“Lex is gone!” he shrieked, flailing his arms. “What happened to my brother?”
“Xander! Listen to me!” His mom grabbed his shoulders and pressed down, something she used to do when he was a kid and having a tantrum; now, as then, it automatically quieted him. “It’s just a bad dream!”
He whispered, “Where’s the baby?”
“Xander,” his mother said. “Son. Open your eyes.”
(open your eyes, Zan)
“Look,” his mother said, pivoting him until he was right in front of the room that was supposed to be a nursery. His mouth worked silently as he looked at the piles of boxes and storage bins gathered haphazardly on the floor. In the back corner, shadows gathered until they pulled into the shape of a man, reaching for him—
***
—and the shadow reaches for him and he knows that when the shadow touches him that’s the end of everything and so he screams again—
***
and Xander screamed and stumbled backward.
“Xander,” his mother said firmly, her hand pressing down on his shoulder. “It’s just a dream. Look, Son. Look.”
(open your eyes)
So he looked, and he saw shadows, only shadows. There was one man in the apartment, and that man was still fast asleep in his parents’ bedroom, because nothing short of a nuclear blast could wake his father.
His brother was gone.
“Son,” said his mother. “This is just a bad dream. Go back to bed now. Time for a good dream, Xander.”
“It’s only fair,” he said, remembering the promise from his childhood: After the bad dreams came the good, because that was only fair.
His mother nodded and steered him back to his bedroom, then she rose up on her toes to kiss his forehead. “Good night, Zan.”
Feeling lost and so very small, Xander said good night and shut his bedroom door. He threw himself into bed and waited for sleep to come.
It didn’t.
Xander shoved his pillow over his head and made himself remember holding Lex—his fragile baby brother, with the soft spot on his head that still hadn’t closed.
Except Lex was gone, erased as if he’d never been.
Xander was losing his mind.
He turned on his table lamp and grabbed the spiral sketchbook and pencil that waited on the nightstand. He had to get the images out of his head and onto paper; maybe then he’d be able to get some sleep. But when he tried to draw, his hand shook so badly that he couldn’t keep the pencil point from dancing on the paper’s surface.
Disgusted, he tossed the sketchbook onto his nightstand. It landed with an indifferent thud. The pencil missed the table completely and disappeared somewhere on the floor.
He settled into his bed and pulled his covers high. Aloud he said, “Time for a good dream.”
Sleep was a long time coming.
When it finally did, Xander didn’t dream.
***
It was the beep that woke him—shriller than an alarm clock, more insistent than a fire alarm. It was a sound that resonated through him, that was part of him, a sound he couldn’t ignore or tune out. It called to him, beckoning, and he had no choice but to answer.
Xander opened his eyes.
He was in bed yet not in bed; he couldn’t understand it, other than he had to be waking in a dream. He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, and he listened, waiting.
Beep.
He looked around, trying to determine from where the sound had sprung. There, on his nightstand, his sketchbook lay discarded, abandoned; beside it, his alarm clock was silent. Next to his clock, a pile of coins glittered—his change, emptied from his pockets. Farther down, his overflowing bookshelves threatened to spew paperbacks onto his carpet—works by Kurt Vonnegut and Spalding Gray and Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett and Piers Anthony and Tom Stoppard and so many others, stories that had captured him and taken him far, far away, whether they were true stories or only mostly true or not true at all. There was his desk, with his computer and cell phone and philosophy textbook, buried somewhere amid the mound of drawings and papers and sticky notes. On various shelves, framed pictures winked, showing him and Ted, him and Suzie and Izzy, him and his parents—fragments of his life captured forever in a moment, frozen. Around him, the walls were decorated with fantasyland maps and Escher’s Möbius ants and, in the center, the two blue nudes: the enraged Matisse and despairing Picasso. So many other things that defined him and yet were just trinkets, trifles. Things.
Muffled, yet adamant: Beep.
It came from outside his room.
Xander stood up and wondered only for a moment why he was wearing his blue button-up shirt, the one that made the blue in his eyes really pop, as well as his jeans and sneakers, but he had more important things to do—specifically, he had to find out what was causing that sound.
He walked out of his room . . .
. . . and into his philosophy and film studies class. He stood in the doorway, blinking, and he said, “What? What? What?”
“The late Mr. Atwood,” said Ms. Lewis, shaking her head. “At this rate, you’ll be late for your own funeral.”
As if in a dream, he slid into his seat next to Ted and replied, “Wouldn’t you want to be?”
Ms. Lewis sighed loudly, then turned her back to finish writing on the board.
“You’re only half as clever as you think you are,” Ted murmured.
“Which is still twice as clever as you.”
“Ouch. You practice that comeback as much as you practice smiling in front of a mirror?”
Xander should have known it was a mistake to share that tidbit with Ted.
“Seriously,” Ted whispered, “why bother? If Riley hasn’t noticed you by now, it’s not gonna happen. Let it go.”
“It’s good to have goals,” Xander said, and then he frowned. Something wasn’t right. He was dating Riley—had been with Riley for two months at this point. He and Riley were in love. Everything was fine.
Everything was fine.
