This Is Where the World Ends (11 page)

“Well, we're not done. Come on. Last clue,” I say impatiently, trying to tug both of us back into the boat. But Micah digs his feet in.

“Wait,” he says. “That's the boat from the barn.”

“Get in the boat, Micah.”

“I'm not getting into the boat. No. No way.”

I consider stomping my foot. Overload? Overload. I glare at him instead. “Why not?”

“Oh, I don't know,” he says. “I don't really want to drown tonight.”

“You're not going to drown,” I say impatiently. “I keep telling you, it's totally safe. Alex Brandley takes girls out in this boat all the time. We'll be fine. You're like, half his size. If it doesn't sink while Alex has sex in it, it won't sink with us in it.”

“Oh, great,” he says. “Unstable and ridden with STDs.”

But he pushes the boat into the water and climbs in, and then I run and leap into it, and the boat wobbles and we cling to each other, but it doesn't tip over, and we don't drown. We are nervous laughter and fast breath and faster heartbeats, alive alive alive.

And then we calm and become a different kind of alive, the kind that requires music, so we take out the Walkman and push earbuds into our ears.

“Indie shit,” Micah complains, but he hums along. And the next track is Liszt, and his fingers tap against my palm. Eventually we are on our backs, hands pressed together.

We are Janie and Micah, Micah and Janie.

“Let's play a game,” I whisper. I am the quiet and the quiet is me. “Let's play Secrets.”

“Okay,” he says, like I knew he would, like he always does. “You start.”

“I peed in the quarry before you got here.”

He quickly retracts the hand he had been trailing in the water. “God, Janie.”

“What? I had to pee. Before I got in the boat. Or else I would have peed in the boat, and—”

“Okay, okay,” he says. “Um. Uh . . . I still do the lightning bug thing. Like, you know. Put them in jars with grass and stuff.”

“That doesn't count,” I say. “I already knew you did that. I've seen them on your dresser.”

“It does count,” he says, sounding annoyed. He's not, really. Just embarrassed, which he shouldn't be. I think it's adorable, and mostly I was just mad that I didn't think
of it first. “It just has to be something you've never
told
anyone before.”

“Fine,” I say. “I ordered a pair of Hunter boots even though I swore I'd never get a pair.”

“Yeah, I'd probably care more if I knew what Hunter boots are. I stuck a cockroach in Dewey's sandwich at lunch yesterday.”

“Ew ew
ew
,” I say, and the boat rocks as I try to wriggle the word off.
Cockroach
. “Ugh, where did you even find one?”

“What, the cockroach? I just—”

“Stop saying that word. I hate that word.”

“—grabbed one out of the empty locker next to mine. There's always five or six in there. Cockroach cockroach cockroach.”

I try to push him out of the boat. He tries to pull me in with him. We splash each other and we both end up soaked.

“I tried to pierce my own belly button.”

“You used that last time,” he says. “You always try to use that one.”

“Yeah, because I tried to pierce it
again
.”

“Yesterday I told my dad that I couldn't believe he grabbed his one opportunity to have an affair, while Mom had so many more and never did.”

It's quiet now, just the wind and us. The rest of the world has stopped existing. This is it: the quarry and the boat and the curving sky, and our confessions to each other. Our soul is bare, and we are spilling everything.

Well, not everything.

But he's holding stuff back too.

“I flushed my mom's Tiffany earring down the toilet,” I say. “Then I went online. It cost five thousand dollars.”

“Did you really?”

“Well, I only flushed one, so I guess it was only twenty-five hundred. So now she just wears the one and leaves her hair down over the other one.”

“I told Dewey that we couldn't hang out tonight because my dad's taking me out to dinner.”

“My parents think I'm at Piper's because they didn't want me to be alone in the house that they should never have bought, and I'm glad I'm not.”

That's not a secret, but Micah just braids his fingers tighter with mine, matching up our life lines. I scoot closer. I push my shoulder against his, and my thigh against his thigh, and I hook my foot around his calf because he's gotten too tall for our feet to match up. And that's how we lie, telling secret after secret as we drift, until I look around and decide that
this is it
, this is the center of the quarry.

