The Edge of Everything

by Jeff Giles

  X stared down at the plain as the squad lumbered off. Regent was brooding and pacing in such a tight loop that it looked as if he might wear a groove into the rock. X knew he would come to him—and soon. Yet he could not imagine what news he would bring.

  The dark feeling in his heart told him it would not be good.

  At last, Regent stopped pacing. He turned to the vast black rock of cells and leaped toward X, landing in front of his cell with a tremendous thump and a blast of air. He motioned X toward the bars.

  “I have been commissioned to tell you that you must bring the Lowlands one more soul,” he said. “If you fail to locate this final bounty, if you grow sentimental and release him, as you released Stan—or if you waste a single instant chasing your newfound love—you will never leave the Lowlands again. You will never even leave this cell.”

  “And if I do precisely as I am instructed?” said X. “If I bring the soul back on his knees? Then I can remain a bounty hunter?”

  “No,” said Regent. He took a pause that seemed endless, before continuing. “Then you can be free.”

  It took X a long moment to find his voice.

  “Free?” said X. “Forever? I have never heard of such a thing.”

  “Nor have I,” said Regent. “But you are innocent, and the son of a lord. You were never meant for a cage. Perhaps this is the Lowlands’ attempt at justice.”

  “I do not mean to appear ungrateful, for you have been a great ally to me,” said X. “But I fear this is a trap.”

  “Then pray it is not,” said Regent. “And I will pray with you.”

  The lord made sure no one was watching, then slipped his hand through the bars and shook X’s firmly.

  “What I am about to reveal to you, you must never breathe to another soul,” he said. “Do I have your word?”

  “You do,” said X. “Of course you do. I owe you the world.”

  “Very well,” said Regent. “My true name is Tariq.”

  part three

  Promises to Keep

  twelve

  Zoe tried sleeping in a dozen positions, as if she were inventing an alphabet with her body. Outside, the trees rustled peacefully, and a breeze brushed the window. The world was returning to normal, as if the word “normal” still meant something.

  Whole days had slipped by since X had left. There would be school tomorrow. School! How absurd was that? Whenever Zoe felt a wave of sadness about to hit, she remembered how she’d stood in her socks in the driveway—how X had put his coat around her shoulders, how he’d pulled her body toward him. His mouth had been so warm it had made her lips glow like the ring on a stove.

  At midnight, her door creaked open, and Jonah crept in, along with a cone of yellow light from the hall.

  Zoe pretended to be asleep. Dealing with her brother was not on her list of priorities.

  She let out a loud snore.

  “I know you’re awake,” said Jonah. “Duh.”

  Zoe snored louder.

  “Faker,” said Jonah. After a moment, he added, “Where’s X? Why isn’t he back? I liked it when he was here.”

  Zoe groaned, and sat up in bed.

  “He had to leave,” she said. “You know that, bug.”

  “But, like, leave leave?” said Jonah. “Forever leave?”

  His voice faltered.

  The reality of the situation flooded through Zoe, too. Maybe she’d never see X again. Maybe their kiss had been so engulfing, so singular, because it would be the only one.

  “I don’t know about forever,” she said. “All I know is that he wants to come back and that he’s stubborn, like us.”

  Jonah seemed to accept this. He approached the foot of Zoe’s bed and prepared to burrow under the blankets.

  “No, bug,” she said. “You can’t sleep here. Not tonight.”

  He didn’t think she was serious. He lifted the covers.

  “No, bug,” she said, snatching away the sheet and blanket.

  Jonah left the room without a word, trailing a cloud of hurt. Zoe fell back onto the bed. Through the wall, she could hear Jonah push open their mother’s door and say, “Zoe is the worst. Can I snuggle with you?”

  Zoe changed positions yet again. She missed X—there was a lake of pain where her heart should have been—and now she felt guilty, too. Up on the roof, a clump of snow broke apart. It slid down the shingles, dropped past the windows like a body falling, and landed in the snow with a thunk.

  She was never going to sleep.

