FRANKIE: I was just a toddler when my mom walked out on us. It was just my pops, my baby sister, and me, and it was hard. I was just a toddler, and I can still remember how mad I was at my baby sister. I thought it was her fault my mom left. I mean, everything was good until she came into the picture. So I decided I was gonna march my toddler ass into the baby room, get up on my potty stool, and yell at that dumb-ass baby in her dumb-ass cradle. Tell her how much I hated her. So I dragged my potty stool in there, climbed up, and glared into that cradle.
(Frankie’s voice breaks. A tear trickles down his cheek. He sniffs and wipes it with a tattooed finger.)
FRANKIE: But in that cradle was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. And somehow, in that moment, I knew that little girl came from somewhere special. They say you can’t remember stuff when you’re that young, but I remember, man. I remember.
TEGAN: Okay, all jokes aside…
CLIFF: Please.
TEGAN: I think we all just need to take a deep breath.
CLIFF: Take a deep breath.
TEGAN: Yeah.
CLIFF: And then what?
TEGAN: And then do whatever you want! But stop first. Take a deep breath. We live in a world where everything is instant, and the Internet shoves it in our faces, and suddenly we’re worried about all the hate filling our news feeds, and countries having dick-measuring contests with their nukes, and why does everyone else’s lives seem so much more happy and perfect than mine? And it’s suffocating. It’s like someone is holding my head underwater. I’m worried about so many things at once, I can’t even function, and Christ! I just…I’d do anything to shut it all off!
(Tegan follows her own advice. Stops. Inhales deeply. Lets it out like she’s releasing a piece of herself.)
TEGAN: We’re all gonna die. And we only have so many fucks we can give in a lifetime. So give a fuck about the things that matter most. Maybe you don’t know what those things are right now. Maybe ’cause you’re too busy worrying about the fact that you don’t know what matters most to you. So stop. Take a deep breath.
(Tegan grabs Jack’s camera.)
JACK: (voice-over) Whoa! Hey!
She holds the camera away from herself—at selfie length—angled so it captures both her and me, Cliff Hubbard. She grabs me by the collar and pulls me down, simultaneously lifting herself on her toes. Then, she kisses me.
Caught completely off guard, my arms flounder aimlessly for a moment. And then they fall, slowly, onto her waist.
Our lips part. Tegan angles the camera on herself.
TEGAN: Sometimes the things that matter most are right in front of us.
I woke up to a strange text message. It was Noah. The fact that it was almost six in the morning only amplified the strangeness. He texted:
If you could tell Shane one thing, what would it be?
I might have responded sarcastically if I was more than half awake. But I wasn’t, and, in a sleepy haze, I considered my answer just a little too seriously. I replied:
I would probably ask him why he made me think I knew everything about him, when really, I didn’t know anything. I would also tell him that I love him and that killing himself was a dick move.
There was a long pause before Noah’s next text. I may or may not have dozed off, but the buzz and the bright flash of the screen woke me up again.
I would tell him that everything’s going to be okay from now on.
I stared at that for a long moment before one plus one equaled Holy shit! Today was the anniversary of Shane’s death.
And then I fell back asleep.
I woke up to a number of things—my phone vibrating, my mom yelling/groaning/burbling my name, but mostly, I woke up to the pillow that flew across the room and hit me in the face.
“Who? What?” I said.
“Your phone!” My mom was still lying in bed with an arm draped over her face. “It’s been going off for the past half hour. My alarm is set to go off in fifteen minutes. If I don’t get to enjoy those fifteen minutes in peace, either you or that phone will die.”
My mom didn’t seem concerned with an answer as she rolled over sideways, curled into a ball, and smothered her head with a pillow.
I grabbed my phone, walked outside, and answered it without glancing at the caller. “Hello?”
“Cliff, where are you?” It was Aaron.
“Uh…” I had to think for a second. “Motel 6?”
“Motel 6? Why are you at a Motel 6?”
