The Rest of Us Just Live Here Read online

  Contents

  Chapter the First

  Chapter the Second

  Chapter the Third

  Chapter the Fourth

  Chapter the Fifth

  Chapter the Sixth

  Chapter the Seventh

  Chapter the Eighth

  Chapter the Ninth

  Chapter the Tenth

  Chapter the Eleventh

  Chapter the Twelfth

  Chapter the Thirteenth

  Chapter the Fourteenth

  Chapter the Fifteenth

  Chapter the Sixteenth

  Chapter the Seventeenth

  Chapter the Eighteenth

  Chapter the Nineteenth

  Chapter the Twentieth

  Chapter the Twenty-First

  ALSO BY PATRICK NESS

  More Than This

  The Crane Wife

  A Monster Calls

  Monsters of Men

  The Ask and the Answer

  The Knife of Never Letting Go

  Topics About Which I Know Nothing

  The Crash of Hennington

  For my own excellent sister, Melissa Anne Brown, who’s both kind and funny, the best possible combination

  I thought I could organise freedom.

  How Scandinavian of me.

  –Björk

  CHAPTER THE FIRST, in which the Messenger of the Immortals arrives in a surprising shape, looking for a permanent Vessel; and after being chased by her through the woods, indie kid Finn meets his final fate.

  On the day we’re the last people to see indie kid Finn alive, we’re all sprawled together in the Field, talking about love and stomachs.

  “I don’t believe that, though,” my sister says, and I look up at the slight tension in her voice. She gives me a half-annoyed nod of reassurance in the sunshine, then shakes her head again at Henna. “You always have a choice. I don’t care if you think it’s love – and by the way, NOT a word you should throw around so easily – but even if that, even if that word, you can still choose to act right.”

  “I said I loved the way he looked,” Henna says. “I didn’t say I loved him. You’re twisting my words. And that’s not what I’m talking about anyway. I’m talking about … how your heart fills up. Actually, no, it’s not even your heart, it’s your stomach. You feel it and everything just goes.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” my sister says, firmly. “No. It. Doesn’t.”

  “Mel–”

  “You can feel it, and you can still do the right thing.”

  Henna frowns. “Why is it a question of the ‘right thing’? I’m describing a totally normal human feeling. Nathan’s a hot guy.”

  I look back down at my History textbook. I touch each of the four corners, counting silently to myself. I see Jared notice.

  “You said you had no choice,” Mel pursues. “You said if you’d been able to kiss him, you would have done it right there, regardless of who saw. Or if he had a girlfriend already. Or if Tony was around–”

  “I’m not going out with Tony any more–”

  “Yeah, but you know how sensitive he is. You’d have hurt him and then you’d have said you had no choice and it would have been bullshit.”

  Henna puts her hands over her face in frustration. “Melinda–”

  “It’s something I feel strongly about.”

  “I can see that–”

  “And don’t call me Melinda.”

  “Henna’s right, though,” Jared says, from where he’s lying back with his head on Henna’s butt. “It is in your stomach.”

  “On a guy, you’d think it’d be lower,” Mel says.

  “That’s different,” Jared says, sitting up. “Your dick or whatever, that’s just wanting. Animal stuff. This is more.”

  “Yeah,” Henna agrees.

  “You feel it right here.” Jared puts his hand on his belly. It’s a biggish kind of belly and we know he doesn’t draw attention to it lightly. “And it’s like, for that moment, everything you believed is wrong. Or doesn’t matter. And everything that was complicated is suddenly, like, yes-and-no simple, because your stomach is really the boss and it’s telling you that your desire is possible and that it’s not the answer to everything but it’s the one thing that’s going to make the questions more bearable.”

  He stops, looking up into the sun. We all know what he means. He knows we all know what he means. He never really talks about it, though. We wish he did.

  “Your stomach isn’t the boss of you,” Mel says, evenly.

