harder.
“It happened again, didn’t it?” he asked. “Who was it?”
“Does . . . it . . . matter?” I said between gasps.
“Of course,” he said. “It matters to someone. To many people, probably. To me.”
I thrust my arms into the air and he grabbed my hands and pulled me up and against his body. Leaning forward, my nose grazed his cheek, and I kissed him, a tiny peck on the neck. “I’m pretty sure it was Perry Love,” I told him.
“Crap. I liked that kid.”
I kissed Dylan again, and the little hairs on his neck tickled my lips. “I hardly knew him,” I said, which was the nicest thing I could say at that point. When we lost Katelyn and Brian, it had torched my insides. With Perry, I felt . . . not nothing, exactly, but this particular horror was more communal. It seemed obvious. We were all going down together. Sure, that was worth crying about. But it was also worth laughing about.
“I didn’t see it,” he said. “I saw you looking toward the bench instead of the end zone and then I saw the blood and then . . . dammit, I wanted to be there for Perry.”
I kissed him again and whispered, “Be there? What do you mean?”
“When you die, don’t you want someone to see it? People say that everyone dies alone, but that’s a bunch of bull.”
“We do everything alone, essentially,” I said as I kissed him again. I was going to keep kissing him. This wasn’t going to be another Brian Chen incident. These lips would not be ignored.
He put his hands on my shoulders and nudged me off his neck. Looking me in the eyes, he said, “To have that moment etched in people’s memories, in the very biology of their brains, that’s not dying alone. That’s a magical thing. And you’ve been there for three people’s last moments.”
“I’d hardly call it magic,” I replied.
“Yet you’re laughing. And you’re here in these woods, with me, as alive as you’ve ever been.”
He was right, obviously. I had an undeniable spark in my body. A feeling of lightness, of thereness. So when he leaned in and finally kissed me, it was one motherfucking blockbuster of a kiss.
Sirens in the distance answered one another’s howls and the wind gusted as I pawed that boy’s body. It wasn’t all contoured and smooth. There were riffles and lumps. Not a perfect body, but I didn’t want a perfect body. I wanted this body—whole, intact— there in the patch of woods not far from where three of my classmates had blown up.
it will come as no surprise
There was chatter about patterns. When one kid blows up, it’s an anomaly. When two blow up, it’s a disturbing coincidence. Three and you’ve got yourself an epidemic. So what happens when a kid blows up at a football game that’s supposed to symbolize a town’s return to normalcy?
Things get weird.
Football season was officially canceled. No surprise there. No real complaints, either. It was easy for terrified players to shoot down arguments from meatheaded fathers waxing nostalgic on how “kids were tougher back in the day.”
“Tougher, eh? Did your teammates randomly splatter all over you back in the day? No? Well then, shut the fuck up, Dad.”
School was closed indefinitely. We all learned this via the press conference held on Saturday morning. Press conferences were nothing new to us, but Sheriff Tibble didn’t use the steps of the library to deliver his shrugs and empty promises this time. He moved the production to a vacant field past Brighton Orchards. It was the only way to accommodate the people who had arrived as soon as the death toll had reached what-the-fuck?-able numbers.
You’d think a town full of exploding teenagers would scare people away, but no, there was a mass migration here. Scientists came in search of samples—water, dirt, blood, anything they could stick under a microscope. It had been a calm year for hurricanes, tornados, and other natural disasters, so the storm chasers and aggressively charitable types came rolling through in RVs, hoping to get off on our tragedies. I don’t think I need to mention that the religious fanatics swarmed the streets and public buildings like a proverbial plague of . . . religious fanatics. My favorite of their charming picket signs?
THE DEVIL INSIDE YOUR CHILDREN HAS FOUND HIS WAY OUT!
It was inevitable that their signs also zeroed in on the whole Perry “Gay” Love angle. Soon almost everyone would focus on that angle. It was the one obvious and tangible difference he had from the rest of the herd.
But what did that mean about Katelyn and Brian?
“I kissed Katelyn once,” Jenna Dalton told me the Sunday after the game, when she picked me up at Covington Kitchen on the way to an emergency town hall.
“Not listening,” said Joe, who was sitting shotgun and sticking his fingers in his ears. “Do not wanna know who my sister has or hasn’t kissed. No thank you. No way.”
“Like really kissed?” I asked.
Jenna shrugged. “Yeah, I mean we were on molly and it was dark but, you know, tongue and everything.”
“But you’re not gay,” I said.
Jenna shrugged again. “I don’t know what I am. I don’t know what Katelyn was either. It was a good kiss. I can say that for sure.”
Other girls had also kissed Katelyn and were now telling. The only thing it proved, of course, was that Katelyn was into a bit of experimentation, but when the stories hit the comment sections, suddenly she was gay too. And when photos surfaced of Brian Chen in fishnet stockings, it was case closed for an assortment of morons and homophobes.
The seeds were actually sown at that emergency town hall, when Tina Parcells, self-proclaimed “social media guru and internationally renowned mommy-blogger,” grabbed the microphone and asked, “Has anyone tested their DNA?”
Our mayor, the perpetually harried Roger Giancola, answered from the podium. “I do not know all the science behind an autopsy, but you must remember that we don’t exactly have a lot of . . . autopsy material.”
There were groans from the crowd, and I looked around hoping none of the Ogdens, Chens, or Loves were present to hear their dearly departed referred to as “autopsy material.” I didn’t see any of them, but it didn’t mean they weren’t there. The town hall was held in the State Street Theater, just like Katelyn’s memorial, but it was even more packed than that had been. Priority seating was given to town residents, and the rest was standing room only. When the place reached fire-code capacity, the crowd spilled out into the streets, where there were giant speakers, a projector, and movie screen rigged up to broadcast the proceedings. There were also live streams provided by major news outlets, which meant some kid in a yurt in Mongolia could fire up his laptop, snuggle under a yak blanket, and join us, so long as he had a decent Wi-Fi connection. It was like the World Cup. Only not boring.
“You only need a drop of blood to do DNA tests,” Tina said. “It’s as if you haven’t watched a movie or TV show in your entire life.”
Mayor Giancola’s tone became decidedly perturbed. “I’ve watched
