A couple of the other nerds giggled.

"But then you start getting diarrhea, as the cell walls in your intestines break down and die. It's not just 'I ate too many M&Ms' diarrhea, either. It's b.l.o.o.d.y and chunky. That lasts for a few days, and then you go crazy from the pain and the diarrhea and the radiation scrambling your circulatory system, and you start bleeding out of every hole in your body."

I had the nerds squirming. A couple of them stood up and walked away. The Junior stared at me with the same expression he probably had when his mom told him there was no such thing as Santa Claus.

"But you're right," I said. "I hope you pull the nuke, too. It's a better way to die, right?"

I didn't care about the rules anymore, and I wanted to make a good exit. I went over to the bleachers. I still didn't see Maggie anywhere. I asked one of her friends where she was, but her friend didn't know. She said her parents had come to take her out of school after homeroom. She wasn't the only one, either.

"I heard you pulled OLD AGE," said her friend, after a few awkward moments of standing around, like teenagers do.

"Where did you hear that?"

"I dunno. Just a rumor I guess. People were asking me like I should know."

"I didn't pull OLD AGE. n.o.body does."

"That's not true," she said. "My mom's first boyfriend did."

"Did you actually see his cert?"

"No," she said. "Why would my mom lie about it?"

"I don't know," I said. "It just seems kind of implausible."

"Why?"I got that question a lot.

I shrugged. "It's really ambiguous."

"So?Lots of certs are ambiguous."

"Don't mistake the exception for the rule," I said.

"What?"She was getting annoyed. I got that a lot, too.

"Just because somebody gets a weird, ambiguous cert doesn't mean they all are. Or even most of them."

She shrugged and looked away.

"I was wondering," she said. "Did you and Maggie do it?"

"That's private," I said. She didn't see me blush.

"Yeah," she said. "You know what you said about ambiguous stuff?I was thinking. I think that's what it's all about, you know?It's ambiguous for a reason. That's why n.o.body pulls YOUTH."

"That's silly," I said. "n.o.body pulls OLD AGE, either."

"Whatever," she said, and shrugged and walked away.

People were always walking away from me. I started to think that if I was going to live forever, I was going to be pretty lonely.

I tried to call Maggie, but her parents weren't answering the phone. I went to bed sad and worried, so I snuck one of my mom's Tylenol PMs to help me sleep.

That stuff gives me weird dreams. I dreamed I was standing on a charred ball of dirt, like a chunk of hamburger that sticks to the grill, all wrinkled and black and ashy. I watched the sun gutter and spit and go out, like a wick on a dead candle. It was cold. My breath came out and crystallized in front of me, a growing cloud of spiky ice.

Some dreams are like an emotion magnified into a wide, flat layer and wrapped around your whole brain, so everything that happens in the dream is stained with it. I woke up in the middle of the night, convinced that I was the only person left on earth, in the universe. Reality filtered in slowly, m.u.f.fled and grey. I heard my dad snoring in the next room, and pulled the blankets close. I got myself back to sleep by imagining Maggie next to me. I missed her warmth.

It was happening all over the country. By the next day, the number of kids who had pulled the nuke was over a thousand. A lot of people were starting to get worried. I stopped watching the news with my parents because I couldn't stop thinking about Maggie and what was going to happen to her, or what was going to happen to all the other people who had pulled it. Everybody was comparing it to 9/11. Now that we know that these people are going to die from a nuke, maybe we can do something about it. Maybe we can avoid another one.

A lot of parents didn't want their kids to get their blood drawn, and kept their kids home. The FBI was using the Patriot Act to get their blood by force. I started to think that Stephen Hawking was wrong, that chaos was going to win. A nuclear bomb is pretty much the definition of chaos, after all.

I walked to Maggie's house after school. She was anxious, but I think seeing me made her feel better. We hugged in her kitchen, and her mom and dad left the room to leave us alone. Her parents didn't mind. The boy genius who would live forever could go console the Nuclear Kid.

