Away We Go - Emil Ostrovski Page 0,3

put under quarantine after a handful of armed and desperate Texan parents raided the South Houston Boys’ Recovery Center. A hundred infected youths escaped into the general population; the mayor of Houston declared a state of emergency, and Governor Johnson called up the National Guard.

From beside me, a snort. “Yeah, whoop-dee-doo.” But I could tell he didn’t mean it. He rubbed at his eye angrily with a knuckle.

“Pinkeye?”

“Shut up,” he said, and kicked me lightly in the shin.

“Hey,” I said after a time, to break the silence that had settled over us. “Can I ask you for something weird?”

He pitched his head forward in a nod and listened to my request, and said “Oh, No,” in agreement, in the softest voice I’d ever heard him use. In the recovery center’s second floor bathroom, across from the dormitory, he let me wash his hands with warm water and soap. They were coarse. I worked intently, finger by finger, until his nails were clean.

SEVEN WEEKS BEFORE THE CATACLYSMIC, FIERY, KIND OF CLICHÉD END OF ALL THINGS (OR NOT)

WESTING CAMPUS

1 - Main Gate

2 - Galloway Hall

3 - Teacher’s Lot

4 - Wellness Center

5 - Chapel

6 - Library

7 - Cafeteria

8 - Bullsworth Hall

9 - Gates Hall

10 - Lombardy Hall

11 - Greenhouse

12 - Dorlan House

13 - Violet House

14 - Clover House

15 - Turner House

16 - Lakeside Apartments

17 - Galloway Lawn

18 - Westing Lake

19 - Sunset Hill

20 - Galloway Gardens

21 - The Westing Wall

THE REASON I STICK AROUND

Atoms are mostly empty space.

I am mostly empty space.

I have been thinking about this a lot.

I am thinking about this as I step into the shallows of the Westing Lake, the apartments on the far shore white and blinding in the August sun. Beyond the Lakeside Apartments are the walls that enclose the Westing campus.

I do not remember a time when I wasn’t surrounded by walls.

The water is surprisingly cool. Another step and it will be up to my balls. I may be empty, but I am not ready for that shock just yet. I leave my clothes on so, if worst comes to worst, I can comfort myself with the thought that my modesty won’t be compromised as I sink to the bottom of the lake.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Alex. He was older, must’ve wanted me gone before he got bad. I’m a week short of seventeen now, running on borrowed time myself. I’ve sat for hours on the Internet, searching for Alex in a place I know I won’t find him, AwayWeGo’s DEPARTEES section. Got to hand it to whoever came up with the idea of a social network for the terminally ill. The site’s in its trial stages now, restricted to Westing students, but they’re going to make a killing on us—ha—when in a few years it gets rolled out to recovery centers across the whole country.

That is, if we’re still here in a few years.

If Apep, the mile-long asteroid I refer to as the Great Cliché, passes us by.

Maybe at that point, if we’re still here, and if someone cares, someone who is decent, they will take the time to revise the names that fill the DEPARTEES pages, and add Alex to the list. By then I’ll probably be a departee myself.

I rush forward into the water.

But maybe—stroke—before that happens—stroke—I’ll find out where it is that the sick kids go, and why we never hear from them again.

For now, I swim, even though I’m supposed to be staying out of the sun. The side effects of the meds we choke down at our weekly checkups are different for everyone. For me, the meds dry my skin out, make it peel. Sometimes it bleeds.

I call it my minor case of leprosy.

The sky is unflaggingly blue, the light of day hiding a thousand thousand stars, and another thousand thousand beyond those—stars I’ll never see even in the night. Something to do with dust and the acceleration of the universe, with galaxies hurtling ever more quickly away, away, always away. Or so the scientists say. Once they told us the galaxies would fly together, dragged by gravity to relight a primordial fire, on and on and on again. Now the galaxies are fleeing.

Somewhere up there, too, is The Great Cliché, with its one-in-ten-thousand chance of hitting the Earth this September twenty-sixth at 11:37 p.m.

It is the ultimate proof that life is a joke, as empty and fleeting as a walking shadow.

Out, out, brief candle!

All human civilization, the Pyramids of Giza, the Bhagavad Gita, the Noble Eightfold Path,

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