The End and Other Beginnings

by Veronica Roth

  “You always were best at that kind of thing,” Kate said. “I guess it makes sense you’ve gone pro.”

  Edie looked down at her clothes—nothing special, just red jeans and a blazer with a little pin on the lapel. A skull and crossbones, to match the ones on the toes of her flat shoes. But it was more stylish than Kate’s baggy sweatshirt. “Are you referring to my outfit?”

  “Yeah.” Kate shook her head. Her freckled nose twitched. “Sorry, I . . . I think it’s cool, that you know about all that stuff. I still remember the day my mom presented me with a hairbrush instead of a comb, like ‘Oh, I guess this might be easier for you.’”

  Kate’s mother had a short, practical haircut, and the most makeup Edie had seen her wear was a dab of concealer under her eyes. But Kate’s hair was wavy and thick, frizzing close to the scalp so it glowed when light shone through it, and she had the kind of long, curled eyelashes other people pined over. No need for mascara.

  “I remember that, too,” Edie said. “We were fourteen and the comb just broke in your hair.”

  She laughed, and so did Kate, and that was how they ended up in Kate’s bathroom, with the makeup Edie kept in her purse spread over the counter and Kate perched on a stool with Edie standing in front of her, talking to her about eyeliner.

  After giving up on the sparkly eye shadow (“If I wanted to look like New Year’s Eve threw up on my face, I have a bag of confetti I could use,” Kate had remarked. “Why do you have a bag of confetti?” Edie had asked, laughing.), Edie and Kate sat on stools in the kitchen, tossing popcorn into their mouths. Then Edie thought to check her phone, which had been on silent since she got home from school that day.

  There were three missed messages.

  Arianna: Don’t leave me in suspense!

  Chris: ???

  Evan: Up for a smoke tomorrow during lunch?

  Edie stared at Chris’s question marks, and her heart began to pound. “???” was right.

  She didn’t know why it was so hard to make this decision—it was prom, after all, not life or death—but the thought of the way Evan’s eyebrows would pinch in the middle, half disappointed and half critical, or the way Chris’s eyes would avoid hers in the hallway again, as they had since the breakup, was just . . . too much. Right now, before she decided anything, all the different parts of her life were suspended in midair. And once she did, everything would come crashing down, she just knew it.

  Kate must have seen the panic flash in her eyes, because she let the popcorn kernel fall on the floor and asked, “You okay, Vim?”

  The casual use of the nickname—probably unintentional—made tears prick in Edie’s eyes. And then she had an idea.

  “Hey, you know that prototype your dad has in the basement?” she asked. “For the Elucidation Protocol? Do you think he would mind if we . . . used it?”

  Kate raised her eyebrows.

  “Let’s see. Would my dad mind if I touched the thing he’s always telling me not to touch under pain of death and the removal of my bedroom door?” She scratched her chin. “Yeah, Edie, pretty sure he would. Why?”

  “I just . . .” Edie closed her eyes. “There’s a decision I need to make, and it’s kind of a big deal, and I just . . . I thought the EP could help.”

  “That is what it’s designed for,” Kate admitted. “Um . . .” She chewed her lip, the way she always did right before she suggested something stupid. This time was no exception. “Let’s do it anyway.”

  Edie brightened. “Really?”

  “Yeah, Dad’s not going to be home until late,” Kate said. She paused, tilting her head as she looked Edie over. “It really is important, right?”

  Edie hesitated.

  “Yeah,” she said finally. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.”

  The prototype of the Elucidation Protocol was a little disappointing when you came face-to-face with it. The first time, Edie had narrowed her eyes and said to Dr. Rhodes, “This is it?” It looked like a headband with a bunch of wires attached to it, running along the floor to a little computer. The device wasn’t the revolutionary part, Dr. Rhodes had explained. The substance that triggered the program was. He had made batches and batches of it, to the point that the other Dr. Rhodes, his wife, insisted he stop bringing it home, particularly when the protocol moved to its next stages and the original formula was no longer viable.

