“Something like that,” Gaia said, swallowing the carrot. “Let’s not talk about it.”
“Okay,” Kevin said agreeably. “What should we talk about?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Something normal. What do normal people talk about at graduation? I mean, besides their ‘plans for the future’?”
“I have no idea. Ask one of them.” Kevin pointed with disdain to another gang of shiny happy people huddling up for another photo op.
“I think I’ll pass,” Gaia muttered.
Kevin nodded soberly. “We’ve got so little time to talk about anything real,” he agreed. “It’d be a shame to waste what little time we’ve got left on trivial stuff.”
“Um—” Gaia wasn’t sure what Kevin meant, but on the few occasions she’d spent time with him or talked on the phone with him, she’d gotten used to that, too. “I guess you’re right.”
At another part of the rooftop Gaia’s father had engaged one of her professors in a spirited discussion—or at least, half spirited. Tom Moore was talking animatedly, and the professor was nodding patiently. They must hate this day, she thought. All the teachers—they have to listen to everyone gush. As she watched, her father glanced over, smiling yet again, and she was glad to have Kevin by her side.
See, Dad? I have friends—or at least one friend. See how normal I am?
“Look at all these people, about to begin their empty lives,” Kevin remarked, gazing around at the graduates. “They’ll all look back on this with sappy fond memories of all the friends they made—so many they’ve already started to forget the names. But we know better, right? We only have memories of each other—of the brief time we had before the end.”
“What?” Gaia looked at him and saw the way he was looking back. She didn’t want to admit the obvious—that Kevin had a little bit of a crush on her—so she didn’t object. “I guess that’s true. I sure didn’t connect with anyone else here, Kevin.”
“Connect,” Kevin said. “Exactly the word I was going to use. We connected. Listen, Gaia, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about before this ends.”
“Hey, grads!”
Gaia saw Kevin flinch as the high—pitched, bubbly voice intruded on their conversation. A well-built, muscular young woman with a long black ponytail stood there, holding a tray of wineglasses. She was dressed in the same outfit as all the other catering personnel. Kevin still looked alarmed, as if the woman’s voice had given him a very bad fright.
“Glass of wine?” the waitress asked, beaming.
“No, thanks,” Gaia said.
“Okay!” the woman replied in her bubbly voice. “Well, I’m here if you need me!”
“Right,” Gaia said, sharing a perplexed glance with Kevin. “Good to know.”
“As I was saying,” Kevin went on in his painfully shy way, “I’d like to talk about something.”
“Fine,” Gaia said, glancing around at the oppressive sea of graduates and caterers. “Let’s get out of the line of fire here.”
“Follow me,” Kevin said obligingly, taking her hand and leading her toward the low parapet that bounded the roof. Gaia was so startled by the gesture that she let herself be pulled along that way.
They made their way across the roof and settled into the sunny corner, looking out over the vast Stanford campus, with its winding white walkways, tall green palm trees, and terracotta roofs. Kevin seemed to have fallen deep into his own thoughts as he gripped the ledge and gazed out at the clear blue sky. The long silence grew too uncomfortable, and Gaia finally felt the need to break it.
“So what did you want to talk about?”
“Well, I just figured, you know …” Kevin smiled selfconsciously and lowered his head as the wind tossed his babyfine hair. “Since it’s all going to end now … that I should let you know …” Kevin’s voice tapered off into silence again.
“Let me know what?”
“Um … Just to let you know that … I always liked talking to you, Gaia. I mean, I liked … being with you.”
She laughed awkwardly but then saw that it was the wrong response. Kevin’s expression had grown very earnest and serious. Gaia suddenly realized that this wasn’t going to be the kind of delightful graduation chitchat she’d been after. Her chest grew tight with discomfort. “Well, I liked talking to you, too,” she said.