I had only been there for a few minutes when they came to test her. Her parents were furious but powerless, which made them even more furious. They looked at me when the FBI agents came to the door, as if I could do anything. Agent Williams was there with some cops and an ambulance that the government was renting out. It had a machine in the back, humming as it warmed up.

I sat on Maggie's bed, waiting. I listened to her iPod. She was listening to a lot of Tori Amos lately, songs about rape and wrath.

Williams came into the room and sat down on the bed. I muted the iPod, Tori's pounding piano ringing echoes in my ears.

He looked concerned, and then looked away, pretending to scrutinize the posters on Maggie's wall.

"It's scary, I know," he said.

I didn't respond, hoping my stare would drive him away.

"I guess you've got it made, though. A couple of trillion years, right?"

"I guess so," I said.

"There will be a lot of girls to love," he said, suddenly, like he couldn't keep it in anymore, in that fragile moment where small talk cracks and shatters under the weight of Bigger Issues. "My high school girlfriends are distant memories. I hardly ever think about them."

"Thanks," I said.

He chuckled, and said "I'm glad they're still teaching sarcasm."

"What are you going to do to them?"

"I'm not going to do anything," he said.

"Until they tell you to."

"Don't make more of this than it is. Nothing like this has ever happened before. If we can see something coming, don't you think we should do something about it?"

"What does it matter?If I'm not going to die in a nuke, what if I stayed right by her?Moved in, worked from home, holed up in a bunker?I'm still not going to die of a nuke."

Williams sighed and rubbed his eyes with his palms, then sat back on the bed, resting his shoulders on Maggie's The Nightmare Before Christmas The Nightmare Before Christmas poster. Jack Skellington loomed over his shoulder, grinning. poster. Jack Skellington loomed over his shoulder, grinning.

He reached into his wallet and pulled out a yellow, crumpled cert. The stamp had been worn away, and the corners were soft and blunt.

"It's only fair," he said.

I tried to act disinterested, I tried to be disinterested, but curiosity moved my hand.

It was his cert, and the cause of death was OLD AGE. I stared at him, ready to accuse him of faking it.

He shook his head and took it out of my hand. He pushed play on the iPod, and left me to myself.

Tori sang about earthquakes.

The universe began as a wad of crumpled paper. Since then, invisible hands have been smoothing it out. Stephen Hawking thinks the machine makes those hands human, and makes them move faster.

n.o.body pulls YOUTH because there's no ambiguity. The exception is the rule. There is so much irony that it has lost its meaning. A metaphor can kill, a h.o.m.onym can predict. n.o.body pulls YOUTH because there's no joke in it.

Hawking is wrong because the order is imposed, it's an ice cube made of human thought. We believe the cube freezes the lava, but it's just as hot as it was before.

I poked around on the Internet for a little while. The numbers were up. Three thousand, now. Rumors of camps being set up in the desert. Tent cities for children. The government won't comment. The ambulance in front of Maggie's house says enough.

The ambulance pulled away with Williams in the pa.s.senger seat. He saw me at the window and waved.

Did he know what I was planning to do? He planted the seed, after all. I took it as a blessing.

Maggie came back to her room and sat down mechanically on her bed next to me.

"You're nervous," she said. Maggie. Always worried about me, not worried enough about herself. I would have to worry for her.

"There are three heavy-metal bands called 'Heat Death of the Universe.' There are twelve books by that t.i.tle and one independent movie. There are a hundred thousand Google hits with those words."

"I don't know what you're saying," she said.

"That FBI guy showed me his cert. He pulled OLD AGE, Maggie. It's true. It does happen."

I held her hand.

"I've figured it out. The exception is the rule. People pull OLD AGE but they don't pull YOUTH. Ambiguity is built into it. The machine doesn't tell us how we're going to die, it picks a word to describe it. It's unspecific for a reason."

"For what reason?You're scaring me."

"I don't know," I said. "A joke, maybe. Or a test. You can't die of youth but you can be shot by a young person. You can die of old age but you can also be killed by an old person. What you pull is what you're going to die of, but it's just language. It's just words. It doesn't define anything until you start acting on it. Until you force it. We make the order out of the chaos, but the chaos is still there if we want it. That's how people deal with the certs and the machine and knowing how you're going to die. They just don't think about it. They don't act on it. They just live their lives."

