This Is Where the World Ends (7 page)

“Okay,” he says. “So, what? Just ovals?”

“Here, I already made the pattern. It's not that difficult.”

He glances at me, and then down again. I don't look at him. I cut a little harder than I have to and snip off the edge of a nail by accident. I chew on the inside of my lip, and Micah sighs, really sighs this time, and his breath makes the feather I'm cutting flutter. He gives in. “Oh, fine. Tell me about the wings.”

“Okay,” I say, and he laughs because it comes out so quickly. “You know Leo da Vinci's flying machine?”

“The one that didn't work?”

“Yeah, that one,” I say. I reach across the fairy tales and start sketching on Micah's calc review. “See,” I say. “I'm using wire and bamboo for the main frame, and these”—I draw the wing fingers—“these here are going to be just wire. You remember the pantyhose and wire sculpture I did? Freshman year? With the spray paint? It's going to be like that, but bigger, a hundred times, with feathers instead of spray paint. I think I might call it
Icarus
.”

“Why?” he asks. “Icarus's wings didn't work either. And that's not really a fairy tale.”

Why is he stomping all over my dreams?

“They did work,” I say. Keep calm. “They totally worked. Daedalus made it across the sea fine. You know what Icarus's problem was? He loved the sun too much. He
loved fire, like me. He saw the light and he loved it more than anyone. There are things worth dying for.”

Micah leans back against the Metaphor and raises his hand to block the sun from his face. “Oh, come on, Janie. What happened to hating clichés and all that?”

“Huh?”

“Dying for love?” He rolls his eyes and shakes his head at the same time, so it just looks like his eyeballs are loose. “You're such a romantic, Janie. Is that part of your whatever-step plan with Ander? Fall in love, die for him to prove your devotion?”

“You're such an asshole, Micah.”

I didn't mean to say it. But I don't take it back.

I want to take his condescension and shove it up his nose.

Instead I take a breath. I push the feathers and calculus aside and scoot until I'm sitting in front of him, our legs crossed and knees touching. He doesn't look up, but it takes effort now. He wants to; I want him to too, and our soul is so tired of straining.

“You know Mr. Markus's key to happiness?” I ask him.

Every year, on the last day of classes, Mr. Markus tells the seniors the key to happiness. That's it, really—no one knows anything else, because the seniors have never spilled, ever. No one has ever teased the secret out of Mr. Markus before he was willing to tell it, and the suspense has been
driving me crazy since we were freshmen.

Micah snorts. He's a disbeliever. He still won't look at me, either, so that's annoying. He's doing it on purpose.

“I've decided that I'm going to get it early,” I tell him. “I don't care what it takes.”

“I'm sure you will.” It's not a compliment.

I leap to my feet. I give up. I don't want to leave and I don't want him to leave, but right now the friction on our soul is making me itchy. I glare at the Metaphor.

You and me,
I think, and begin to climb again.

The stones do the same sliding thing, and there's nothing to hold on to. The whole thing is crumbling as I climb, so I climb faster. I use our soul as an anchor and a rope—friction is useful that way. The Metaphor crumbles, and I climb faster. The rocks fly all over, but I keep going, and—

“Janie? What the hell are you—holy shit.”

And that makes it all worth it. I'm not at the top—not yet—but I'm higher than either of us has been before, and I beam down at Micah before I spread my arms and shout,
“Right here.”

“Right here what?” asks Micah.

I drop my arms and blow him a kiss. “Don't you feel it? Just listen. Don't you feel it, Micah? This is where the world is going to end. I'm giving you a front-row seat to the apocalypse. So what do you think? Music, Micah.
Everything needs a good soundtrack. The apocalypse most of all.”

He thinks for a long time. That's one of my favorite things about Micah—he always takes these kinds of questions seriously. He always thinks that I deserve an answer. “Rachmaninoff, maybe? ‘Prelude in G Minor.'”

“Really?” I say. I can almost touch the sky. I'm stretching so hard that I feel the tension in every cell, every atom. “I would have gone with the Beatles. ‘Let It Be.'”

He watches me and I watch the sky, and I smile because it doesn't feel like the world is ending at all.

I've been thinking a lot about being a suspect. Some about how I've never been one before. Some about how it could be true.

Dewey only has to remind me of that a few times before I can remember on my own. I'm starting to remember better, I think. The police help too. I know now that the fatter one is Gibbs. I'm still working on the other one.

They are at school the day I go back. The doctors said my memory probably wouldn't get better anytime soon because they can't figure out why I keep forgetting things. They think it might help if everything just goes back to normal. I guess that's okay, because I'm bored of Metatron.

It's a Monday when I go back. It's raining. I don't remember much else. I probably go to English and calc, and it doesn't matter that I don't remember because I wouldn't
have learned anything anyway. The police are here and pulling people out of class for the arson investigation. It's official now. They can only talk to people over eighteen who want to talk back. Dewey tells them I don't want to, but that isn't true. I do want to help, because I can't stop thinking about being a suspect.

