Away We Go - Emil Ostrovski Page 0,24

the eternal return of the game-over screen, until Marty gently pries the shot I poured for him out of my fingers and downs it with admirable form.

This is his apology for bringing up the parents.

He’s the best, like that.

He coughs, throws me a look of reproach, coughs again. “Christ, Noah.”

“You need to drink more,” I say. “Like Tolstoy, it gets better the more you put into it.”

“I can’t believe you just compared—”

“Believe it, Marty-guy. Believe it.”

I try to sound cheery. There’s no point in being sad. But every couple weeks, my parents send me Age of Rome florins or Pirate World booty and that kills me. They even donated an extra shipment of Growth Hormone to my Factoryfarmville factory farm the other day. Why do they keep sending me these things, when I never send them anything in return? When I never open their letters?

Marty watches me pour him a second shot. I spill a bit of vodka on the table. “Here,” I say, handing him the shot glass. He toasts me, but his eyes are sad.

“Close your eyes, please,” I say, and the wonderful thing about being drunk together is that he listens without so much as raising a question. I wipe away my tears and we go out to have an adventure, because there’s something about having a BAC above .15 that makes everything possible, including but not limited to acute alcohol poisoning. We take my vodka with us, of course, passing it back and forth. Security patrols clack by in their hard plastic boots. They won’t bother us unless we get too close to the lamp-lit walls. We cut through the residential quad until we reach the lawn in front of Galloway, the parking lot empty save for a handful of cars, overnight workers at the Wellness Center, probably—there’s a figure standing at a window on the third floor, the floor that girls at Westing sometimes go up to, and for two weeks afterward aren’t supposed to take baths or have sex or use tampons.

Marty takes another gulp of vodka.

He’s caught up with me enough that it doesn’t matter he’s not caught up with me. He gazes up at the stars transfixed, and I think of Whitman’s learn’d astronomer, a dissident student fleeing the lecture hall, fleeing a reduction of the world to equations and formulas, and instead, looking up in perfect silence at the stars. Alice wanted to teach me the constellations, but I told her all I saw were a whole lot of balls of fire. Which of us was right? Are the stars mythic Greek figures, or simply a bunch of hot air? Are we atoms, or do we have souls? If you don’t know which story is right, then how is it possible to know whether you should be sitting in the lecture hall or standing outside with your head tilted skyward, praying in Church or huddled over a physics problem set?

I ask these questions of Marty, and his response is “What?” Impressively, he manages to slur the one syllable.

“What do you mean, ‘what’?”

“I mean—what do you mean?”

“Well, which part didn’t you get? The Whitman reference? That was very Westing of me, wasn’t it? There’s also an implied part, but I’m not sure what I implied.”

“It’s like you’re talking Japanese. Never mind.”

“So I’m talking English?”

“No. Yes. I mean—you’re talking Japanese. I just don’t want to offend the Japanese. I have a Japanese friend, you know.”

“But, Marty,” I say, “if I’m talking Japanese, then how do you understand me enough to know you’re not understanding me?”

“I’m, uh, taking an intro class.”

That explains absolutely everything. For a few minutes neither of us speaks, until, I don’t quite know why, but I tell him, “I miss your play.”

I haven’t acted in a while. Sometimes I think it’s for the best—I act plenty as Noah, no need to take on other personas when I have my hands so full with this one. But during the spring, in Marty’s take on Peter Pan, I became the boy who would never grow old. The play took place in a quarantine ward in an unnamed children’s hospital. There was a corridor with two entrances, a door on the right and a door on the left. Doctors entered in the morning and exited in the evening through the door on the right, which was guarded by soldiers, soldiers with guns. Sick children were wheeled out in stretchers through the door on the left. The doctors would return with empty stretchers. Peter