ONE

MAY, 2049

THE FUNNY THING about Luke and I being at prom the night of the sixteenth was that we'd never even talked about going until a few weeks before.
     We were at the Beth watching Cannibal Creek Massacre for the hundred millionth time. It was the capper to this weeklong horror fest I'd talked my boss into putting on instead of the subtitled weepies and black-and-white American classics he usually played. I'd chosen some seriously brutal shit. Adolf Bonhoffer's Needles Beneath My Skin. Cho Sun Pak's Scream, My Beloved. Aguilar's Black Suitcase, of course. I'll be the first to admit that it was not exactly a rip-roaring success. The only person besides Luke to buy a ticket was Mr. Stahlberg, a Beth diehard ever since his wife passed away the previous spring. I was supposed to be working the concession stand, but Mr. Stahlberg always smuggled in his own snacks, so I took a seat with Luke down front.
     It had just gotten to my favorite part (Michael St. Vincent getting that arrow through his throat), but I couldn't seem to enjoy it. I was stuck on how, when the two of us had walked into school that morning, the hallways had been draped, entrance to exit, with a candy-colored spew of prom-aganda.
     I elbowed Luke in the side. "I mean, how is prom even still a thing? We're halfway through the twenty-first century and people are still getting all torqued up about prom? Seriously?"
     Luke shushed me.
     "What?"
     He pointed up at the screen. I turned around. Mr. Stahlberg was eight rows back and fast asleep. I scrunched down in my seat and pressed on, sotto voce.
     "All I'm saying is these people are telling themselves they're going to have this deep, meaningful experience, when the truth is any marrow prom ever had in its bones was sucked dry over a hundred years ago. The only reason people go now is because it's a thing you do. Their parents did it, their grandparents did it . . ."
     Luke opened his mouth, but I knew what he was going to say.
     "And don't come at me with rites of passage and shared rituals. Calling this low-rent gropefest a ritual is an insult to good rituals."
     Luke slid down until we were cheek to cheek. His breath was fruity and sweet from the Mike and Ikes I'd embezzled from the concession stand.
     "So?" he asked. "What would you prefer?"
     "Old-school bacchanalia. Everybody gets naked in the light of the full moon and they drink wine and dance until they completely lose their minds."
     "Please. You hate parties. Remember Connor Albright's birthday? We weren't there ten minutes before you said we had to leave because his taste in music was giving you chlamydia."
     "I'm not talking about a party. I'm talking about a transformative, communal experience. One that's so intense you actually, like, leave your body and become one with God."
     "This also might be a good time for me to remind you that you're an atheist."
     I grabbed the box of Mike and Ikes. "Well, maybe I wouldn't have to be if we lived back before communing with God meant going to some megachurch nightmare like your mom and dad do. Seriously, Luke, it's got its own McDonald's franchise!"
     He snatched his candy back. "Hey, that McDonald's is the best part of my Sunday. Oh! I love this scene."
     One of the camp counselors grabbed a flashlight and headed out into a rainstorm alone. Instantly, the theater filled with the whispery chanting of the unseen cannibal tribe. I dug my fingers into Luke's bicep, resisting the urge to shut my eyes. See, the thing everybody gets wrong about people who love horror is the idea that we don't get scared. Not true. Movies I'd seen a thousand times still scared the hell out of me. In fact, sometimes it was even better when I knew what was coming. Sure, the jump scares might not have worked anymore, but jump scares weren't horror. Seeing an awful thing coming from a thousand miles away and being utterly powerless to stop it? That was horror.
     We watched the rest of the movie straight through, huddled together, the crowns of our knees kissing. By the time sweet, virginal Alice ended up running through the jungle--clothes torn and covered in the blood of her fellow campers--I was breathless and lightheaded and my heart was going buh-duh-bump buh-duh-bump buh-duh-bump buh-duh-bump. And then, BAM! Just when you think Alice is about to reach the rescue helicopter, the cannibal king explodes out of the jungle and drags her, screaming, back into the trees. The camera stays on the shaking branches as they go still, like nothing happened, like Alice was never even there. As the credits rolled, the fist that had been squeezing my heart released, leaving me a boneless puddle in my seat.
     Most people would leave then, but Luke and I always stayed. We figured that since all those gaffers and best boys worked so hard, the least we could do was read their names. When the screen went to black and the lights came up, Luke yawned and stretched, then turned to me, eyebrows raised, ready to go.
     "At the original Bacchanalia in Rome," I said, "they used to go so insane for Bacchus that they'd tear live bulls apart with their bare hands and drink their blood."
     "So you're saying you'd be okay with prom if it involved the slaughtering of livestock?"
     "Wouldn't you?"
     Luke smiled, which made his eyes go all twinkly. He kissed me; then we rolled out of our seats and headed up the aisle. Mr. Stahlberg was slumped over, snoring gently. I nudged his shoulder.
     "Hey. Mr. Stahlberg. Movie's over."
     His snowy brows twitched and then his eyes slowly opened. He looked like a little kid for a second, fresh from a nap. He sat up and rubbed at his stubbly face.
     "I take it that movie was your doing, Lucy?"
     "Pretty, awesome, right?"
     "It was terrible."
     "How do you know? You slept through the whole thing!"
     "I saw enough." He wagged his finger at me. "Amanda would have given you a piece of her mind if she'd been here. She would have instructed you on the classics."
     I was pretty sure he was right, given that instructing me on the classics was exactly what Amanda Stahlberg had done the last time I'd seen her, roughly six months before a bout of skin cancer finally caught up to her. She was horrified when I admitted that I found Jane Austen kind of boring. Amanda was a retired English professor, so when she got going on books, it was like God calling down from on high. When she was done with me I went to the library and checked out every Austen they had.
     I took Mr. Stahlberg's hand. "I would've liked that."
     "Yes," he said. "So would I."
     I helped him up and the three of us went to the lobby. Luke and Mr. Stahlberg chatted while I changed and did closing--shutting down the projector, taking out the trash, putting the day's skimpy take in the safe. By the time I was done it was nearly eight o'clock. The three of us stepped out of the air-conditioned chill of the theater and onto the sidewalk, where we were struck by a wall of steamy heat. Sundown had taken the edge off our hundred-degree day, our third that spring, but it still had a little punch to it.
     "I hear the highways are melting again in Arizona," Mr. Stahlberg said. "Imagine that. Black rivers flowing through Phoenix. They'll need kayaks instead of cars. Kayaks with hulls of steel."
     Luke said, "There'll be wildfires in California again."
     "If there's anything left to burn."
     Mr. Stahlberg fanned himself, distressingly red-faced and sweaty after only thirty seconds outside. Luke asked him where he'd parked and he explained that his car had died earlier that day, forcing him to walk. He protested when I said we'd give him a ride home, but all I had to do was curl my arm around his and he gave in. Luke's car was in a lot a few blocks away, so we joined the Friday night shoppers as they strolled along Main Street sipping at tall, icy concoctions from Bethany Square.
     "So," I said. "Tell us about your prom night, Mr. Stahlberg."
     He threw his head back and laughed. "I haven't thought about prom in years. The spring of 1984! Wonderful night. I was dating a poet named Sophie at the time and we went with her cousin Jim and this magnificently stupid girl he was dating. We must have smoked a metric ton of pot beforehand. My God, we laughed until we couldn't breathe. Let's see, I was in a blue tuxedo and Sophie was wearing black leather . . ."