She didn't like my enthusiasm.

"It's not a joke," she said. "There's nothing funny about nuclear war."

"Your cert doesn't say NUCLEAR WAR. It says NUCLEAR BOMB.

That can mean a thousand things, and only one of those is nuclear war."

"Then why is everybody so worried?"

"September 11. Hiroshima. Chern.o.byl. Governments can't take the risk, or don't want to. I can't really blame them. Last year, a hundred thousand people died of INFLUENZA. I looked that up too. What if they put all those people in one place?What if they rounded them up and put them in camps?"

"I don't know," she said, watching me talk, watching me gesture. She looked worried, maybe a little scared. I squeezed her hand.

"That would make something happen, Maggie. That's what takes the chaos away. That's what forces the order. It's not the certs that crystallizes the order into something sharp, it's us. It's what we do with them."

"What does that have to do with the flu?"

"Because if you force everybody together, then they won't just all get the flu randomly at once. That's not how it works. It would be bad, Maggie. The universe or order or G.o.d or whatever would have to impose a way on those people for them all to die of the same thing. Like bird flu, or something worse. It would be an outbreak, probably. It would be bad."

"But if n.o.body else pulled flu, it wouldn't matter."

"Not everybody dies of the bird flu. The cert isn't the whole story, it's just the end. It's just the last couple of words in your story. If there's a big flu outbreak, lots of other bad things will happen. Rioting and violence and food shortages. Now all those people who pulled STARVATION or GUNSHOT will have the order crystallized for them, too. It's going to be really bad, Maggie. But we're not talking about the flu, it's even worse. It's a nuclear bomb. I can't even imagine what's going to happen."

I took a deep breath and held her other hand."I pulled HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE, but that doesn't mean I'm going to die in a centillion years. It can mean anything. It's just words. It's just the end of the story. That's what your cert can be, too. The end of the story, not the whole thing. We have to go, Maggie."

"What are you-"

"Don't argue, OK? We have to go. Far away. Into the wilderness somewhere."

"We don't know anything about the wilderness!"

"We'll learn. There are lots of places to hide out there."

"I don't want to," she said. She was starting to cry again.

"They're building camps in the desert. You know that, right?"

"Yes," she said, quietly.

"To put you all there, away from the rest of us. They're taking away the ambiguity. They're crystallizing the causality. They're going to make a nuke go off there, Maggie."

"They wouldn't do that!Would they?"

"Oh, I don't know. I don't think so. But they won't have to. Hawking is right, but for the wrong reasons. Order is taking over because we're imposing it. The chaos is still there, but the machine lets us choose not to take it. A nuke is going to go off there because that's what all the people pulled. If you put a lot of people together with that reading, it's the only way it can happen."

"Oh G.o.d," she said. She was silent for a long time, and I was out of breath. Finally, she looked at me, red rims around her eyes.

"We have to go," she said.

I'm not sure where we'll end up. Maggie suggested finding her uncle, the one out in the woods somewhere. She doesn't know exactly where he is, but he'll know more about surviving out there than we do. She has a few ideas of where he is, so we'll start there.

Maggie might still be worried, but she isn't showing it. I've given her some hope, and she's given me some, too. Hawking might be right, but I don't think he is.

I feel better about my own cert, too. I'm leaving the ambiguity on the table, next to this doc.u.ment. Mom, Dad, I'm sorry for taking the car and taking some money. I think you know it's for the best. Maggie and I aren't going to be slaves to order like everybody else. I understand why the government is going to put people in those camps. I don't think they have a choice. All those people who pulled PLANE CRASH and FALLING and BURNED ALIVE in September 11 didn't tell anyone what they got. There wasn't a database tracking them. That didn't happen because it was inevitable, it happened because a bunch of terrorists made it happen. n.o.body who died on September 11 pulled TERRORISM. There's no joke in it.

My certificate, my reading, isn't the whole story. I'm writing it as I go, day after day, with Maggie next to me. I don't know how things will go, or how we're going to survive.

I only know how it ends.