“Yeah,” Kevin went on, looking down over the ledge. “And I wish—you know, now that it’s all going to end … I’m just saying … I wish that I’d gotten to know you better while we were here. I wish we could have gotten closer. You know what I mean? Much closer.” Kevin looked up and locked his eyes with hers. And now with the sun shining directly on his face, she could see just how pale Kevin had become—how dark and deep the circles under his eyes had gotten.
“Yeah,” Gaia finally admitted. “I’m sorry we couldn’t have been closer.” It was a vapid, Hallmark card thing to say, but she couldn’t think of anything better. “Closer is not my forte, Kevin. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, you certainly don’t have to worry about it now,” Kevin said. “I totally understand how you feel. Believe me.”
“You do?”
“Sure, I do,” he replied, peering at her through his increasingly wary eyes. “I mean, why try to make connections with people that you know will never last, right? Why make the effort? Wasn’t that our philosophy here?”
Gaia shook her head. “No. No, it wasn’t that. It was way more complicated than that, Kevin.”
“Oh, come on,” Kevin snapped. “It’s not so complicated. You and I are the same, Gaia, I know we are. We were never going to make any friends at this place. We never gave a crap about these people and they never gave a crap about us. And why would they? All they give a crap about is themselves. I mean, look at them. Look at all these sad, pathetic automatons, posing for pictures and holding up these stupid diplomas like they mean something. You know they’re telling themselves some crap about how they’re going to leave this place and go out and save the world, but the only people they really want to save are themselves. They just want to make enough cash to send their kids to this school so their kids can make a ton of cash and send their kids to this school and on and on and on like a freaking machine—”
“Kevin, what the hell is wrong with you?” Gaia grabbed Kevin’s shoulder. She had never seen this look on his face before, and she’d never heard him talk this way. The things he was saying were depressing enough, but combined with this new look in his eyes, it was downright disturbing. “Are you okay?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me; it’s them. They’re just completely in the dark. They’re all just drinking their wine and whooping it up like there’s some big bright future ahead of them, but you and me, Gaia, we know the truth, right? We know the truth. There is no big bright future. They just don’t know it yet. They have no idea that today is their last day.”
Gaia stepped in front of Kevin and took hold of both his arms. “Kevin, you need to chill. You’re freaking me out, okay? Cut it out.”
He turned back to Gaia and gave her a piercing stare that she couldn’t even begin to read. “I want to show you something,” he said quietly. “If I show you something, will you promise not to scream?”
“Kevin—”
He pulled his hand inside his sleeve and brought something out from under his gown, presenting it proudly to Gaia. It looked like one of the joysticks from a flight simulator game—black with a small red button at the top. A metal wire ran from the bottom of the joystick down under his sleeve. Kevin wrapped his fingers tightly around the shaft.
“What is that?” she demanded. “Kevin, what is it?”
“It’s the way out,” he said. “And it’s a rude awakening for all these ignorant, soulless people.” He ripped the Velcro of his gown open with his free hand, revealing the taped-up package at the center of his chest. It was strapped to his body by the metal wire from the joystick. The top of the package looked like a digital clock readout, and
the number 20 was flickering at its center.
A bomb. Oh my God—he’s got a homemade bomb.
Gaia forced herself not to move. She wanted to look around the roof and gauge how far away the other partygoers were, but she kept her eyes fixed on Kevin’s.
“Good-bye, Gaia,” he said, backing slowly away from her. “I really do wish we could have been closer, like you said. But it’s all over now.” His thumb hovered over the red button.
“Jesus, Kevin, what are you doing?” Gaia hollered. “What the hell are you?”
Suddenly Gaia heard a crashing noise—somebody had dropped a tray, it sounded like. A surprised gasp went through the crowd.
“Freeze!” a high-pitched voice shouted. “FBI! Drop it! Drop it now, Bender!”
FBI—? Gaia thought she must have heard wrong. What the hell?
She whipped around to see the bubbly catering woman standing at the center of the roof. She had dropped her tray of glasses to the ground and was thrusting a huge automatic handgun forward with a two-handed grip, aiming squarely at Kevin.
