elected officer, there is always the dilemma about how to best represent your constituents.” Zach hesitated briefly. “Noah, at the last Polo meeting. Your square knots were magnificent, I must say. I don’t think I ever properly commended you. I wanted to commend you.”
I smiled stupidly, because everything was going to be okay, but Marty spoiled it by breaking off from his blank gaze long enough to confide in me that he had “rarely seen better.”
“Seriously, bro,” Nigel said, from across the waiting room. “You put us to shame, man. To shame—” He had spilled some root beer on his shorts.
“You guys are haters,” I said, but it felt wrong, to joke, to love, while Melanie was in another room, preparing to have the contents of her uterus gently suctioned out, emptied out—this was how a brochure on a nearby table described the procedure.
Aspiration.
“I’ve failed you guys,” Zach said, scratching sheepishly at his head. “But I think I know how to make everything right.” He motioned to Grace and Nigel, who gathered round.
“Our phones,” he said, keeping his voice low. There were a couple other girls in the waiting room. “If we snuck them out, when they come to take us away—it’s not like they’re going to strip-search us when we’re lying there dying, right?”
“Bro, what you even talking about?” Nigel said, and burped.
“Our phones,” Zach repeated, slow. “We know we can only call Westing numbers. We don’t know we can’t call Westing numbers from outside Westing. It wouldn’t even need to be a call. Just one text. We could text each other what’s it like. Where the sick kids go when they go away. The tertiary centers.” He had a hint of a smile on his face. “God, it’s so simple.”
“A friend of mine said—” Grace hesitated, adjusting her Westing Rugby sweater. “She said she thinks they take us straight to a crematorium.” Grace seemed as surprised as us, like she hadn’t meant to voice the thought.
I thought of Alex, how he said it would be better if the world were simply rid of us, so we wouldn’t be a burden on anyone anymore, not on our parents, nor the taxpayers.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Marty said somberly. “I mean, look what they’re doing to Melanie. I mean, I get the baby wouldn’t, the baby probably wouldn’t, I know that—”
“I can still make everything right,” Zach said, finally, and our eyes met. My stomach did one of its usual Zach-flips.
“Man, I read the other day on AwayWeKnow, some dude with a prosthetic leg punched a shark in the face,” Nigel said. “World makes no fucking sense, am I right?” He had finished off his root beer concoction, was now playing with the empty bottle, trying to screw on the cap, failing. “Punching a shark in the face. What have you done in your life?”
Grace shrugged, and emphasized what we should take away from Nigel’s spiel: “He was reading.”
“So we have to wait until one of us gets sick,” I said. “Before we know where the sick kids go.”
Zach nodded. “Only way I can think of.”
Outside on the Galloway lawn, a handful of students were having a snowball fight. The sun receded and my stomach grumbled, the sky turning a bruised color, the last of the teachers’ cars gone, and after a little while of this, I offered to go grab some dinner for us all. Zach said he’d join me, so we set off in the cold together; it was the first time we’d been alone since New Year’s.
Our boots pressed softly into the snow. The cafeteria loomed large before us. We stole glances at each other while pretending we weren’t stealing glances at each other. At the cafeteria steps, he pressed a hand into my shoulder.
“Noah.” He bit his lip. “I’m going to tell you something that’s going to make you hate me, but I think you need to hear it, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and there was a man inside my chest, doing a drum solo on my heart.
“Last night, I was sitting there and I imagined I was talking to you, kid. The whole back and forth. I say ra ra ra and you bring your hand to your ear, pretend you don’t hear and then I say it again. The whole shebang. And I could see everything. I could see your expression, I could hear the way you’d say things, I knew what you’d say, and I’m sitting there thinking about all this and I realize I