by Amy Zhang
Dedication
To the girls with matches in their fists
and fire in their hearts
Contents
Dedication
Part I: Once Upon a Time After: November 15
Before: September 8
After: November 16
Before: September 10
After: November 19
Before: September 18
After: November 24
Before: October 3
After: December 2
Before: October 8
After: December 5
Before: October 9
After: December 5
Before: October 10
Part II: Happily Ever After After: December 6
Before: October 11
After: December 6
Before: October 13
After: December 15
Before: October 15
After: December 16
Before: October 16
After: December 19
Before: October 16
After: December 19
Before: October 16
After: December 20
Before: October 16
After: December 20
Back Ad
About the Author
Books by Amy Zhang
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART I
ONCE UPON A TIME
after
NOVEMBER 15
Everything ends. This is obvious. This is the easy part. This is what I believe in: the inevitable, the catastrophe, the apocalypse.
What’s harder is trying to figure out when it all began to collapse. I would argue that it has always been going to shit, but this is when we finally began to notice:
On the last day of summer before senior year, Janie Vivian moved away. We sat at our desks facing each other through windows thrown open. A bookshelf was balanced between the sills, but she didn’t crawl over. She didn’t cry, either. She was thinking, hard. That was worse.
“You could always just move in with me,” I said. I wasn’t quite joking.
She didn’t answer. She sat still except for her fingers, which hadn’t stopped rubbing her favorite rock from the Metaphor since her parents had told her to pack up her room. Her thumb was black from all the marker ink on it.
The new house was on the other side of town and much bigger. The back was almost entirely windows, and she could see the quarry and the top of the Metaphor from her room. Her grandpa had finally died, which meant that they finally had money again. It was everything her mother wanted. These were the things she had told me in pieces. She rarely talked about it, and I didn’t ask. I hadn’t seen the new house yet, and I never wanted to.
“It’s going to be okay.” She said it slowly. Her thumb rubbed circles on the rock, smudging the writing. Behind her, the room was empty. She was leaving the desk and the shelves because her parents had bought her new ones.
Downstairs, her dad shouted her name again.
It was humid. I shifted, and there was sweat on my desk in the shape of my forearms. It had been the hottest day of the year. Janie had said it was a sign.
“This isn’t it,” she said. She was glaring at me. “I know what you’re going to say, and this isn’t it.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” I said. “I was going to say that I’ll see you in English tomorrow.”
“No, you weren’t.”
She was right. I wasn’t.
“It’s just across town,” she said, and she was still glaring, but not at me. She was rubbing her thumb raw. “That’s nothing. Nothing’s going to change, okay? Okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, but she wasn’t listening.
Her name came again in a singsong. “Jaaaaaaaaanie!”
Her mom. Janie’s fist went white.
“It’s not really even across town,” I said. “Really, it’s just down the road.”
She reached into her pocket for a new rock, a clean one. She pulled out a marker, scribbled something in tiny letters, and then she opened her top drawer and dropped the rock in. She always did that. She trailed rocks behind her.
She stood. She stared at me. Her hair was frizzing from the heat, and her pockets bulged with stones.
“You and me,” she said. “You and me, Micah Carter.”
Then she reached for the board between our windows. She pulled it back into her room, and I thought, This is it. Our eyes met, and she said, “More than anything,” before she banged the window shut between us.
“More than everything,” I said, but of course she couldn’t hear me. I felt a ripple in the air; the window closing made the only breeze we’d had in days. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes again, she was leaving. Her journal was tucked under her arm and her hair was swinging, and she didn’t slam the door as she always did—she closed it with her fingertips, and everything was still. The world had already begun to end.
When I wake up in the hospital and they ask me what happened, that’s what I tell them. It’s the last thing I remember.
People are here for smoke inhalation and alcohol poisoning. A lot of people have burns. A lot of the burns are bad. At least one person sprained an ankle, and a few people have broken fingers.
That’s what the nurses say, but they don’t tell me what happened. They just keep saying there was an accident. Every time they leave, Dewey flips off the door. Dewey never fucking leaves. He brought the new Metatron and my Xbox, and he sits there and shoots Nazi zombies at full volume while my head explodes.
“Look, man,” he says again. “You were an idiot. That’s not an accident. You got too shit-faced and you’re goddamn lucky you didn’t drown in your own puke.”
He’s lying. His fingers twitch. Cigarettes strain against his front pocket. The nurse told him he’d have to leave if he tried to smoke in here again.
I feel like shit. The doctors didn’t pump my stomach because they were too busy sewing my scalp together, which split open. No one has told me how the hell that happened yet. I’m still nauseous enough to be clutching the bedpan, but the real pain is deeper, somewhere around the place where my brain stem meets my spine. It hurts my eyes when I stare at my phone, but I keep staring. Janie has to text back soon.