  So she wasn’t surprised when Kate plucked a vial of the stuff from a shelf in the—completely packed—closet of identical vials, without a second thought. She even tossed it to Edie, who caught it, thankfully. She sat in the padded chair—ripped across the seat from overuse—and buzzed with nerves as Kate arranged the wired crown atop her head like she was some kind of sci-fi prom queen.

  “Wrap that heart monitor thing around your arm, will you?” Kate said. She was in Scientist Mode now. She had never been into science the way Edie was, but she was capable enough, growing up under her father’s watchful eye. It was Edie, though, who knew how to attach the heart monitor to her arm so that it would pick up her pulse, who untangled the wires and made sure the leads were secured to her temples.

  “You know the drill, but I’m going to give you the whole speech anyway, okay?” Kate said as she sat behind the computer to set up the program. “The protocol will run twice, once for each of the options you’re considering. It doesn’t see the future; it just helps you to see what you think would happen in each of two scenarios. The prototype is flawed in that it can’t account for any other factors aside from the knowledge you yourself possess, though it does assist in clarity of thought.”

  Edie nodded. She knew all this. Her hand was getting sweaty around the vial of substrate. She was worried it would tremble when she brought it up to her mouth to drink, and Kate would see it, and know how terrified she was. About prom dates, of all things.

  But it was more than that, wasn’t it? Evan was intellectual, daring, opinionated. Chris was kind, open-hearted, enthusiastic. And when she was with either of them, she was those things, too; she was more than she could ever be alone, like Vim and Vigor and the Charge. It was a choice between dates, sure, but it was also a choice between Edies.

  Wasn’t it?

  “I’ll cue you verbally to start the second phase,” Kate said. “So, drink up, and it should set in after ten seconds. Don’t be alarmed when your scenery shifts, it’s perfectly normal.”

  Edie nodded, and tipped the vial’s bluish contents into her mouth.

  Edie twisted her arms behind her back to push up the zipper on her black dress. It was simple, hanging from off-the-shoulder straps and clinging just enough—not too much—to her belly and thighs. She tucked a stray curl into the twist at the back of her head, then, making sure that her little brother wasn’t anywhere nearby, sniffed under each armpit to check that she had remembered deodorant.

  “Edie!” her mother sang from the first floor. “There’s a boy here for you!”

  “Coming!” she crowed back. She checked her winged eyeliner one last time in the mirror, stuffed a Band-Aid in her silver clutch in case her shoes gave her blisters, and made her way downstairs.

  Evan waited by the door. He wasn’t carrying a corsage, and she hadn’t expected him to, but it was still vaguely disappointing, like he couldn’t be bothered to do something silly even if it was just a nice gesture. But she pushed that thought aside as she went down the steps, particularly as his lips twitched into a smile.

  He wore a black suit, white shirt, black tie. Classic. And at least he wasn’t wearing flannel. His hair had just as much product in it as it usually did, and it looked so thick she wanted to bury her hands in it.

  “Let me get a picture of you two!” Edie’s mother said, and she rustled in her purse for her phone. Poking at it like it was a typewriter, she found her way to the camera app and held it up. Evan pulled Edie close to his side, grinning.

  She smiled back, and with a click, the moment was captured.

  After a hug that lingered a beat too long, Edie b
roke away from her mother and followed Evan to his old green Saab. She loved the way the car smelled, like tobacco and men’s deodorant. She wondered what she would find if she opened the center console, and made a list of guesses. A tin of mints, a lighter with half the fluid gone. Maybe, if she dug deep, the stub of a joint, and a button from a winter coat. People’s scraps said so much about them.

  They didn’t talk much on the way there, as Evan parked and they piled into one of the buses with everybody else. Edie loved seeing all the people in their formalwear stuffed between bus seats, some of the skirts so big they fluffed up by a girl’s face. Evan chose a seat in the back, next to an open window, and he sat a little closer to her than was strictly necessary.

  “You didn’t want to sit near your friend? What’s her name?” Evan asked. “Arianna, right?”

  “She went on the early bus—yep, it’s Arianna,” she said, inordinately pleased that he remembered Arianna’s name. “You corrected her grammar once, remember?” she added on a whim, a little smile on her lips.

