As if the tragedy weren’t hard enough on his father, Alex could no longer stand to be alone. It felt less painful when there were other people around. His dad didn’t have to be as close if there were friends or other family around—of which there were plenty in the days following the accident. After a week, both Alex and his dad thought it was a good idea for him to go back to school. The two entered the building together to speak to Alex’s principal. Everything was very somber, but it seemed like the best decision.
Back outside, as his dad was walking away, and before Alex knew what he was doing, he shouted at the top of his lungs, “I love you! Don’t go!” The panic in his voice brought stares from everyone around him in the crowded schoolyard. Suddenly he felt very isolated. His heart raced and he gasped for air. He tried to rush into the school, but in his panic, he couldn’t get the front door open. His best friends, Mark and Jeremy, tried to help, but Alex just shoved them away. Almost everyone else ignored the situation and Alex’s distress.
Almost.
Alex thought he had gotten past the problem almost entirely. He barely thought about the incident at school, or the accident, or the nightmares that came with it anymore. However, ever since then, Alex always had to know exactly where his father was. He would never allow it to happen that his father would simply not come back home to him.
Pushing the thought aside, he set the table, listening to the sound of the news and his father talking to Mary as if she could understand the stories. “It just looks worse and worse every week down there, huh Mary?”
His dad always watched the American news from Bangor, Maine. He watched local news too, but said the American news was more “current” because things always came to Cape Breton way later than anywhere else in the world. Plus, he said it was just more interesting. Alex didn’t get it. Nothing about the news was interesting. The only time he had spent more than a few fleeting seconds watching it was when it had ruined his birthday party earlier that year.
The MacAulay’s had never been big on parties—in fact, Alex refused to celebrate his fourteenth birthday the September after his mother had died. It was something that she had always done with Alex; he thought doing it without her would be a disservice. He admitted his regret just before his father’s birthday the following January. His father offered to share his birthday and vowed to give Alex the best birthday celebration of his life on January 28, 1986.
The day the Challenger exploded.
They tried to pretend nothing had happened, but everyone was distracted by the disaster. After that, they were done with parties. Last month, for Alex’s fifteenth birthday, his dad took him and two of his friends to Simeon’s for dinner.
Alex had never really been interested in the news prior to the Challenger disaster, but he avoided it like a disease after. There were updates on the story for weeks, constantly reminding him. Now he just avoided it out of habit.
He knew he wasn’t missing much: wars in countries he had never heard of, diseases getting worse and spreading, economic recessions—whatever those were—and generally just more and more bad news. There was enough of that with his dad getting laid off from the steel plant and signs that things would only be getting worse around Cape Breton as he grew up.
To him, the news was a reminder of what a great time it was to be alive.
He yawned as he approached his school. He sat on the front step, barely able to keep his head from rolling sleepily out of his hands as he waited for his friends, Mark and Jeremy, to arrive.
“My Uncle Steven said that it’s, like, something to do with AIDS,” Mark was saying as he and Jeremy arrived. The topic of AIDS had overtaken the junior high in previous months. Like most topics in the school that were considered ‘mature’, it seemed that most people had no idea what they were talking about.
“Like…” Mark strained, trying to come up with a term so he would sound like an expert, “like … hyper-AIDS.”
“Hyper-AIDS, huh?” Jeremy said skeptically. “I dunno. My cousin is in the army, and he never said anything about that. He’d know.” Jeremy was a notorious liar. Alex doubted he even had a cousin, let alone one who knew anything in the army.
“What are you guys talking about?” Alex asked his friends as he shook the left-over sleep out of his head.
Mark stopped and stared at Alex. “Something that was on the news. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Great,” Alex sighed. As much as he avoided the news, his friends had become engrossed in it in an effort to show how adult they were at the sophisticated age of fourteen. Alex was in no hurry to be an adult, despite being the oldest of the three.
Mark smirked at Alex then to Jeremy. “Don’t worry, Alex. You’ll catch up some day.”
Jeremy snorted out a chuckle as they dropped their book bags and sat with him.
“Anyway,” Mark continued, “it just said that it happens fast and that people are disappearing.”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said with a nod. “That sounds like AIDS to me.”
“Oh yeah?” Alex finally decided to enter the conversation. “In what way does that sound like Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome?”
Jeremy stared at him blankly. “What?”
“And, checkmate,” Alex said with a grin. Mark gave him a high five. Clearly, they were on a higher level of intelligence than their dumber friend. He was just lucky that he memorized the medical term from a poster that hung in the hall outside of his French class. He had