“Dude, stop texting and grab a controller.” Dewey brought my extra. It’s the shitty one that my dog chewed up before he died. “Listen to me. You’re keeping the bench warm in T-ball, and she’s in the major leagues. You got it?”
Dewey is an asshole. Some people are musicians or dreamers; Dewey is an asshole. He smokes a pack of cigarettes a day and wears his collars popped up and he does shit like play video games with the volume all the way up while you’re in the hospital. He’s my best friend because we are the only two inhabitants of the ninth circle of social hell. We didn’t have options.
“My point is, you’re not getting to any bases. You’re not in the same league.” His voice shakes. His avatar gets filled with bullet holes.
“What?” I ask. “What’s wrong?”
Dewey swallows. He won’t look at me. He puts the controller down. A nurse comes in. He picks the controller up again.
“How’re you doing, love?” she asks as she tries to fluff my pillows.
“Is Janie here?” I ask her. “Is she okay?”
“You just worry about yourself for now, all right?” she says. Her voice is honey, and I swallow quickly so I don’t puke. “Doctor’s going to come check you again soon. All right?”
He’ll check me everywhere and say things like “selective retrograde amnesia.” I’ll try not to puke in his direction and splatter his coat anyway.
The nurse checks the IV in my arm before
moving away and closing the door.
“Do you know who else is here?” I ask Dewey.
His eyes are fixed on the screen.
“Is Janie here?”
He shoots a Nazi zombie in the head. “I already told you,” he says. “No, I don’t know who the fuck is here, Micah.”
“But weren’t you there last night?”
“No, I wasn’t. Stop asking me.”
Dewey’s avatar ducks behind a crumbling wall. His avatar is bleeding from its leg but still walks fine. His supplies are low. The zombies are coming. They surround him. He sighs. “Oh, fuck it.”
He jumps out from behind the wall and his avatar fills with bullets. He goes down like a rock. A jingle plays. Game over. World fucked.
“Apocalypse music,” I say.
Dewey starts a new game. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say. Nothing. I don’t know what’s coming out of my mouth. No, wait. It’s more vomit. It tastes like vodka I don’t remember drinking.
“Shit, man,” Dewey says, pausing the game and leaning away. “Jesus. You’re disgusting. I fucking told you not to go last night, I—”
He swallows again. “Go back to sleep,” he says eventually.
I guess I listen. My eyes are closed, but I don’t really remember closing them. Nurses come and go, and doctors, and policemen. I guess I must open my eyes to see them, but I don’t remember that either.
Apocalypse music.
Janie declared an apocalypse.
She declared an apocalypse and told me I could pick the music. The leaves were the color of her hair and she stood on top of a mountain of rocks. She was laughing. Her fists were full of stones and she was stuffing them into her pockets.
“So what do you think?” she asks me. Her eyes are two shades brighter than ice, bluer than normal. “Everything needs a good soundtrack, Micah. The apocalypse most of all.”
I don’t remember what I said.
I don’t remember if it happened at all.
THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN
Once upon a time, a little girl built a house out of Skarpie markers. They were cheaper than the name brand and much more permanent—you had to shed a whole layer of skin to get rid of it. She sat on the floor of her house and drew on her arms until her parents huffed and puffed that markers were for paper, not skin. Besides, they told her, she would get ink poisoning.
So the little girl put her markers in her pocket and went on to build a house of matches. She shook them out of their boxes and watched them burn closer to her fingertips. She made wishes and blew them out. She stacked them in little rickety stacks and imagined them going up in flames, because she thought it’d be beautiful. She stacked the matches higher and higher until her teachers huffed and puffed that little girls shouldn’t play with dangerous things. Besides, they told her, it was against school rules.
So the little girl put her matches in her pocket and went on to build a house out of rocks. Her parents and her teachers and the whole town huffed and puffed, but no one could knock this house down and no one could keep her away. She named the house of rocks the Metaphor and spent every moment she could there with a boy who never huffed and never puffed. She always kept a marker and a match and at least five rocks in her pocket: the marker to write, the match to wish and burn, and the rock to keep her grounded.
And they all lived happily ever after, probably.
before
SEPTEMBER 8
When we were seven, I set Micah on fire. Mom always tells the story on our birthday when we blow out the candles together because she thinks it’s cute, but it totally isn’t because I was making a wish and his hair got in the way and I never got my Skip-It. Lesson learned: bad things happen to good people.
(I mean me, not Micah. He was hardly even burned. And I really, really, really wanted a Skip-It. Piper and Carrie and the other girls brought theirs to recess every day even though they weren’t supposed to, and I never even got one.)
So, to recap: bad things happen to good people, and that’s not fair. Bad things should happen to bad people, like Caleb Matthers.
Cue mustache twirling!
My pockets are full of stones. I drew runes for silence and speed and courage all over my arms and I’ve wished for luck on two matches. Usually I only light one before ninja missions, but one isn’t enough for tonight.
