by Andrew Smith
“You know, you’ve saved my life about a hundred times.”
I watched Conner bite at the inside of his lip. He shifted in his seat.
I turned and looked at the traffic outside the window, and tried to change the subject. But every subject only ended up being about us, anyway.
“I really like it here. I mean, at St. Atticus. I can feel it.”
Conner tipped his empty cup, like he was trying to read a message in the drying foam.
“This is it, right?”
“This is good enough for me, Con.”
“I’m okay staying here if you are, Jack.”
He sounded nervous, choked up.
I knew he was talking about much more than just England and St. Atticus Grammar School for Boys. We both knew it.
“Well, I’m okay staying here, Con. And, well … thanks.”
“No prob.” Then he squinted and smiled. “But don’t ever try that shit again.”
“Try what? The before thing, or … um … you know, after?”
Conner turned red and tried to clear his throat, pretended to look at the cars passing by outside, too.
“Hey,” I said. “In case you’re wondering, I’m not bugged about it at all. I thought it was totally cool. Really nice. Really. Okay?”
He looked at me and nodded.
* * *
“Oh fucking hell!” When I saw the station sign through the window, I shook my head. “We need to get off, Con. We’re going the wrong fucking way.”
We were on the Tube, at Finchley Road, heading in the entirely opposite direction, on the totally wrong line to get to the train station at Charing Cross.
We weren’t paying attention to what was going on around us—outside our little universe—that morning, so in our daze we ended up boarding a wrong-way train at Baker Street. And we barely made it out of the car before the doors whooshed shut.
But after spending a few minutes decoding the colored lines on the Underground map, we switched tracks and headed south on the Jubilee Line, which unfortunately also took us out of our way.
I sighed, and slapped my head when we passed the Baker Street stop.
“Why the fuck didn’t we get off there? What the fuck is wrong with me? I am so messed up today.”
Conner sat beside me, our bags on the floor between our feet.
He laughed. It was a real laugh, and it sounded good.
Like home.
He pressed his foot against mine. “It’s not like we have a plane to catch or something.”
When the train slowed into the Bond Street station, I pulled a small folding map from my back pocket.
Like Henry’s compass.
“We can switch at Westminster or Waterloo,” I said. “Waterloo’s probably better. Then we won’t have to get off again till we’re at Charing Cross.”
I tucked the map away. “I’m sorry about getting us lost, Con.”
Conner leaned forward and turned so he was looking straight into my eyes. He tapped his hand on my knee.
“I’m having a good time. Don’t sweat it.” He grinned. “It’s kind of fun being together in a place where nobody cares about us, and nobody’s trying to kill us.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Welcome home, huh?”
“Yeah. Home.”
The train stopped.
The doors swished open.
We were at Green Park.
And this was it.
thirty-six
There is something about this particular place.
It is a magnet, and Jack cannot break free.
My head snaps around; Conner watches me. He senses something, too, and I am aware of a tightness that clamps down, invades the edges of my vision.
Like being in a vice.
Something is wrong.
Don’t black out, Jack.
Conner’s hand is on my back, between my shoulders, and he says, “Are you feeling all right?”
This is the arrow.
There are so many people waiting to board the train.
They begin pressing into the car, packing everywhere. Suddenly it is as though their collective mouths inhale every molecule of air around me. Suffocating, empty, I shake my head and hang my chin down to my chest.
“I don’t know. I feel sick, Con. Like I’m going to pass out.”
“Jack?”
He’s rubbing my back, like he’s trying to keep me awake, and I say, “Shhhhh…”
Everything is suddenly so noisy. I am trapped inside the howling engine of a jet.
Whiteness paints my drained skin; I feel the opening of each pore and I begin to bleed small tears of freezing sweat. I am shaking, and Conner has his arm around my shoulder.
“Let’s get off for a second, Jack. Catch your breath.”
Conner begins to lift me up, but it is too crowded and too late. The doors are closed. The air turns to chalk dust, and I drop back into my seat as the train sluggishly lurches, skips, accelerates.
Of course.
This is why we got onto the wrong train.
The train passes into a tunnel. Outside in the velvet black, a white light smears by; it burns a trail like a glowing worm across my eyes. And as it wriggles, I stare blankly at the glass, waiting for it to become real and swallow me.
I take a deep breath.
Breathe, Jack.
I know Conner is here, he’s pressing his mouth up to my ear, saying something. I can feel the steam of the words that evaporate against my skin, but I can’t tell what he’s saying.
I feel along the seat beside me, find his hand, and grab on.
Tight.
I lean into him. “Conner, no matter what happens, I love you.”
I feel him squeezing my hand.
“Jack?”
“Hey,” he says, trying to shake me back. “Jack? Do you know that kid? What’s he want?”
Someone is saying, “I have a score to settle with you.”
The train begins to slow, it leans me forward, and I nearly fall into Conner.
Conner says again, “Do you know him?”
I shut my eyes tightly, reopen them.
