Away We Go - Emil Ostrovski Page 0,74

blow it apart. I want them to blow it out of the sky. I want them to save us all. I want a light show, fireworks. That would be a great last memory. I couldn’t save anyone, but maybe they can save me.”

The sound of plastic ripping. An outstretched hand. “Here,” he says. He gives me three yellows in a row.

I eat them, and say, “I hate yellows.”

“I know. You scrunch up your face. It was always a mystery to me, Noah, why you were so fond of me.”

Knots in my throat, my chest.

“I’m not,” I say. “I’m just really good at answering texts.”

“Ouch,” he says. “I suppose I deserve it. God, I suppose I deserve worse.” He glances over the edge of the roof.

“Why did you give me a yellow if you knew I hated yellows?”

“I don’t know,” he says with a weary sigh, and it feels like he’s accepted something. “I think you’ve always wanted something from me I couldn’t give, kid. I think you’ve always thought I was someone I wasn’t.”

“I think you’re the best,” I say. “You helped me with my room, and you showed me that squirrel because you felt bad. We raced in the rain. You gave me your shirt. You started Polo and you were there for Melanie and you’re always so kind. I like everything about you.”

I want to tell him about how he brushed his finger through my hair, that small, intimate gesture. A friend does not brush a friend’s hair.

“God,” he says.

“So why do you always have to do things like—give me the yellows?”

“The world’s about to be blown apart and all you can think about—”

“It wasn’t just me,” I say. “Was it?”

Because it matters more than ever if what I felt was real, if what I felt was returned, especially if the world is about to be blown apart. If all this time I’ve been living in a fantasy, then I might as well just off and vanish.

“Check the time,” he says, scanning the night above.

The alarm’s still blaring.

“I know you felt something,” I say.

“Check the time, Noah.”

I do.

There is a minute and a half left.

I tell him so.

There is a minute left.

I tell him so.

There are forty-five seconds left.

I tell him so.

Our eyes are set on the sky, and the stars in the sky, Peter and Wendy and beyond them the stars we’ll never see, even in the night, as we wait for the great tragic powers of the world to reveal themselves.

There are twenty seconds.

“You’re not going to respond?”

There are ten seconds.

I put a hand on his shoulder. “Why won’t you tell me?”

He brushes my hand off, looks at me sadly. “I don’t want to ruin our end of the world. Can’t you see that?”

There are five seconds.

And four.

And three.

And two.

And one.

We wait.

We wait.

We wait.

“Maybe they were wrong,” I say eventually.

And then we see it.

A red streak in the sky.

“They’re going to do it,” Zach says, watching, his mouth hanging open. We wait to be saved, for that red streak to burst into a thousand smaller ones.

It doesn’t happen.

The red streak passes us by, like all those learned astronomers said it would, like AwayWeKnow said it would. A minute elapses, and another, and I am in pain, because the world is still here, and I am still here, because there are no easy solutions, no deus ex machinas, no great rescues, because the world doesn’t end with a bang but with a whimper, because you have to live with that thin, papery feeling no matter how much you want to rage, rage against the dying of the light.

“Well,” Zach says, and pitches forward, toward the edge, but I grab his arm.

“We were together,” I plead.

“God, kid, let me go,” he says, dragging me till we’re both about to topple over. He is surprisingly strong. “I didn’t want to hurt you, that’s why I never told you, but it felt wrong. I’m not that way. Can’t you understand that? Can’t you?”

Security carts rev in the distance above the sound of the alarm.

His hands are on my chest, pushing.

“You brushed your hands through my hair.”

“I can’t be whoever you want me to be.”

“We metaphorically made fun of each other’s metaphors.”

“What are you even talking about?” he asks. He’s crying.

“We played ring-around-the-rosie.”

“I barely remember,” he says. “It was so late.”

And if he doesn’t remember, how do I know I didn’t make it up? How do I know what is true and what is not? If I am my memories, and