The girls at the pool table squealed with delight, razzing the losers. I tried to block them out. “But you’re going to die anyway.”
“Sure, when I’m old.”
“You could die at any time. A freak lightning strike could fry your heart, or you could drown in a molasses tsunami.”
Diego’s face was difficult to read. He seemed to take my question seriously, but I hoped he wasn’t going along with it while he devised a way to escape. “If I don’t press the button, I’m definitely dead. At least if I press it, I’ve got a chance at a long life. I like having choices.”
Having choices is the problem. Everything would be easier if someone told me what to do: push the button, stop seeing Marcus, get over Jesse. The problem with choices is that I usually make the wrong ones.
Diego reached out and brushed a stray lock of hair off my forehead. “Sorry, that was driving me crazy.”
“Great, now everyone’s going to figure out my secret identity.”
“Space Boy?” Diego said, smiling. “They already know.”
My smile disappeared, and my defenses snapped up. I shoved my way past Diego without a word. His apologies bounced off my back because I was fucking bulletproof. I needed to leave, to escape the house and party and all those artificial people, but the front was crowded, so I stumbled onto the patio, where it was quieter and I could breathe.
“Space Boy!”
Marcus and a mixed group, some of whom looked familiar, were sitting around a patio table by the hot tub. Natalie Carter lounged across his lap. The moment he said my name, I became visible. People who hadn’t noticed me before were suddenly glaring at me like I was covered with festering sores. They parroted “Space Boy” and invented semicreative variations of their own. None stung as badly as when Diego had said it.
“Who the fuck let you in?” Marcus’s voice was cough syrup, but his words were acid.
“Front door was open.” A burning pang began in the center of my chest and spread to my limbs. Marcus was treating me like I was nobody—less than. I wondered how his friends in the hot tub would react if they found out what we’d done where they were lounging.
Marcus elbowed Adrian Morse. “We need to start charging at the door. Keep out the trash.”
I’m sure when Adrian’s mom looks at him in the mornings or brushes his sweaty hair off his forehead while he sleeps through a fever, she thinks he’s a nice boy, but when I look at him, all I see is a demented thug with an inferiority complex and hardly a thought of his own bouncing around in his empty head. “I can get rid of him.”
“If only getting rid of your herpes was as easy,” I said.
Adrian stood, but Marcus pulled him back. There was a dangerous gleam in Marcus’s eyes, a flicker that scared me. “Fuck it. I’m feeling charitable. Space Boy can stay. Maybe he can phone home and convince the aliens to join the party. If you do, ask them to bring ice. We’re running low.”
I had no intention of remaining at the party. All I could think about was how I’d been so wrong. I never should have come. Once Marcus was done torturing me, I planned to leave and never speak to him or anyone else again.
“But first,” Marcus said, “you have to take a shot.”
From where Marcus’s friends sat and stood on the patio, drinking and smoking and judging, I felt their contempt. It burned through my skin, melted the fat from my body, chewed through my muscles until I was nothing but a -skeleton—-bleached bones held together by duct tape and the tattered remnants of my pride.
Jay Oh flicked a bottle cap at me that bounced off my chest and skittered across the table. “What would aliens want with a jizz stain like him? Aren’t there better people to abduct?”
“Better looking, certainly,” Marcus said, which earned him a kiss from Natalie. He kept his eyes on me while she sucked his lips.
And I stood there and took it because I was an object. We were all objects to Marcus McCoy.
Marcus began chanting, “Shot, shot, shot!” and it was taken up by the drunken horde surrounding me. Adrian set up a round of shots, sloshing a dark brown liquid into the glasses, spilling some over the sides. Marcus watched me with a manic, sweaty grin.
Adrian finished pouring and rolled his eyes. “Space Boy’s a little bitch. He won’t—”
I grabbed the nearest shot glass and threw it back. The liquor tasted like pureed licorice and blood. I shivered as it hit my empty stomach. When I finished, I downed a second shot. “Thanks for the drink.” I tossed the glass onto the table and left.
Their laughter hounded me, but I refused to look back. The world was going to end, and none of this mattered. I tried to convince myself I was all right.
But I was so far from all right.
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