  “Oh,” Jared says, realizing. “Sorry–”

  Mel shakes her head, brushing it off. “Not what I meant. Your heart isn’t the boss of you either. Thinks it is. Isn’t. You can always choose. Always.”

  “You can’t choose not to feel,” Henna says.

  “But you can choose how to act.”

  “Yeah,” Jared says. “Hard, though.”

  “Early Christians thought your soul was in your stomach,” I say.

  There’s a silence as a new wind blows across the grass, all by its lonesome, as if saying, Don’t mind me.

  “Dad told me once,” I say.

  Mel looks down to her laptop and starts typing in more homework answers. “And what would Dad know, I wonder,” she says.

  The wind picks up a little more (Terribly sorry, I imagine it saying; apparently, the wind is British, wondering how it got all the way over here) and Henna has to snap her hand down on a page of an assignment that’s threatening to fly away. “Why do we even have paper any more?”

  “Books,” Jared says.

  “Toilet paper,” Mel says.

  “Because paper is a thing,” I say, “and sometimes you need things rather than just thoughts.”

  “I wasn’t really looking for an answer,” Henna says, tucking the page – a handout on the Civil War that we’ve all got – under her computer tablet.

  I tap the four corners of my textbook again, counting silently in my head. And again. And one more time. I see Jared watching me but pretending not to. Another gust of British wind tousles my hair. (Top of the morning! Oh, no, wait, that’s Irish.) It’s a sunny day for it to be so windy all of a sudden. We only come out here when the weather’s nice enough, and it’s been a weirdly warm April and early May. The Field isn’t really much of a field, it’s more like a property plot that someone never built on because they died or lost it in a divorce or something, a big grassy square at the end of the road from my house with some handy sawn-off tree stumps scattered here and there. Rows of trees block it off from the rest of everything else, too. You’d have to make a point of coming back here to know about it, which nobody does as we’re so far out in the boonies it’s only actual super-thick forest beyond anyway. You can hear coyotes at night and we get deer in our yard all the time.

  “Hey,” Jared says, “anyone doing the Reconstruction After the Civil War essay or is it just me?”

  “I am,” I say.

  “You are?” Mel says, distressed. “I’m doing it, too.”

  “Me, too,” Henna says.

  “Everyone?” Jared says.

  Mel looks at me. “Could you not? I mean, could you really, really not?”

  “I’ve got all these notes, though–” I say.

  “But I’m really good on the Reconstruction.”

  “So do the Reconstruction essay–”

  “We can’t both do it. Yours will be all brainiac and I’ll look stupid by comparison.”

  My sister always does this. She thinks she’s stupid. She’s so, so not.

  “It’ll be better than mine,” Jared says.

  “Mikey, just let me do it.” And here, I know, most people would be thinking, Bossy older sister, and most pe
ople who don’t know us would be wondering why we’re both seniors even though she’s more than a year older than me and most people would think they could hear a spoiled tone in her voice.

  Most people would be wrong. She’s not whining. She’s asking, kinda nicely for her. And most people wouldn’t see the fear in her eyes over this exam.

  But I can.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll do Causes of the Civil War.”

  She nods her head in thanks. She turns to Henna. “Could you do Causes, too?”

  “Hey!” Jared says. “What about me?”

  “Seriously?” Mel says to him.

  “Nah, not seriously,” he laughs. Jared, despite being big and tall and shaving by age eleven and a linebacker on the football team since we were all freshman, is a math guy. Give him numbers, he’s great. Give him words and sentences to put together and his forehead creases down so you can see exactly what he’ll look like when he’s eighty.

  “Mel,” Henna says. “You gotta stop–”

  Which is when one of the indie kids comes running out of the treeline, his old-timey jacket flapping out behind him. He pushes his fashionably black-rimmed glasses back on his nose and runs past about twenty feet from where we’re all tumbled together. He doesn’t see us – the indie kids never really see us, not even when we’re sitting next to them in class – just crosses the Field and disappears into the opposite treeline, which we all know only leads to deeper forest.

