Ringer and I didn’t start off on the right foot, and the relationship just went downhill from there. She treated everything I said with a kind of icy contempt, like I was lying or stupid or just crazy. Especially when Evan Walker came up. Are you sure? That doesn’t make any sense. How could he be both human and alien? The hotter I got, the colder she got, until we canceled each other out like either side of a chemical equation. Like E=MC2, the kind of chemical equation that makes massive explosions possible.
Our parting words were a perfect example.
“You know, Dumbo I get,” I told her. “The big ears. And Nugget, because Sam is so small. Teacup, too. Zombie I don’t get so much—Ben won’t say—and I’m guessing Poundcake has something to do with his roly-poly-ness. But why Ringer?”
Her answer was an icy stare.
“It makes me feel a little left out. You know, the only gang member without a street name.”
“Nom de guerre,” she said.
I looked at her for a minute. “Let me guess, National Merit Scholar, chess club, math team, top of your class? And you play an instrument, maybe a violin or cello, something with strings. Your dad worked in Silicon Valley and your mom was a college professor, I’m thinking physics or chemistry.”
She didn’t say anything for a couple thousand years. Then she said, “Anything else?”
I knew I should stop. But I was in now, and when I go in, I go all the way in. That’s the Sullivan way. “You’re the oldest—no, an only child. Your dad is a Buddhist, but your mom is an atheist. You were walking at ten months. Your grandmother raised you because your parents worked all the time. She taught you tai chi. You never played with dolls. You speak three languages. One of them is French. You were on the Olympic development team. Gymnastics. You brought home a B once and your parents took away your chemistry set and locked you in your room for a week, during which time you read the complete works of William Shakespeare.” She was shaking her head. “Okay, not the comedies. You just couldn’t get the humor.”
“Perfect,” she said. “That’s amazing.” Her voice was as flat and thin as a piece of aluminum foil fresh from the roller. “Can I try you?”
I stiffened up a little, bracing myself. “You can try.”
“You’ve always been self-conscious about your looks, especially your hair. The freckles are a close second. You’re socially awkward, so you read a lot and you’ve kept a journal since middle school. You had only one close friend and your relationship was codependent, which means every time you fought with her, you slid into a deep depression. You’re a daddy’s girl, never that close to your mother, who always made you feel like no matter what you did, it wasn’t good enough. It didn’t help that she was prettier than you. When she died, you felt guilty for secretly hating her and for being secretly relieved that she was gone. You’re stubborn and impulsive and a little hyper, so your parents enrolled you in something to help with your coordination and concentration, like ballet or karate, probably karate. You want me to go on?”
Well, what was I going to do? I saw only two options: laugh or punch her in the face. Okay, three: laugh, punch her in the face, or give back one of her own stoic stares. I opted for number three.
Bad idea.
“Okay,” Ringer said. “You’re not a tomboy and you’re not a girly girl. You’re in that gray area in between. Being an in-between meant you always secretly envied the ones who weren’t, but you saved most of your resentment for the pretty girls. You’ve had crushes but never a boyfriend. You pretend you hate boys you like and like boys you hate. Whenever you’re around someone who’s prettier or smarter or better than you in any way, you get angry and sarcastic, because they remind you of how ordinary you feel inside. Go on?”
And tiny-voiced me: “Sure. Whatever.”
“Until Evan Walker came along, you had never even held a boy’s hand, except on elementary school field trips. Evan was kind and undemanding and, as an added bonus, almost too beautiful to look at. He made himself an empty canvas you could paint with your longing for a perfect relationship with the perfect guy who would ease your fear by never hurting you. He gave you all those things you imagined the pretty girls had that you never did, so being with him—or the idea of him—was mostly about revenge.”
I was biting my lower lip. My eyes burned. I clenched my fists so hard, my nails were biting into my palms. Why, oh, why didn’t I go with option two?
She said, “You want me to stop now.” Not a question.
I lifted my chin. And Defiance shall be my nom de guerre! “What’s my favorite color?”
“Green.”
“Wrong. It’s yellow,” I lied.
She shrugged. She knew I was lying. Ringer: the human Wonderland.
“Seriously, though, why ‘Ringer’?” That’s it. Put her back on the defensive. Well, she never actually was on the defensive. That would be me.
“I’m human,” she said.
“Yeah.” I peeked through the crack in the curtains to the parking lot two stories below. Why did I do that? Did I really think I’d see him standing there, lurker that he was, smiling up at me? See? I said I’d find you. “Someone else told me that, too. And, like a dummy, I believed him.”
“Not so dumb, given the circumstances.”
Oh, now she was being kind? Now she was cutting me some slack? I didn’t know which was worse: ice maiden Ringer or compassionate queen Ringer.
“Don’t pretend,” I snapped. “I know you don’t believe me about Evan.”
“I believe you. It’s his story that doesn’t make sense.”
Then she walked out of the room. Just like that. Right in the middle, before anything was resolved. Who, besides every male person ever born, does that?
A virtual existence doesn’t require a physical planet . . .
Who was Evan Walker? Shifting my eyes from the highway to my baby brother and back again. Who were you, Evan Walker?
I was an idiot for trusting him, but I was hurt and alone (alone as in thinking I was the last human being in the freaking universe) and majorly mind screwed because I had already killed one innocent person, and this person, this Evan Walker, didn’t end my life when he could have; he saved it. So when the bells went off, I ignored them. Plus it didn’t hurt (help?) that he was impossibly gorgeous and equally impossibly obsessed with making me feel like I mattered more to him than he did to himself, from bathing me to feeding me to teaching me how to kill to telling me I was the one thing he had left worth dying for to proving it all by dying for me.
He began as Evan, woke up thirteen years later to find out he wasn’t, then woke again, he told me, when he saw himself through my eyes. He found himself in me, and then I found him in me and I was in him and there was no space between us. He began by telling me everything I wanted to hear and ended telling me the things I needed to: The principal weapon to eradicate the human hangers-on were the humans themselves. And when the last of the “infested” were dead, Vosch and company would pull the plug on the 5th Wave. Purge over. House clean and ready to move in.
When I told Ben and Ringer all this—minus the part about Evan being inside me, a bit too nuanced for Parish—there was a lot of dubious staring and significant looks from which I was painfully excluded.
“One of them was in love with you?” Ringer asked when I finished. “Wouldn’t that be like us falling in love with a cockroach?”
“Or a mayfly,” I shot back. “Maybe they have a thing for insects.”
We were meeting in Ben’s room. Our first night at the Walker Hotel, as Ringer dubbed it, mostly, I think, to get under my skin.