  Exasperated, Zoe sat up and hurled her pillow across the room. It struck the shelves above her desk, and sent some trophies clattering to the floor. She tried to assess the damage, but, in the darkness, could only identify an award for Best Sheep Shearer among the casualties. The trophy was of a golden half-naked sheep. It was one of Zoe’s favorites because it reminded her of Val, who shaved the left side of her head. (Val was so gorgeous she could get away with it.) Zoe had bought the trophy at a thrift store in Columbia Falls. The man behind the counter—he’d been dozing and she had to wake him up with the shiny hotel bell—was so surprised that someone wanted the thing that he said, “For real?”

  Zoe banged the back of her head against the wall in frustration. Once, twice, three times. Her mother must have thought she was knocking because she knocked back. It was a comforting sound.

  Zoe realized she didn’t really want to be alone.

  The door to her mom’s room stood open. Zoe entered tentatively, wondering if she’d be turned away. Her mother and Jonah lay huddled under the blankets, whispering like conspirators. Jonah heard Zoe’s footsteps and lifted his head.

  “This room is for sad people only,” he said.

  He’d been crying.

  “I’m sad, too,” said Zoe. “I promise.”

  Jonah put on his frowny thinking face. Finally, he nodded.

  Zoe went to the foot of the bed and tunneled under the blankets like a gopher, for Jonah’s benefit. When she popped her head out, she saw him snuff out a smile he didn’t want her to see.

  Zoe settled against the wall so that she and her mother lay shielding Jonah like parentheses.

  “Your body’s so warm,” she told him.

  “I get warm when I’m sad,” he said. “Because of science.”

  Zoe and her mother took turns patting Jonah’s hair. A clunky metal fan that their mom used to lull herself to sleep spun noisily in a corner, like the propeller of an old plane.

  Jonah fell asleep within minutes, and Zoe’s mother drifted off soon after. Zoe lay on her side, her thoughts swirling. Was this what love was like—one part pleasure, two parts pain? Zoe thought of Val’s obsession with Gloria. She understood it now. She’d never felt anything like that with Dallas—it had never even occurred to her to make a Tumblr about his feet. For one thing, she was pretty sure he waxed them.

  Zoe laughed softly, and her body relaxed, muscle by muscle. She could feel sleep coming for her at last.

  But then Jonah, who’d apparently not been sleeping, announced into the darkness, “I’m not going to school tomorrow.”

  Zoe clenched.

  “Shhh,” said her mother, her voice soggy with sleep. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  “Okay, but I’m not going,” Jonah said, as defiantly as he could. “And you can’t make me.”

  “We will talk about it in the morning.”

  “I know you’ll try to make me. But I won’t. I hate it.”

  Zoe knew she should keep her mouth shut. But the idea that Jonah hated school was ridiculous. His homeroom teacher, Miss Noelle—he worshipped her. Once, he’d drawn a picture of her on his arm, like a tattoo.

  “You don’t hate it, bug,” she said. “Don’t say that.”

  “I hate it if I say I hate it,” he said.

  He sat bolt upright, and kicked the covers to the bottom of the bed.

  Crap, thought Zoe. Here comes a meltdown.

  “Jonah, control yourself,” her mother said. “Please.”


  “Only I know if I hate school,” he said. “So Zoe shouldn’t say I don’t hate it. I hate it if I say I hate it.”

  Zoe got out of bed, and stalked across the room, allowing herself a childish outburst of her own. She was carrying around enough pain already. She couldn’t add her brother’s misery to the pile. Not this time. It wasn’t fair. Didn’t Jonah know that she missed X, too? Didn’t he know that she was thinking about him with every breath?

  On her way to the door, she kicked over the idiotic fan with her bare foot. Behind her, Jonah said, “See how she just left? Nobody says good-bye.”

  The morning was a nightmare. Zoe avoided Jonah as she printed an essay for English, but she could hear his shouts of “I hate it if I say I hate it” ringing through the house. He wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t brush his teeth, wouldn’t get dressed. Zoe felt her mother’s impatience rise. As she passed Jonah’s bedroom, she saw her mom trying to dress him herself. Jonah refused to cooperate. He stiffened his body like a war protester.

  Zoe motioned for her mother to come into the hall.

  “I can’t believe he’s being so heinous,” she said.

