We Are the Ants(71)

“Stop stressing. You’ll figure something out.”

“I shouldn’t even be doing this.”

Audrey sat beside me and rested her head on my arm. “Doing what?”

“Looking for a gift for Diego, thinking about Diego, imagining that we might have a future together. Even if the world doesn’t end, he’d still end up abandoning me.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Jesse did. It’s my fault he’s dead.”

Audrey slapped my shoulder. “Are you soft in the head?”

“Jesse always said I didn’t love him the way he loved me. He must’ve been right; otherwise, he wouldn’t have killed himself.”

She took my hand and kissed my fingers. My knuckles were still scabbed from punching the drywall with Charlie. “Jesse didn’t die of a broken heart, Henry; he died of a broken brain.” I tried to interrupt, but she cut me off. “It took a lot of therapy for me to understand that Jesse committed suicide because he was sick. It wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t his fault, and it sure as hell wasn’t your fault.”

“I should have been a better boyfriend.”

“Depression isn’t a war you win. It’s a battle you fight every day. You never get to stop, never get to rest. It’s one bloody fray after another. Jesse got worn down and didn’t think he could fight anymore.”

“Why? Why did he do it, Audrey?” My voice caught in my throat, and tears weren’t far behind, but I didn’t care. Fuck it, and f*ck them.

“I don’t know.” Audrey shook her head.

To Jesse’s parents, I was just some boy their son was dating. I’d eaten dinner with them a couple of times, but the conversations were awkward and unmemorable. “Sometimes I think about going to their house and asking to see Jesse’s room one last time. He had to have left something behind explaining why he killed himself.”

“What if he did? What then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would it make you feel better?”

“No, but at least I’d know the truth.”

Audrey said Jesse’s suicide wasn’t anyone’s fault, but I think we all shared the blame. Me, Audrey, Jesse’s parents, the kids at school. Sometimes when a star collapses, it becomes a fiery supernova, but other times the core density is so great that it quietly consumes itself, forming a black hole, its gravitational pull so terrible that nothing can escape, not even light. You can’t see a black hole, but if you look closely, you can witness its effect on those objects nearest to it—the way it changes the orbits of solar systems or draws off a star’s light a little at a time, sucking it down to its dense center.

Maybe we couldn’t have stopped Jesse’s collapse, but we should have seen it happening. If I can figure out why, I can stop it from ever happening again.

Audrey tossed her empty coffee in the trash. “You want to get out of here?”

“I still don’t know what to get Diego for Christmas.”

“You’ll figure it out, Henry.”

“And if I don’t?”

Audrey took my arm and led me toward the parking lot. “Then give him the gift every horny teenage boy wants for Christmas.”

“An Xbox?”

“I love you, Henry.”

“I think he already has an Xbox, Audrey.”





24 December 2015


As Mom studied Diego across the table, her fingers twitched, itching for a cigarette. She regarded him the way a battle--hardened general regards the enemy on the other side of a blood-soaked battlefield, which was weird since she was the one who’d invited him to dinner.

The whole thing had happened suddenly. Charlie and Zooey were arguing over paint colors for the baby’s room while Diego and I played video games on the couch. Then Mom burst into the house and herded us all into the car for a surprise family dinner at Neptune’s.

“So, Diego, where in Colorado are you from?”

Diego’s mouth was full of a tomato wedge from his salad. His eyes grew wide, and he chewed quickly while everyone watched him, before spitting out, “Brighton.”

“How’s the renovation coming, Charlie?” I was trying to rescue Diego—I’d never seen him so adorably flustered—but my mother was not easily deterred.

“What brought you to Calypso?”

Diego set down his fork. Unlike at the barbecue, he had impeccable manners. He kept his elbows off the table, didn’t talk with his mouth full, and used his napkin frequently. “I got into some trouble, so I came to live with my sister, Viviana.”

“What kind of trouble?” My mother, the Grand Inquisitor.

“This isn’t an interrogation,” I said. As mortified as I was at her merciless prying, I was as anxious to hear the answers as she was. Only, I didn’t want Diego to know that.

“Sounds like one to me,” Charlie said. Zooey elbowed him in the ribs. She couldn’t scoot all the way up to the table because of her bulging belly, but she didn’t let that stop her from eating everything within reach—her salad, all the bread, Charlie’s salad. Zooey’s pregnancy was turning into a great diet for my brother.

“I’m only trying to get to know your boyfriend, sweetheart.”