We Are the Ants(75)

“Are we doing this?” Audrey asked. “If we’re doing this, we should go now.” She’d been rambling like that for fifteen minutes, reciting everything she’d ever seen on TV about how to not get caught breaking into someone’s house, and the penalties if we were. I wanted to tell her this wasn’t an exam to be failed, but I got the feeling she’d melt down if I tried to silence her.

Audrey’s car didn’t stand out, which was a boon to us, as were the Christmas Eve parties happening at a few of the Franklins’ neighbor’s houses. One set of teenagers would hardly be remembered by someone who might have glimpsed us as they stood on their front porch, guzzling spiked eggnog and trying to avoid one more pinch on the cheek from Aunt So-and-So.

“In and out,” I said. “Mr. and Mrs. Franklin probably haven’t even gone into Jesse’s room since . . . Everything will look the same as it did the last time I was there.” I tried not to think about that last time or about what we’d done. I had to remain focused.

“What if Jesse didn’t leave a note, Henry?”

“Then he left a journal entry or an e-mail he never sent or a video he recorded on his phone that no one thought to check. There has to be something.”

Audrey grabbed my hand and held it to her chest. She was sweating through her thin Muppets shirt. “Finding out why Jesse killed himself won’t change anything.”

“You’re right. It’ll change everything.”

I got out of the car before I lost my nerve. I was halfway across the lawn when Audrey caught up. I hoped to find out that Jesse had killed himself because someone had molested him when he was little or because his parents beat him or because he’d had a crisis of faith and couldn’t reconcile being gay with his belief in God. I didn’t actually believe any of those things were true, and I didn’t want to think that Jesse had been tormented by them, but if there had been some horror in Jesse’s life that had driven him to suicide, at least I’d know it wasn’t my fault.

Audrey stumbled, and I caught her by the elbow. Anyone watching would have thought we were just a couple of tipsy kids. I led her around the side of the house to the back patio. The waterfall splashed into the pool, reminding me that I needed to pee. I pushed my bladder aside and went straight for the Christmas cactus on a metal shelf with a dozen other plants. Red-and-white blossoms burst out of the padlike stems. The key was under the pot. Jesse’s parents hadn’t even known he’d kept a spare for those nights he needed to sneak in. I put it to its intended use one last time.

As we entered the house, Audrey hooked her finger through the belt loop of my jeans and crept so closely behind me that her breath warmed my neck. The alarm beeped its insistent warning, and I silenced it with Jesse’s birthday. The outside lights poured through the windows, but even without them, I could have navigated my way through the kitchen, to the living room, and up the grand staircase to Jesse’s room—third door on the right.

“We don’t need to do this, Henry.” Audrey whispered even though the house was empty, and there was no one to hear us. The house felt more than empty. It felt gutted.

“There are answers behind this door.” There was also truth, memories of times that sparkled in my mind like exposed bits of broken glass in a heaping pile of shit. Some of my best days happened behind that door, and they would never happen again.

I turned the knob, pushed open the door, and turned on the light. Jesse’s bed stood in the center of the room, unmade; his long chest of drawers lined the far wall, the surface crowded with dirty clothes and half-empty water bottles and whatever scraps of the day he’d pulled out of his pockets and tossed there; across from his bed was a TV stand with a TV and four game systems, the controllers on the floor; and a small desk hunched in the corner, bearing the weight of a hundred books on its back.

Only, none of those things were there.

They should have been; they’d always been before. The books changed, the dirty laundry rotated items, but the fundamentals remained constant.

Audrey poked her head in, pulled it back out, and looked around. “Is this the right room?” She already knew the answer. She’d spent more time in Jesse’s house than I had.

The bed was gone, the dresser gone, the desk and books and game consoles. Gone. Even Jesse’s posters of the Broadway shows he’d seen—Miss Saigon and Little Shop of Horrors and Wicked—were gone. Jesse’s parents had transformed his bedroom into a sewing room. The walls were painted a tasteful yellow, antique shelves filled with bolts of cloth in every color lined the walls. Drawings of gowns were tacked to a corkboard, and racks held examples of work in various stages of completion.

Jesse wasn’t there. It was as if he’d never existed at all.

“Henry . . .”

Audrey put her hand on my shoulder, but the weight was too much, and I sank to my knees. There were no truths to find in Jesse’s bedroom. No absolution.

I didn’t cry. There was no point. There was no point to anything. “It’s all f*cked up, Audrey. Jesse’s dead, and it’s probably my fault because I didn’t love him enough or I wasn’t good enough for him and he kept so many secrets from me that I thought maybe if I’d known I could have stopped him from killing himself, so I pushed Diego because he’s the first person who’s made me think maybe I was wrong, maybe it wasn’t my fault, and maybe I could press the button and have a future that wasn’t meaningless, but I pushed him too far and now he’s gone too.”