An agent—the waitress is a freaking FBI agent.
Gaia felt like she was dreaming; the logic of what was happening to her had veered so quickly that she’d barely had time to understand it, let alone react.
An inexplicable sensation had suddenly invaded her senses. It was something like nausea, only ten times worse. The sickness spread out through her lungs and her stomach—penetrating her core with this unbearable pressure. She clenched her fists and tried to shake it off, but even the simple act of shaking seemed momentarily impossible. It was like a sudden glitch in all her motor functions, and she had no explanation for it.
A rash of confusion and screams broke out in the crowd—some of the partygoers flattened to the ground at the sight of the gun. Some of them just stood there in shock. Gaia had no idea where her father was—she strained to see, but she couldn’t find him.
“Move away from him, ma’am!” the ponytailed FBI agent yelled.
They knew, Gaia realized suddenly. That woman’s here because the FBI knew Kevin was going to do this—
“Oh, that won’t really make a difference,” Kevin shouted. He was holding the trigger out in front of him, and with his other hand he’d grabbed Gaia’s wrist. “Once I hit this button, the whole roof goes to kingdom come. Me and my darling here will be first on the list at heaven’s gate.”
The agent thrust her gun into the air and fired off two warning shots that echoed over the campus rooftops. Each shot was like another bolt of pain through Gaia’s center. She slammed her eyes shut for a moment just to cope with the nauseating aftershocks in her chest. And that’s when she finally realized where this god-awful feeling was coming from …
It was the gun. Gaia hadn’t seen or heard a gun since that horrific night—the night that Jake was shot. She’d sworn off all the violence as of that evening, and she’d made it through all these years at school without even a glimpse of a loaded weapon. Now the sight of that gun was bringing it all back. Images of Jake’s murder were flooding her head and torturing her with this unbearable feeling. It wasn’t fear, of course. The shots didn’t frighten her. It was just the purest kind of repulsion. A supreme and stagnating discomfort. And Gaia needed to get the hell over it. Fast.
“Drop the trigger, Bender,” the FBI agent repeated. She had to shout to be heard over the screams of the crowd. “Drop it or die.”
“But I want to die,” Kevin argued. “Anyway, if you shoot me, I’ll still push the trigger.”
The screams of the crowd had gotten louder. Over the parapet Gaia could see passersby on the quad gathering into a crowd, gazing up at the roof. There was no way to get them to scatter.
“Put it down, Bender,” the FBI agent ordered. “Don’t make me shoot. You do not want to do this.” She began to move slowly toward them as Kevin backed himself up against the ledge, pulling Gaia with him.
“No, you’re wrong about that,” Kevin said. “See?”
Almost casually, he squeezed his thumb down on the red button.
Everyone on the rooftop screamed. It was deafening. The rooftop had devolved into pure chaos: black robes were flying in every possible direction and no direction at all, like a flock of panicked crows who had forgotten how to fly.
Gaia had to shake it off right now—the flashbacks, the paralysis, all of it. There was no more time to indulge her damaged psyche. She took a deep breath and she swallowed it all down—all the memories and all the promises she’d made to herself. And finally her thoughts became very focused and very clear—clearer than they had been in a long time. Because she knew what she had to do. There was simply no way to get all those people off the roof in twenty seconds. She had to get Kevin off the roof. That was the only way to save everyone else. And she was the one person on that roof who could do it.
“Congratulations, everyone!” Kevin hollered. The digital clock on the center of his chest had begun to count down from twenty. “Twenty seconds to impact! So say your good-byes to each other and then say good-bye to your bright and sunny futures.”
Without wasting another second, she pulled her wrist from Kevin’s grip, ducked her head, and dove at his midsection just as the clock on his chest struck fourteen seconds. She heard the loud whuff sound of their impact, the muffled clatter as they smacked against the parapet, pinwheeling upside down, slipping and plunging straight toward the ground.
