This Is Where the World Ends

by Amy Zhang

  Fairy-tale miracles. And I chose religious apocalypses.

  She had laughed when I told her, because we didn’t even plan this. We balance the world, accidentally.

  And now it’s tilting. It’s tilting and tilting.

  I look up, or down, maybe. The policemen are still watching.

  “Her parents are crazy,” I say. “They got half the library banned. Did you know that? Sophomore year, I remember all of that. Janie wanted to read Mrs. Dalloway, and Virginia Woolf was a lesbian. And they didn’t want Janie to become a lesbian. Her uncle’s on the school board, and her parents made him ban half the library.”

  “I remember that,” says the less fat one. “A few years ago, right?”

  “Sophomore year,” I say. “And she crawled into my room one night and we took my dad’s car and went to Goodwill. We bought books—she had a list of banned books. She left them in the trunk and the next morning we went to school early and she set up a library in her locker.”

  I don’t tell them how she made me tie a black T-shirt around my face like a ninja mask. I don’t tell them how I didn’t do much more than watch her. I don’t tell them how she looked, her hair falling out onto her shoulders and freckles sharp. I don’t tell them how I loved her, how I loved her apocalyptically. I don’t tell them how she stole her dad’s credit card, or how she took his favorite book from his bedside and burned it while I watched.

  It’s a good snapshot of us. Representative. Janie, furious and full of ideas. Me, following.

  “You drove to Goodwill as sophomores?” asks the police officer.

  “Janie drove,” I say. “Janie had her permit.”

  “Right,” the fatter one says. He is cautious now, slow. I am talking too fast, using my hands too much. I take a breath while he says, “That’s right. It’s all right.”

  The less fat one keeps scribbling.

  I might be getting her into trouble.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” I say to them. “Especially not her parents. Especially not her dad. Janie and her dad don’t like each other. Does he know about Nepal? He would never let her go to Nepal.”

  They still do not look at me.

  “Who else have you talked to?” I ask them.

  The less fat one narrows his eyes. “Just about the whole school, kid.”

  “The whole school?” That’s a lot of people. “Huh.”

  “But we’d like to talk to you again in particular, Micah,” says the bigger one. “And a couple more people too.”

  “Who?”

  “Some of Janie’s friends. Piper. Wes, Ander.” He watches me too closely. “Did you know them?”

  “Not really,” I tell them. “Janie likes Ander, so I hate him on principle.”

  “I should hope she likes him,” the bigger one says. He’s trying to smile, he’s trying to lighten the mood, but we’re in a fucking hospital and my head is broken. “They were—they are dating.”

  “Are they?” No one told me that. Or maybe they did. I shouldn’t be surprised. So they’re dating—Janie always gets her way.

  They do not ask me why I hate Ander on principle, but it’s because I am in love with her and always have been. Maybe I already told them. I don’t know.

  My head hurts.

  “I know, kid, and I’m sorry about that. We’ll be on our way soon enough,” says the less fat one, and sure enough, he’s putting his notepad away. I said that out loud; I thought I was getting better about telling the difference. “You just rest up, kid.”

  “There was a fire,” I say suddenly, and they pause on their way to the door. “A bonfire.”

  “There was,” says the fatter one.

  My hands. My fingers aren’t bandaged. None of me, except my head.

  “A lot of people were burned,” I say slowly.

  They policemen look at each other.

  “Am I burned?”

  The less fat detective twitches; he wants to reach for the notepad, but the other one stops him. “Were you at the party, Micah?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. I can’t, I can’t remember.

  “Okay, okay, son,” the fatter detective says. His voice is calm again. His hands are up. I take a breath. “Get some rest. We’ll talk soon.”

  Waldo doesn’t have many parties. There aren’t really any colleges around, so no one knows how to throw one. People drink in their basements after prom and blast music in earbuds so their parents won’t wake up upstairs. Waldo doesn’t have big parties, parties people talk about, parties people go to. Parties everyone goes to.

  But Janie did.

  There was a party and a bonfire.

