The 5th Wave (The Fifth Wave #1)(10)

For a half hour we waited by the windows. Nobody said much. Ms. Paulson told us to go back to our seats. We ignored her. Thirty minutes into the 1st Wave and already social order was breaking down. People kept checking their phones. We couldn’t connect it: the plane crashing, the lights going out, our phones dying, the clock on the wall with the big hand frozen on the twelve, little hand on the eleven.

Then the door flew open and Mr. Faulks told us to head over to the gym. I thought that was really smart. Get all of us in one place so the aliens didn’t have to waste a lot of ammunition.

So we trooped over to the gym and sat in the bleachers in near total darkness while the principal paced back and forth, stopping every now and then to yell at us to be quiet and wait for our parents to get there.

What about the students whose cars were at school? Couldn’t they leave?

“Your cars won’t work.”

WTF? What does he mean, our cars won’t work?

An hour passed. Then two. I sat next to Lizbeth. We didn’t talk much, and when we did, we whispered. We weren’t afraid of the principal; we were listening. I’m not sure what we were listening for, but it was like that quiet before the clouds open up and the thunder smashes down.

“This could be it,” Lizbeth whispered. She rubbed her nose nervously. Dug her lacquered nails into her dyed blond hair. Tapped her foot. Rolled the pad of her finger over her eyelid: She had just started wearing contacts and they bugged her constantly.

“It’s definitely something,” I whispered back.

“I mean, this could be it. Like it it. The end.”

She kept slipping the battery out of her phone and putting it back in. It was better than doing nothing, I guess.

She started to cry. I took her phone away and held her hand. Looked around. She wasn’t the only one crying. Other kids were praying. And others were doing both, crying and praying. The teachers were huddled up by the gym doors, forming a human shield in case the creatures from outer space decided to storm the floor.

“There’s so much I wanted to do,” Lizbeth said. “I’ve never even…” She choked back a sob. “You know.”

“I’ve got a feeling a lot of ‘you know’ is going on right now,” I said. “Probably right underneath these bleachers.”

“You think?” She wiped her cheeks with the palm of her hand. “What about you?”

“About ‘you know’?” I had no problem with talking about sex. My problem was talking about sex as it related to me.

“Oh, I know you haven’t ‘you know.’ God! I’m not talking about that.”

“I thought we were.”

“I’m talking about our lives, Cassie! Jesus, this could be the end of the freakin’ world, and all you want to do is talk about sex!”

She pulled her phone out of my hand and fumbled with the battery cover.

“Which is why you should just tell him,” she said, fiddling with the drawstrings of her hoodie.

“Tell who what?” I knew exactly what she meant; I was just buying time.

“Ben! You should tell him how you feel. How you’ve felt since the third grade.”

“This is a joke, right?” I felt my face getting hot.

“And then you should have sex with him.”

“Lizbeth, shut up.”

“It’s the truth.”

“I haven’t wanted to have sex with Ben Parish since the third grade,” I whispered. The third grade? I glanced over at her to see if she was really listening. Apparently, she wasn’t.

“If I were you, I’d go right up to him and say, ‘I think this is it. This is it, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to die in this school gymnasium without ever ha**ng s*x with you.’ And then you know what I’d do?”

“What?” I was fighting back a laugh, picturing the look on his face.

“I’d take him outside to the flower garden and have sex with him.”

“In the flower garden?”

“Or the locker room.” She waved her hand around frantically to include the entire school—or maybe the whole world. “It doesn’t matter where.”

“The locker room smells.” I looked two rows down at the outline of Ben Parish’s gorgeous head. “That kind of thing only happens in the movies,” I said.

“Yeah, totally unrealistic, not like what’s happening right now.”

She was right. It was totally unrealistic. Both scenarios, an alien invasion of the Earth and a Ben Parish invasion of me.

“At least you could tell him how you feel,” she said, reading my mind.

Could, yes. Ever would, well…

And I never did. That was the last time I saw Ben Parish, sitting in that dark, stuffy gymnasium (Home of the Hawks!) two rows down from me, and only the back part of him. He probably died in the 3rd Wave like almost everybody else, and I never told him how I felt. I could have. He knew who I was; he sat behind me in a couple of classes.

He probably doesn’t remember, but in middle school we rode the same bus, and there was an afternoon when I overheard him talking about his little sister being born the day before and I turned around and said, “My brother was born last week!” And he said, “Really?” Not sarcastic, but like he thought it was a cool coincidence, and for about a month I went around thinking we had this special connection based on babies. Then we were in high school and he became the star wide receiver for the team and I became just another girl watching him score from the stands. I would see him in class or in the hallway, and sometimes I had to fight the urge to run up to him and say, “Hi, I’m Cassie, the girl from the bus. Do you remember the babies?”