I was the first one to get the tap. I didn’t even need to ask if I was the angel or the hit man. I knew. Even then I had a reputation.
When Mr. Piper said, “Mafia, awake!” I pointed my finger across the circle of kids lying around, some smart-asses with their arms crossed over their chests like cadavers. I cocked my finger like a gun straight at Crock, who even then was kind of obnoxious. Then I lay back down.
After that it was someone else’s turn. I heard Mr. Piper say, “Angel, awake! Who do you want to save?”
As I lay back with my eyes closed, someone else sat up and tried to undo my damage.
My turn again. Again and again I sat up and pointed. Again and again someone tried to save everyone else.
There were thirty kids in the class. Number twenty-seven I pointed to was Jaime, and number twenty-eight was Sonia. I didn’t even point to the one Mr. Piper had chosen as the angel, because I knew without looking who it was.
When the bell for the end of class rang, everyone sat up and opened their eyes. Well? they wondered. They didn’t need to ask who the hit man was. But the question was, when do we get to guess how everyone died?
Mr. Piper gaped at me, and at my best friend, Evan. No one had ever gotten three for three, let alone twenty-six for twenty-eight. “It’s uncanny,” he said. “You two must share some kind of cosmic connection.” The only two we’d mixed up, it seemed, were Sonia Krajicek and Jaime Deleuze.
Ev and I talked it through on the bus home—not about the ones we’d gotten right, but the ones we’d gotten wrong. Evan thought Jaime was the last one I’d want to kill because (a) she was the first girl in our class to develop a rack (and believe me, it was a good one), and (b) he didn’t think she could handle being dead. He was right about that. She was always running off crying to the bathroom because some boy had teased her about her hair or her clothes, when really they only wanted a grope. Yeah, try explaining that to a twelve-year-old girl. It’s not about you. It’s about your boobs.
But I countered with Sonia: Had Ev seen the way she moved, those legs sprouting up long and sexy? The way she flicked her black hair over her shoulders when she was studying her algebra book? The way she’d look at me with those soft brown eyes when she told me to fuck off? No, Sonia was the cool one. Sonia was the last one I’d ever kill.
That was years ago, before Ev had his appendix out. Before my father left, and then came back. Before we became the Gallivanters. Before Ziggy entered our lives suddenly and deserted us just as quick.
After everything was over, and only three of the four of us walked away, I kept remembering that day in seventh grade, and realized that Ev and I had been asking each other the wrong questions. It wasn’t, who would we want to save last? It was, who would we want to save at all?
Every day since, I’ve wished that Mr. Piper had chosen me for something else.
Now, every night before I go to sleep, I feel a tap on my shoulder. But this time my role is different. He doesn’t call me hit man. He whispers, “Angel, awake! Who do you want to save?”
This time I know what I have to do to make things right. Night after night, I try to call him back. Night after night, I shake the blankets off, sit up, and point.
“NO, NOAH. ALIENS DID NOT EAT YOUR GREMLIN.”
It was two o’clock in the morning and we couldn’t find my beloved car, Ginny the Gremlin, pale blue on the outside with a burgundy and brown herringbone interior. Getting behind the wheel was like biting into something that looked chalky and boring, like Maalox, and discovering it gushed sweetness, like chocolate and cherries.
It was just Ev, Crock, and me. We’d been kicked out of the Satyricon a whole hour before and had spent our time threading the downtown streets trying to find my car. Finally I threw up my hands and said that maybe aliens had eaten her. Because that was the only explanation. It was 1984 and everyone knew an alien invasion would happen at any time, and that when they overran us, they would be wearing silver jumpsuits, permed hair, and jungle-cat eye shadow.
Crock and Ev and I joked about it all the time, but right now Ev didn’t think it was so funny. And who could blame him? We were stranded and out of ideas, and by the looks of it he had another migraine coming on.
He was leaning against a beige brick wall of the PfefferBrau Haus, his rainbow dreads falling around his shoulders. His face was scrunched tight and he was pinching his nose. He used to say he could feel those headaches before they hit, they were like a halo of pain. That was when he was supposed to catch it, when it was just a halo. Not later, when his head felt like someone had pinched it in a vise and screwed it up tight.
I had to get him out of there soon.