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“Discharge.”
“Vocab king!” She winces, lowers her voice. “I think Colby was there… Like, clapping.”
“He’s not worth you.”
“Jeaaa—lous?” Jules grinds me in her gauze-thin cat-suit.
“Don’t,” I say. She grinds even freakier, which means she’s pissed off. Because a machine gun up your hole probably sounds okay when you’re high, but not the next morning when your female parts and what-have-you probably hurt. But there’s no point talking about it. Aporia’s hitting in less than three days, so who wants to spend the time crying over sexual violation by blunt object?
I realize I’m mad, too. At myself, for leaving her alone with those scabs. At her, for being so stupid. At colony fourteen, for buckling so easily. At everybody. Especially the people on the other side of my crank-phone, who won’t tell me where they are, or how I can find them, or even if my baby sister—whose stuffed bu
“Faggot,” Jules sneers. She’s gone completely radioactive. It’s about the machine gun. It’s about the asteroid. It’s about her denial-blind mom and sister who think Aporia’s a hoax. Mostly, it’s about me. Because I love her in every way but the way she wants.
“Don’t be mean to me,” I tell her. “You’re my only friend.”
“I’m not mean; I’m honest! You’re a faggot orphan and once your family got their tickets, they threw you away,” she shouts with veiny-necked rage.
“You’re trash. Your sister’s a stripper. You’re dumb as… toast?” I shout back. This last part isn’t true. She’s one of the sharpest people I know.
Nobody’s listening, not even the militia or my old gym teacher or Colby Mudd, who trifled with Jules to make another girl jealous, and she’ll never see that, because she uses men like spikes to stab herself against.
“They’re
not
trash. One of ’em said he’d marry me!” Jules flashes her hand. She’s wearing a small, yellow-gold engagement ring. It had to have come from a dead body. Some salt-of-the-earth old lady, a suicide pact with her true love after fifty good years.
“God, Jules.”
The homeroom bell rings. The halls clear like mopped-up jimmy sprinkles. Front and back door militia in desert fatigues bang the butts of their guns against cinderblock. They’re like orangutans at mealtime.
“It’s jewelry from a man,” Jules says, and I can tell she hates it, and the hand that wears it, and herself.
“Throw it away, Jules. It’s garbage!” I tell her.I’m so upset about all this that I go a little crazy. I imagine cutting her up. Peeling her skin off and poking out her eyes.
Jules squeezes out a pair of tears. “You’re just mad because someone loves me, and nobody loves you.”
And the guns are banging, and my homeroom teacher is waving for me to come in. Only it’s my gym teacher, because my real homeroom teacher is gone. Faces keep dropping away. No one knows what happened to them. It’s like a visual representation of Alzheimers. “That’s an awful thing to say,” I tell her.
Jules starts laughing.
I’m walking away. The sound of her gets louder as it echoes.
“Hospital tonight?” she calls.
I hate her.
“Sorry, Tom Crawford,” she calls. “I suck, literally. I’m a spooge-whore-bitch.”
I keep walking with these iron-heavy feet, imagining the whole world on fire. I am the asteroid. Dense and without feeling. I am the destroyer of all in my path.
She flings the ring so it skates past me down the hall. I turn back and there’s Jules. She fluffs her hand out in pretend-pompousness as she bows, then blows me a kiss. “I’m your dumb-as-toast best friend.”
I pretend-twist a gear along my temple. “Forgotten. Forgiven. Everybody but you is dead, you big skank.”
• • • •
Mr. Nguyen is the only real teacher left, and he’s taking it seriously. He passes out a physics quiz, which he’s written by hand because there aren’t any crank printers. We’re supposed to convert joules and calculate work. There’s only four other students here, and none of us have pens.
I crank, then send a text on my phone:
Where are you? Is Cathy OK? If you only have two tickets and she’s not allowed in, I’ll come get her. Does she need Baby Bu
Nguyen hands me five ball point Bics and gestures for me to pass the rest around. The guy’s relentless. He wears dirty polyester button-downs and his parents were refugees from Vietnam. Last plane out and all that. He probably wishes he was still there.
“Focus,” he says. But I can’t. My paper’s black letters on white. They could scramble and rearrange, and then what would they be?
Nguyen perches on the edge of his desk. He’s got three small kids at home. His wife is fat. Not like Orca. Happy, well-fed Hobbit fat. “Young ladies and gentlemen,” he says. “What if it’s not the end of the world, and you’re still accountable for your actions? Did you think of that? Take your test.”
In my mind, everybody in this room goes bloody. They’re just meat, and I’m wondering: Where’s the stunt camera? I mean, really. Death by asteroid? I thought I was more important than this.
The loudspeaker clicks on. Everybody twitches. Maybe it’s a militia-led public execution. They happen often enough that I’m starting to look forward to them. The routine comforts me. Which is fucked up, obviously. I know that, so don’t take notes or underline this or whatever.
The assistant principal or vice-secretary or some jackass’s voice pipes through. “This can’t be right,” she says.
“
Just read it!
” some guy demands.
“Darlins, I got some bad news,” she says. I realize it’s Miss Ross, a native Colony Eight who teaches auto shop. She gave me a C-, which I hated her for but deserved. “Aporia’s go
“
Keep reading
,” the other voice tells her through a muffle of static.
“Dang it! I heard you the first time!” she says. “About ten minutes ago, President Brickerson sent out a last communication. Since most of your crank phones don’t have Freenet, the militia wants me to pass it along… Brickerson says not to worry. The rocket will… eviscerate? Sure, okay, that’s a word. It’ll eviscerate Aporia before impact. Until then, we gotta stay put. So there’s no looting, transgressors between colonies’ll be shot. Anyone caught stealing fuel’ll be shot… Anyone messing… Ah, forget it. Run, darlins’. Just run. Get as far away as—”
Nguyen clicks off the loudspeaker. It doesn’t spare us. We still hear the gunshot. I go hard in a place that ought to be soft over something like this, which doesn’t mean I enjoy it. I’ve also been known to fantasize about drowning puppies, and I kind of like puppies.
Nguyen lets the reverb settle, then takes the quiz from my desk and crinkles it into a ball. Tosses it like a hoop-shot but misses the garbage. “Who wants a lesson in falling bodies?”
Twenty minutes later, he’s got it all written out. Seventy degrees, density = 8000kn/m3, speed at impact: 30km/s. Force = a trillion megatons. He’s not smiling or pretending to be brave. He touches the word
megatons
on the blackboard, totally freaked out.
“Meg-A-Tons…” he says. The guy’s a Tesla nerd—he figured out how to turn garbage into gasoline and there’s rumors he siphoned the refinery’s generators to power his house. “Would you ladies and gentlemen find it comforting to have me describe impact to you?”