Everything is everywhere.
Seated across the aisle on the bench directly facing us is a redhead kid.
The punk.
Quinn Cahill.
Slower.
Slower.
The kid is saying something.
“Billy? Billy? Isn’t that you, Billy? Don’t play games now. Hell … I knew I’d find you somewhere, as long as I only kept looking.”
My words are slurred, drunk, and they disconnect, set loose from my mouth like crazy rabbits. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, kid.”
The train stops.
Westminster.
Whoosh.
The doors.
The kid looks like he’s been stung.
“Billy!”
I’m holding Conner’s hand. I jerk it and lean forward, grab my bag.
I whisper, “Please get me out of here, Con.”
I fall out of the train as the doors hiss shut behind us; end up flat on my face in a forest of legs on the crowded Westminster platform.
* * *
“He’s okay. He’s okay. He’s just sick and couldn’t breathe for a second.”
Conner waved back the people standing around me, fanning the air above my face with his hand.
Someone said, “Do you need medical assistance?”
“No. Thank you. He gets like this sometimes.”
Conner hovered over me, a serious look on his face. He combed my hair back from my eyes with his fingers. He was shaking, nervous. Something happened.
“You need to get up. Let’s get the fuck out of here before we end up in trouble.”
I knew what he was saying, but it took all my will just to move my legs.
The Underground.
This is it.
Conner pulled me to my feet, lifted my arm across the back of his neck. He held both our bags with on
e hand, and someone said, “Let me help.”
But Conner dismissed the man. “We’re okay. I just need to get him outside.”
So he dragged me along. It seemed like we walked for miles in that station, through long subterranean tunnels that stunk like sweat and piss until we finally came up into the light of a gray afternoon. And the entire way, as we threaded like a weaver’s string between the anonymous ghosts of people, knitting us and them all together into the fabric of my this is it, I kept searching for the redhead, expecting Quinn to be following along, always following, watching.
But he was gone.
In the cold outside, we sat on a low stone wall looking out at the churn of the Thames.
A bead of sweat crawled slowly along the front of Conner’s ear and curled around the bend of his jaw.
I caught my breath, watched the river.
“What the fuck happened in there?” Conner tried to look into my eyes, to see if Jack was really here or not.
I swallowed.
He said, “Who was that kid? Why was he calling you that? Billy?”
This was it.
Right?
I shook my head. Conner knew about Quinn Cahill in Marbury. He told me how the Rangers made deals with the redhead who lived in the firehouse.
Not here.
What do I tell him?
This has to be it.
This is going to be it.
So I said, “I don’t know, Con. I swear I never saw that kid before in my life.”
Conner blew out a breath that fogged and then vanished in front of his face.
It was cold.
He said, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, if he didn’t know you before, I don’t think he’s going to ever forget us now.”
“What happened to him?”
Conner grinned. “I punched him in the fucking face when he tried to follow us off the train.”
“Conner?”
“What?”
“You’re amazing.”
“I try, dude.”
Farther down the bank, sheltered behind a row of square wooden stands that sold tickets for river cruises, an old man sat playing a concertina in the gray wind.
It would rain soon.
I could feel it coming.
“And, Con?”
“Yeah?”
“How about we just catch a taxi to Charing Cross?”
“Good call, Jack.”
“I try.”
a passenger’s epilogue
In this winter, they sleep.
Nearly three months have passed, and I have never once taken them out, touched the Marbury lenses.
I know what would happen if I did.
I am done with that place, all those worlds and not-worlds.
And this is it.
It is okay for me and Conner to let this be it.
I have to keep telling myself that.
There was a time when I could almost hear it breathing, calling me, and each time the sound made such a convincing argument for how desperately Jack needed Marbury. But ever since I opened my eyes that rainy morning, safe inside the room Ethan Robson shares with me at St. Atticus, I have either been deaf, or Marbury has been silent, asleep.
I’m not fooling myself, though.
Jack’s First Law of Marbury: Objects at rest are just waiting for some asshole to wake them up.
And Jack always knows where they are; where he keeps them.
What strikes me is the one thing I believe to be perfectly true: I caused it all to happen. Everything. Waking up drugged, stripped, bound to Freddie Horvath’s bed, stumbling into Henry Hewitt, finding Ben and Griffin in Marbury, and all the terrible and destructive things that took place there—the choices I made—I caused it all.
Like Freddie said: He didn’t do anything to me; I did it all to myself.
It’s been six months since that happened. It seems like forever, but I still think about it every day.
And I’m still carrying around that garbage.
So fuck you, Jack.
But if nothing else, now that we’ve all made it back—even if this is just another not-world—I am determined to keep it this way. Forever. This will be it.
So there is no need for me to ever explain to Conner the truth about the redheaded kid who sat across from us on the train at Green Park, how Quinn Cahill is a part of our world in Marbury, too.
Everything is everywhere.