Mostly I wonder if Janie is ignoring the police like she is ignoring me. I text her every day and she never responds, and I guess it must be because she doesn't get service in Nepal or something. I wish she would just talk to the police so they know that we didn't do anything. I wish she would just come back and help me remember. I wish she would just come back.

I asked Dewey if she can even refuse to talk to the police when they're investigating arson, if she's even allowed to be out of the country, and he told me to shut up.

He also told me that Ander is a suspect too, because he's Janie's boyfriend and because they traced the gas purchase to his credit card. Wes Bennet swears they had already left the party when the fire started, and Ander says he lost that credit card before wrestling regionals. But nobody knows whether or not they should believe them yet.

I don't remember wrestling regionals, but Dewey tells me we lost.

The less fat detective tells me that it took less than ten minutes for the house to burn.

Gibbs tells me that it started on the second floor. It didn't spread from the bonfire like everyone thought.

He tells me that someone spilled and spilled gasoline there, so much gasoline that there is nothing left of her room at all.

He tells me and watches me for a reaction, as if these things will help me remember.

He also tells me that I'm a good kid, but I figure if I really did start the fire, that won't matter much.

He also asks me what I knew about Ander and Janie.

“Nothing,” I tell him. “I knew she liked him. She had this plan to get the two of them together. It worked, huh?”

“Was he ever violent? Specifically with Janie,” he asks me.

I blink. “I don't know. Was he?”

Gibbs shifts and looks uncomfortable. “We talked to some of her friends. You know, Carrie Lang, Katie Cross. They said—” He pulls out a notebook and flips through it. “They said that she was upset. Maybe afraid. They think he might have hurt her.”

“Oh,” I say. “I don't know. I don't remember.”

Gibbs sighs and closes the notebook. “Her parents don't know anything, either, so we can't do anything if he did.”

He watches me for a reaction. I don't really have one. I just don't remember.

Eventually he sends me back to class.

I don't go back to class. I go to the art room instead. If anyone asks, I'll say that I forgot which class I was supposed to go to. Or that I forgot how to get there.

The art room is in the workshop wing. The senior studios are a series of closets next to it. Down the hall, Dewey is probably smoking in the metals lab with other slackers. Janie skips class all the time here too, but not really. She just bats her eyelashes and tosses her hair and teachers write her passes to wherever she wants.

I go to the art room, but I don't remember how I get there.

Her studio is empty. I've only been here one other time, at the beginning of the year. I stepped inside and filled it; it was tiny and dingy and badly lit and had no windows and she must have loved it, because I had barely been there for five seconds when she started shrieking that I was bumping into things and ruining it all. Back then it was already full to bursting. I remember. Her weird-ass crap spilled off the shelves.

There's only dust here now.

I close the door. The movement stirs the air, and I smell her. The room still smells like cinnamon and vodka. Like
lemons and sleep. Like her shampoo and the overpriced tea she ordered from a website that gave her computer viruses. I keep telling her that she's probably drinking bong water, and she keeps ordering it.

It's so empty.

I wonder if she brought it all to Nepal with her.

I wonder if she is happy in Nepal.

I wonder why she will not text me back.

I sit down and the dust puffs up. I cough. My eyes water. I blink and blink. Maybe I blink for a few seconds or maybe I blink for hours, but when I stop, I see rocks in the corner. Rocks from the Metaphor, and they are in my hand though I don't quite remember reaching for them. I have to blink a few more times. It's very confusing. I keep thinking that I've finally gotten used to it and then I forget again and it's confusing again.

I turn the rocks over and over in my hands and think about how she only left rocks in places she'd probably never see again.

I sit there with the rocks in my hands until the lunch bell rigns.

It rings and keeps ringing. I put the rocks in my pocket and go to the cafeteria. I don't remember getting there, either. I guess it doesn't matter much. The hallways are ugly anyway.

The cafeteria is loud and full of people. It is too full of people, because I run straight into someone else.

Janie always says that my main problem is that I don't know how to walk away from things. I think she's wrong. Walking away isn't the hard part. Turning around is.

I should have turned around.

I should have turned and kept my head down before Ander Cameron could see that it was me.

“You,” he said.

Me.

“What the hell did you do, you little shit?” he demands. “You two, the two of you. What the hell did you do? The police won't fucking leave me alone because of you.”

What did I do?

What did we do?

Hell, what didn't we do?

For a moment, it's funny. I smile by accident.

Ander Cameron takes another step toward me and swings his fist at my face. It connects with my jaw. My tray goes flying and so do I.

In researching for my stupid senior project on apocalypses, the only thing I really found interesting was all of the different ways people think the world is going to end. I read Wikipedia pages and collected catastrophes. An enormous
snake is going to swallow the world. Fire and brimstone is going to fall from the sky. Freezing. Flooding. Four horsemen and a whore. Falling stars and empty oceans.

