Before We Go Extinct Read Free Page A

marble choking you to death.
    I gag and spit in the sink. Pink mist.
    â€œI need to talk to you about something important, JC,” she says. “I wish you’d come out of there. I have to go to work in an hour. One hour, do you hear me? One. I can’t miss this train. And I want to … I have to … Well, just come out, would you?”
    Her voice wobbles a bit, which bugs me. It makes me mad. I’m still me . Why can’t she see that? I’m so angry with her for treating me like I’m broken, even if I am.
    Ahem, ahem, Mom coughs. Ribbit ribbit.
    â€œSharky?” Mom leans on the door and I can tell the full weight of her is there, pressing. The door is wood. Brown. Wood makes me think of coffins. The idea of coffins makes me feel like I am breathing through a straw with holes, nothing is filling up my lungs. I inhale and inhale and inhale until I’m dizzy, dizzier, the dizziest. The King’s coffin isn’t even wood, it’s marble. There are stones inlaid across the top that look like actual jewels. I don’t know what they are. Diamonds? Crystals? His coffin is worth more than everything I’ve ever owned in my life.
    â€œSweetheart?”
    I shove the window open farther and gulp in the garbagey, fishy, hot-pavement scent of the alley. My lungs drown in the humid stench, that damp stink that seems to have stuck around long after they cleaned up Hurricane Sandy, like everything went moldy and now can never really be cleaned.
    My mom sighs so loud I can practically feel it. “JC…,” she starts again. She rattles the knob. “What are you doing in there? Do I need to do something?” She delivers a solid kick to the door, which rattles but doesn’t break. “Ouch,” she says. “Shit. I mean, sugar.”
    I take my phone out of my pocket and type, Am OK. Sorry , and send it to her. The swoop swoop of those invisible birds carries it right through the door into her pocket and I hear her phone buzz and then I can hear her reading it. I know you shouldn’t be able to hear someone read, but somehow, now, I can. Sharks can read the electrical impulses in the water; I can read the electrical impulses in the air.
    Everything vibrates.
    The last thing I said to The King was, “Hey, Chief Not Scared of Heights, you’re going to fall.” I was sort of laughing, sort of not. I took a picture. #dontlookdown He was too far out for it to be funny, maybe five or six feet from safety. That’s not much when you’re two feet off the ground, but when you are on the forty-second floor, trust me: it’s a lot. He bounced a little on the balls of his feet, like he was going to start jogging. Then he wobbled, sat down. “HEY!” I yelled. “Seriously.”
    He was looking at his phone. Typing.
    â€œDon’t text and drive!” I said, which was a joke because of this campaign at school about texting and driving that we all made fun of because we were kids in New York: none of us could drive .
    Then my phone buzzed. I pulled it out of my pocket while I was yelling, “Come on . You’re going to get blown off, dude.”
    I angled my phone to cut the glare on the screen and read it. It said srry . It was from The King. “What?” I said. “Dude. WHAT?”
    The distance between me and The King stretched like melting plastic and then there was that forever second, my WHAT? hanging in the air between us, becoming as thin as a thread, breaking in the sky, long strings of it dangling down toward the ground like a jungle of plastic vines.
    The King didn’t hear me because of the wind and because he was already tipping backward, scuba diver–style. His face like the weather, all jumbled up: storm clouds, rain, lightning, and the sun.
    I saw him raise his eyebrows and
    It was really gusty by then, the wind was
    Anyway he was already
    Some things are too hard to
    Screw this. I mean,