So, for the next several minutes, I explained in detail why I was staying in a Motel 6. It was a deeply uncomfortable conversation.
“Damn,” said Aaron. “The Motel 6 on Gleason?”
“Uh. Yeah?”
“Okay.” Aaron hung up.
I stared at my phone, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. When the pieces failed to come together, I gave up and started getting ready for school. I was halfway through the most wonderful shower of my life—God bless Motel 6’s Niagara Chrome showerhead—when I remembered the Happy Valley Apocalypse countdown.
I stumbled out—waging battle with the shower curtain in the process—wrapped a towel around all seventeen acres of my ass, and ran out of the bathroom, soaking wet. I fumbled with my mom’s phone until I navigated my way to happyvalleyapocalypse.com.
The countdown was gone. The audio clip was gone. The website was completely empty, except for a single quote:
“You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.”
—Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
And that was it. No blackmail. No extortion. No nudes or embarrassing/incriminating messages, pictures, or videos.
I did it. I stopped HAL.
The elation of this moment was disrupted by a knock at the door.
I glanced at the door. I glanced at my mom, who was practically in cryostasis. Then I glanced at my big, wet, naked self.
After dressing myself in Guinness World Record time, I answered the door.
It was Aaron and Tegan. And Tegan was holding a four-pack.
“Is that beer?” I started to ask—but Aaron and Tegan were already attacking me in a vicious group hug.
My confusion lasted for only a moment. “Is this about the Apocalypse countdown?”
Aaron and Tegan released me from their covert hug assault.
“That is amazing news,” said Aaron. “But no.”
“I remembered that today was the anniversary of…” Tegan hesitated. “You know. Shane.”
Oh.
Oh!
How had I forgotten that?
“We wanted to get him flowers,” said Tegan, “but the grocery store flowers were lame and wilty, and I realized that Shane would probably hate flowers anyway, so I stole some beers from my dad’s garage stash.”
“So now,” said Aaron, “before school, the three of us are going to pay Shane a visit. The fourth beer is for him.”
I could already feel the waterworks coming—like a great tsunami in the back of my eyeballs. I attempted to hide it by returning the hug attack, pulling each of them in with an arm.
“You guys are the best friends ever,” I said.
“Um, friend?” said Tegan.
“Girlfriend, best friend, whatever. You guys are the best.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what is this?” I said.
The “this” I was referring to was Aaron sitting in the backseat of his Camaro, and Tegan—who did not have a driver’s license—climbing behind the steering wheel.
“Oh, I’m not allowed to drive for the next couple weeks,” said Aaron. “You know, in case I have another epileptic seizure. Doctor’s orders. So Tegan offered to be the wheelman.”
Tegan winked at me.
“She never earned her driver’s license!”
“About that, Cliff…” said Tegan. “I may have told you a slight untruth. I didn’t want you to think I was a bad person.”
“Oh my God.”
“I did earn my driver’s license. I
just had it revoked when I accidentally T-boned an ice-cream truck.”
“Tegan!”
“But the driver was okay!”
“How do you accidentally T-bone an ice-cream truck? It’s a car the size of an ambulance that plays ‘Turkey in the Straw’ from a megaphone!”
Aaron shrugged. “You don’t have a license, either. I don’t care who drives as long as it’s not me.”
Tegan’s hands fastened on the steering wheel. “You already drove once. I’ve got dibs.”
I surrendered the argument, climbed into the passenger seat, and buckled my seat belt. I even tugged on the buckle, just to make sure it was secure.
It was a quiet drive. But not a sad one. This was mostly due to the fact that I was monumentally distracted. I couldn’t think about Shane because I was too preoccupied with HAL.
Aaron and Tegan, meanwhile, might as well have been mannequins. They were probably trying to pay their respects—which I appreciated—but right now, there was a cyber-terrorizing elephant in the car that needed addressing.
“HAL called me last night,” I said.
