We All Looked Up (9 page)

“I'm just saying think about it, all right? Just in case.”

The clock blinked over to four thirty.

“We should get to bed,” Andy said. “School's gonna be a bitch on three hours of sleep.”

“I already Googled it. School's canceled tomorrow. They're giving us a three-day weekend. As if we were gonna go anyway.”

Andy hadn't even considered skipping out on school, but Bobo was right. There was no reason left to show up at Hamilton. For that matter, there was no reason left to do much of anything. Andy thought about making the same old drive, sitting through some pointless sad assembly, seeing a bunch of people he didn't really give a shit about and who definitely didn't give a shit about him. Was there even one person there that he'd actually miss?

“Eliza,” he said, and the word was like a doorway stumbled on in the dark.

“What?”

“Eliza Olivi.”

“What about her?”

What was it that made you keep playing a video game, hour after hour, day after day, no matter how terrible the writing was or how boring the story? You kept going because you had a quest. It didn't even matter what it was—saving a princess or conquering an alien world or assassinating a king. Andy pictured Eliza as she used to be: shy and spectral, quiet as a painting. It was as noble a quest as any.

“I'm going to sleep with her,” Andy said.

Bobo laughed. “Bullshit.”

“A hundred bucks says I do it by the time Ardor gets here.”

“Fine. But make it a thousand.”

“A thousand?”

“It's the goddamn end of the world, Andy. And you have to have sex with her, okay? We're talking hard-core, sustained intercourse here.”

“Sustained?”

“Sustained. None of that premature ejaculation shit.”

“Deal.” They shook hands—a gentleman's agreement. Sure it was immature and stupid and probably impossible. But you had to have something to get you out of bed in the morning. Something to hope for. And for Andy, that something would be Eliza.

In a landslide, running unopposed, she'd just been elected his reason to live.

P
eter

AFTER IT WAS OVER, PETER
sat on the couch and let his mom hold him. His dad kept changing the channel on the TV, hoping to find someone able to contradict some part of the president's speech. Both of them were crying, his mom steady as a stream, his dad like an imperfectly sealed pipe—just a slow drip around the edges. Peter loved his parents, but right now, he would have given anything to get away from them. Their anxiety burned away all the oxygen in the room; his own feelings couldn't breathe. He was only eighteen! There were so many things he hadn't experienced yet—world travel, bungee jumping, sushi. And what the hell had he been waiting for? Why had he assumed time was some sort of infinite resource? Now the hourglass had busted open, and what he'd always assumed was just a bunch of sand turned out to be a million tiny diamonds.

Peter could feel the moisture of his mom's tears bleeding through his T-shirt. He shivered. His parents had always been pretty miserly when it came to heating the house. The wisp of a funny thought: Why not keep the thermostat at a balmy eighty degrees from here on out? Odds were good they'd never have to pay the bill. And how many nest eggs and trust funds would get blown in the next couple of months? How many secret grievances would finally see the light of day? How many neighbors would finally go ahead and shoot the yipping Chihuahua that had been keeping them awake every night? Or, come to think of it, why not just shoot the inconsiderate neighbor who wouldn't keep his damn dog in the house? All of a sudden, the world seemed like a very dangerous place.

“I'm going to go find Miz,” he said.

His mom actually moaned—one long, ghostly note—as Peter peeled himself away from her.

“Good idea,” his dad said. “But come right home, okay?”

“Sure.”

Misery would be over at Andy Rowen's place—the ma-in-law—where her crew always hung out. He texted her to come outside in twenty minutes; for some reason, he really didn't want to see her boyfriend right now. The news about Ardor seemed to affirm the
Why bother with anything?
philosophy that Bobo and his friends had always championed. Peter couldn't help feeling like a sucker for having sided with the seekers and the strivers of the world.

She was waiting for him when he got there, standing on the sidewalk in a round puddle of light. Impossibly slim, like an orchid. Her pumpkin-colored hair and crazy ripped-up clothes seemed like some kind of futile existential gesture, and Peter felt freshly responsible for it. He'd always suspected that his sister's rebelliousness was, in some way, a response to his own mainstream triumphs. And though he'd come to terms with the sarcastic attitude and the slacker ethos and the freak-show fashion sense, the one thing he still couldn't understand was why a smart, pretty girl like her chose to spend all her time with a drug-dealing creep like Bobo.

“Hey, Miz.”

“Hey.”

They hugged in that awkward space between the front seats.

“Mom's freaking out,” he said.

“I'm sure.” His sister pulled a pack of Camel Lights and a red Bic from her purse. Peter considered chastising her, then figured that lung cancer was yet another of the million things that no longer mattered. “Hey,” she said, breathing out a cloud of smoke, “would you mind if we didn't go straight home? I can't really handle being in that house right now.”

“I would the
opposite
of mind.”

It was a clear, quiet night. The news had emptied the streets. Peter didn't have any destination in mind as he started driving, but when he saw the sign for Beth's Cafe—a pig with wings atop the old
DRINK NESBITT'S ORANGE
marquee—he pulled off and parked.

The door jingled as it opened, wafting a breath of warm air that smelled of pancakes and bacon. Beth's had always been Misery's kind of place, rather than Peter's, but it felt right to him tonight. The twenty-four-hour greasy spoon hearkened back to a time when the freaks of the world didn't feature in every prime-time drama and on every street corner, when they really
needed
their own places to congregate. Tall red stools were evenly spaced along an L-shaped counter. The waitress at the register—a smileless Goth monster with a face comprised mostly of holes filled with metal—greeted Misery by name. Nobody in the restaurant looked particularly tragic or hysterical. Was it possible that none of them had heard, or were they all still in shock?

