We Are the Ants(69)

“Part of it,” Diego said. “Compared to other kids, I wasn’t in juvie for that long, but it felt like forever. Being inside, it strips you of your identity. I was who the lawyers and the judge and the guards told me to be. Now I can be whoever I want, and I’m still struggling to figure out who that is, but the point is that the choice belongs to me.”

Maybe he believed that, but it sounded to me like a lie he fed himself so that he could wake up in the morning believing he could change. That people would let him. “Can you take me home?”

We didn’t talk on the drive, and I hated Marcus for f*cking up the night. If I’d never seen him, I would have enjoyed the movie with Diego and we would have kissed and he wouldn’t have told me about being in juvie and I wouldn’t have been sitting in his car wondering what he’d done to deserve being there and what other secrets he was keeping from me. I understood he had his reasons, and it shouldn’t have mattered what he’d done in the past, but it did. The past overshadowed everything I thought I knew about Diego. It made me think maybe he had smashed Marcus’s car windows. And if he was capable of that, what else was he capable of?

Diego parked Please Start in front of the duplex. “I’m sorry, Henry. I should have told you the truth.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve really f*cked this up, haven’t I?”

I brushed my hair out of my eyes and tried to look at him, but when I did, I was too tempted to forget the past. It didn’t matter that history was our way of keeping score, since the points didn’t matter, but I couldn’t just ignore it. “Diego, I like you but . . .”

Diego ran his thumb down the side of my face. His touch was soft, and I wanted him to kiss me so badly. “I spent nearly two years locked up in juvie, dreaming about the outside world. I thought about my choices, about the things I’d done and the things I hadn’t. I’ve never been to Paris or water-skied or fallen in love. When they let me out, I swore not to waste one second of my life. My counselor used to tell me that we remember the past, live in the present, and write the future. Even if the world ends next month or in a million years, we can still write our future, Henry.”

“I want that to be true.” I leaned my forehead against Diego’s, felt his breath on my nose.

“Do you hate me now?”

“Kind of the opposite.”





23 December 2015


Audrey and I braved the mall two days before Christmas. It was a demonic landscape of strollers and shoppers and bad holiday music that made me want to cut off my ears so that I would never again be forced to endure Wham! singing “Last Christmas.” We killed time at the Apple store, waiting for someone in a blue shirt to acknowledge our presence while hordes of tiny, teething infidels ran screaming around us.

“Why do people who so obviously hate children have so many of them?” Audrey asked. I stuck out my tongue when she took my picture with one of the display phones.

“Because they hate everyone else more. Their bratty kids are their revenge on a society that has denied them the riches they so rightly deserve.” As if to emphasize my point, an exhausted father watched his little angel pull a laptop off the table and throw it onto the ground with dead-eyed glee.

“You complete me, Henry Denton.”

The mobs of people were making me claustrophobic, and I wanted them to die slowly of plague almost as much as I wanted to get the hell out of there. I felt as if each person within visual range were slowly draining the life from me. We were all connected, and the more of them there were, the more I wanted to crawl under a table and cry. “Can’t you buy the computer online?”

Audrey shook her head. “It won’t arrive in time, and I promised Mom I’d pick it up for her. Remember when she called the UPS guy a heartless, baby-killing Nazi because they lost the knives she ordered from Amazon?”

“Oh, I remember.”

“Christmas makes her insane.”

“I still need to find a gift for Diego.”

A blue-shirted employee passed within arm’s reach, and Audrey pounced on her, ignoring her protests. I wandered toward the front of the store while I waited for Audrey to finish.

I don’t know how long he was standing there, but I noticed Adrian Morse on the other side of the store. He was wearing a blue shirt and grinning. I’d always assumed he was rich like Marcus, and it surprised me to find him working in the Apple store. A moment later every demo computer screen, monitor, phone, and tablet blinked, and their displays lit up with the picture of me covered in paint wearing the alien mask. Most of the shoppers were confused, but a few began to laugh. My face was hidden by the mask in the photo, but Adrian wasn’t the only CHS student in the store, and they recognized me immediately.

I drew breaths in ragged jags, my heart raced, and my skin burned. The world went waa-waa-waa at the edges, and the floor seemed to tilt to the side. I tried to find Audrey, to focus on her and regain my equilibrium, but the crowd had swallowed her up.

“Oh my God. Is that him?”

“Space Boy?”

“What a freak.”

“Really thinks aliens took him?”

“The mask’s an improvement.”

I fled the store, not caring where I went. I rounded a corner and blew through a side door into a dark labyrinth that led into the bowels of the mall. It reeked of trash and cigarette smoke. The taunts couldn’t follow me there. I steadied myself against the wall. A kid in a hairnet, carrying a bag of garbage, trudged past, nodding in my direction before disappearing down the maze of walkways.