  There was a party and a bonfire at Janie’s new house. I remember, suddenly, as we leave the hospital and the sun hurts my eyes.

  The fire was enormous.

  I think about this as Dewey drives me home. I thought my dad would have to pick me up, but I’m eighteen. I am an adult. I keep forgetting. I wish I remembered our birthday. Janie must have done something crazy for our eighteenth birthday.

  At one point, I ask Dewey why he’s doing all this, and he says my dad is paying him. That makes a little more sense, except of course that my dad has no money.

  There was a party and a bonfire and the bonfire was enormous.

  I repeat that to myself as Dewey bumps along roads that no amount of construction can smooth. They’re still trying, though. They’re always trying. At the corner of our neighborhood is another tractor laying down pebbles along the shoulders.

  Janie loved those pebbles.

  She left them anywhere.

  I wonder if the police know.

  I wonder if I should tell them.

  THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN

  Once upon a time, a girl and a boy went to the forest without their parents. They walked until they found a tree wide as the sky, a cemetery full of flowers, and best of all, a mountain of stones better than any witch’s house of candy, because it was theirs. Back at home, there were parents who told them to fatten up or skinny down, who said that they must save money for school and study and stop believing in fairy world. But at the mountain of stones, it was only the two of them, and that was enough.

  Sometimes they got lost. Sometimes they didn’t want to be found. But it was a big forest and a bigger world, and whenever they went anywhere without each other, they left trails of stones that led all the way back to each other.

  Because they loved each other with the biggest love of all.

  before

  SEPTEMBER 10

  Ander Cameron is on a ten-phase, month-long, totally non-creepy schedule to fall in love with me. I spent two weeks planning us out on pages 158 to 176 of my last journal, and he—bless his beautiful heart—has rushed ahead this morning. Being the most perfect person in all the inhabitable planets in the universe, Ander Cameron has brought me coffee this morning. He didn’t have to do that for another week, but god, isn’t punctuality hot? (It totally is.)

  And it gets better—he did it right! Chocolate hazelnut latte with chocolate whipped cream. He walks into English, slides it down on my desk, flashes those perfectly perfect teeth, and says, “Hey. That’s what Piper usually grabs, right?”

  One of the perks of being best friends with Piper Blythe is that she lives right next to Starbucks and picks up coffee every morning. But Piper is at an orthodontist appointment today, and I had already steeled myself to the horrible reality of trying to survive today without caffeine, even though I’m still trying to make up the sleep I lost for Carrie, and then—well, hello, Prince freaking Charming.

  “You’re the best,” I tell him, like he doesn’t already know, and fluff out my hair in his direction so he can catch a whiff. Lemon raspberry keratin strengthening shampoo and conditioner—I smell like a freaking sunrise. And it works! He leans in, just a little bit, but the little things matter most.

  But he, on the other hand, smells like salt and deodorant, which is preferable to, like, no deodorant, I guess. He smells like salt in my
head too, just more like the ocean and less like sweat. Alas, life isn’t perfect. Who knew?

  Here is what you should know about Ander Cameron:

  1. His soul is the color of a humid day, when there’s just the thinnest layer of clouds hiding the sky. You know there’s something behind there—it might be rain or sun or thunder, but you can’t quite tell yet.

  2. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, he goes to the community college and strips—I mean disrobes—for the drawing class. Ander isn’t beach-boy hot, he’s hand-assembled-by-God hot. He’s made of the kind of angel parts that would have had Michelangelo swooning, and he pretends not to know.

  3. Okay, so he’s kind of a douchebag. That’s okay, though. It’s high school. Everyone’s a douchebag.

  The bell rings, and someone nasally comes on the PA and says the pledge, and Mr. Markus does attendance, and Micah and Dewey still aren’t here. Mr. Markus sighs when he sees their empty desks (again) and passes a hand over his face. He has time-travel hands, at least twenty years older than the rest of him, wrinkled and veined and knobby, nails like moons. I sketch them on the desk while he talks. (I figure that the no-drawing-on-desks rule mostly applies to penises.)

