In the kitchen, Corina gets in line at the cat carrier next to Damon. She smiles when she sees him. He smiles back at her.
I look around the room, feeling alone.
I don’t want to stand in line at the cat carrier next to Damon and Corina feeling like a charity case, so I sit down next to Maddie, who’s already got her plate. It’s chicken of some sort.
She offers me a bite of it and I take it to be polite. It’s good, I suppose, but it’s not my style.
“You’re from LA?” she asks me.
I nod. “What about you?”
“Colorado,” she says as she scrapes up more chicken. “Aurora—near Denver.” She’s quiet for a moment and then she turns to examine me. “You down with all this?”
She looks like she’s actually asking. I sigh. “I don’t know. I’m freaking out a little bit, I think. This’s pretty weird.”
She nods. “Yeah. It was hard coming here.” She drags a finger through her hair to get it out of her face. “Freaked me the fuck out.”
“Yeah . . .” I offer, not sure what else to say. “Me too.”
She cuts off another small bite of her chicken. “It gets better,” she says as she eats it. She chews slowly and I scan the table for other conversations. Nobody’s looking back at me.
The line at the cat carrier is down to just the black guy, Calvin. Everybody else is already seated around us. Corina’s got a slab of salmon on top of rice.
Damon returns from the cat carrier with a burrito. He looks at me again as he sits down next to Corina. I try not to care, but I do. He says something to her. She laughs and I’m suddenly not hungry at all.
I walk to the cat carrier anyways, just for something to do.
“Mac and cheese,” Calvin says as he passes me with his plate. He gestures back at the carrier with his chin. “That thing’s bomb.”
I laugh. I don’t know what I’m looking to eat when I get to the cat carrier. I was thinking burger, but then as I was thinking about it, it disappeared in a flash of Locusts eating people. The carrier pulses and then stops. I open it.
Pizza. The cat carrier is bomb.
There’s not much talking while we eat, but as soon as we’re done, the questions start coming fast and furious at me.
Maddie: “You’re into soccer.”
It’s not a question as much as it’s a statement. I shrug and nod. I like soccer alright. Pete was the big soccer fan. He and my dad used to watch games together. They took me down to see the Galaxy play in Carson a couple times, too. Dad stopped watching soccer when Pete died.
“I watch it sometimes.”
Paul wants to know how old I am and what music I like. I tell him that I like metal, rap, and oldies, which starts a whole discussion about whether it’s possible to like both metal and rap equally. Calvin says it’s impossible because anybody who likes metal doesn’t have an ear to really appreciate rap, and Corina says that they’re both annoying so it’s perfectly possible to be tasteless enough to enjoy them both equally, which makes Calvin laugh and Maddie roll her eyes. Corina asks what sort of oldies and doesn’t believe me when I tell her stuff like the Temptations and the Platters. Paul asks whether I could ever listen to country. I tell him to not be ridiculous before I can stop myself. At first he looks hurt, but then he turns to Calvin and says that he can’t marry me anymore, which weirds me out for a second, but then I laugh. Maddie says she likes country and that he can marry her and he looks at her like she’s got scabies until Maddie promises to love the gay right off of him.
While we’re talking about music and stuff like that, I start to really just chill and I’m almost able to forget why we’re here.
Until Damon says out of the blue: “I wonder what Marcus is doing right now.”
The table goes quiet, then Calvin speaks: “Whatever it is, he’s doing it with a mind clear of Locusts, Live-Tech, Gentry, and the end of the world.”
Maddie turns, speaks quietly just to me: “When they send us back, they wipe our memories and give us new ones. Marcus doesn’t remember shit about this now.”
I nod to show her I heard, but I don’t know what to feel about that.
“Can’t be easy going back like that, but it’s better than the alternative.” Corina shakes her head. “Can you imagine going home remembering all this shit, but not being able to say boo about it to anybody?” She pinches some rice between her thumb and finger and pops it into her mouth. “All this shit wears on me too much. I can’t wait for them to wipe it from my mind.”
Calvin shrugs. “Yeah, me too. It’d be bad to have this all in my head out there. Nobody to talk to about it.”
The conversation splinters again after that. Everybody’s talking, but nobody’s talking to me.
Which is fine, because I don’t want to talk anymore.
I clear my plate. When I try and sneak out, Corina catches my eye. She gives me a shy little wave, which warms me up.
Back in my room, I get ready for bed. I usually sleep in my boxers, but I feel really exposed just wearing my underwear here, so I keep my T-shirt on and crawl under the covers.
As I fall asleep, I think about the people I used to know. I try to get a picture of my mom and dad, but their faces keep changing and I’m suddenly sure I’m going to forget them.
I try to imagine Mousie sitting on her retaining wall, waiting for me to pick her up for school, but I end up with a fuzzy mess of colors and shapes in my head instead.
I do the same with Pete, and then with Julio and my aunt, but they’re not clear either.
Tía Juana. She’s probably in the apartment, feeling like the world ended. She lost her house when my uncle died, and she had to move into a big apartment building in Boyle Heights that she hates because it’s loud and the walls are thin and it’s right next to the freeway. That’s part of the reason she was always at our house. But she can’t do that anymore because our house is . . .
My auntie believes in ghosts.
I get out of bed and grab my backpack, looking for my old screen. Its battery’s dead, so I plug it in and turn it on. While it loads, I imagine what I’ll find when I get connected. Texts from people, wondering why I did it, where I am. Articles about me being a murderer.
Messages from my Tía begging me to call her. I imagine the conversation, telling her that I didn’t do it, describing what happened, telling her about Sabazios and where I am now.
I want to see the article again, the one that quoted her. I want to get a message to the reporter so she knows that I’m innocent.
Maybe she’ll publish it and let everyone else know.
The screen comes on finally, but there’s no Wi-Fi. Not like there’s no open connection; there’s no connection at all. There’s no emergency service reception, either. It’s like we’re in a hole.
I move the phone around the room a bit to see if I can get the corner of some service, but there’s nothing.
I look at the door, but I’m not dressed and I don’t want to talk to anybody here.
There’s only one person I want to talk to. I dive to try and find her. I feel her.
HELLO?
She says nothing, and then:
“Goodbye, scared boy.”
She sounds sad.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN?
“You’re on your own, runaway boy. You’re gonna get your patch. Gonna plug the drain in your brain where the Silly Juice and me come through. Don’t be scared, boy. I’ll be here when you need to run away again.”
And then she’s gone. I call for her. I wait.
Nothing.
I fall asleep totally alone.