We Are the Ants

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  “I’m serious,” I said. “Honestly, I don’t even understand what you see in him.”

  The bookstore was a twenty-minute drive, and the only way I could have escaped the car would have been to throw open the door and leap into the street. Don’t think I didn’t consider it.

  “I knew Charlie in high school. Did you know that?”

  “I thought you met in college.”

  “We did,” Zooey said, “but we were in the same grade in high school. We didn’t really know each other, but I knew of him. I thought he was a jerk. He ruined homecoming by streaking across the football field with his buddies during the parade.”

  I leaned my head against the window. “That’s my brother.”

  “Do you know what changed my mind?”

  “No,” I said, but I was sure she was going to tell me.

  Zooey smiled, maybe at the memory, maybe from gas. “We had college algebra together. Our professor was new, an older woman who had decided to change careers late in life. She was a pretty terrible professor, but she tried hard.

  “There were these guys who talked through every class. When Dr. Barnett stuttered, they’d laugh and imitate her. She ignored them, but it was bad. One class, she was reviewing for an exam, and the guys were watching videos on their phones. Like, not even trying to pretend they cared about the class. Dr. Barnett asked them to shut off their phones, but they ignored her.”

  I glanced at Zooey. “Let me guess: Charlie told they guys to stop, and that’s how you knew he was an okay guy.”

  Zooey laughed so hard, she nearly drove off the road. I clutched the door for dear life. “God, no,” she said. “Charlie was one of the guys cutting up.”

  “And that made you decide he was worth dating?”

  “It was after class. I’d left my graphing calculator behind, and I went back to get it. I saw Dr. Barnett sitting at her desk, crying. Charlie was still in there. He asked her why she was crying, and she told him she didn’t think she was cut out to be a professor. Your brother told her she was the first teacher who’d ever made him understand math. I don’t know if it was true—she really was a terrible teacher—but he never cut up in class again after that.” Zooey was quiet for a moment, and I didn’t have anything to add. Then she said, “Charlie doesn’t always do what’s right, and he can be insensitive, but he tries, Henry, which is more than I can say for a lot of people.”

  “He can try all he wants,” I said. “He’s still going to be a terrible father.”

  Zooey glanced at me again, and the entire car swerved to the right, barely remaining on the road. “I need a burger.” Without another word, she detoured into the nearest McDonald’s, bought herself two cheeseburgers, and forced a chocolate milk shake on me despite my protests because, in her words, “Milk shakes make the world seem less shitty.”

  When we reached the bookstore, Zooey pulled in front of the doors to drop me off. “I can pick you up later if you want.”

  “I’ll find a ride.”

  “You’re wrong about Charlie, you know.”

  “I wish I were.” I started to open the door, stopped, and said, “When things got tough, my dad left. I needed him, and he abandoned me—walked away and never looked back—and one day Charlie’s going to do that to you and that little parasite you’re carrying.”

  Again I waited for Zooey to smack me or scream, but her expression was serene and never wavered. “Can I tell you something, Henry?”

  Seeing as I’d just trashed her future kid’s father, I didn’t feel like I could say no. “Sure.”

  “When I found out I was pregnant, I wanted to abort. I wanted to finish college and start a career, and I thought a baby would derail my hard work.” Zooey’s voice was soft and soothing. “I made the appointment at Planned Parenthood before I even told your brother.”

  “Obviously, you changed your mind.”

  “No,” Zooey said, locking her eyes onto mine. “Charlie changed it. He told me our life wouldn’t be easy, that we’d struggle to pay our bills and put food on the table, that we’d argue and fight, and that there was a good chance we’d end up hating each other.”

  I rolled my eyes. “How could you resist a pitch like that?”

  Zooey smiled. “But he also told me that no matter what happened, we would love our baby like no parents had ever loved a baby in the history of the world. He said he would sell every last thing he owned to give our child the life it deserved.” She stopped speaking for a moment, but I could tell by the way she bit her lip that she wasn’t done. “Even though I agreed to have the baby, I still wasn’t sure until Charlie took the job with my father.”