  “The first part of your senior projects is due today,” says Mr. Markus. Collective sigh from the class, but not me, because I’ve talked my way into an extension. We’re supposed to write an autobiography, because you have to understand yourself before you can understand anything else.

  But my project is multimedia and my autobio is going to document my process—I’m fracturing fairy tales and fracturing them again until they fit my life, and it isn’t due until the end of the year. Anyway, Mr. Markus couldn’t argue when I told him I knew myself pretty well already.

  “As of five minutes ago,” he continues, “I’ve received four. This is pitiful. I want to remind all of you that your senior projects are seventy-five percent of your English grade. Fail this and you won’t graduate. Work.”

  Gideon Markus isn’t one to waste words, because he is a genius. A lot of people hate Mr. Markus because he doesn’t bullshit them, but I think they also like him for the same reason.

  There’s a pause, and then a mad rush to the laptop cart, but I just lick the chocolate whipped cream from my coffee and open my journal. Journal Number Twelve feels promising. It’s already thick with envelopes and movie stubs and silly things I’ll page through and smile at when I’m gray, which is such a relief after the obsessive, writing-only neatness of Number Eleven. Twelve is a good number, heavy with significance: dancing princesses, brothers turned to swans, doors in heaven. (Number Thirteen will be a different story, but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.)

  It’s too early in the day to be actually productive, so I pull out a Skarpie and flip through the index of Virginia Woolf quotes at the beginning of Journal Number Twelve to find one to write on my arm. I’m always covered in Virginia Woolf quotes because I’m in love with her. If I could hook up with one person in all of history, I’d pick Virginia in a heartbeat.

  I decide on: Arrange whatever pieces come your way. I think it fits my senior project pretty well, and that’s probably enough work for today. I open Journal Number Twelve to a new page and put the Skarpie to the margin and continue to draw. Planets and universes, fairy tales and girls who arrange the pieces that come to them, and in the center: a star, dissolving, an atom spewing away toward earth with twin souls inside. That’s one atom, singular, with a spastic and dancing electron field brighter than any sun.

  Across the room, Mr. Markus is scolding Wes Bennet for not working, and I steal the words and unravel them until he’s narrating in his sandpaper voice.

  Once upon a time, he says, and I draw in furious little strokes, in the beginning, there was no such thing as darkness. There were only stars bridged by light, and a single atom with wings.

  Wings—they’re going to be my masterpiece. They’re going to blow everyone away, out of the water, into oblivion. Good-bye, Wes Bennet and your fuck-the-system paper on American education. So long, Piper Blythe and your (admittedly really cool) thesis on cognitive biases and human failure. Even you, Micah, and your apocalypses. My wings are going to put you all to shame.

  I start sketching again: wire for the frame, canvas over bamboo, feathers cut from Andersen and Grimm. Fairy-tale monster wings, shaped like butterfly but feathered like bird, clawed like bat and wider than dragon.

  Then the Skarpie lines trail and jerk, learning to fly. They morph into birds and trees and veins and dreamers and a few rabid scribble creatures that snarl at the idea of being mistakes. There. I have one wing stretching and another that collapses into the whole wide world.

  Mr. Markus almost didn’t agree to my proposal. I wheedled and begged and bribed (with cookies) the yes out of him. He says my problem is that I was born with a thousand beginnings and no endings at all. It’s hard to argue with that, because there’s an awful lot of proof in the senior studio art room. Projects upon unfinished projects: a teapot with no lid, four saucers and one teacup, a clay map of the world minus Australia, seven or eight untrimmed bowls, one ball of wedged clay that I lost and found after it fossilized and covered in Viking runes for luck.

  Not this time, though. I will finish the wings if it kills me. I will! You’ll see.

  The door bursts open. Dewey struts in with his stupid collar to his chin and Micah trails in behind him with cartoonishly bad bedhead and caffeine in his fingers. You see guys doing the air piano thing all the time, tapping their fingers on the edges of the desk while they sit sprawled in the chair with their legs wide open, thinking they’re so cool. Micah doesn’t do that. Micah is all nervous habit and music that never goes away.