Peter and his sister were seated in the passageway between the restaurant's two rooms, just across from the jukebox and the little nook where the pinball machines lived. The tinny digital effects almost disguised the sound of Peter's phone ringing: Stacy.

“You gonna get that?” Misery asked.

He hadn't even thought about his girlfriend since the announcement.

“Not right now.”

“So you're finally gonna break up with her?”

“What?” But Peter hesitated a little too long before answering, “No!”

Misery smiled hugely. “You are? Really?”

“I said no, Miz.”

“Yeah, but you had to think about it. That means it's just a matter of time. Start the countdown.”

His sister seemed so genuinely pleased at the thought of his dumping Stacy, he was tempted to do it just for her. But that would be even more awful than doing it in the hopes of getting together with a girl he barely knew.

Misery ordered black coffee and hash browns. Peter decided there was no time like the present to tackle Beth's famous twelve-egg omelet. The song on the jukebox kept saying something about a bomb, over and over again.

“So, while we're on the subject of breaking up,” Peter said, “what about you and Bobo?”

“Why would I break up with Bobo?”

“Because he's a punk. And he's too old for you.”

“Two years is nothing. Plus, I love him, even if he is a punk.”

There was another jingle as four men entered the cafe. They were classic Beth's—all leather and studs and the reek of stale cigarette smoke—and brought with them the kind of generalized menace that made you cross to the other side of a dark street. As they passed by the table, one of them did a double take. He couldn't have been older than thirty, but his skin was prematurely leathery—drugs, probably. He was smaller than the others, five-foot-five tops, though something about the way he moved marked him as their leader. Peter noticed the tattoos on his knuckles as he placed his hands on the tabletop:
LIVE
on the right,
ONCE
on the left.

“Misery,” he said, “you're looking good.”

“Hey, Golden.”

“And who's this guy? You stepping out on Bobo?”

“This is Peter, my brother.”

Peter put out a hand to shake, but Golden didn't take it. His pupils were steel gray, dilated so far that there had to be some kind of amphetamine in his system. He fingered the thin gold chain looped a dozen times around his neck.

“Hey there, Peter my brother.”

“Hey.”

“You take good care of this one, yeah?”

“That's what brothers do.”

Peter's phone rang again. Golden glanced down and saw the screen, smiled a mouthful of gold teeth. “Better talk to mommy,” he said, then walked away.

It took Peter five minutes to convince his still-weepy mom that he and Misery would come home right after dinner. Meanwhile, the waitress dropped off their food, looking with tired distrust toward the hysterical laughter and thumping already coming from the game room, where Golden and his friends had ensconced themselves. Peter took one bite of his omelet and realized he wasn't hungry. It was time to discuss the elephant in the room.

“So,” he said, “death.”

“Yep.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I don't even know. It doesn't seem real yet. I mean, what are we supposed to do? What's going to happen?”

“Nothing good.”

A raucous cry, then the sound of something shattering. A sickle-­shaped fragment of coffee mug slid across the floor from the game room to knock against Peter's sneaker.

“So those are Bobo's friends, huh?”

“Friends would be pushing it.”

“Well, I can see why you'd want to be involved with such classy people.”

“Leave it alone, man.”

But he'd seized on something important now, and he wouldn't let it go without a fight. Even if he accomplished nothing else before the end of the world, at least he could set his sister straight.

“Listen, Miz. I know you've never liked Stacy, and I know I've never liked Bobo, but that doesn't make them equivalent issues.” He could see her eyes beginning to glaze over. “Bobo's a thug. It's his fault you weren't with the family tonight. It's his fault your grades this year have been a train wreck.”

Misery leaned back against the window at the far end of the booth. “Can you even hear yourself? Who cares about grades anymore?”

“It's not your grades that I'm worried about.”

“Then what?”

“Your . . . soul,” Peter said, and wondered where the hell
that
word had come from. “I know guys like Bobo, Miz. They don't give a shit about anything.”

“He gives a shit about me. And you don't know him. You don't know how fucked up his life has been. That's why he acts the way he does. And every time I make him happier, I feel good. He makes me feel good.”

“Misery, you weren't put here on Earth to cheer up a scumbag.”

As soon as he said it, he knew he'd gone too far. Misery struck back hard. “You're the one with a girlfriend you don't love,” she said. “And I've never cheated on Bobo.” She slid out of the booth. “Not that you'd care, but he and I
did
break up once. And he tried to kill himself. So, you know, there's that.”

His sister stormed out of the café, while Peter sat back and tried to process this new information. It did clear up one thing; now he could understand how Misery had gotten hooked. The prospect of rescuing someone from death itself—what was more compelling than that?

There was another loud crash from the game room. A member of Golden's crew came out, wincing and grinning at the same time. His hand was covered in red streamers of blood, and a shard of glass protruded from between his knuckles like a shark fin. “My ball got stuck in that fucking machine,” he said, by way of explanation.

Misery refused to talk to him on the way home, so Peter just watched the road. He counted three ambulances, two fire engines, and seven police cars. It had already started. . . .

Home again, Misery ran straight upstairs, ignoring their parents, who'd waited up in the living room.

“Is she okay?” his mom asked.

Peter laughed bitterly at the ridiculousness of the question—at the fact that, for the next two months, all such questions would be ludicrous and insensitive and insane.

“Yeah, Mom,” he said. “She's fantastic.”