  “That’s not commitment; it’s survival.”

  “Your brother gave up his dream for me, Henry.”

  The pregnancy was making Zooey crazy. “Charlie doesn’t have any dreams that don’t involve naked cheerleaders and muscle cars.”

  Zooey frowned. “Do you really not know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Charlie was enrolled in the firefighting academy.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “He gave it up to work with my father because he didn’t want to risk getting hurt and not being around for the baby.” Zooey seemed to be speaking both too slow and too fast. I heard what she said, but I couldn’t process it.

  “I guess I don’t really know my brother at all.” I got out of the car and wandered into the bookstore in a daze. Charlie had secretly wanted to be a firefighter—something he’d never mentioned—but he’d given it up for a fetus. The little parasite wasn’t even born yet, and Charlie was already rearranging his life. That’s love. That’s what you do when you love someone. Maybe Jesse hadn’t really loved me at all.

  When Jesse and I visited the bookstore together, I’d disappear into the science section, lost in books about quantum mechanics and space travel and theories I hardly understood but that fascinated me anyway. I’d lose track of time and Jesse, and have to go up and down every aisle because he couldn’t stand to remain in the same place. I loved science, but he loved everything. Sometimes I’d find him in home improvement, sometimes in philosophy, sometimes in fiction, his arms straining under the weight of all the books he was considering buying. It was always a surprise to turn a corner and see him standing there, totally immersed in whatever he was curious about that day.

  As I wandered among the stacks, I kept hoping I’d ­stumble upon him reading about the life of Rimbaud or searching the pages of cooking books for a great lemon meringue pie recipe. The most upsetting part isn’t that I never found him; it’s that he was everywhere.

  “Henry?”

  I dropped the book I was holding. I didn’t even remember taking it off the shelf. Audrey stood at the end of the aisle. She rushed toward me, grabbed the book off the floor, and looked at the cover. “Are you taking up cake decorating?”

  “No.”

  Audrey and I hadn’t talked much since the fair. “Looking for something in particular?”

  I shook my head. “I just needed . . . Forget it.”

  “What?”

  “I wanted to feel close to Jesse.” I stared at my feet. “It’s stupid.”

  “Not really.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

  Audrey stood aside to let me pass, but before I turned the corner, she said, “Wanna get a cookie?”

  I stopped, turned around. “What?”

  “A cookie. I can drive us across the street to the mall. If we time it right, we can get some fresh from the oven.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can’t hate me forever, Henry.”

  “I can try.”

  “But if you come with me, you can hate me and eat cookies. Win-win.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Fine.”

  Audrey grinned. “It’s a date.”

  “It’s a cookie.”

  “It’s a cookie date.”

  • • •

  “So we were making out, and my nose
was running a little, but I had it in my mind that if I stopped kissing Jesse, he’d realize I was a loser and never want to kiss me again, so I ignored it and snogged on. I’m pretty sure we made out for hours, but when we turned on the lights, I screamed because Jesse’s face was covered in blood.”

  “Gross!” Audrey ate her cookie as we sat outside the entrance of the mall.

  “Turns out I’d had a bloody nose. It was smeared over both of our faces.” We’d gotten six cookies to split, and they’d been gooey and delicious at first, but all the sugar was beginning to sour my stomach.

  Audrey laughed, and if I closed my eyes, I could imagine Jesse was with us, swapping stories and cracking up at our lame jokes. “Jesse never told me about that.”

  “I swore him to secrecy. It’s not the sort of thing I wanted getting around.”

  “I won’t tell a soul.” Silence fell, and we both turned our attention to our uneaten cookies. The conversation sputtered along in fits and starts; one second everything was good, the next uncomfortable as the past overwhelmed us. “I’ve missed you, Henry.”

  The statement stopped me because I knew she was waiting for me to say it back. To tell her that I missed her, and I had, but it used to be me and Audrey and Jesse, and we were still incomplete.

  “What was it like?” I asked.

  “What was what like?”

  “The hospital?”