  There’s a silent few seconds where we all exchange wtf glances and then a young girl glowing with her own light comes running out of the woods from where the indie kid came. She doesn’t see us either, though she’s so bright we all have to shade our eyes, and then she disappears into the second treeline, too.

  None of us says anything for a minute, then Jared asks, “Was that Finn?”

  “Which Finn?” my sister says. “Aren’t all the indie kids called Finn?”

  “I think there are a couple Dylans,” Henna says, “and a Nash.”

  “There are two Satchels, I know that,” I say. “A boy Satchel and a girl Satchel.”

  “It was one of the Finns,” Jared says. “I’m pretty sure.”

  A pillar of blue light, bright enough to see even in the sunshine, shoots up suddenly from a point where the indie kid (I think Jared’s right, it was one of the ones called Finn) and the glowing girl might have run.

  “What are they doing now?” Mel says. “What was with the little girl?”

  “And the lights?” I say.

  “They better not blow up the high school again,” Jared says. “My cousin had to have his graduation ceremony in a parking lot.”

  “Do you think Nathan is an indie kid?” Henna asks, making Mel groan.

  “The name could go either way,” Jared says, watching the pillar glow.

  “What kind of a guy transfers to a new school five weeks before the end of his senior year?” I ask, trying not to make it sound like anything, tapping the corners of my textbook again.

  “The kind of guy that Henna falls in love with,” Mel says.

  “OH MY GOD I DIDN’T SAY LOVE!” Henna shouts.

  Mel grins. “You sure seem to have a lot of passion about the subject, though. Or is that just your stomach talking?”

  The wind stops, all of a sudden.

  “Light’s gone,” Jared says. The pillar of light has faded. We can’t hear the sound of anyone running any more. We watch the woods, not sure what to expect, then we all jump when my sister’s laptop starts playing a song we like. It’s an alarm she set. It means our parents have left our house for the evening to go visit our grandmother.

  It means it’s safe to go home.

  CHAPTER THE SECOND, in which indie kid Satchel writes a poem, and her mom and dad give her loving space to just feel what she needs to; then an indie kid called Dylan arrives at her house, terrified, to say a mysterious glowing girl has informed him of the death of indie kid Finn; Satchel and Dylan comfort each other, platonically.

  Over the course of my life, I’ve told Henna about my mad, desperate feelings for her exactly zero times.

  We’ve got a lot in common: a thing with anxiety we don’t really like to talk about, best friends who we kind of love more than any girlfriend or boyfriend could really compete with, parents who … aren’t the best. We’ve got Mel in common, of course, so that’s good, and we’re also both not indie kids, even though she’s totally got an indie kid name (but it’s because her dad is foreign, so it doesn’t count; and I guess in Finland, “Henna” isn’t very indie kid anyway. Plus her last name is impossible).

  We’ve been friends since we were eight, over half my life now, though mostly with my sister as an intermediary. I’ve been madly, desperately in love with Henna from when we were about twelve. She started dating Tony Kim slightly before then, which was, of course, the thing that made me realize the madly, desperately thing. She broke up with Tony this past New Year and has been single since then. It’s now May.

  So what have I been doing for the last five months? I refer you to “zero times” above.

  “Coast is clear,” Mel says, as the four of us come down our driveway, dogs barking eternally in distant yards, and see my mom’s car gone. We live in a suburb of a suburb of a suburb of a suburb of a city that takes about an hour to get to. There’s nothing out here but woods and the huge great Mountain on the very near horizon that’ll blow up one day and flatten everyone and everything in this part of the state. That could happen tomorrow. It could happen five thousand years from now. Life, eh?

  The road to our house only got properly paved last year, and our neighbours are a mixture of professionals like my parents who wanted a bit of land to build a house on and other people who think Fox News is too liberal and build bunkers for their guns. Out here, people either grow organic turnips or vast fields of marijuana. My parents do daffodils.