  “Did I? God, she must hate me.” Evan laughed. “It’s a reflex. My mom used to make a horrible sound every time we made a grammar misstep. I think it was her attempt at classical conditioning.”

  “What was the sound?”

  Evan’s face contorted, and he let out a loud “EHH!” Like a warning buzzer mixed with an old car horn. There was a rustle of skirts as some of their classmates turned toward the sound.

  Edie mimicked Evan’s expression of horror. “She did that every time?”

  “God forbid we used the word ‘like’ as a filler word,” he replied sourly. “My parents split up when I was twelve, though, so her influence wasn’t as strong after that. You know what they say about the formative years, though.”

  “They form you,” Edie supplied. “You lived with your dad, then?”

  “He’s the responsible one,” Evan replied, nodding. “So to speak. He hasn’t noticed my unexcused absences yet, but I’m not complaining.”

  He was complaining, though, Edie knew. The same way she complained about her parents avoiding each other’s eyes when they were in the same room together—by pretending it was better that way.

  She wasn’t sure where the question came from, but it was bubbling from her mouth. “Why did you want to be my friend, Evan?”

  She had wondered more than once. And the answers she came up with ranged from Because I wanted to get in your pants to Because your knowledge of cutting-edge neuroscience is downright alluring and everywhere in between, but what he said surprised her anyway.

  “You seemed as lonely as I was,” he said, and he looked away, his hair tousled by the wind.

  The bus rattled and rocked all the way to the Holiday Inn ballroom, which was decorated with different kinds of strings of lights, stars and roses and tiny lanterns. A folk-pop song with a twangy guitar was playing over the sound system, and there were a dozen round tables arranged next to the dance floor. A buffet table held deep trays of food, covered to keep them warm.

  She spotted Arianna and her boyfriend, Jacob, already cuddled close at one of the tables, a plate of finger food between them. A hint of movement caught her eye on the side of the room, and she spotted Kate gesticulating wildly to Lynn. Edie blinked. Kate was wearing black pants and a glittery shirt that caught the light when she moved, and Lynn was in a red knee-length dress.

  Kate’s eyes found hers. Then looked away.

  “Wow,” Edie said. “This is a teen movie nightmare.”

  “You said it,” Evan said. “I think I need a smoke. Want to?”

  “A little early to bail, don’t you think?” she said.

  “I came, I saw, I prommed,” he replied. “We can always come back. Come on, there’s a place I want to show you.”

  They ended up a few blocks away, at the boardwalk. The smell of salt and seaweed was on the air, as well as the occasional whiff of cigarette smoke whenever the wind blew just so. The cigarette itself dangled from Evan’s fingers like he was about to drop it, just like Edie’s shoes dangled from hers by their little black straps.

  He did put out the cigarette, then, smashing it against the inside of a little tin he kept in his jacket pocket. A second later she thought she saw him pop a mint into his mouth, but she couldn’t be sure. She ducked her head to hide a smile, and followed him at his gesture. Then he was hopping off the boardwalk, drawing a gasp from her lips and a laugh from his own.

  “Don’t worry, there’s a sandbar here at low tide,” he said, and his pale hand stretched out around the boards beneath her. She set down her shoes, hiked up her skirt—all the while sparing a few choice words for boys who didn’t understand how much harder it was to maneuver in a slinky dress than a pair of loose pants—and jumped down.

  She splashed a little in the landing, but since her dress was black, it didn’t really matter. She kept her skirt out of the sand, though, draping it over her elbow as she turned to face him. Yes, he had definitely eaten a mint—even from a foot away, his breath was fresh now, with a hint of tobacco.

  “If we weren’t in formalwear, I’d suggest we sit down and listen to the waves,” he said. He ducked his head, and to her surprise, blushed a little. Or she thought he did—it was getting dark, so it was hard to tell. “Guess I didn’t think this through very well.”

  “You know, it would probably be creepy if you had,” she said, and he laughed, with less control than he usually had, so it came out like a bark.

  And she realized, suddenly, that Evan—journal-carrying, smoking-behind-the-shed-on-school-grounds, pep-rally-ditching Evan—was nervous. That for all that he pretended to know himself and what he wanted, he was just as clueless about the whole thing as she was.

