We sat parked in my driveway for a while. I didn’t even realize we’d arrived until Audrey looked at me in the rearview mirror and said, “We missed midnight.”
I didn’t know if the stain would come out or if some shadow of it would always remain. “We didn’t miss it,” I said. “It just happened without us.”
It seems silly to worry about the arbitrary moment some person long dead declared to be the end of one year and the beginning of another, as if our attempts to divide time into meaningful chunks actually mean anything. People wait for the countdown to tell them that it’s okay to believe in themselves again. They end each year with failure, but hope that when the clock strikes twelve, they can begin the new year with a clean slate. They tell themselves that this is the year things will happen, never realizing that things are always happening; they’re just happening without them.
“I should get home,” Audrey said.
“Are you okay to drive?” Diego asked.
“Yeah.”
When Audrey’s BMW disappeared into the night, Diego hugged me close. I wanted him to kiss me, to kiss away everything that had happened. To kiss me until time reversed and we were back in my bedroom. But you can’t live in the past; you can only visit. I wasn’t sure what was happening between us, but I didn’t want it to happen without me.
“Happy New Year, Henry.”
“Happy New Year, Diego.”
6 January 2016
Hardly giving us time to breathe, Ms. Faraci launched into her lecture on acids and bases and the importance of a neutral pH. I already knew most of what she was teaching, and glanced over my shoulder at Marcus out of boredom. He’d snuck into class at the last minute, looking ragged. I searched for the boy who’d given me the calling card behind the auditorium before winter break, but couldn’t find him. Marcus’s eyes were bloodshot and his cheeks hollow. His New Year’s Eve party was all anyone had talked about in the halls and before classes. Rumor was that Marcus had leapt from his roof into his pool wearing nothing but his grin; that he’d passed out pills like candy; that the party had devolved into an orgy of Dionysian proportions. But the more Marcus tries to prove that he’s the life of the party, the less I believe him.
Adrian’s seat was noticeably empty, though most speculated he’d been expelled and questioned by the police. I wondered if he’d ratted out his friends or if he was the kind of guy who’d take the fall rather than snitching. I suppose I already knew the answer, since Adrian was gone but Marcus wasn’t.
After class, I hung back to talk to Ms. Faraci. “Did you have a nice break?” she asked.
I didn’t want to tell Ms. Faraci about Charlie and Zooey, so I said, “Yeah. It was all right. You? Tell me you didn’t spend the whole break buried in books.”
Ms. Faraci flashed me a wry smile. “Despite your insinuations, I do have a life outside of this classroom.” If she’d said it with even a hint of conviction, I might have believed her. “So, what can I do for you, Henry?”
“Is your offer to do some extra credit still on the table?”
“Of course!” She looked relieved and surprised simultaneously. “Do you know what you want to write about?”
I hung my head. “Well . . . it’s just . . . I’ve been keeping journals since I was a kid, and I thought I could put them together, maybe write about how the world ends.” I glanced up at Ms. Faraci to judge her reaction, but her expression didn’t change. “It’s stupid, I know.”
“As long as it’s got something to do with science, no matter how tenuous the relation, I’ll take it.” Her lip twitched, and I wondered if she was going to ask me about the sluggers—I suspected even my teachers had heard the rumors of my abductions—-but instead she said, “What changed your mind?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just like having choices.”
I’m not sure my answer made sense to Ms. Faraci, but she smiled anyway, her round cheeks so high, they brushed the bottom of her glasses. I was about to leave, when she snapped her fingers and said, “I almost forgot.” She dug around in her bag and plopped an ancient yearbook on her desk from a school called Jupiter High. “I brought this to show you something.”
“You graduated in 1996?” I would have guessed she was older than that, but didn’t say so.
“Indeed. It was quite a year. They cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996.”
“Good for Dolly.” Diego was waiting for me in the cafeteria, so I said, “What’d you want to show me?”
Ms. Faraci flipped through the pages. She stopped on the only section of color photos. The boys were all wearing tuxes, and the girls, black dresses. “In high school one of my nicknames was Spacey Faraci because I always had my head in the clouds.”