It doesn't end like that, though.

What it actually feels like when the world explodes, the instant it explodes, is nothing.

The explosion doesn't hurt at all. It doesn't hurt until you hit the ground.

Again.

My head cracks on the linoleum and my tray lands on my face and the soup is in my nose. Somewhere above me Ander Cameron is telling the unlucky bastard on lunch duty that I slipped, and perhaps for the first time in his life, no one backs him up. The monitor drags him away, but I am still on the floor.

I understand why Janie did the things she did. I understand why she wanted everyone to like her.

It sure as hell beats this.

There are people all around me, and it's hard to focus on most of them. I think Dewey must be there, because someone has been swearing for the last five minutes. I look around, and around, and I see Piper. She hangs back with fingers pressed to white lips.

Janie would never have done that. She would never stand
back and watch. Janie would have been brimming with wrath. For her friends, she would have done anything. Anything. She didn't kick or punch. She flayed, slowly, with eyes too bright.

Sorry,
I tell her.
Sorry you made such shitty friends.

Something moves above me and I figure it's someone else telling me to get up, but it's not. It's Janie.

“God,” she says. She sits on one of the tables and grips the edge, legs swinging. She looks at me. “So many assholes. Asshole here and an asshole there. Old Waldo had a farm and called it high school.”

She jumps off the table and lands beside me. Her head is cocked to the side and her hair is spilling across her collarbones. I wait for her to reach out a hand and pull me up. She doesn't.

What she does is lie down beside me, so that we're both on the floor in the spilled soup. Her fingertips reach out to brush mine, and I pull away because my hands are still covered in clay dust. She would freak if she knew I'd been in her studio.

We just lie there.

Neither of us helps the other up.

Eventually the lunch monitor does get me up. She sends me to the nurse, who tells me to call my dad to take me
home, or maybe to the hospital in case my stitches have split again. I pretend to talk to him, and go to the lobby to wait.

I wait until no one is watching me and then I walk out the door, and keep walking.

It has stopped raining.

I walk through the park, which takes me a street over from my house. But I keep walking. The quarry is only 0.72 miles from our houses. Her old house and my house. Really, the new one was just down the street.

It starts raining again. It's okay. We've always liked water. No, that's not right. Janie loved fire. She loved markers and rocks and fire. I like water, though. I like the way it waits, and when you touch it, it both moves away and clings to your finger. I like the way it rises, like memory, or fear. You told me once that I was made of water, I think. I don't remember. I don't remember again but

what if

it just

doesn't

matter?

My head hurts.

My head hurts a lot and the world is spinning because of it. By the time I get to the quarry, it has turned upside down twice.

I have to sit down or I'll puke on the Metaphor, except—oh, of course. It isn't there anymore.

Some things are easier to forget than other things, I'm noticing.

I sit at the edge of the quarry and look over the water. The loose rocks left behind from the Metaphor that is gone dig into my ass. The water seeps into my shoes.

The water climbs higher, or I slide lower.

Oh, look. A memory.

Her hair in my lap. My feet in the water, which is cold but not unbearably. The sun is burning our skin. A book of fairy tales is open on her stomach while she scrolls through her phone, which keeps vibrating. The wind is turning the pages back and forth.

“Does the Metaphor look smaller to you?” she asks me.

She is squinting up. Her hand shades her eyes. “Maybe it just looks smaller. Do you think it could be sliding lower?” she asks. “Or the water's climbing higher?”

“It doesn't look different to me,” I say. I am too lazy to turn around to look. My fingers were in her hair. I always liked touching her hair, because sometimes it was hard to believe she was real. Her hair was soft and smelled like lemons.

“There are only four weeks and two days until our birthday,” she announces. “Did you know that? I have a
countdown. Can you believe how warm it is? I love the sun, Micah. I love it as much as it loves me. Are you listening? Stop looking at my phone.”

I catch the words
Nepal
and
volunteer trip
before she closes the tab.

“Four weeks and two days, Micah,” she says. “We're going to be
adults
. We're going to drink tea with our pinkies up and do whatever the hell we want because that's what adults do. That's all I want for my birthday this year. Ha ha, just kidding.”

I touch her hair. The strands both move away and cling to my finger.

“What do you want, then?”

“I want a bottle of wine so big that the cork can plug up the hole in the ozone layer,” she says. “I want a poem, or a poet. I want the world with a bow on top. What about you?”

You.

I don't say that, but I think it. I think it with everything I am.

“I think the Metaphor is getting smaller,” she says again, and that's all I remember, except her eyes, which are only blue because they reflect the sky, or the water.

The water.

The water climbs higher, or I slide lower.

The water is cold, and the rain is turning to snow. The sky is falling down. The sky is falling faster.

“Janie,” I try. Her name is stuck in my throat blocking my breath.

My breath comes too fast and too shallow.

The water climbs higher, or I slide lower.