Free Before We Go Extinct by Karen Rivers

to tell them, the “Academy” was no different from Red Hook High. The only difference was the way the kids oozed the kind of laconic cool confidence that slid across the floor like oil and kept me slipping, never sure when I was okay, when I was safe to stand. They were all always playing a game, something with complicated rules that no one really understood but also would never admit to not understanding. A game that was more-than-slightly dangerous.
    That’s when I did my speech about the sharks and how they matter.
    When I cried .
    Fucking idiot , The King’s dad would have said. Look at you, blubbering up there, you fucking idiot faggot . (He threw in faggot when he was feeling extra cruel.)
    Afterward, I walked alone down the empty echoing hall to the bathroom. I remember feeling really tired, and not only because it took an hour and a half to get to the school and I’d come early, just to make sure. It was a different kind of tired. The kind of tired that you feel in the part of you that’s nothing to do with your body, more like the universe had recently become too heavy to move around in. I held my hands under the cold tap and stared at myself, wondering how I came to be here and why, exactly, I was such a loser and what my old friends were doing at Red Hook and why I’d let my mom talk me into this weird alternate universe where I didn’t belong.
    Who cries ?
    I looked younger in a tie, like a kid playing dress up. I tightened the knot in the mirror so hard that I nearly choked.
    Then The King came in. I jumped, not going to lie. He startled me. He let out a short laugh and then he lit a cigarette and drew on it in one long breath, let it out slowly in a twirling shape. He sat down next to me on the floor, the smoke ringing his head. He looked like a cartoon genie emerging from a bottle.
    He said, “I think you take that movie a little too seriously, bro. I mean, it was a good film but everything is a lie. Everyone has an agenda. And no one’s gonna die.”
    Well, eff you, you liar, I think now.
    Someone did die, after all.
    He did.
    I swallow hard, carsickness and sadness congealing in my throat like sour milk. Cough into my hand.
    Dad talks and talks. His voice isn’t boulders, it’s just annoying, like sand being flicked repeatedly in your face. He grinds on, grating on my last nerve.
    I keep my eyes closed. I do what I’ve done since I was little and feeling anxious, do what was prescribed by some shrink in a completely nonhelpful “support group for anxious kids.” What I do is I imagine my happy place. Which is underwater. In the sea.
    I picture the sharks sliding through the blue depths.
    I count the shark species, naming them all in my head.
    Slower and slower and fewer and fewer and fewer of them until suddenly it’s just entirely blue and I’m asleep and I’m dreaming that I’m underwater and I’m looking and looking and looking and there aren’t any sharks and between me and the surface is only blood and I gasp and nearly wake up except suddenly I’m standing on the platform at the Smith-9th station looking down over the whole city, my uniform wearing me, turning me into someone different, someone who matters. A homeless dude laughs at me and throws something, a bottle of piss, which splashes my pants and I want to go home and change but then I’m back at school, at the bathroom sink and The King is there, crouched on the bathroom floor, which I think actually was marble, too (What is with rich people and marble? Don’t they get it? That’s what they make headstones out of. That’s the material of your grave.), going, “Guess you’ll be called Sharkboy from now on, which if you think about it, is better than being called Freak. But me, I’m gonna call you Great White. Because you’re white, see? And maybe you’ll be great. Probably not though. Probably none of us will. But in