We Are the Ants(59)

“How do you figure?”

Finding the words to explain to Diego that I couldn’t be with him—that no sane person should want to be with a disaster like me—was one of the most difficult things I’d ever done. But Diego remained silent until I was ready to talk. “In case you haven’t heard: the world is ending. I can’t start something with you knowing it can’t last.”

Diego tensed like he was afraid to move. “If you’re not over Jesse, if you need more time to grieve, tell me.” He caught my gaze for the first time since joining me on the staircase, and utterly disarmed me with the intensity behind his hazel eyes, like the endless fire of the Crab Nebula burning in space.

“I hate Jesse,” I said. “And I love him. I’ll never be done grieving for him.”

“You miss him—I get that—but the world doesn’t stop because he’s gone.”

He was wrong. The world had stopped. The world had stopped and it was going to end, but I didn’t tell Diego that; Jesse was just a name to him. “Tell me why you moved to Calypso. You hardly talk about your family, and when you do, it’s all horrible.”

“That’s because it’s not important, Henry.” Diego rocked back and forth on the step. “This is confusing for me, too. You’re not the only one with a past, but unlike you, I don’t live in mine.”

“I like you, Diego—so much, it scares me. But what does it say about me that I can like you as much as I do and still not want to press the button?”

“We can forget it happened,” Diego said.

“I don’t want to.”

“Then where does that leave us?”

Diego ignored the past, and I believed we had no future. It was impossible to look at him and not want to kiss him. It was impossible to look at him and not know the world was going to end and drag us to hell with it. It was impossible to look at Diego and be anything but honest. “I don’t know.”

It wasn’t the answer Diego wanted—I could see it in his bent back and slumped shoulders—but it was all the truth that was in me. The world wasn’t worth saving without Jesse in it.

“My mom’s going to kill me.”

Diego kept his hands in his pockets as we walked up the stairs, like he didn’t trust himself not to touch me. “Do you want me to drive you home? Your mom might not freak out with me there.”

The offer was tempting, but Diego’s presence would only delay my mother’s wrath, and time had a way of concentrating her anger. “I’ll walk.”

“Try not to get abducted.”

“Funny.”

We lingered at Please Start. Diego sat on the rusted hood and traced lines in the dirt, while I kicked at the gravel on the side of the road. Maybe we were both thinking about that kiss on his bedroom floor. I certainly was. Making out with Marcus had always felt like a race to the finish line, but with Diego I felt like I’d already won.

? ? ?

The house felt lonely inside. Mom’s car was parked in front of the duplex, but it didn’t feel like anyone was home. Nana wasn’t on the couch, and it looked abandoned without her sitting on it, reading while she watched the twenty-four-hour Bunker live feed.

“Hello?”

Smoke drifted into the living room from the kitchen, a spectral finger beckoning me onward. Mom sat at the kitchen table, still in her uniform, the black apron stained with salad dressing and other unidentifiable food particles. She looked a little like a slug herself, flabby and limp, leaning on the table with her face buried in her hands. The only sign of life was the lit cigarette smoldering between her fingers.

“Mom?”

“Sit.” She took a hard drag from her cigarette, the cherry flaring, and lit the end of a new one off the old before stubbing it out. I chose the seat across from her, hoping to stay out of arm’s reach. “I can’t do this with you, Henry. I need you to be okay.”

I’d expected anger, rage. I’d come to the table, garbed in heavy plate armor capable of deflecting my mother’s barbed and poisonous words. I was not prepared for this. The emptiness of her voice. “Mom—”

“I put Mother in a home.”

“What?”

Mom sucked on the cigarette like it was the only thing anchoring her to the world. “My mother is sick and I put her in a home, my oldest son dropped out of college to have a baby out of wedlock, and I can barely gather the strength to get out of bed in the morning. I need you to be okay.” Mom looked me in the eyes, but I didn’t see my mom anymore. I saw a woman struggling and failing to hold the tattered shreds of her life together. “Are you okay, Henry?”

After the first abduction, my mom sent me to one doctor after another. She never believed the various diagnoses—she hadn’t believed I was being abducted by aliens either. When they said I was depressed, she refused to let them medicate me. When they said I had avoidant personality disorder, she told them I just hadn’t learned to be comfortable in my own skin. She didn’t believe the psychiatrists, she didn’t believe in aliens, but she always believed in me. Through everything, she held fast to the notion that I didn’t need help, that all I needed was time to figure out who I was. I’m not sure if she was right, or if I would have been better off on pills or locked up in a mental hospital, but her belief in me was absolute. If I told her I was still being abducted, that I’d been fooling around with the same boy who attacked me in the showers, that the world was ending and I could prevent it, but that I wasn’t sure I wanted to, it would have destroyed that belief, and it was the only thing holding her together.