Full Tilt by Neal Shusterman Page A

could hear only him. “What are you saying, Quinn?”
    “You came here to save me from this place, didn’t you? But who said I want to be saved this time?”
    I opened my mouth to speak, but all my words had been robbed from me. What could I say to him? What could I say to my brother, who came here not just for the thrills, but for something else? As much as I didn’t want to face it, I had to now. Somehow he knew where these rides would end. He knew that once he crossed through the gates, he wasn’t coming back. He knew, and still he had come.
    “What’s out there for me, huh?” Quinn’s eyes flowed with tears, and those tears flowed with a dozen different emotions. “What’s ever been out there for me? When I’m at home, it’s like I’m . . . it’s like I’m empty on the inside. You don’t know what that’s like.”
    They say that before someone takes their own life, there’s always a cry for help. Sometimes it’s loud, and you have to be seriously deaf not to hear it. Sometimes it’s just a word or a look, like the look Quinn was giving me right now. I might have been deaf to it before, but that look screamed louder than anything now. I had no skill in talking someone in from the edge, and that space between us was still a whole universe wide.
    “Quinn . . .”
    “It’s not your job to save me, so give it up, huh? Please . . . just give it up.”
    “It’s not a job,” I told him. “It’s something I’ve got to do. Something that I need to do.”
    “But why?” Quinn asked. “Is it because of what happened on the school bus?”
    I looked away from him. “Mom shouldn’t have told you about that.”
    “She didn’t. I just heard.” Quinn hesitated for a moment. I thought he might take a step closer. “Is it true that you’re the only one who survived?”
    I took a deep breath. “Let’s go home, and we can talk about it there.”
    Quinn thought about it and shrugged sadly. “Some people are survivors. Some aren’t.”
    “And how do you know you’re not? Just because things stink now and you feel empty inside, it doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way next week, or next month, or next year!”
    “That’s just words!” Quinn said, getting more frustrated. “Hell, I don’t have the patience to play a game of Scrabble, and I’m supposed to hang on your words for months and years?” He looked down. His shoulders dropped. I could see into his works now—the angry pistons, the overheated gears, and that pit inside of him. He kept it so well hidden back home with attitude, but here, it was bare and bottomless. A wave crashed behind me. I could feel it vibrating up my legs and into my joints.
    “Sometimes I just want to disappear . . . y’know?” Quinn looked around at the tortured faces in the rocks around us. “Can you think of a better place to do it?”
    “I’ll never let you disappear, Quinn.”
    I locked on his teary eyes and imagined that I had tractor beams in mine, that my gaze would somehowpull him in. “Come on,” I told him. “We’ll ride out of this place together.”
    He took one step closer, then another. I reached my hand toward him, he reached out his—
    And then the symbol on the back of his hand began to glow.
    From deep in a cave behind him came the distant, hollow cries of other kids in the middle of one last thrill.
    Quinn backed away from me. “I kinda got used to riding alone.” Then he turned toward the cave.
    I was losing him again. I didn’t know what else to say that would get through to him, so I leveled the truth at him with both barrels.
    “You’re lying in a coma in the hospital!” I shouted. “They carted you away in an ambulance, and that’s where you are!”
    It was harsh, like waking a sleepwalker; but it stopped him in his tracks. “At least that’s what Mom thinks,” I said, trying to ease the blow.
    Without even turning to look at me, he said, “Maybe it’s best she thinks that.” Then he leaped into the gaping mouth of the