Free Swansong by Rose Christo

Regret.  You can’t regret someone’s absence if you didn’t love them once.
    “You gonna be okay?” Judas says.  “While I’m at work?”
    Changing the subject.  “I—sure.”  Why wouldn’t I be?  I’m only going to school, right?  “What are you doing for work, anyway?”
    He doesn’t touch his tomato juice, even though it’s his favorite.  “Computers.”
    Okay, somehow that’s terrifying.  But at least computers don’t spit out pieces of toast.
    “Jude?”
    “M’listening.”
    “If you ever want to…you know…talk…”
    Judas stares at me.  I can tell my words aren’t reaching him.  Boys don’t talk about their feelings, right?  Maybe there’s some truth to that.
    “Never mind,” I tell him.  I stretch my mouth in a smile.  “I’ll clean up later.  If I keep Kory waiting…”
    “Don’t worry about it,” Judas says.  “I’ll clean up.”
    I squeeze Judas’ shoulder.  “Just don’t break the sink.”
    Kory’s waiting for me when I walk down to the lobby.  He flips his glasses at me—why?—and smiles a goofy smile.  I smile back, comforted by his familiarity.  All the same, the juxtaposition is clearer than ever.  He’s not Jocelyn.  He’s not wearing the latest boy band on his t-shirt.  He’s not grabbing my arm, gabbing in my ear.  All of this feels surreal; like I’ve stepped into somebody else’s life; like I’ve become another person.
    “Want to hang out at the arcade after school?”  Kory follows me out the door.
    “Maybe,” I hedge, smiling without confidence.  Video games aren’t really my…never mind.
    We step out onto the street.  A wave of heat strikes me across the face, hidden though the sun is behind dirty gray clouds.  Just yesterday it was chilly, and raining.
    Kory says the same thing.  “The planet’s going to shit,” he reports calmly.
    “Really?” I ask, a little skittish.
    “Our own horizon’s about to eclipse us.”  Kory ticks off his fingers while we walk.  “We’re pulling so much oil out of the earth’s crust, plate tectonics have no lubricant when it’s time for them to shift—so we get earthquakes and tsunamis instead.  Aquifers are drilling up groundwater at ten times the planet’s sustainability rate and our country’s still building 12,000 new wells every year.  We need 110 billion cubic meters of rain to replenish all the water we’ve sucked up, but we’re just not getting it.  Why?  The ozone layer.  There’s a hole in the ozone layer, and it’s ripping faster than it can repair itself.  Blame carbon emission.  Consequently there’s nothing protecting us from the sun.  Skin cancer skyrocketed 86% in the past decade alone.  If we shot chlorofluorocarbons into the thermosphere to eat up the pollutants, maybe sent somebody up there with a gigantic Tesla Coil, we could repair the depleted ozone, no problem.  But where are we going to get enough chlorofluorocarbons for that ?  We could take the bromine from the ocean—but the Pacific Ocean’s already shrinking two inches every year.  We’re slowly being cooked to death.  Even so, the sun’s reached the halfway point in its lifespan.  The minute the sun dies, the planet freezes over.  Heat death—ice death—which one comes first?”
    When he lays it all out like that, it sounds horrifying.  “This whole planet…”
    “Not just the planet,” he says swiftly.  “The universe, too.  The Higgs boson’s mass is only 126 billion electron volts.  Oh, sure, that sounds big, but consider that this particle needs to give mass to more than five hundred billion galaxies…that we know of.  Our galaxy alone has an estimated seventeen billion planets and four hundred billion stars.  A single mother on minimum wage can’t feed a family of ten.”
    “You don’t have much hope,” I say.  “Do you?”
    “What’s the point?  In all likelihood there’ve been universes before this one.  Should a new Higgs boson come along,