattle. But your photographs show that the Emerald City hasn't escaped unscathed. Many of your pictures feature looters and drug dealers caught in the act. My question is this—aren't you ever scared? I don't imagine those folks much like having their picture taken.”

“What's to be scared of? The world's probably going to end in, like, six weeks.”

“What about your parents? Don't they worry?”

Eliza hesitated. She was still dodging her mother's calls, and as for her dad, he'd taken one look at the photos on her website and said that she had to keep going with the project, no matter what. And the weird thing was that a little part of her wished he'd asked her to stop. Not that she would have or anything. She'd just wanted to be asked.

“I live alone with my dad, and he's a graphic designer and a photographer himself, so all he really cares about is that I'm making something good.”

“Lucky you. One last question, Eliza. Given what a beautiful girl you are, I'm sure everyone wants to know—is there a special someone in your life?”

And what did it say that her mind flashed straight to Peter, like some kind of Pavlovian response mechanism?

“No. There's nobody.”

“What a shame. Well, that's it for me. Let's turn things over to our listeners.”

Eliza answered one question about the blog (“I'm a big Francis Ford Coppola fan”), three questions about her personal life (“Straight but looking forward to my experimental phase,” “Does ‘bad for me' count as a type?” and “Missionary, I guess, but they're all pretty good”), three questions about her technical process, and two questions about her favorite photographers. Then Sandrine thanked her invisible audience and shut down the live feed.

“Great job, Eliza.”

“Was it?”

“Sure! You've really got a future in this. If, you know, you have a future at all. And hey, if you ever make it out to New York, I'd love to launch you on that experimental phase.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

Sandrine winked and closed out the session. Eliza shut the lid of her laptop. Across the table, Andy looked up from the book he was reading—by Immanuel Kant, of all people.

“Someone's got a secret admirer,” he singsonged.

“Shut up.”

He'd gotten lucky, was all. When Eliza first got Andy's drunken ­ramble of a voice mail, she didn't even bother to listen to it all the way through. It wasn't until a few days later, when she was talking to Madeline on Skype, that she thought about the message again. Eliza had been hoping that her best friend would come back to Seattle after the announcement, but apparently Madeline had fallen in love with some senior boy at Pratt, and because most of her family still lived on the East Coast anyway, her parents decided to move out that way.

Eliza wasn't sure which was stranger, the fact that she might never see Madeline again, or the fact that Madeline was actually in a relationship.

“You have to have enough fun for the both of us, okay?” Madeline said. “Tell me stories. Any crazy end-of-the-world sex yet?”

“Not quite. I did, however, receive the mother of all drunk dials from a boy.”

“Do you still have it?”

“Yeah. But only because deleting it would involve looking at all the voice mails my mom's left me. It's getting ridiculous.”

“We can talk about that later. First I wanna hear the epic drunk dial.”

“Really? You wouldn't rather talk about my deep emotional issues with my mother?”

“Nope.”

“Fine.” Eliza scrolled quickly—Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom—until she found the five-minute-and-forty-two-second message left by an anonymous 206 number.

“It's actually sorta sweet,” Madeline said, once it was over.

“But he's totally wasted.”

“So what? He sounds . . . romantically insane.”

“I agree with exactly half of that.”

But once she turned off Skype, Eliza listened to Andy's message again. This time she noticed something she hadn't before—a particular word that he used, odd but familiar. She Googled “cuirass,” and then “corass,” and finally the search engine got her drift and pulled up results relating to “karass.” The ever-helpful Urban Dictionary defined it as “a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident.” How could she have forgotten? It was from Kurt Vonnegut's
Cat's Cradle
, one of her favorite books back when she was a sophomore, with its promise of a world religion that owned up to its own ridiculousness, and an apocalyptic ending that was more than a little relevant to current circumstances.

Maybe it was just a lucky guess on Andy's part, but it got her attention. A couple of days later, she decided to call him back.

“I'm not interested in anything romantic,” she told him. “If you can handle that, meet me at Bauhaus at six thirty. And don't you dare bring any fucking flowers.”

He was already waiting for her when she got there, so she snuck around the table to order a drink and do a little reconnaissance. Her primary fear was that he might still misinterpret this as some kind of date. The end of the world was coming, after all, and a lot of people were doing a lot of crazy things. In the past few days, the scientists had nailed Ardor's arrival time down to the wee hours on Tuesday the first of April—April Fool's Day. It was T-minus forty days, which meant humanity as a whole was living in the existential equivalent of last call at a dive bar, when people's standards started dropping like panties at a Justin Timberlake concert. Andy had obviously cleaned himself up for the meeting—his hair was freshly cut and combed, and he was wearing a pair of jeans that actually fit him and a sweater instead of a hoodie. It was way too dramatic a change for him to have pulled off all by himself. A woman's hand, or at least a gay guy. Was this really the outfit of a boy who'd gotten the hint?

“Well, you got me here,” she said, gently setting her saucer down on the table.

Andy had a cup of black coffee in front of him, already nearly empty. “I guess so. Everyone's a sucker for a good drunk dial.”

“One thing first, just to ensure we are definitely, one hundred percent on the same page—we will not be having sex now, or at any point in the future. Understood?”

“Understood. Any hand holding?”

“None.”

“No cards on Valentine's Day?”

“I'd kill you. Plus Valentine's Day probably won't come again.”

“Okay, last question. Does no sex also mean no kinky role-playing, wherein you play the mature professor and I play the naughty student in need of a good spanking?”

“It does.”

“Got it. I forgot to bring my Catholic schoolgirl outfit anyway.”

Eliza laughed, and Andy looked pleased with himself for making her laugh, and the awkwardness between them let up a little bit.

“So you think we're in a karass together, do you?” she asked.

“Sure. It makes sense, right? We're basically living in a Vonnegut novel now anyway.”

“Those don't tend to end well.”

“That is true.”

Eliza sipped her coffee—about forty cups left, assuming her usual one-a-day regimen. She hadn't told anyone about her morbid new habit, but she figured Andy would probably get a kick out of it. “So I've started doing this weird thing in my head,” she said. “Like, when I put on socks, I think to myself, well, I'll only put on socks forty more times. And when I look at the moon, I think about how many more times I might look at the moon. Even when I ordered this coffee, I couldn't help counting how many more coffees I'd probably get.”

Andy held up his mug. “I think I can fit in a good two hundred, if I stay focused. Which the coffee should help with. Now if only I had something to focus on other than my own imminent demise.”

“Actually, that reminds me, I could use your advice about something.”

“Really?” He seemed genuinely surprised.

“Why not? We're karass-mates, aren't we?”

“Damn straight.”

“So I started this blog a few days ago, and it's already turned into a bit of a thing. But I think I might be totally full of shit, in which case I should probably shut it down.”

“Are you talking about
Apocalypse Already
?”

“You know it?”

“My friend Jess found it on Reddit. It's kickass.”

“Really?”

“Totally. You gotta keep doing it. Bobo says it's important that everyone knows about the messed-up shit that's going on at Hamilton.”

“Yeah, well, Bobo seems pretty messed up himself, as far as I can tell.”

Andy stiffened, as if someone had just insulted his mom. Eliza remembered how she used to feel when her dad gave her grief for hanging out with Madeline, whose sense of style he once described as “a stripper dressed up as a prostitute for Halloween.”