Luke still had some time before his curfew after we dropped off Mr. Stahlberg, so we headed up to Bethany Ridge. The welcome center parking lot was deserted. We took a spot with a good view of the lights from town and sat on the hood of his car. It was cooler at the top of the mountain. Pine-scented breezes blew across my bare arms, raising tiny goose bumps. Luke's phone pinged. He laughed as the blue/gray light of the screen washed over him.
     "What?"
     "Carter got ahold of Mom's phone again," he said. "He's become really invested in keeping me updated on Greg's adventures. Greg's the pet goldfish."
     "Goldfish have adventures?"
     "They involve swimming in circles and pooping, apparently."
     Luke tap-tap-tapped to his little brother. I flopped onto my back and looked up at the stars. Insects were chitter-chattering around us, a sound that immediately morphed into Cannibal Creek's whispery theme. I entertained myself by turning every snapped twig and fallen branch out in the woods into the tread of a blood-thirsty murderer, every gust of wind into the breath of some nightmarish elder god brought back to life to spread madness and ruin across the countryside. I could see it all so clearly that I got the dull edge of a thrill, a pitter-pat in my chest, a squirt of adrenaline. I swear, if someone had put a camera in my hand right then, I could've put Aquilar herself to shame.
     After a while Luke leaned back, phone face-down on his chest. I drew his arm around me and snuggled in close. He smelled like soap and boy.
     "I had this dream last night that we were in Antarctica surrounded by a horde of penguins."
     "There are penguins left in Antarctica?"
     "There were in my dream," I said. "They were all squawking and flapping their little penguin arms."
     "Sounds scary."
     "They were just excited because earlier that day they'd made you their king."
     "Were you the queen?"
     "No, you had a penguin queen. Her name was Emily. I was jealous at first but then I realized you two were actually really good together."
     Luke kissed the top of my head. "That's very mature of you. So does this mean Antarctica is on the list now?"
     I turned on my side and slipped my hand in between the buttons of his shirt.
     "Well, you are their king."
     Luke kissed me again, and the next thing I knew it was nearly an hour later and we'd gone from the hood of the car to the back seat and were all jumbled up in a knot of tingling limbs and bare, sweaty skin. The air was humid, the windows steamed white. I reached between the front seats to pull a pen and our trip journal out of the glove box. I'd read somewhere that most people traveled to Antarctica by sailing from Tierra del Fuego, so I flipped pages until I got to South America, then wrote Antarctica at the bottom in bright green ink. Beside it I drew a penguin army hoisting Luke into the air, along with a speech bubble that read ALL HAIL THE PENGUIN KING! I sat there awhile staring at the words, tracing their peaks and contours, giddy. In less than six months, everyone we knew would be conquering freshman dorms while we'd be conquering the world.
     Luke nibbled at my shoulder. I put the notebook away. I didn't really have a curfew, but Luke's parents were fanatical about his (as they were about many, many things), so it wouldn't be long before we'd have to head back down the mountain. He traced a lazy fingertip down my arm, raising even more goose bumps.
     "Hey. Weaver."
     "Hmm."
     He leaned in close, and his warm candy breath filled my ear. "You wanna go to prom with me?"
     I laughed. "Damn, Vaughn, I thought you'd never ask."