Conner knows it. He heard the old man playing the accordion on the bank of the Thames. The strings are always going to cross, weave, and burn; and I wonder if Conner wakes up every day saying those same three words to himself.
This is it.
None of it matters now, if I keep it this way.
Ben and Griffin started calling me again. For a while, it was almost like they’d vanished. They didn’t call me for the longest stretch after we came back from Marbury the last time.
Sometimes, I’d start to take the phone out to see if they were okay, to be certain they hadn’t ended up inside some fucking blue trash barrel, and every time I would stop myself, believing that never knowing is the same as not being. Jack’s Second Law.
But all this past week, just minutes after the school day ends, my phone buzzes and it’s the boys, asking when I’m coming back, and can they come over and see me when I do.
I know what they want.
And I haven’t been able to tell them it’s not going to happen.
Ben and Griffin want something else. Maybe they feel, as I once did, that all they need is one small peek at Marbury again. The boys aren’t finished playing yet.
But I am the King of Marbury, and I say this is it.
Conner’s been giving me shit for avoiding Ben and Griffin. He says it would be better if we all faced the truth, but I can’t bring myself to tell Ben and Griffin that they can’t go back to Marbury again.
I haven’t seen Henry since the night I told him good-bye at The Prince of Wales. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a sick sonofabitch who fucked me worse than Freddie ever did. And I knew two things for certain that night before I tried to hang myself, naked, inside our fucking closet: that I never wanted to see Henry Hewitt again; and that he would do anything to take another slide through the lenses, even if it meant winding up back in his crap-filled apartment in a crumbling city on a street plastered with fucking corpses and crucified kids who were begging to die.
Fuck you back, Henry.
He called a few times. I deleted his number from my phone and erased whatever fucked-up pleading messages he left in his civilized and reasonable-sounding appeal to Jack’s mercies.
We don’t ever go to The Prince of Wales now, just because I’m afraid I’d see him there, stalking the place, waiting for Jack and his lenses to pop in.
Now, Conner and I hang out in the places the St. Atticus boys go.
I’ve decided I love being here at St. Atticus.
Conner does, too.
In some ways, I suppose it’s almost like being in Marbury. There’s a Jack who lives in the minds of the people back in Glenbrook, and a Jack that does the things they’ll never find out about over here. We’ve talked about staying on through our senior year, too; and I think it’s what Conner and I are going to end up doing.
So, good-bye, Glenbrook.
Fuck off.
And good-bye, Marbury, too.
Seth never came back after I told him to leave me alone, when his thrashing rousted Conner out of the shower so he could cut me free from my gallows. I know he’s not gone forever, because I know more about Seth Mansfield than I know about myself.
So every time I hear some incidental tapping noise, my heart kind of tightens up and I look for him.
I do feel sorry for cursing him like I did that night, but there was nothing I could have done to stop myself.
He’ll come back.
But Nickie won’t.
That was my idea, too.
The day after C
onner and I came home to St. Atticus from London, I took a crowded Monday-afternoon train to visit Nickie in Hampstead.
Nobody knew I went.
I didn’t even let Conner know about it for a few days. When I finally worked up the nerve to tell him everything I said to Nickie about me and Conner, he just smiled and shook his head and said, Holy shit.
I do love Nickie. I always will love Nickie. But I’m not going to lie to her, and there is too much of my life—my universe—that she will never be part of.
Telling her about it was one of the toughest things I ever did, here or anywhere, but Nickie … well, she’s just Nickie, and she’s always been so strong when it comes to putting up with Jack’s bullshit.
In the end, I guess she took the whole thing easier than I did. And she’s coming with us to Heathrow today, too. Conner and I are going back to Glenbrook for our school’s winter break. Our plane leaves this afternoon.
He had the “talk” with Rachel, too. Well, to be honest, there was nothing he could do about it after Nickie got involved. I didn’t need to ask Conner about it. Afterward, I could see on his face how rough it must have been, and I felt bad about that.
My fault, too.
We fucked up and we hurt those girls.
When there’s nothing we can do to make things better, at least Conner and I can stop letting them get worse.
Jack’s Third Law.
I guess I should say a few things about my friend before we leave.
You know how you can go all your life knowing someone, everything about him, no secrets at all, and then you get just a peek—a moment’s understanding—of one little thing that defines who he is, and then it’s like a spotlight gets turned on at nighttime; and you can see stuff that was always there, now unhidden, so clearly?
But it’s not a surprise, either.
That was what happened between Conner and me the night he saved my life in London. I realized that all that time when I took his game playing so personally, he wasn’t actually picking on me about being “gay” or whatever.
He was just trying to see if it might be okay.
Conner was testing himself more than he was testing me.
And, most of the times, acting like a dick about things is the only way Conner Kirk knows how to do stuff.
It’s just how he is.
But he’s always meant more to me than anyone in this world. Or any other world, I guess, for that matter. And one thing I do know for certain is that Conner has grown up so much since we’ve been here at St. Atticus.