We Are the Ants(79)

REMEMBER THE PAST,

LIVE THE PRESENT,

WRITE THE FUTURE.

Diego traced the words. I couldn’t tell if he liked it or not. He’d practically gone catatonic.

“I thought you could use it to record all the stuff you want to do,” I said. “I don’t know. It’s stupid. If you hate it, I can take it back.” Of course, I couldn’t take it back because of the etching, but whatever.

“Thank you, Henry.” It was only three words, but it felt like more to me. It felt like a wish that we could go back and forget I’d accused him of breaking Marcus’s windows, that we could forget about his past and my Jesse and meet at a time before tragedy had consumed either of us. But that wasn’t possible, and this was all we had. For these last thirty-five days we could be friends, and that would have to be enough.

Diego handed me my gifts.

I looked at the wrap job, and grinned. “That was so sweet of you to let those poor orphans with no fingers do your wrapping for you.”

“Whatever,” Diego said. “It’s abstract wrapping. You just don’t understand my art.” There were four badly wrapped gifts in all. A book about rockets and space travel written in 1948, a retractable fountain pen, a bottle of dark red ink that looked like blood, and a star chart.

“You shouldn’t have done all this.”

Diego grinned like crazy. “There’s one more.” He handed me an envelope. “Open it.”

I expected it to be a card, and I felt like a jerk for not getting Diego one. Only, it wasn’t a card. Inside were two tickets to see Janelle Monáe in concert. I’d only mentioned liking her once. “I can’t believe you remembered.” I turned the tickets over, scanning them for the when and where. The show was at a club in Fort Lauderdale. On February 2, 2016. “Diego—”

“If the world doesn’t end, we can go. Or you can take Audrey if you want. Either way, I thought having something to look forward to might help you make your decision.”

“You still want me to press the button, even after what I did?”

Diego smiled. His hand twitched like he wanted to touch my cheek but was fighting the impulse. “I still want you to want to press it.”





28 December 2015


I wish I could say that it was my idea, but that honor belonged to Jesse Franklin. Jesse believed stories were the collective memories of the world, recorded in books so that each of us could know who we were before we became who we are. He said that’s why people love The Catcher in the Rye when they’re teenagers, but fall out of love with it as adults. We’re all Holden Caulfield at fifteen, but when we grow up we want to be Atticus Finch. I didn’t exactly buy Jesse’s theory, but I stumbled upon the copy of To Kill a Mockingbird he’d loaned me, and it came back to me. That’s when I knew what I needed to do.

Audrey and Diego were both in on the plan—it’d been easy to convince them. Convincing TJ to let us into Nana’s room without her permission required a more devious approach.

“And that, gentlemen, is what boobs are good for,” Audrey said as she shut Nana’s door behind us and dropped the box she was carrying onto the empty bed. We hadn’t spoken about breaking into Jesse’s house, and I was happy to forget it had ever happened.

I rolled my eyes, but I doubt we would have gotten in without her. “You can finish patting yourself on the back later. Mom said she’d have Nana here by three thirty, which leaves us less than an hour.”

Diego scanned the bare room. “Where should we start?” It was difficult to resist holding his hand or leaning over to kiss him. I caught myself a couple of times, forgetting we’d agreed to just be friends, and I wondered if it were easier for Diego.

“Let’s start at the beginning.”

It took the entire hour, all three of us working quickly to finish before Nana returned. That didn’t include our preparation from the last two days. This was my belated Christmas gift to Nana, and one that she wouldn’t need to remember to appreciate.

Mom wasn’t in on the plan. Not the real plan. I’d only told her that I wanted to hang something in Nana’s room at the nursing home as a surprise, and convinced her to delay bringing Nana back after spending Christmas with us. My phone buzzed, letting me know they were close. We finished in a mad rush, and were waiting outside the door for Nana when she arrived.

“What’s this, Charlie? What are all of you doing here?” A few of the residents shuffled from their rooms, drawn by Nana’s annoyed tone.

“Come on, Nana. There’s something I want to show you.” I held out my hand and led her into the room.

I already knew what was on the other side of the door, so I watched Nana’s face when she saw it for the first time. Her tight frown eased, fell, and disappeared completely, replaced by confused awe as she tried to take in everything at once. The walls were almost completely covered in pictures of Nana’s life. There had been hundreds of photographs in the boxes Charlie had taken from her room, and the ones we’d chosen barely represented a tenth of them.

“This is the story of you.”

Nana touched the nearest picture. She was dancing with a handsome young man. Her left arm was raised, and her -flowered dress twirled around her, open like an umbrella. If you listened closely, you could hear the Coasters singing “Poison Ivy” in the background. Nana couldn’t have been older than I am when that photo was taken. That girl’s face was unlined, untroubled, and unconcerned about the future.