  “He’s in pain, Zo,” said her mom. “We all process pain differently.”

  “Yeah—and he processes it heinously,” Zoe said.

  “Anyway, look, there’s no way I can go to work today,” said her mom.

  “Can you afford to take a day off?” said Zoe.

  “No, but I can’t afford a sitter either,” said her mother. “And who could I call? All the sitters are going to be in school, which is where children are supposed to be.”

  Jonah must have overheard them because he called out from his room.

  “Could Rufus be my babysitter, maybe?” he said. “I would never be heinous at Rufus.”

  Zoe’s mom didn’t like the idea. She didn’t want to take advantage of Rufus’s crush on her, probably. But Zoe thought it was genius, and she wanted this morning, this crisis, this escalating Jonah nonsense over with.

  She called Rufus herself. He sounded surprised by the request—chain-saw artists are rarely asked to babysit—but before she could say never mind he had declared the idea to be rad.

  “Thank god,” said Zoe. “I was afraid you’d think it was gnarly.”

  “You’re making fun of me, I know,” said Rufus, laughing, “but tell my man Jonah to prepare himself for an epic hang.”

  Twenty minutes later, Rufus’s van could be heard negotiating the mountainside. Zoe saw the wooden bear affixed to the roof as it rose above the treetops, waving like the queen.

  At last she was free. She drove the decrepit Struggle Buggy to school as if it were a race car. Every nerve in her body seemed to be humming. Every song on the radio seemed to be about X.

  Zoe’s and Jonah’s schools were nestled next to each other in Flathead Valley near a dense settlement of chain stores (Target, Walmart, Costco) and beef-slinging restaurants that Zoe’s mom referred to as the Cannibal Food Court (Sizzler, Five Guys, House of Huns). Students were allowed to eat lunch at the mall once they became juniors. For everyone else, it merely shimmered across the highway like an unreachable promised land. Zoe was a junior, but the thrill of eating in the Cannibal Food Court had lost its shine. It was partly because her mother’s ethics had sunk in over the years—Zoe wasn’t a vegetarian, but she felt a cloud of guilt whenever she ate meat—and partly because House of Huns was where she’d told Dallas she didn’t want to go out anymore.

  Val had begged Zoe not to see Dallas in the first place. She thought he was cocky and kind of a douche. But Val’s relationship with Gloria was so intense that she had a skewed idea of what was generally possible in 11th grade. Zoe loved that Dallas was a caver like her and her dad, that he was fun and uncomplicated, and that—so sue her—you could see his triceps through almost any shirt. When she told Val that she was going to give him a chance, Val said simply, “I weep for you.”

  They began dating in September, and Zoe soon discovered that there were many sweet things about Dallas: His favorite color was orange. He still slept in pajamas. He used a photo of his mom for the wallpaper on his laptop. Val didn’t want to hear any of it. Once, when Zoe and Dallas passed her in the hallway, Zoe sang out, “Still dating!” Val nodded, and sang back, “Still weeping!”

  In November, when her dad died and she was crying constantly and everything was so raw and dizzying that she felt like she’d been thrown out of a moving car, Zoe decided to strip away everyone who wasn’t essential to her life. And Dallas just wasn’t. She broke the news to him at House of Huns, which was a Benihana-type place where shirtless men grunted like barbarians in front of a massive circular grill. At first, Dallas flatly refused to be dumped. He told Zoe she was in too messed-up a state to be making “mega-life-altering decisions.” Zoe had face-palmed—she couldn’t help it—and said, “Dude, this is in no way a mega-life-altering decision. I know what a life-altering event is, okay? My father just died.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Dallas. “I didn’t mean to compare this to—to that. To your dad. I just think you’re a badass. And you’re hot. And those are, like, the two best things.”

  Dallas asked if they could still hang sometimes—as friends, or whatever. He said it very simply and genuinely. Zoe said of course. Dallas grinned and told her that there was another girl at school he was kind of into anyway—and that he was pretty sure if he asked her out she’d say yes. He said Zoe was probably “too complicated” for him anyway. The air cleared, Dallas then turned his attention to the comments card and the miniature-golf pencil that had been left on their table: How was your meal? Let us know! Dallas reflected for a moment, and wrote, Solid salad bar! When Zoe left, he stayed behind to apply for a job.