He listened to Ms. Lewis pitch the upcoming school musical, read her comments on his report about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and listened again as she explained the theory behind solipsism.
As Ms. Lewis got the DVD of The Truman Show set up, Xander distinctly felt a sense of déjà vu.
The lights went off, and he heard it, even over the swell of background music, rising, building until the sound carried like a scream:
Beep.
It came from outside the classroom.
Xander rose from his seat. When Ms. Lewis didn’t stop him, he headed toward the door. His fingers over the doorknob, he paused and looked back. No one noticed that he’d left his seat, or if they did, they weren’t commenting about it or trying to stop him.
Déjà vu gave way to fear.
That was foolish, he told himself. There was nothing to be afraid of. Everything was fine.
No, he couldn’t quite convince himself that everything was fine, but even so, he opened the classroom door and took a step . . .
. . . and grabbed a paintbrush. “Light adds depth to colors,” he said to Suzie. “It changes them, sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically.” He squeezed raw umber onto his palette and added a few streaks over Suzie’s patches of brown. “See?”
Suzie complained that he was being finicky, and he replied that details matter, especially the small ones. He led her around to his section of the prop tree, and he showed her where he’d painted a few objects into the bark: War’s sword, gleaming brightly; Pestilence’s silver crown; Famine’s scales.
Around them, hundreds of coins winked.
In Xander’s pocket, his penny weighed a thousand pounds.
“Come on,” he said uneasily. “I’ll tell Deb that you want to paint part of the wall.”
As he got Suzie set up with a roller, she asked, “Hear anything from Carnegie Mellon yet?”
He shrugged. “You know how it goes. I’m doing the hurry-up-and
-wait thing.”
“Thought you applied early admission.”
He had. He’d actually received the acceptance letter, but he hadn’t said anything about it to anyone—not his parents, not his friends. Not yet. “I’m sure I’ll hear soon.”
“Well, some places have sent them out already,” Suzie said. “Stanford, for instance. Riley got an acceptance letter today.”
“Riley told you that?”
“Sure,” Suzie said, casting him an odd look as she dipped her roller into paint. “We’ve only been friends since third grade. Riley sort of tells me everything. Why?”
“No reason,” he said, feeling like the world was out of focus. Something was off, something wasn’t right, no matter how he tried to convince himself that everything was fine.
“You going to Marcie’s thing on Saturday?”
“Yeah,” he said, thinking if Riley got a letter today, then maybe there was one waiting for him already. “We’re going to the party.”
Suzie said, “We? We who?”
“You know,” he said, hearing the words coming from his mouth. “Us. You. Me. Izzy. Ted.”
She looked at him like he had drool pooling at the corner of his mouth. “Presumptuous much?” Then she grinned. “Well, you’re right. Of course we’re going.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said, thinking that he had time, didn’t he? There had to be time.
But then there was another beep, and he was already moving on. He stepped away from the Art Squad and turned a corner . . .
. . . to find himself in his room, a letter in his hand.
He read the letter, and then read it again, and again until the words blurred and were no more than smears of ink.
He wanted to crumple the paper into a ball, crush it until it was hard and unyielding and then hurl it at his closed bedroom door, see if it would leave a mark. But all he could do was let the letter slip from his numb fingers.
He watched it make its way to the carpet in a fluttering, lazy circle, somersaulting twice before it landed.
He sat down hard on his bed and stared at the piece of paper littering his floor. It was just a thin piece of paper, with one paragraph’s worth of words. And that paper, with those words printed onto it, was enough to change the future.
He couldn’t pretend anymore—nothing was fine, nothing would ever be fine again.
Nothing. He was nothing.
Something in his chest tightened, and his eyes stung. He felt himself falling, even though he was still sitting on his bed with his feet planted on the floor—he was falling into someplace dark where he couldn’t breathe . . .
A small, still voice: Breathe, Xander.
Xander breathed.
And then, a shining thought, almost blinding in its intensity.
Riley.
Yes, he could tell Riley everything. Tomorrow, at Marcie’s party, he’d tell Riley what he’d done. And Riley would help him figure out what to do.
Tomorrow was the day.
(open your eyes, Zan)
From somewhere outside his room, a beep. It resonated, reverberated, and Xander leaped up from his bed and charged over to his bedroom door as if the sound were his salvation. He opened the door . . .
. . . and sauntered into Marcie’s house. Everyone had shown up for the party. No surprise there; Marcie’s shindigs were famous for being parent-free and alcohol-heavy. As Izzy had said on the way, Marcie’s parents were either incredibly cool or incredibly oblivious. And Ted voted for incredibly cool. Suzie, who didn’t drink, abstained from voting.
The party blared around them, with music blasting from hidden speakers and people resorting to screams to be heard. As a result, the volume was just under migraine-inducing. Xander barely noticed; he was too busy doing a circuit of the house, seeing who was where. He needed to find Riley, tell Riley what he’d done, have Riley tell him, in turn, what he should do. Riley would make everything fine again.
But before that could happen, Xander needed liquid courage.