“This isn't the center,” Micah says when I tell him.

“Why not?” I ask, and he doesn't have a good answer.

I open the vodka. We pass it back and forth, throwing it back and coughing all the way down. We flick water at each other as we wait for it to kick in, and when it does—when the dark is fuzzy and the stars are much closer, I bring out my matches. Micah hands me the sparklers. I aim at the stars and set the sparklers off, and we lie back and laugh at how high they go.

“We should do this again,” he says. I watch the fireworks in his glasses.

“Nope. No repeats. Just live the moment, Micah.”

He doesn't argue. “Something else, then,” he says, and his voice is cautious, almost shy, and I lean back against him. I put my face in his shoulder and breathe him in, memorize the way we fit together.

“Something else,” I say. “After tomorrow. Then we can do anything. Anything.”

“Right. You can legally have sex with Ander,” he says, and his voice gets further away with every letter of every word.

“Micah,” I say, closing my eyes. “Don't. Not tonight. Hey, what time is it? Can you check? My phone is dead.”

He squints at his watch. “Twelve fifteen. Almost.”

“Happy birthday, Micah Carter,” I say. “This is my
present, by the way. I hope you like it.” I put my face in his side and smile. “We're eighteen, mostly.”

He pushes me away, and for a second I wonder if this isn't enough, if he's still angry, before I open my eyes and see him shifting so he can pull an envelope out of his pocket.

“What's that?” I ask, already reaching.

“Happy birthday, Janie Vivian,” he says, shy.

I open it and begin to cry.

“Oh my god,” I whisper. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, Micah. What did you do? Did you really?”

They're tickets, and brochures, and phone numbers and emails and a map to Nepal.

“This is the trip.” I still can't get my voice louder than a whisper. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, Micah. Did you really? You can't do this, it's too much—I mean, I'm going to take it, obviously. But Micah.
Micah.
I can't believe you. How did you know?”

He laughs. “Are you kidding? You've been looking at that page for months and closing it if you thought anyone was looking. You even didn't start your college applications, did you.”

It's not a question because he already knows the answer. I can't stop sniveling. His smile is everything.

“You have to pay me back,” he says, but he still can't stop smiling for long enough for either of us to take him
seriously. “I only got it because I knew you'd never go unless someone told you it's a good idea.”

“Oh, shut up, Micah,” I say. I love him more than anything. I grab him and drag him against me, full-on sobbing into his bony shoulder. The boat wobbles and Micah shouts a warning and his head bumps mine and we collide. We are whole again, we are us.

“So there,” he says, “now you know what you're doing next year. Good Samaritan Janie Vivian. I still have no idea where I'm going to be—”

I slap my hand over his mouth, because I'm not done admiring my tickets, and none of that matters right now anyway. Tonight. This moment is all that matters.

“We have this,” I tell him, and drop my hand from his soft, soft lips. “This is ours.”

“This,” he says, and the word is so quiet that it seems to stretch on forever.

Later, as we paddle back, I ask him, “Did you get it? The treasure hunt?”

“Um, I guess. Was it your way of saying you're sorry you were a total bi—”

“It was the elements,” I say. I tick them off on my fingers, starting with the middle one. “First was the tree, and climbing, and into the sky, the air. And then the cemetery,
for earth. And the fire, and the water. And the last one.”

“Ununoctium?”

“Us,” I say. “You and me. We're the last element, you idiot. I love you more than anything.”

“I love you more than everything.”

Janie and Micah. Micah and Janie.

Dewey is reaching for me and he is missing, his voice in my ear. He spits
fuck shit goddamn
at me, and the moment splits: us, here now, and also not us, not here.

Dewey's fist is slamming into my jaw, his voice in my ear telling me to never fucking talk to him again.

His eyes are all pupil and the fire is burning higher in them.

I am falling but also already on the ground, and the smoke is thick and my glasses are shattering and Dewey is on top of me. His spit is flying and splattering on my face.

