Laurence wished Isobel and her rocketeer friends would come and take him away. She was helping to run a start-up aerospace company that was actually making deliveries to the Space Station, and he kept reading articles where she was quoted about the brave new future of space travel.
After Laurence flopped onto his bed and gazed up at his ceiling-wide poster in which every fictional spaceship congregated at a massive nebula, he remembered how he’d spoken to his parents. If he strained to listen over the dozen cooling fans along one wall of his bedroom, he could hear his parents fighting. Not the kind of fight where anybody hopes to win. Or even find some solution. This was hopeless, pointless, mindless aggression, two creatures caught in a trap with nothing to do but tear each other apart. Laurence wanted to die.
His mother sounded more wounded, his father more fatalistic. But they had identical levels of bitterness.
Laurence put a pillow over his head. It did no good. He wound up putting his headphones on, with the latest girltrash songs that everybody was listening to at school, and then a pair of winter earmuffs over them. Now he could no longer hear his parents, but he could still imagine what they were saying. He focused on the crooning, growling voice of the girltrash singer, whose name was Heta Neko, and he found himself with an erection. Ignoring it did as much good as ignoring these things ever did. He hated himself, even as he let one hand drift down and carry out the motion he’d practiced incessantly of late. Just as Laurence splashed onto a dirty fast-food napkin, he both heard and felt one of his parents slamming the front door of their house, he didn’t know which.
I wish I were dead and in hell, Laurence thought.
Laurence didn’t sleep much. The next morning, he felt too sick for school, but he knew better than to ask to stay home. He barely noticed when kids threw erasers at him or refused to let him sign their petition to save something or other, because if he signed it then nobody else would.
When Laurence got home that afternoon, he found the form sitting on the kitchen table, signed by both parents. Neither was home. At dinner, he tried to thank them, but they just shrugged and looked at the table. The three of them ate in total silence.
The next day, Laurence just stood in the hallway, watching it drain of people. He realized his buttons were buttoned wrong, so his jacket was askew.
Patricia came up to him in the hallway. “You’re going to be late,” she said. “They’re going to kill you.”
For the first time ever, Laurence noticed that Patricia was pretty. Her skin had a brightness underlying its faint tan. Like an airbrushed picture he’d seen once. Her neck was really smooth and graceful, and her wrist pivoted as she held her backpack on her shoulder. Her dark hair fell almost over one gray-green eye. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders. He wanted to run away from her. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to scream.
Instead, he said, “Do you want to ditch school?”
“Why?” she said. “And go where?”
“Let’s go to the woods,” he said. “I want to see your magic Tree.”
He no longer cared if this girl was crazy. He was a bad person, and what was worse, being crazy or being evil? Plus she might be the only girl who would even consider kissing him before he turned thirty. And he was growing more conscious that he had been a dick to her.
“You want to go to the woods with me,” Patricia said. “Right now.”
Laurence nodded. He needed to fidget. He didn’t.
He thought about how dull the tiles underfoot were. Someone waxed them every day, leaving them shiny for an hour until they dried and hundreds of kids walked on them, and then the floor just looked sticky and gray with wax scum. The floor probably looked dirtier than if nobody ever waxed it.
“I’m sorry,” Patricia said. “I can’t. I have to stay on at this school, after you’ve gone on to your math paradise.”
“Sure,” Laurence said. “Okay.” He wanted to say something else, like maybe apologize, but he didn’t. And then the moment had evaporated, and they were walking to separate classes.