Tegan nearly swerved off the road, and Aaron exercised the incredible versatility of the F-word. After a brief moment of zigzagging, and everyone’s lives flashing promptly before their eyes, Tegan reined us back into the correct lane.
“Holy shit,” Aaron concluded.
“You stopped HAL?” said Tegan.
I recounted my entire phone conversation with HAL—every detail—leading up to me texting her the link to our video. The moment I mentioned the video, Aaron’s mouth splintered into a crazed smile.
“The video stopped HAL?” said Aaron. “Our video?”
“As far as I can tell.”
“We did it! We found and stopped HAL! The List is complete!”
“But that’s the thing. We stopped HAL. But we didn’t find her. We still have no clue who she is.”
Aaron’s hysteria boiled down to a simmer. “Huh.”
“Oh, c’mon,” said Tegan. “I don’t think God was being that literal. The List is done. You guys did it! Right, Aaron?”
I glanced back at Aaron. He looked just as unsure as me.
And then Aaron’s eyes widened. “Oh shit.”
“What?”
“Is there a quiz today in Algebra?”
I rolled my eyes. “Who do you have?”
“Mr. Gunther.”
My eyes shifted up in thought. “Yeah, there’s a quiz. But it’s easy stuff—quadratic polynomials.”
“Easy?” said Tegan. She snorted and laughed.
Aaron grabbed his skull. “What the hell is a quadratic polynomial?”
He didn’t even wait for an answer. He pulled his backpack onto his lap, unzipped it, and sifted through the contents.
“Shit! I don’t even have my book!”
“Would you like to borrow mine?” I said.
“Oh my God, yes, please.”
I unzipped my own backpack and pulled out my textbook—an ancient hand-me-down from Shane. Technically it was school property, but Shane never returned it. He never had the chance to.
“We can postpone this,” I said, handing him the book, “if you need to study.”
“No, no, no, no, no,” said Aaron. “No postponing. This morning’s for Shane. Lemme just cram on the way to the Monolith.”
Aaron opened the front cover. Paused. “Why do you have Noah’s textbook?”
“Huh?”
Aaron lifted the book with the front cover open for me to see. A name was scribbled in the top left corner:
Noah H. Poulson
I knew why I had Noah’s textbook—because he tutored Shane in Algebra, and it seemed like an easy mistake for textbooks to get shuffled in the process.
But then there was the initial between Noah’s first and last name.
I stared at that H for an infinity compounded into mere seconds.
I fumbled to pull my phone out of my pocket, scrolled through the contacts, and called Jack. He answered after the second ring.
“Hey, Cliff,” said Jack. “What’s up?”
“I need you to look up Noah’s middle name for me.”
“Noah? Why?”
“Just do it!” I paused before adding, “But don’t bother with the school directory. It’s not there.”
“What do you want me to do? Hack the private student files?”
“Can you do that?”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“Yes. That. Do that.”
“Okay…”
Tegan eyed me from the driver’s seat, clearly confused. Aaron pulled the textbook back into his lap, returning his attention to Noah’s name. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him go breathless.
“No way,” said Aaron.
There was silence on the other line. An occasional click or scroll of the wheel button on a computer mouse.
“No. Way,” said Jack, finally.
“What is it?”
“Haley,” he said. “Noah Haley Poulson.”
It was a good thing I wasn’t driving because this was the part where we would have crashed and died.
“Holy shit,” said Jack. “Does this mean Noah is HAL?”
It meant much more than Noah being HAL.
It meant that Noah and Shane were in love.
Fragments of Shane’s journal were flashing in front of me. The dots were connecting.
…I started liking Hal, but I didn’t fess up to it, because Hal REALLY wasn’t my “type.”
We haven’t had sex yet, and frankly, having sex with her kind of scares me, which probably sounds weird, but if you knew her, you’d understand.
And then the kicker:
It seems like I’ve told you a lot, but I really haven’t told you anything.
I am a liar. The truth is that I don’t know how to tell the truth, to you or to anyone.