“You asshole.” He says it like he means it. “You asshole, you little fucking asshole. You piece of shit, you actual fucking piece of shit—”

And me on the ground. I look up at him through smoke, so much goddamn smoke, and seeing my blood on his
knuckles, his hair in his eyes, blue eyes eclipsed by his pupils.

A memory within a memory:
I shouldn't have said that.

I should have kept my fucking mouth shut.

And then—pain, searing but dull. Focused but everywhere.

Here, now, my head hits the ground.

The impact shakes the memories loose, and they come back in floods.

Helium on her breath. Her voice rising higher as I wondered if it was okay that it turned me on.

Janie climbing the Metaphor. Arms spread wide as I squint and try to find where her hair ends and the trees begin.

The sky and fireworks. The secrets and elements.

She climbs into my bed. We huddle under the covers. The air is humid with her sobbing.

Wings. I remember the wings, I remember them burning. A fire, a different one.

Janie pulling on my sweatshirt and transfering her rocks, her markers, her matches into its pockets.

They come, they fall, faster and faster.

Anything, everything: they're almost equal, but not quite.

I have always needed her more than she needs me.

“Goddamn,” Dewey gasps in my ear. We're on the ground and the night is dark and I'm cold, I'm freezing. “Goddamn it, Micah, goddamn, we're getting out of here.”

He drags me to my feet, and I sway.

“She declared an apocalypse here,” I tell him.

“Good for her. Can we go?”

“Right. Go. Barn. We have vodka in the barn. We're out of champagne, though. We drank it all that night. Didn't mean to.”

I am swaying from the memories. Dewey hitting me Janie sobbing fire burning. Drink, drink to forget.

“No, not the barn, we're fucking going home—”

But I'm stumbling toward the barn already, Old Eell's where there are ghosts. Ghosts. Janie's ghost? Maybe.

Maybe we drank here too much. We had a stash in the winter to keep warm. And in the summer, to stay hot. That's what she said, anyway.

“Micah, will you just hold on—”

I push the barn doors open and almost fall over. I see the blurry shape of the boat and remember the treasure hunt, remember how easy that was. How she was waiting. How I always expected her to be waiting. Needed her to be waiting.

“Micah, please—”

“Back here,” I say, stumbling in the dark to the rusty tractor. It's dark; I lose my balance and then my footing. It doesn't hurt. Something is poking into my elbow. Dewey stops next to me and uses his phone screen to shed a bit of light on us and I see

I see

Matches and Skarpies and rocks. Rocks, but only a few.

“What the hell is this?” Dewey asks. He crouches down and starts sifting through the papers, squinting. “What the fuck? Hey, Micah, look. Plane tickets.”

“What?”

He opens a brochure. “Cool. Look at this. You want to go to Nepal?”

He understands faster than I do. He snaps it closed and shoves it out of sight, and glances at me with his mouth tight. I sway on my feet.

Tickets to Nepal.

Janie is in Nepal.

But

but if the plane tickets are here

then

she's not.

And if she's not in Nepal, then

then

I scramble for the rocks. I yell for Dewey to turn on his
fucking flashlight app, and the light is sudden and burning but when the stinging stops and I blink the water away, I see it.

Black against the other ones, smeared by her fingers.

Fear no more.

I can't claim to know Janie Vivian. I don't know if our souls are connected. But I do know this: she would never go anywhere without this rock in her pocket.

“Micah.” Dewey's voice finally reaches me, frantic. “Micah, man, can you hear me? Oh, shit. Oh, goddamn, shit goddamn—okay, it's fine. I'm taking you home.”

I reach up and clutch his collar, and try to say his name. My lips are slow. “Fuck,” I say. “Oh god. Wait. Dewey, wait. I remember. I think I remember.”

He doesn't listen, or he doesn't understand. I can feel his body heat and his breath. No one has been this close to me since Janie, that night.

Janie in my arms, hot breath and fingers clutching, lips on mine.

“Oh, Micah.” Her voice is everywhere, that night, tonight, every night.
Forget. Forget.
“Forget everything. Burn it all.”

“
Shit
, you weigh a ton. Okay. Fuck you, fuck this. Fuck this. Stay here.”

I don't know how long it takes me to realize that I'm alone.