It would have been best if I’d faced Diego at lunch and gotten it over with, but instead I hid in an empty classroom and watched him wait by my locker, pacing back and forth, checking his phone every few seconds. After ten minutes passed he punched the locker door and left.
Regardless of what he said, I doubt he believed my stories about the sluggers. Who would? Maybe it’s for the best that they abducted me before things between us got serious. There’s so much I don’t know about Diego. Jesse used to say I was oblivious to the world around me. I thought he was referring to things like poverty and hunger and wars in countries I didn’t know the names of, but now I think he was talking about himself. I didn’t know what had been going on with my own boyfriend, and we’d spent nearly every waking second together for more than a year. I’ve only known Diego for a few weeks.
Despite my brother hating me and my mom waiting to yell at me and the whole end-of-the-world thing, all I could think about was Diego. It was ridiculous. I hated movies and books where people ignored bullets whizzing by their heads and zombies chasing after them so that they could make out, but I finally understood. Kissing Diego dominated my every thought. I tried to think about something else, but I always returned to him, and I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
Instead of going straight home, I took a detour to the beach and sat on the rickety staircase to watch the tide go out. The ocean retreated, exposing the bones of the shoreline. It was one of those days that was neither rainy nor sunny. A layer of clouds muddied the sky, bleeding the surrounding color, leaving everything monochrome and drab. If this was how dogs saw the world, it was no wonder they humped anything they could mount. It was probably the only thing that kept them from committing doggy suicide.
The steps creaked behind me, and I scooted to the side to let whoever it was pass, but they didn’t.
“I figured I’d find you here,” Diego said. “Also, I already tried everywhere else.”
Diego Vega was the person I most and least wanted to see. He sat down beside me, leaving space between us that hadn’t existed the last time we were together, and it was all I could do not to push him to the ground and kiss him until he knew I was sorry. He handed me my cell phone.
“Was it a dream?” I asked.
“Was what a dream?”
It was raining over the ocean, the wall of it so heavy that it appeared nothing existed beyond. The world consisted of only me and Diego and the beach. Maybe that’s all it ever was. “Thanksgiving? Your bedroom?”
Diego shook his head. “Was it them?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I asked. I begged them to send me back, but the sluggers aren’t keen on taking commands.” I wished I knew how to make Diego believe me; I wished the aliens had abducted him, too, so we could have watched the stars together. “Maybe it was for the best, though.”
“How do you figure?”
Finding the words to explain to Diego that I couldn’t be with him—that no sane person should want to be with a disaster like me—was one of the most difficult things I’d ever done. But Diego remained silent until I was ready to talk. “In case you haven’t heard: the world is ending. I can’t start something with you knowing it can’t last.”
Diego tensed like he was afraid to move. “If you’re not over Jesse, if you need more time to grieve, tell me.” He caught my gaze for the first time since joining me on the staircase, and utterly disarmed me with the intensity behind his hazel eyes, like the endless fire of the Crab Nebula burning in space.
“I hate Jesse,” I said. “And I love him. I’ll never be done grieving for him.”
“You miss him—I get that—but the world doesn’t stop because he’s gone.”
He was wrong. The world had stopped. The world had stopped and it was going to end, but I didn’t tell Diego that; Jesse was just a name to him. “Tell me why you moved to Calypso. You hardly talk about your family, and when you do, it’s all horrible.”
“That’s because it’s not important, Henry.” Diego rocked back and forth on the step. “This is confusing for me, too. You’re not the only one with a past, but unlike you, I don’t live in mine.”
“I like you, Diego—so much, it scares me. But what does it say about me that I can like you as much as I do and still not want to press the button?”
“We can forget it happened,” Diego said.
“I don’t want to.”
“Then where does that leave us?”
Diego ignored the past, and I believed we had no future. It was impossible to look at him and not want to kiss him. It was impossible to look at him and not know the world was going to end and drag us to hell with it. It was impossible to look at Diego and be anything but honest. “I don’t know.”
It wasn’t the answer Diego wanted—I could see it in his bent back and slumped shoulders—but it was all the truth that was in me. The world wasn’t worth saving without Jesse in it.
“My mom’s going to kill me.”