I’ve been freaking out a lot lately, and I’ve been taking it out on Hal. Which isn’t fair. It’s not her fault I’m in love with her. At first I was asking myself how I could love someone so much and hate them at the same time. But now I realize that she’s not the person I hate.
I hate myself.
Shane was gay. Or maybe bisexual. And he had lived in a cesspool of homophobia. Between the JTs—who infiltrated nearly every social sphere—to my dad, Happy Valley was certainly not supplying him with reasons to love himself.
My mind was a spinning top, and the rotational inertia was just getting started.
If Noah was Haley, that meant that he was the one who left Shane’s journal on my doorstep. Which meant that he knew about the lie in the journal. He knew that Shane had crafted this fake version of their story, turning Noah into a girl named Haley. Shane couldn’t even tell the truth to a journal!
Realization struck me like a line drive to the face—a texting conversation I had only hours ago. It had been all but a forgotten dream. But now, in this moment, reality sucker-punched me awake.
If you could tell Shane one thing, what would it be?
Why would Noah ask me that?
I would tell him that everything’s going to be okay from now on.
Oh my God.
“Cliff?” said Aaron. “Cliff, are you okay?”
I ignored him. “Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“I need you to find Principal McCaffrey right now.”
“What? You’re not going to rat Noah out, are you?”
“Listen, there’s no time—”
“C’mon, Cliff. Noah stopped the countdown. There’s nothing on that List that says you need to throw Noah under the bus like—”
“DAMMIT, JACK. I think Noah’s going to kill himself.”
That shut Jack up. “What?” he said, eventually.
“WHAT?” said Aaron and Tegan, simultaneously.
“I don’t have time to explain,” I said to Jack. “Find McCaffrey and see if she can find him….”
“Okay, okay, I’m going!” said Jack. “Shit.”
And he hung up.
“Cliff, what’s going on?” said Tegan.
“Do you know where Spruce Forest Drive is?”
“Where the Poulsons live?”
“Yes! YES! Do you know where they l—?”
Tegan didn’t wait for me to spit out another syllable. She simultaneously hit the brakes and turned the steering wheel hard, flipping the bitchin’est U-ey ever flipped.
“Jesus, Tegan!”
Two seconds and 180 degrees later, we were nearly doubling the speed limit in the opposite direction. Apparently, shit had just gone from bad to Biblical because the Seven Seals of Revelation were unraveling, and man and machine were becoming one. In that moment, Tegan and Aaron’s ’69 Camaro Z28 RS transformed into the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.
“So this is how I die,” Aaron mused.
“Confession,” said Tegan. “In first grade, Esther and I used to be best friends. You know, before she discovered Jesus, and I discovered sociopaths.”
“WHO ARE YOU?” I said.
“Hey, we were six, and we liked Bratz dolls! Back off!”
This revelation could be digested later. Right now, I was already dialing Noah’s number. I listened to the ringback tone and told myself I was overreacting. Noah would answer. He would wonder why I was freaking out and tell me he was just planning on visiting Shane’s grave later this afternoon. That I had fabricated this whole suicidal innuendo in my head. McCaffrey would be pissed, Jack would be irritated, and Noah and I would have a great big laugh about the whole thing. Everything would be okay.
No one picked up. Instead, it went to Noah’s voice mail.
“Fuck!” I hung up and began hyperventilating into my hands.
“Noah is Haley,” said Aaron, breathless. “Isn’t he?”
“What?” said Tegan.
I took a deep breath and let everything out. “Long story short: Noah and my big brother, Shane, were…uh…in love apparently, but now Shane’s dead, and today’s the anniversary of his death, and Noah texted me something vaguely suicidal last night, and his voice mail is…Oh shit, this is bad.”
“Oh my God,” said Aaron.
“Holy fuck,” said Tegan.
My phone rang—causing my heart to do Cirque du Soleil in my chest. Please let it be Noah, please!
It was an unknown number. I answered, “Hello?”
Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe Page 31