  Audrey stood and walked toward the parking lot, stopping when she reached the curb. Her shoes dragged on the ground like her feet were too heavy to lift properly. I brushed the crumbs off my lap and followed. I wasn’t sure whether she was going to answer, but I gave her the space to decide. “It was lonely,” she said. “But it was like this whole other world where you didn’t exist and my parents didn’t exist and Jesse wasn’t dead. Nothing seemed real there. Time was blurry, and maybe that was because of the meds they had me on, but I think it was just me. I needed a pocket of space to curl up in and wait out the pain of losing my best friend.”

  I leaned to the side, bumped Audrey’s shoulder with my arm to let her know I was there. “I thought you left because you blamed me.”

  “I did,” Audrey said. “I mean, I didn’t leave because of that, but I did blame you for a while.”

  “Oh.”

  Audrey looked at me. The golden hour of the setting sun cast Audrey’s skin in bronze. “Jesse loved you so much, Henry, but he was terrified of never being good enough for you. You told him constantly how perfect he was, but Jesse wasn’t perfect, and he was worried that if you ever saw his flaws, you’d leave him.”

  Those words hurt more than being kicked in the testicles in the locker room. “I knew Jesse wasn’t perfect. He exaggerated everything. If he were on the phone with someone for an hour, he’d say it’d been five. If he bought one shirt, he’d tell me he bought twenty. And he had terrible taste in books. He said his favorite book was The Catcher in the Rye, but he had a copy of Twilight under his bed with pages so battered, he must’ve read it a hundred times.”

  Audrey leaned her head against my arm, and I didn’t move away. “I know, and I don’t blame you now. I just . . . I had to leave.”

  “You didn’t have to leave me.”

  “I know.”

  “How come you never told me about Jesse hurting himself?”

  Audrey sighed and sat on the brick wall of the decorative fountain near the bus stop. I sat beside her. The water gurgled behind us, and wishes glittered at the bottom of the pool. She looked fragile right then in a way I’d never seen her look before. I felt I had the power to break her in that moment, to destroy her utterly. A few months ago I might have done it, but it didn’t seem important anymore. I think Audrey Dorn was punishing herself worse than I ever could.

  “Jesse was mine.” Tears rolled down Audrey’s cheeks, but I doubted she was aware of them. “He was mine before he was yours, but he’d never given me all of himself. Then you came along and got everything I ever wanted.”

  “You didn’t just love Jesse,” I said. “You were in love with him, weren’t you?”

  Audrey sniffled. She dug a tissue out of her purse and wiped her nose. “I hated when Jesse hurt, when he cried, and when he cut himself, but he only showed those parts of himself to me. Oh, I rationalized that I didn’t tell you because Jesse made me swear not to or because I didn’t seriously believe he’d really hurt himself, but deep down I knew it was because I wanted something of Jesse that belonged only to me.”

  If Audrey had admitted that immediately after Jesse died, I never would have forgiven her. But the year between us had given me the distance I needed to understand. I even envied a little that she knew Jesse in a way I never did or would.

  “Don’t hate me,” she said.

  “I think I would have done the same thing.”

  “Jesse’s parents hate me. They blame me.”

  “I don’t hate you, Audrey.”

  Though we weren’t touching, I still felt the tension she’d been holding all those months drain from her body, and I realized how difficult it was for Audrey to admit the truth to me without knowing if I’d ever forgive her. Only, there was nothing to forgive. Audrey may not have told me about Jesse’s troubles, but I had willfully ignored their signs. I’d let myself believe the lies because it was easier than digging for the truth.

  “I don’t hate you either, Henry.”

  I stood and put my hands in my pockets as the last of the day’s light retreated below the horizon. “Then that makes one of us.”

  24 November 2015

  Lunch raged around us, but I was too absorbed watching Diego and Audrey argue to notice anything outside of our bubble.

  “Only an idiot could prefer Matt Smith to David Tennant.” Audrey was so worked up, her nostrils flared and her eyes had gone full-bore crazy.