A pit stop into the kitchen for the first beer of the night, and then Izzy and Ted peeled off to join other groups. Xander stayed with Suzie until she found a handful of others who dominated the high end of the GPA spectrum. Suzie happily joined in their passionate debate about their local U.S. senators. Xander waited until she was firmly entrenched in the conversation, and then he slipped away.
He had to find Riley.
There was Deb and fellow art geeks, which gave way to the thespian crowd, where Ted was working on getting smashed.
Izzy was elbow to elbow with the varsity soccer girls and guys.
Xander saw them all, hanging with their friends, schmoozing easily. They were fine without him.
Everything was fine without him.
He finally spotted Riley, who was with the others from the track and field team. Xander let out a relieved breath. Before he headed over there, he needed to replenish his empty beer. Besides, he could get one for Riley, too, and casually offer the fresh drink as he joined their group. Riley would take the beer and grin at him—oh, that infectious grin—and then the two of them could slip away, maybe to that small room just down the hallway, and they could talk.
Maybe even more than talk.
Yes. Yes. Everything was going to be fine.
Xander went into the kitchen, tossed the old bottle, and grabbed two more, but when he walked back to where the track team was gathered, Riley was nowhere to be seen.
Everything was fine.
Everything.
Sipping from both bottles, Xander wandered his way to the small room, some sort of home office, and closed the door behind him. He needed a little me time. He went through the beers in the quiet of the small room, slowly working his way toward a decent buzz. When he was done, he’d talk to Riley, and Riley would tell him what to do, and then the two of them would start their happily ever after. He deserved one, didn’t he? After all he’d done? The risk he’d taken?
Of course he did.
Everything was going to be fine.
He was nudging the last bit of backwash from one of the bottles when someone opened the door to the small room, slurred something about trying to find a bathroom. Xander pointed her in the right direction and went to find Riley. No more waiting. It was time.
After one more beer.
He threaded his way back to the kitchen. The house was packed sardine-tight with partiers, everyone hovering around the booze like they were ready to body slam anyone who dared to take the last one. Xander managed to snag a can of the cheap stuff—the only kind left—and then went to find Riley. But there were so many people, all pressing against him, that it was impossible to find anyone he knew. It was impossible to think.
Clutching his beer, he retreated to the small room again. He closed the door and leaned heavily against it. His heart was pounding, and now he was sweating like he was running a marathon. He popped his beer and chugged it, desperate to find some sort of calm. He let out a deep belch, followed by a shaky breath.
Everything was going to be fine.
He pushed away from the door and walked around the room, attempting to gather his thoughts. But there was a buzz in his brain and a beep on the horizon, and he was running out of time. He knew it in his gut: He was running out of time.
(today’s the day the world ends)
Something slammed against the door.
Xander whirled, startled, and saw two people stagger into the room, close enough to get drunk off each other’s breath.
Eating each other’s faces.
Xander’s vision tunneled to a pinpoint and the world gave way to a sea of red as he watched Ted and Riley kiss sloppily, their hands groping and slick.
The empty beer can slipped from Xander’s fingers. It hit the wood floor and bounced once, then rolled lazily along the floorboards until it came to a stop by Riley’s feet.
“Zan!” Ted blurted. “There you are!”
Riley swayed and grinned, saying nothing.<
br />
Xander stared at the one he loved, at that empty drunken grin, at the mouth that he dreamed of kissing, and all he could think was No and no and no.
Riley’s grin melted into a frown. “Teddy, your boy there looks sick.”
Teddy.
Teddy.
“Bastard,” Xander growled.
Ted held out a hand. “Come on, Zan. Don’t be like that.”
Xander barreled past them and out of the small room. He couldn’t see, couldn’t think. He stumbled his way through the house until he came to the back deck. Blundering outside, he took heaving gasps of air, but it still felt like he couldn’t breathe. People gave him space, or maybe he pushed them out of the way. He didn’t know; it didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered.
Someone was calling him, shouting his name, but he didn’t want to hear it.
“Zan!” Ted’s voice, penetrating like a spike through his brain. “Xander, come on! Don’t be like this!”
Xander staggered around to glare at his best friend, who dared to smile his smug trademarked smile, as if this was all some kind of joke. And it was—Xander had been played the fool. The joke was definitely on him. He jabbed a finger at Ted’s chest.
“You ass!” he snarled. “You know, you know how I feel about Riley! You’ve known forever!”
“I know,” Ted agreed.
Xander shouted, “How could you do that to me?”
“Do what to you, Zan?” Ted, no longer smiling, looked tired and angry and out of patience. “Stand on the sidelines and wait and wait for you to man up and make your move? How long was I supposed to wait, Zan? You’ve been mooning over Riley for freaking years. Years. And I was good, Xander. I waited for you to finally do something about it. I supported you, man! I wanted you to do it! But you just couldn’t. You didn’t. And then tonight, when Riley kissed me . . .”
“Kissed you,” Xander spat.
“Yeah, kissed me.” Ted sighed, exasperated. “Even six months ago, I would’ve told Riley no. Hell, two months ago. But Zan, school’s out soon. Real soon. We’ve got summer, and then college. Riley’s got Stanford. You’ve got Carnegie Mellon. Come on. It hasn’t happened yet, so when was it gonna happen?”
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