Walking on air, Gaia thought randomly. The wind slammed up against her face, pounding her eardrums and whipping her hair high over her head. All the peripheral sounds seemed to fade away—the crowd’s helpless cries, her father’s useless pleas to try and stop her. All she could hear now was the steady beating of her heart as it pumped pure adrenaline through every one of her limbs.
Kevin clasped his arms desperately around her waist and shut his eyes as they plummeted. But Gaia’s eyes were wide open. There was no fear, only focus. She knew her targets. She’d known them before she’d even left the ground. She prayed for dear life as she thrust out her hand and grabbed onto the first Stanford flag on the side of the building. The flag ripped away from its pole just as she managed to grapple the flag below it, tearing it clean off its pole as their fall grew slower. She focused in on her last target, folding her body tightly around Kevin’s as they finally soared into the building’s billowy white awning.
They slammed into the awning with an ear-shattering thud, forcing the entire canvas to fold in on itself as it dipped and dipped, tearing tack by tack from its frame until it had enveloped them in a thick white parachutelike ball on the ground.
The ground. She had gotten them down to solid ground. Still breathing and with all their limbs intact. But her job wasn’t done yet. Not by a long shot. She hurled the awning off them and fixed her eyes on Kevin’s chest as he lay there in a state of shock. The clock was down to six seconds. Five, four …
She smacked her hands down on his chest and ripped the front of his T-shirt right off, grabbing the bomb and all the wires with it. Three, two … She sprang up from the ground, took two running steps, and hurled the bomb with every ounce of her strength, rocketing it high into the air.
“Get down!” Gaia screamed.
There was a brief moment of absolute silence—and then a ball of fire, exploding in the air like some kind of ungodly fireworks finale. The deep, deafening sound seemed to echo through the entire campus as the ground shook below her.
And suddenly there was total quiet. Nothing but peaceful silence as the black cinders fell harmlessly from the sky.
Gaia knelt on the green grass, realizing that the explosion had momentarily deafened her. She felt a strong hand come down on her shoulder and another reach for her arm. The hands helped lift her back to her feet. When she finally looked up, she realized there were in fact three men helping her to rise. She saw the wide smiles on their faces and the confounded amazement in their eyes. And then she noticed the insignias on their dark blue windbreakers:
FBI
Three unmarked cars had pulled up beside her—Gaia was still in her silent world, and she wouldn’t have known except for the dust clouds and exhaust against the bright sky. Kevin Bender stumbled and fell as he was thrown into one of the cars. An agent still had his hand on her shoulder; he squeezed it, and Gaia realized he was trying to tell her something….
“I’m sorry?” Gaia yelled. She could hear herself, muffled—but her hearing was returning.
“I said,” the agent yelled distantly in her ear—she could barely hear him, like a shout from miles away—“it sounds like there are a lot of grateful people up there.”
“What?”
The agent pointed. Gaia followed his gesture upward.
And finally her hearing came back. The dull roar intensified until she recognized it.
Clapping. They’re all clapping….
It was true. All the way up on the roof of the Roth Library the entire senior class, and all of their parents and friends, were leaning over the ledge and showering Gaia with applause. And in the middle of the rooftop crowd, silhouetted against the flawless blue sky, was her father.
Gaia wanted to wave—but she couldn’t move. She was so stunned by what had happened, and how fast it had occurred, that she could barely think straight. But one thing was certain.
That nagging sense of emptiness that she’d felt throughout her graduation day, that sense that something was missing … it was gone.
For at least this one moment, Gaia felt whole again.
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Well, here goes, Gaia thought.
Alone in the air-conditioned waiting room, Gaia let herself slump in her chair—and then quickly straightened up. The room probably had hidden cameras.
Taking a deep breath, Gaia uncapped her pen and wrote her name. The steel tip of the ballpoint nib scratched loudly on the form, pressing against the metal clipboard they’d given her. For the fifteenth or twentieth time she glanced over the information she’d written, checking to see if she’d made a mistake. Her handwriting looked fine, she thought—not too childish, not too messy or too neat.
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