  Diego remained calm, which only seemed to infuriate Audrey more. “Then I’m an idiot.” He popped a chip into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed, while holding his free hand in the air to let Audrey know he wasn’t done speaking. “I’ll give you that Tennant brought a gravitas to the Doctor that grounded the insanity of the ludicrous situations he got himself into, but Matt Smith didn’t play the Doctor, he was the Doctor.”

  “You guys know I’ve got no clue what you’re talking about, right?”

  Audrey and Diego both turned to look at me like I’d climbed atop the table, dropped trou, and hosed them down.

  “You’ve never seen Doctor Who?” Diego glanced at Audrey. “You have failed as a best friend.”

  “Hey, I only got hooked last year,” Audrey said. “There was nothing to do at my grandma’s house except watch a ton of  TV.”

  “How’d you watch it, Diego?” I asked. “I thought you didn’t have a television.”

  Diego focused on eating his sandwich, chewing each bite deliberately. His smile and laughter vanished like he’d blown a fuse, and an impenetrable wall rose between us.

  “Look.” Audrey pointed toward the door, where Marcus McCoy stood sweeping the cafeteria with his eyes. His forearm muscles bulged from clenching his fists, and his lips were twisted into a snarl. I’d spent enough time with Marcus to know that it took skill to make him seriously angry. He was rich and popular, which insulated him from the effects of most humiliation. He started walking and wound through the crowd until he reached a table occupied by Larry Owens, Shane Thorpe, Tania Lewis, Missi Lizneski, and Zac Newton. Everyone was watching Marcus—taking pictures and video with their phones—and I had to stand to see over their heads. He was yelling at Zac, but his words were lost in the excited murmuring of the lunch crowd. Zac’s shorter than Marcus, but he’s on the wrestling team and built like an inverted pyramid. He got in Marcus’s face, using his weight to bully him backward.

  Marcus sucker-punched Zac in the jaw and followed with a left to the nose that sent him reeling into the table. Zac’s friends rushed to help him, but Marcus didn’t even wait to see if Zac was going to retaliate before he stormed out of the cafeteria.
Mrs. Francesco chased after him while Mr. Baker cleared a path to Zac.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked. Zac’s nose was gushing blood, and Mr. Baker was trying to stanch the flow with a handful of napkins. If I hadn’t witnessed it, I wouldn’t have believed Marcus capable of breaking Zac Newton’s nose.

  “You didn’t hear?”

  “Hear what?” A small knot of students had gathered around Zac and Mr. Baker, offering ice and towels. It took the combined strength of Larry, Shane, and Mr. Brown to keep Zac from running after Marcus.

  “Someone smashed the windows of Marcus’s car,” Audrey said. “Obviously, he thinks it was Zac.”

  “Do you think it was Zac?” I asked. Audrey’s only answer was a shrug. “Why the hell would he have busted Marcus’s windows?”

  Audrey’s voice rang with a note of satisfaction. “Because he’s dating Natalie Carter—was dating Natalie. I’m not too clear on the current status of Zac and Natalie’s rocky romance.”

  “That’s no reason to take it out on the car.”

  Mr. Baker led Zac out of the cafeteria, and I sat back down. Audrey was gathering her trash and babbling about how Zac learned Natalie and Marcus had hooked up because someone posted pictures from Marcus’s party on their SnowFlake page, and when Zac confronted her about it in the quad before classes, she hadn’t denied it, reducing Zac to tears.

  Diego hadn’t spoken since the beginning of the afternoon show. I kicked him under the table, gave him a smile. He barely returned it.

  “You have econ with Zac, don’t you, Diego?” I asked. “Do you think he did it?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care. I’m just glad Marcus got what he deserved.” Diego picked up his tray, dumped his trash, and returned to his seat. He didn’t say another word until lunch ended.

  • • •

  “Everything all right?” I asked Diego as we walked to study hall. He seemed preoccupied. “Diego?”

  “What?”

  “I asked if you were okay.”

  Diego shrugged. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You’ve been somewhere else since lunch.”