  Today, Zoe swung the Struggle Buggy into the parking lot that connected the schools. She was an hour late, thanks to Jonah’s meltdown. She gathered up her books and bags, and slammed the car shut—a complicated process that involved pulling the handle up and to the right because the door had been sideswiped by a snowplow and now sagged several inches too low.

  No one at Jonah’s school even looked at Zoe sideways when she told them that he’d be out sick. Everyone knew that Zoe’s family had slipped into a dark tunnel. She’d always been an A student, but lately her grades had been sliding. Given the awful stuff that had happened, she found it harder and harder to believe that there was really an earth-shattering difference between an A and a B, or even between a B and a C. Today, Jonah’s vice principal, Ms. Didier, asked if Zoe was doing okay with so much compassion—with so much eye contact—that Zoe knew rumors must be circulating about what had gone on at the lake with Stan. God only knew how the story had been twisted in the retellings.

  “I’m okay, yeah,” Zoe told her. “Jonah’s kind of … not.”

  “Well, look,” said the vice principal, “this is incredibly scary, upsetting stuff. There’s no handbook. But we will do whatever your family needs. Let Jonah know we’re thinking about him. Who’s with him now?”

  “Our friend Rufus,” said Zoe.

  “The chain-saw guy?” said Ms. Didier.

  “Yes,” said Zoe. “But he’s—”

  “Oh, no, no, I love Rufus,” said Ms. Didier. “I didn’t mean to sound critical. He made a moose for me.”

  By the time Zoe got to the high school, the only period left before lunch was Spanish. Zoe sat between Val and a girl named Mingyu, who penciled little wings at the corners of her eyes, dressed in layer upon layer of black, and drew pentagrams and 666’s on the undersides of her wrists during class. Mingyu played bass in an all-girl punk band called the Slim Reaper and claimed to be a Satanist. Zoe didn’t believe the devil-worshipping part. But sitting down next to Mingyu now, she wished the girl actually was a Satanist, so she could freak her out.

  Hey, Mingyu, guess where my boyfriend’s from!

  The Spanish instructor, a slender woman named Ms. Shaw who had what Zoe and Val agreed was by far the best teacher hair, rapped her wedding r
ing on the Smart Board to get the class’s attention. Zoe raised her hand four times in the first eight minutes, so she could spend the rest of the period staring out at the mountains and thinking about X without being called on.

  She tried to imagine where he was now. Had he found Stan or was he still hunting him down? All she could picture was the model of the Lowlands that he’d built with Jonah, so she imagined him talking to a Revolutionary War soldier while an orc from Lord of the Rings waved a club nearby. Zoe was terrified for X, but she told herself that she would see him again. She would. Meeting X had convinced her that things were possible. She didn’t even know what things, but it didn’t matter. Things!

  She’d take him swimming in Tally Lake—not just at the dinky, roped-off pebble beach, but in the big blue bowl of the water. She’d go huckleberry picking with him. She’d take him hiking on the Highline in Glacier National Park. She’d tell him all the names of the wildflowers. She’d ask what his tattoos meant. She’d ask if he had ever kissed anyone but her. She was pretty sure he hadn’t—his lips had trembled just the slightest bit.

  His lips were so warm. Had hers been too cold? Had he noticed? Was he disappointed?

  Okay, she was seriously losing it. When she surfaced from her daydream, Val and Dallas were making bug eyes at her and motioning toward her desk. Zoe looked down, and saw a quiz she was supposed to be taking.

  As soon as the bell rang, Val rushed up to her, but Zoe floated past her and spent the rest of the day in a daze.

  In the Struggle Buggy after school, Val started up again.

  “Okay, what were you high on in Spanish? You know that quiz counts, right?”

  “Counts how?” said Zoe. “Counts toward what? My total life score? Esta quiz no es me importa para mi!”

  “Yeah, see, even that was terrible Spanish,” said Val.

  Zoe laughed.

  “Sí, usted eres razón,” she said.

  “Ugh, just stop,” said Val. “You’re mauling a beautiful language.”