  Mr. Markus barely spares them a glance. “Sit down,” he says, and then goes back to typing. That’s another thing about Mr. Markus—he does all of our projects with us. He doesn’t just sit on the computer with the screen turned away so he can grade papers or play games or watch porn.

  Micah ducks his head and slides into a desk while Dewey mutters something about how it’s not his fault that Micah drives a piece of shit. Micah catches me licking whipped cream off my finger and smiles, but I have to ignore him because right then—

  “Hey,” Ander whispers. He leans over, and his angel smile makes me feel just right: quirky but not hipster, talented but not cocky, sunshine without the burn. “I like those shoes on you.”

  Such adorable bullshit. Ander is the worst flirt in the world, and he has no idea at all. Being with him is like riding a hot air balloon inflated by his ego—the view is great, the heat is everywhere. I don’t know why I like him, just that I do, and that’s okay. It is! People say because too much. You don’t always need a reason. I want cliché and simple. I want Journal Number Twelve to be heat and moments. Condensation gathering on Starbucks cups with my name spelled wrong. White people almost kissing. Boyfriend in plaid. Hot dog legs and sunshine.

  Ander leans a bit more. This is important, the leaning, because it makes my heart beat so hard it feels like it’s going to break a rib. If I die of a heart attack or something one day (GOD FORBID—I will not die of something boring, I won’t), it will have been caused by this moment. The corners of his mouth quirk and he shows his gorgeous teeth again, and my insides go all soft because our babies would be the most perfect babies in the history of ever.

  “Hey,” he says again, catching sight of my sketches. He pushes my hand back to look at the scribbles, the universes and wings and stars, and I freeze. “That’s really pretty. Needs a rocket ship, though. Vroom.”

  No. You don’t get to look, angel boy. You don’t get to push my hand aside.

  But I don’t snatch it away. I swallow and I—

  What do I do?

  I add a rocket ship. I add a goddamn rocket ship.

  (Side note: did he say vroom?)

  “Now go write your paper,” I say, bumping my shoulder against his. Not even to touch him—okay, a little bit to touch him—but to angle my
self away.

  But aren’t boyfriends—would be, will be—supposed to be like this? Peeking over your shoulder and grinning their lopsided grins, faking interest in your stupid little scribbles. I wanted this so badly when I was dating Jeff Martin, who only ever wanted to make out, which would have been fine if he didn’t nibble so much.

  “Mr. Carter,” Mr. Markus says sharply. “Why bother coming to class at all? You show up late, and you make no effort at all to even pretend to work. Your classmates, at least, give that much. I can only assume that you’re finished with your paper, as you and Mr. Dewey seem far more preoccupied by rubber bands than your education.”

  Micah’s head snaps up. His entire head this time, not just his eyes, and it looks painful. Everything Micah does looks painful. He moves too quickly, and everything looks like a flinch. I can’t decide if Micah is cute or not, but once I heard a couple of sophomores saying that he has bedroom eyes.

  Not that I was jealous or anything.

  It’s just that—well, we had already drawn lines on our soul and stabbed our little flags into it. We had claimed. Him: music and reality and all the words too shy to be spoken. Me: art and dreams in Technicolor and everything that had ever happened in sunshine and all the secrets exchanged in moonlight. We agreed on all of that before even the dinosaurs stomped around, and he isn’t allowed to change that now.

  And it’s not like they noticed before. Before his acne cleared up and the barber gave him that undercut (which I maintain is really a Hitler Youth haircut) and hipster glasses were suddenly in. I did. I always knew that his best feature was his eyelashes. And that his glasses prescription is wrong, so when he’s squinting and his eyelashes get all tangled and he does that rapid fluttery blinking thing, it’s because he can’t see, not because he understands you, stupid little sophomores.

  But anyway.

  “Um,” says Micah. His rubber-band gun drops onto his desk.

  Next to him, Dewey mutters, “Yeah, rubber bands trump this shithole.”