Away We Go - Emil Ostrovski Page 0,10
and now insisted on transposing it to real-life situations, mainly those involving me.
“You’re a sheep,” I whispered, and instantly felt bad, wanted to take it back.
She rolled her eyes. “You and your sheep, Noah Falls.”
“I have a dream, that one day, we will be judged, not on the basis of which farm animals we have in our dreams, but on how we choose to spend perfectly decent Friday nights.”
“Troll,” she reiterated, in case I hadn’t gotten it the first time.
Just then the door to the room swung open, revealing a group of boys.
“Welcome, welcome!” Morgan said with grating enthusiasm as they picked their noisy way to the outskirts of our circle. We made room for them, and Morgan resumed her spiel, but after a few minutes, one of the newcomers proceeded to raise his hand. His hair was long, tied back into a ponytail. He wore an A-shirt that revealed painfully skinny arms. His three friends snickered to themselves as Ponytail fidgeted in his seat, waving his hand this way and that.
“I have a question. Miss! Miss President. Madame President!”
Morgan looked startled. “Yes?” she said, in a surprisingly meek voice.
“Madame President,” he said. “You’ve been talking about belief and making things manifest, right? Well, see, what I was wondering, me and my friends—can we believe ourselves into bed with a girl? Believe and make it manifest? Is that how this thing works?”
“Because,” another of the boys piped in, “and I intend no disrespect to this noble organization or its professed goals, but, personally, I would much rather expend my energies toward that eventuality, especially in light of the apparent imminence of the world’s end.”
“He’s a virgin,” Ponytail said of his friend. “You can tell by the way he talks.”
The Believers put their warm, fuzzy feelings about manifesting better realities in honor of killer comets to the side for the moment to tell the four intruders that “We’re trying to do something useful with our lives, so if you don’t like it, go die in a ditch.”
“No, you know what? These guys have converted me,” Ponytail said. “We manifest our realities, so I guess my sister died ’cause she’s a little bitch. Only a bitch dies from organ failure when she’s thirteen, right?”
The meeting was beginning to look more and more like a future crime scene. I grabbed Alice’s hand and dragged her toward the door. Morgan, practically in tears, barred our path, hastily offering us a small bucket full of pins that read “BELIEVERS: The End Time Is Your Time.”
As I took a pin I noticed a red mark on the side of Morgan’s neck. Who’d put it there? Had she lectured him on the power of “Positive Actualization” in the face of the apocalypse? Why wasn’t he here, manifesting a reality that involved standing up for her?
“Thank you for the pin,” I said.
Any desire to challenge Morgan was gone.
She just wanted to believe she added up to something so she could sleep easier, because going away was a lonely business, and yes, it made you feel better to think the world was going away with you. Who could blame Morgan, really, for wanting to sleep easier?
That was why you had to choose the right bedtime stories. The director with her grand convocation day speeches about Westing’s singular purpose. The students working in the library, doing research for teachers, volunteering, going to clubs, whispering theories about where the sick kids go, whispering that tertiary care clinics involving bathing and grooming support were just a cover-up for secret government labs where mad scientists cut Bobby Fisher from econ into pieces in order to cure PPV and save the rest of us, like in this AwayWeWatch flick called The Treatment Program. They pretended that the outside world wasn’t actively trying to forget us, hadn’t boxed us in, limited our Internet access to a grand total of one site, limited our cell phone communication to calling kids who lived down the hall from us, even as our parents sent us letters and micro-transactions through AwayWeGame in the form of Pirate World booty or Age of Rome florins. Most of all, kids pretended all of this stuff, these activities they did, the grades they got, actually mattered.
SILVERWARE IN THE SKY
An hour or two after the Believer meeting, Alice and I had one of those which-way-should-the-toilet-paper-go arguments where the toilet paper is a metaphor for. Pretty. Much. Everything. We were in the gardens behind Galloway, bickering like a married couple even though we’d only known