it out.
It was Alice’s idea to become orientation leaders for the newsies, the incoming students that will be arriving in the fall. The only thing we’re leaders of at the moment, however, is “community building” and listening studiously as administrative authorities lecture us on the dangers of drinking, drugs, and unprotected sex, presumably so we can pass all this information onto the newsies. Nobody ever bothers to mention the little matter of showing up as a name under DEPARTEES.
Today Alice and I are assigned to community-build the garbage out of the academic quad. We take it room by room, bin by bin.
“You wouldn’t know a girl named Addie, would you?” she asks me.
Cold wells up inside me. “Umm, yeah. Why?”
“Addie and I have the same advisor, so we see each other sometimes, during his office hours. . . . She told me you’re friends with her boyfriend. Zach, I think his name was. You do polo together. I didn’t know we had polo.”
The cold circulates through my body.
“Noah?”
“We watch vids of old polo games. From the library. Sometimes we climb onto each other’s backs and pretend to be riding horses. Mostly guys, so it’s pretty homoerotic, riding each other around. Zach’s my favorite polo steed.”
“I can never get a straight answer from you,” she says, pretending to be cross.
Ha. A straight answer.
“I’m a complicated person,” I explain.
She rolls her eyes. “But—so you know him?”
“Yes—umm, yeah. We’re—friendly, yeah. We lived in Clover together. We had a race.”
“A race? I thought you hated races.”
“‘Hate’ is a strong word.”
“When I mentioned you going out for track you gave me that thirty-minute lecture about how beating other people is a—”
“Contrived attempt at finding meaning in a nihilistic void of nothing!” I finish, with enough glee that Alice shoots me a worried look.
“Yes, that,” she says, and I can tell she’s making a concerted effort at not rolling her eyes again.
“This race was different,” I say, glancing out a window onto the academic quad. She looks at me strangely, like she’s trying to read my expression. In the quad, a pair of students sit on a bench, smoking, a guy and a girl. I watch their lips move, invent their words: I love you so much, Jenny. Oh, I love you so much, too, Michael. Look how happy we are. Let’s make everyone who’s not in love feel shitty about themselves. Give me a smooch. Smoochysmoochysmoochysmooch.
“What about him?” I ask, finally. “Zach?”
“He’s sick, Noah,” she says, quiet. “I mean, really sick. Addie said she didn’t know how much longer—she thought your favorite polo steed, he might be happy to see you.”
“He asked for me?” My voice sounds too pained, too desperate. I don’t know why, suddenly, I’m panicking. I’ve only just seen Zach. He told me about baby heirloom tomatoes. The key he gave me is heavy in my pocket.
“You should visit him, Noah. He’s your friend. He deserves that.”
I try not to look at Alice. “I’ve been meaning to,” I say, which is not exactly a lie, but not exactly a truth either.
“If you want I could come with you. I don’t know him, but—”
“No,” I say, too quickly. I can tell she’s hurt. “It’s something I need to do alone. Anyway, it’s not like we don’t see each other. Polo Club’s just on hiatus.” Another half-truth. I don’t tell her our hiatus has been going on for, like, eight months. I don’t tell her we’re waiting for Zach to fall sick, sick enough to be taken away. Then we’ll find out. We’ll find out where all the sick kids go.
“I know you don’t want to hear this, but it could help to see someone,” she says.
Aha. Of course. Enlisting me in Westing’s counseling services is her latest Noah Salvation Initiative. Before this, she’d tried dragging me to chapel, then to Bible study, where I posed queries like “If God is omnipotent, why did he need to rest on the seventh day? Imagine if he’d powered through. We might’ve had unicorns.” I was encouraged to limit my participation in future meetings.
“It could help you work through your feelings,” she continues.
“You’re right,” I say. “I don’t want to hear it.”
Guilt simmers inside me. She and I take out the trash in silence after that. Once we finish with Gates, we move on to Lombardy. Maybe I’m feeling guilty for being brusque with her. Maybe I’m lonely. Maybe it’s the tertiary care informational flyer I find under a chair in a corner of the room. Or