I park my car on the next street over and run through the Gherricks’ yard to our old street, and kick over the FOR SALE sign in front of my house before stopping at the door. It’s blue, not electric like I’d wanted, but still navy, because we painted it back when my parents acknowledged that I was capable of forming opinions. Not that I’m bitter!
Wait, that isn’t even a little bit true. I’m totally bitter. I am brimming with resentment and teen angst.
(And I fucking hate the new house.)
I try my key, but it turns out my parents have already changed the lock. I roll my eyes and hope God will convey the message to my parents, and go to the side of the house. Thankfully, the workmen haven’t discovered the loose basement window yet, but it still takes me awhile to coax open the rusted hinges. It’s Sneak-Out Route Number Seven, and I don’t use it often because of the seasonal spider nest. But you know. Desperate times.
I tumble into the basement and get a face full of carpet, which is still moldy from the flooding last fall. It’s all empty—and I go up the stairs and it still smells like the Wonderfully Happy Vivian Family, like scotch and the kind of perfume they spray on supermarket flowers to make them smell brighter than they really do, and dust. I think that’s a good way to describe us: our house smelled like dust even before we moved out.
I light a match to get me up the stairs and to my room because the house is all kinds of creepy without furniture, and I wish for perfection before I open the door, so all I smell is smoke. I take a breath and burst through, eyes forward, so that the only things I see are the desk and the window and the bookshelf, and not how empty the room is. I open the window and frown at the screen.
Kicking it out is the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done.
The noise it makes brings Micah to his window, and the fury that rises in me is sharp and everything, because this is how it should always be. Us, at our two windows, no screen, sneaking out of the house and driving without headlights just to get over here.
“Janie?” he asks. “Um, what? Are you supposed to be in there?”
I ignore that and slide the shelf across and he holds the other end by habit. I get on my knees and somersault over before I can make a better decision. For a second I’m unsteady and crooked and wondering if I will survive a two-story fall, and a second later I’m tumbling into Micah’s room and he’s saying “Shit!” on repeat and everything, everything is exquisitely funny.
“Oh my god,” I gasp through laughing. “Micah Carter, it is an honor to be alive with you.”
But he just yawns and starts to fall back into bed, and—I do not freaking think so.
So I pounce. I land with my knees on either side of him and he yelps and my hair is in his face and we are tangled in his blankets, and his eyes are the first thing I remember understanding.
For a moment all I want to do is turn off the lights and sleep in a bed with him in it, like we used to when we were little—climbing through the window and falling asleep together. I know the sound of his breathing better than any lullaby in the world.
Instead, I put my knee on his chest and say, “You’re welcome.”
He is still gasping. “What,” he says, “what the hell for?”
I push my knee down harder. “For not killing you,” I explain. “Benji told me that you can kill someone like this. Jump on their chest and land with your knee, break the sternum, et cetera. I just saved your life.”
Benji Arken is going into the navy. He is an asshole. Racist and misogynistic and homophobic, but he is cute, occasionally even funny, and he was a damn good kisser. And he knows how to kill people, which was not why we
broke up. We broke up because he didn’t shower between basketball practice and when he came to my house.
“Janie,” Micah said, and he was looking up at me and his eyes were wide and his pupils were dark and widening, and—
Not yet.
I climb off the bed and drag him up with me. “Come on,” I say. “I told you midnight. Why aren’t you dressed? Where’s your mask?”
“Dude, I have a calc test tomorrow,” he says, rubbing his eyes and yawning with too much effort to be genuine.
“Dude, I have the same calc test. Stop whining.” I throw open his closet and grab our emergency sheet rope (escape route number nine) and one of his (too) many black T-shirts from a wrinkled stack. I toss the T-shirt at his face. He doesn’t catch it.
“Where are we going?”
I blink, and I see the scene from his eyes. No, not his eyes. Camera lens. The Janie and Micah Show.
Me, standing by the wide, wide window staring at the wide, wide world, eyes closed and arms spread. Him, by the bed, pulling the T-shirt over just his face and tying it into a ninja mask, complaining that it makes his glasses fog over but fingers tapping, because we both knew. We could both feel it. The . . . the suspension. Something is going to happen.
Come on, Micah. Let’s pretend. Let’s pretend, just this one night, that nothing is wrong. That nothing has changed.
Janie and Micah. Micah and Janie.
Can you feel it? I can feel it, like we’re swinging and caught at the top of the arc, and we’re not falling but our stomachs are. The butterflies are going crazy, reacting a thousand times more violently than they ever will again. They’re fluttering up and up, and now they’re caught in my ribs and throat and head, and they’re so alive because they’re flirting with something so much more interesting. They’re flirting with life itself.
I pull the bookshelf into his room and tie the sheets to his bedpost, and I hold on tight and throw my leg out the window before I whirl around to meet his eyes—whoosh, shampoo commercial hair. Eyes glittering, light dimming, and just my voice, siren to sailor: “Come, my fellow ninja. We’re going on an adventure.”
