We Are the Ants(36)

“Don’t worry, Marcus, I’ll keep your secrets. All of them. I don’t want people to find out about what we did any more than you do.”

? ? ?

Diego found me during lunch, sitting on a bench beside the library. The weather was too warm to eat outside, but I couldn’t endure the cafeteria with all those people looking at and talking about me. I didn’t have an appetite anyway. “I texted you a couple of times.” There was coldness in his voice, a distant calm. I was sure he knew about the attack, had probably seen the pictures, but he was being maddeningly blasé.

“More like thirty.”

“I was worried.”

“I wasn’t in the mood to talk.”

Diego nodded and sat beside me. He was wearing flip-flops that exposed his flat feet and hairy toes. “Who attacked you, Henry?”

“I already went through this with the cops.”

“I’m not the cops.”

“Just drop it, all right?”

“I’ve told you about my sister, right?” Diego didn’t wait for me to answer. “Viv was wild when we were growing up. She’s got her shit together now, but when we were kids, I didn’t think she’d make it out of high school without a felony record.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “She was great, though. When I was seven, I think, we had this storm come through that knocked out the power for hours. Our parents had gone into town, and I was so scared. Viv found a bottle of champagne in the back of the fridge and made us champagne ice cream. We played penny poker until our parents got home. My pop whipped us both pretty good, but it was worth it.

“Another time, when I was nine, Viv was climbing this huge cottonwood in our backyard. Dad had told her a million times not to, but that was probably exactly why she did it. She slipped and fell, smacked her face on a branch coming down. Came screaming to me, all bloody and purple. Thing was, she wasn’t worried about her nose being broken; she was scared of being grounded for climbing that stupid tree. Mom lost it when I took Viv inside. I told her I was playing ninja and had tackled Viv and accidentally broken her nose.

“When my pop got home that night, he beat me so hard, he ruptured my spleen.” Diego chuckled like a ruptured spleen was hilarious.

I looked for self-pity in Diego’s eyes, tried to figure out why he’d told me. “Did your dad really do that?” Diego lifted his T-shirt. A faded scar ran down his stomach to his navel, marring the smooth tan skin. Another scar, jagged and more fresh, cut across his left side above his hip. He dropped his shirt back down before I could examine it further. “I’m sorry that happened to you, but what’s your point?”

Diego clenched his fists, took deep, even breaths. He said, “I protect the people I care about, Henry.”

“It doesn’t matter who attacked me.”

“It matters to me.” For a moment I considered telling him it was Marcus, and probably Adrian and Jay, who’d attacked me. Maybe he would have turned them in; maybe he would have beaten them bloody. All I know is that he wouldn’t have done nothing. Which is why I didn’t tell him.

“The sluggers—”

“Who?”

“The aliens,” I said. “I call them that because they look like slugs. Well, they told me the world is going to end soon.”

“How soon?”

“January twenty-ninth.”

Diego arched his eyebrow. “That’s pretty specific.”

“It’s the end of life on Earth. Specificity matters.”

“Did the . . . sluggers tell you how?”

I shook my head. “But they told me I could prevent it. All I have to do is press a red button on their ship.”

“Strange. And sort of anticlimactic.”

“I thought so too.”

Most people would have written me off as a delusional lunatic, but Diego treated me like he believed what I was saying, or at least believed that I believed it. “So at Marcus’s party, when you asked me about saving the world, you weren’t speaking hypothetically?”

“Not so much.”

“Did you press it?”

“Not yet.” Admitting that to Diego, telling him about the button and the end of the world, made the burden slightly more manageable. It was still my decision, no one could make it for me, but I didn’t have to carry the weight of it alone.

“It’d be easier not to,” Diego said. “Wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Because you miss Jesse.” The muscle along Diego’s jaw pulsed, and it was a while before he spoke again. “You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you? That’s why you won’t tell anyone who attacked you. The world’s going to end; why rock the boat, right?”

“No. I don’t know.” I’d admitted more to Diego than I’d meant to. “Do you want me to press it?”

“I think I want you to want to press it.”

“Oh.” It wasn’t the answer I’d hoped for. I didn’t want to be responsible for the fate of humankind. I could barely be respon-sible for myself. We sat in silence, each roaming our own thoughts until the bell rang and the walkways flooded with chatty students on their way to classes. The one good thing to come from being attacked was that Principal DeShields transferred me from gym to study hall. Diego escorted me to my new class without asking, and I didn’t tell him how grateful I was.