  Don’t walk on them. I mean, seriously, don’t walk on them.

  Henna’s parents live down the road, but that’s coincidence because we actually know them from the church both our families have gone to for a hundred years. Henna’s mom is the music minister there. She and Henna are the only black people in the whole church. That’s our tiny bit of the world for you. Henna’s dad is a white Finnish foot doctor (so, like, really white) who does mission trips to Africa with Henna’s mom. That’s where Henna is going to spend this summer, the last summer she could spend with her high school friends before leaving for (a very Christian) college. She’s going to be in the Central African Republic, speaking high school French to Central African Republicans who are going to get foot doctoring and music ministry whether they want to or not.

  What this means is that five months of a last chance since her break-up with Tony has narrowed down to four and a half weeks of a last chance until graduation. Given my success rate to date, I don’t think my odds are very good.

  Mel lets us in the house, and we aren’t two steps inside before Mary Magdalene, our tubby little orange cat, is running a purring streak around Jared’s legs. He touches her nose lightly with his finger. “I see you,” he whispers, and Mary Mags does an ecstatic lopsided spin to the floor, like a falling propeller.

  “Anyone want anything?” Mel says, heading to the kitchen.

  Jared asks for an energy drink. Henna asks for an energy drink. I ask for an energy drink. “Little help?” Mel calls from the kitchen. I go over. I look at the glass of water she’s poured herself. “I’m fine,” she says quietly. “We’re out of Diet Coke and I hate the taste of those things.” She’s got a point about the energy drinks, which are all called Monstropop or Rev or Lotusexxy and which are, yeah, kinda disgusting, but so filled with caffeine I’m unlikely to sleep until college.

  We’re next to the fridge. I open the door. There’s a bottle of Diet Coke in the back. It only has a little bit in it, but still.

  “Mikey,” she whispers.

  I look into her eyes.

  “Sometimes it’s just hard,” she
says. “It doesn’t mean anything. And you saw me at lunch.”

  I did see her at lunch. And she’s right, it was fine. Home is always harder for her.

  I tap the rims of each of the four glasses in turn with my fingers. I tap them again. “Dammit,” I whisper, and tap them again. Mel just waits. Three times seems to be enough, so I shut the fridge door and help her take the drinks out to the couches.

  “What do you think that was in the Field?” asks Henna, looking worried. “With the indie kid?”

  “I hope nothing,” Mel says. “And even if it is something, they’d better hold off until after graduation.”

  “I just mean I hope he’s okay,” Henna says, and we all can tell she’s thinking of her brother.

  The indie kids, huh? You’ve got them at your school, too. That group with the cool-geek haircuts and the charity shop clothes and names from the fifties. Nice enough, never mean, but always the ones who end up being the Chosen One when the vampires come calling or when the alien queen needs the Source of All Light or something. They’re too cool to ever, ever do anything like go to prom or listen to music other than jazz while reading poetry. They’ve always got some story going on that they’re heroes of. The rest of us just have to live here, hovering around the edges, left out of it all, for the most part.

  Having said that, the indie kids do die a lot. Which must suck.

  “Where’s Merde Breath?” Jared asks, changing the subject. Our little sister, Meredith (and yes, I know, Michael and Melinda and Meredith and even Mary Magdalene the cat. We once even had a Labrador called Martha, but she bit a porcupine one day and that was the end of that. Apparently you can put a price on love. It’s slightly less than $1,200 for doggy face surgery).

  Anyway.

  Meredith is ten, a loon, maybe a genius (our mom is certainly counting on it), and is hopelessly, painfully ensnared by Bolts of Fire, the country and western boy band specifically created to hopelessly and painfully ensnare ten-year-old girls, even the geniuses. She’s played their biggest song, “Bold Sapphire” (by Bolts of Fire, get it?), exactly 1,157 times. I know, because I checked, after begging my parents for mercy from having to hear it a 1,158th. We’re all a little obsessive, us Mitchell kids.