We Are the Ants(93)

I couldn’t look Diego in the eyes. “It’s not your problem.”

“Did Marcus hurt you?” I nodded. “Did he . . . ?” Diego glanced at my jeans, and I fumbled with them but couldn’t button them because my wrist was swollen and useless.

“He tried.”

Diego’s mouth twisted.

Ms. Faraci touched my shoulder, and I jumped. “It’s okay, Henry. You’re okay. The police are coming. Let’s get you somewhere safe.” She put her arm around my shoulders to lead me toward the school.

“Come on, Diego,” I said, but Diego was gone.

? ? ?

I sat on the back of an ambulance while the cops questioned me and paramedics pressed gauze to my head. My wrist was definitely broken, and I probably had a concussion. I told the police officers everything, including who had attacked me in the showers. The paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital, but I refused to go until someone found Diego. Audrey stayed with me, holding my good hand. She hardly said a word.

A crowd of onlookers had gathered around the emergency vehicles, and my mom shoved them aside to get to me, not caring who she elbowed. “Henry! Henry, what the hell happened?” She was wearing pink pajamas, and her hair was pulled back with an elastic band.

I smiled weakly and tried to assure her I was okay, but what she really needed was a Xanax. “Someone attacked me,” I said. “He tried to . . . He tried to rape me.” None of this would have happened if I hadn’t run from Diego. “I needed to be alone, so I went to the football field.”

“Young man,” said the red-haired paramedic with bloodshot eyes. “We need to take you to the hospital.”

“Not until they find Diego.” I turned to Audrey. “You have to find him.”

“I’m not leaving you.” Her voice was so fierce that I didn’t even try to argue.

The paramedic was about to explain for the fifth time why I needed to go to the emergency room, when two cops led Diego through the crowd, his hands zip-tied behind his back. Dried blood stained his face and was streaked across his shirt. I jumped off the edge of the ambulance and ran to him.

“Diego! Are you okay?” I looked for the source of the blood but couldn’t find any injuries.

“Don’t worry,” Diego said. “It’s not mine.”





16 January 2016


We stayed at the emergency room until nearly two a.m. A chatty doctor put four stitches in my scalp and a cast on my wrist. When we got home, I passed out on the couch with my phone beside my head so I wouldn’t miss it when Diego returned one of the hundred texts or voice mails I’d left for him. I just needed to know he was okay. Audrey messaged me that Marcus had been released to his parents, who immediately checked him into a drug-and-alcohol treatment facility.

Mom peeked in on me repeatedly throughout the night. At around eight in the morning, I sat up and said, “I’m not sleeping.”

With a cup of coffee in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other, Mom sat beside me on the couch. She fidgeted with the cigarette like she was dying to put it to her lips and light it, and didn’t seem to know what she was supposed to be doing. Finally she set the mug on the coffee table and hugged me so tightly that I thought she was trying to break my spine.

“Why didn’t you tell me it had gotten so bad?”

“You needed me to be okay.”

“I didn’t know. . . .” Mom hugged me again, and this time I hugged her back. I tried to be strong, I tried to hold myself together, but I couldn’t do it anymore. I told her everything. About the sluggers and the end of the world and the button and Marcus and my guilt over Jesse’s suicide.

“It’s my fault Diego’s in trouble,” I said. “All of this is my fault.”

I expected my mom to tell me that it wasn’t my fault and that nothing was broken we couldn’t mend, but there were lines on her face I’d never seen before, like she’d aged a decade overnight. “Tell me why you didn’t press the button.”

“Who cares about the button, Mom? Diego’s in jail because of me!”

“This is important, Henry.”

“Mom!”

“Henry.” Mom’s bottom lip trembled. “Do you wish you were dead?”

We slammed doors in my family. We beat each other up and we asked questions we didn’t want answers to and we wielded silence like a dagger. I wasn’t sure how to respond to her blunt honesty except with honesty of my own. “I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to live, either. I don’t know why anyone would. This world is so f*cked up, Mom, I think we’d all be better off if I didn’t press that button. Everything, everything just hurts too much. And I miss Jesse, and I tried to be okay. I thought Marcus could help me forget, and Diego could replace Jesse, but I miss him so much.”

Mom was quiet for a long time. Her silence stretched across the morning and led me back through the past hundred days, and I knew what she was going to say before she finally said it. “I think you need help, Henry.”

“I don’t need help.”

“Then answer me truthfully: Are you okay?”

I was confused and woozy from the pain medication. I didn’t have time for doctors or therapists; I needed to know what was happening with Diego. He was still on probation, and I didn’t know what being arrested for beating up Marcus would mean for him. All I had to do was tell my mom I was okay, and she’d believe me. I could go to the police station and explain everything. All I had to do was say three little words, and I could fix all that I’d broken. But I was broken too, and I didn’t know how to fix myself.