my brother told you, we’re heading down to watch the launch,” I said.
The girl with the hard eyes barked a sharp laugh. “Is your map broken? Because you’re a long way from Florida.”
Tommy managed a smile. Then he squinted, looking over the group, and I could see that his brain had finally figured out what it was seeing. Now if only I could stop him before—“You’re dodgers, aren’t you?” Tommy asked, almost happily.
A tremble went through the group. The girl with the hard eyes seemed to harden even more. “And if we are?” she asked, the question bordering on a threat.
All over the country there had been groups of Embers running from the war. In some parts of the country it was becoming a rite of passage. The biggest case had been dubbed “The Dublin Disappearance.” Twenty-seven high school seniors simply didn’t show up for school one day. By the time the school and the parents found out about it, the kids had a three-day head start. They’d orchestrated it so that their parents had given them permission to go off on a weekend camping trip. But by Sunday night the kids weren’t back and then on Monday morning when time came for school, the kids still weren’t there.
It was late Monday afternoon when a package arrived at the school containing all of the students’ cell phones and all twenty-seven draft letters with the words NO THANK YOU scrawled across them. It had become the slogan of the movement, a polite refusal to be a part of things, a deference so polite that it seemed as though they were only turning down an offer of dessert at the end of a meal. All across the country NO THANK YOU began showing up in the empty beds of seventeen-and eighteen-year-olds who had been drafted.
It was just over two months ago—seventy-seven days, to be exact, which my memory always was—since The Dublin Disappearance.
In the beginning the story filled the news outlets. The people came on television and blamed the government, blamed the war, blamed the parents, blamed the students. There was no shortage of places to point. But when the days turned to weeks and the students still weren’t found, the concern shifted. They were called cowards and deemed “lacking in moral fortitude” by one of the pundits. “A generation of polite cowards” is what some people called them.
Slowly, compassion for frightened kids hardened into anger at cowardly brats.
More weeks came and went and a couple of the students were found. They were caught not far from the Canadian border by a pair of local hunters who had been chasing both deer and dodgers—their words. The pair was sent to jail and there they sat right up until one of them couldn’t take it anymore and decided that the war would be better. So his lawyer spoke to the judge and, sure enough, he went off to the war and died a miserable death but got called a hero for it.
Still, NO THANK YOU showed up spray-painted on walls, plastered on websites, written on abandoned draft notices and left in the middle of schools increasingly diminished by the war’s insatiable appetite. The three words, I understood, weren’t a refusal, but a plea.
“Where are you guys from?” Tommy asked, sounding as clueless and trusting as he always sounded.
“Nowhere,” the girl with the hard eyes said. “Just passing through.”
“Good,” I replied.
“You really headed to the launch?” someone behind the girl with the hard eyes asked.
“Yep,” Tommy replied brightly.
But I couldn’t take my eyes off the girl in the lead and she wouldn’t take her eyes off me. My hand was still in Tommy’s pocket, clamped around the handle of Gannon’s gun. I stared at the girl’s close-cropped hair, the eyes that didn’t seem to blink, only watch and wait, as if she had seen beyond the darkness surrounding them and was able to observe everything, maybe even the whole world, in one swift movement.
“You’ve already been to the war, haven’t you?” I asked.
The girl’s eyes narrowed, then relaxed. “Yeah,” she said.
“Tell me,” Tommy said, almost breathless. “Tell me how it was.”
“It’s a war,” the girl replied. “How could it ever be anything other than terrible?” Her eyes lowered and she was no longer looking at us. She was looking inward, remembering, perhaps. Tommy and I both wanted to know what she saw. There is always a foolish curiosity about war. So many writers and filmmakers have tried to tell us about it, so many veterans, poems, songs. The oldest stories are stories of war. But still, all of us who have never been there wonder how much of the stories is true.
“Really?” Tommy asked, a bit of awe in his voice. “And you made it back okay. You really came back okay.” He turned to me and pointed at the girl with the hard eyes. “You see? I told you. I told you!” Then he laughed and took my hand out of his pocket, making me let go of the weapon. “It’s all going to be okay,” Tommy said, but whether he was speaking of now or of the future was difficult to say.
“Did I mention that I got drafted?” Tommy blurted out.
“You don’t have to go,” one of the other teenagers said. Then, “Just say, ‘No Thank You.’” Their eyes cut from Tommy to me and back to Tommy, pleading.
Tommy dismissed them with his hand. “I’m going to go and come back and be okay.”
“Good for you,” the girl with the hard eyes said.
“You’ll see,” Tommy replied, and he turned to me as he said the words. Then he turned and looked back over his shoulder, as if he was able to see Gannon in the distance, still locked in that car on the side of the road. “But for now,” Tommy said, “my sister and I need to get going.”
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