  So she let her skirt drop to the sand, threw an arm around his neck, and tilted up on her bare toes to kiss him.

  She felt his fingers digging into her waist, and the grains of sand between her toes, and the firm pressure of his mouth. Then, at the nudge of a tongue, parting, giving way, the tension thrumming through him releasing. Salt and mint and cigarette. Waves caressing the shore, and the moon now emerging, and she was exactly the daring girl she wanted to be.

  “Second phase in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”

  Edie twisted her arms behind her back to push up the zipper on her red dress.

  “I got it, don’t dislocate anything,” Arianna said, coming up behind her. She was already wearing a yellow gown that almost glowed against her brown skin. She had gathered her thick hair into a knot just behind her right ear, and there was a flower pinned there, just as bright as the dress.

  Edie’s friend zipped her up, and smiled at her reflection in the bedroom mirror. They picked Arianna’s house for its huge staircase—perfect for prom pictures.

  Edie had tried to buy a normal, simple dress, but Arianna had forbidden it. This is one of the only times in your entire life that it will be okay to wear a huge monstrosity, she had pointed out, and after a few repetitions, Edie agreed. Consequently, her red dress was a gown, with a full skirt.

  And pockets.

  She beamed when she moved in it and heard the layers swishing up against each other. Making sure her phone was secure in one of the pockets, she followed Arianna out of the bedroom. A group had gathered at the bottom of the grand staircase, all the boys in their tuxes and the girls in bright dresses of almost every color of the rainbow. They were Arianna’s cross-country teammates, and Edie liked them, but didn’t really know them. It didn’t matter—she knew Arianna, and she knew Chris, who was laughing by the door with Arianna’s boyfriend, Jacob.

  When he spotted her, his face—if possible—lit up even more, and he broke off his conversation to go to her side.

  “Nicely done, Robbins,” he said.

  “You too, Williams,” she replied, making a show of looking him over. He did look good. Unlike the penguin-like boys around him, he was in a navy-blue tuxedo with black trim, his bow tie so straight it was like he had tied it
with a level on hand. And he was holding a white wrist corsage. An orchid.

  She grinned as he slipped it on her, then caught his hand, and squeezed.

  “I see you’re committed to this occasion,” she said. “Corsage, nice suit . . .”

  “When I was a boy I used to dream about my prom night. . . .” He folded his hands under his chin and gave an exaggerated blink. “And about the gal who would sweep me off my feet, et cetera.”

  She mimed throwing up.

  “Really, though, my granddad always says cynicism is unattractive in a young person,” he said a little more seriously. “Well, actually, he says ‘What do you have to be cynical about, boy? The whole world is at your feet,’ and something about a war, I don’t know.”

  “Meanwhile, there’s my mother, who started to warn me against bad prom-night decision-making and gave up halfway through,” she replied. “Like, literally gave up. Sighed heavily and went into the living room.”

  Chris laughed. They took their place on the steps with the other couples. He stood close behind her, wrapping an arm around her waist. They smiled, stiffly, for the first few shots, and when commanded to be silly, Edie put on a comically deep frown as Chris pretended to collapse against the banister.

  Before pulling away, he bent closer to brush a kiss against her cheek. She flushed with warmth.

  They piled into a white stretch limousine that took them—in a cloud of vapor from the smoke machine—to the high school, where they got on one of the buses instead. They rode in the back, raucous enough to get scolded multiple times by the chaperone. Edie’s stomach ached from laughing so hard, and they weren’t even at the prom yet.

  When they arrived, she and Chris paused in the doorway to marvel at the strings of light that crisscrossed the ceiling, and the luminous gauze that made up the centerpieces of the tables. There wasn’t a soul on the dance floor yet, though the lights were already low and the music was playing. So she knew what Chris was going to do before he did it.

  He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the dance floor. “Someone’s gotta get this started!” he said by way of explanation, but she didn’t need it. Her cheeks were hot as he pulled her into the empty space, and she felt the eyes of everyone in the room like fingers brushing over her, but then Chris was going through his repertoire of stupid dance moves, trying to get her to laugh with him: the cabbage patch, the shopping cart, the sprinkler . . .