This Is Where the World Ends

by Amy Zhang

“Fantastic,” says Mr. Markus, leaning back in his chair and motioning for Micah to go to the podium in the front. “Then, please. Read us your papers. We’ll have group critique.”

  Dewey claps Micah on the shoulder. “All you, man.”

  I can see Micah swallow from across the room.

  It takes him an eternity, two, to make his way to the front. His throat clenches and his paper wrinkles in his hands, and someone giggles. I glare in the general direction. My glare razes—I’ve spent too long perfecting it in the mirror for it not to. Kelsey Davenport quivers.

  The razing is okay. It’s politeness, really, to make sure no one makes fun of Micah. We’re very good about our interaction now, in school. Seventh grade was the hardest, when I got boobs and he got pimples, and we needed each other more than anything but couldn’t even talk in school because I thought I was too cool. But it really is better this way. I think. It’s easier for both of us to have our own friends at school and not try to combine them, but maybe a little easier for me than for him.

  “If there is one thing that science and religion agree on,” he begins, stutters, coughs, clears his throat. “If there is one thing that science and religion agree on, it’s the fact that the world is going to end. Maybe the sun will go out or God will rain his wrath down or a giant wolf will swallow the earth whole, but throughout it all is the pervasive idea of entropy. It’s all unraveling. Everything is stumbling toward an ending.”

  Ander coughs. His lips are twitching, and he catches Wes Bennet’s eye, and they exchange their jock-y smirks. (Sigh. I have a massive crush on an asshole. How cliché.) Micah is bright red, and he does his head-duck thing, where he pulls his shoulders to his ears and doesn’t know where to look.

  Micah lives like an apology. He blushes when he breathes because he’s taking someone else’s air. It’s like all Micah wants is to disappear, and he thinks if he’s quiet enough, if he keeps his eyes on the ground and barely breathes and treads lightly, people will forget he exists.

  But he has it all wrong. Here is how you disappear: you dive into your DNA and rip out everything but carbon. You copy. Carbon copy—see what I did there? And then you keep going. You apply to college because you’re supposed to and then you complain about debt and the classes and the whole system because that’s what everyone else does. You run into businessmen in untailored suits and you marry the lamest one and you move into a nice picture-perfect house full of clock hands that point at the cemetery. Don’t worry. The tide will sweep you right up.

  I stare at him, hard, and tug on our soul until he looks at me.

  “More than anything,” I mouth to him since no one is looking, and his shoulders relax. He smiles. His eyes and my eyes—our soul is so bright.

  Oh, Micah. I’ll never let the tide take us.

  But then Ander glances over again and gives me a flashing side grin, there and gone, and I know I’m sitting at a desk and everything, but still—my knees go Jell-O weak.

  after

  NOVEMBER 19

  They meant it. The police, I mean. They meant it when they said that we would talk soon. They ask me about everything. Everything. They ask me about Janie, and that is the same thing.

  They tell me about the fire.

  They tell me that they think someone set it.

  “Yes,” I say. “It was a bonfire. Wasn’t it?”

  Yes, they say, impatient. I imagine because they’ve said it before. Yes, it was a bonfire. But the bonfire spread. Someone probably made it spread.

  “Who?” I ask.

  They tell me there was gasoline.

  They tell me that it was everywhere, but especially the second floor. Especially her room.

  They ask me if I knew that Janie and I spent that entire night together. They ask me why that was, since we didn’t want anyone to know we were friends. They ask me again why that was.

  The truth is I don’t know how to answer. She is Janie Vivian, and I am Micah Carter. I don’t know how to explain it further than that.

  Dewey is still babysitting. After the police leave, I go down to the basement and find him playing Metatron again.

  “You gotta just stop talking to those assholes,” he says when he sees me. “Your dad told me to tell you not to say anything else to them unless they get a search warrant or something.”

  I ignore that, because my dad can tell me himself if he ever decides to come home. Where is he again? I don’t care enough to ask. “I want to see her house,” I say.

  Dewey plays Metatron with his entire body. He ducks a bullet and a zombie bite and lunges forward to shoot. “Nothing to see,” he says, and ducks again. He hits his head on the edge of the coffee table. “Oh, fuck.” He pauses the game to glare at me like it’s my fault. “Will you grab a fucking controller already?”

  “Will you drive?” My license is suspended until further notice. I’m almost able to walk in a straight line, though, so the reinstatement is within sight.

  “Why the fuck would I do that?”

  “I’m going either way,” I say. “I just don’t want to walk.”

  It’s cold, which is weird. I keep walking outside in shorts because I’m still expecting September. But of course it isn’t September.

  “Give me a sec,” Dewey says, and starts the game over.

  I start back up the stairs.

  “All right—all right! I’m coming. Dammit, Micah.”

  We head toward the quarry. They’re doing construction on the roads. There’s gravel on the shoulders to prepare for the tar, and I keep looking at it. I don’t know why.

  I mention this to Dewey and he tells me that I already know this, and I remember that I do. I think this is a good sign.

  It is cloudy today. It is the kind of cloudy that makes everything look colorless. I think about her eyes.

  Dewey drives and I check my phone. Janie has not texted me back. I have sent her a text every morning at 7:31, but she has not texted back.

  Dewey is a worse driver sober than drunk. He takes the turn into Waldo’s only nice neighborhood, opposite the turn into the quarry, but he takes it sloppily and swerves into the sidewalk just as someone passes.

  He almost kills her but doesn’t, and as Dewey swears and honks, I twist in my seat.

  “That’s Piper,” I say, but she doesn’t even stop to flip us off. She’s already going. Gone. “She was crying.”

  Dewey reverses and gets the car back onto the road. “She wasn’t crying.”

  “Why was she crying?”

  “She wasn’t fucking crying,” Dewey says. He doesn’t look at me.

  We drive in silence.

  The trees here are tall, the houses are nearly taller. They look obscene and hollow. The shutters are fake, and the houses are too far apart to climb from window to window. It’s a new development and most of the houses are empty, because no one in Waldo has the money to live here. Of course Janie hated it.

  Dewey turns again, and I see it. He’s right. There’s nothing left to see. Except the black toothpick frame of the house. The beams poke out of the ground like the ribs of a giant. They remind me of Janie’s fairy tales. Nothing else is black. They don’t tell you that about fires. I thought it would all be burned black, but it’s not. Everything is gray. It is all the same color as the sky.

  I am out of the car, but I don’t remember unbuckling my seat belt. Or opening the door. But I am outside and it’s dry and it still smells like fire.

  The grass is crisp under my feet.

  “Micah, don’t,” I hear Dewey say.

  There is yellow tape everywhere, but I duck under. I ignore Dewey, and he doesn’t come after me.

  The world is tilting, but I still don’t remember.

  The sun is hidden, but it still hurts my eyes.

  And my lungs.

  Among the toothpicks is half an armchair. The chimney and the fireplace. Something that might have been a piano. I don’t remember the armchair. They must have gotten it after they moved. That’s right. I reme
mber Janie talking about the new furniture, and hating that too.

  “Micah?”

  I flinch, and turn to see Mr. Vivian standing at the end of the driveway, and Dewey diving back into the car to avoid whatever is going to happen next. Janie’s dad is a big man, but he looks gray too. He used to be on the football team at Waldo High, and the track team. He used to date Piper’s mom, and also Wes Bennet’s mom, and they might have overlapped. Janie told me that freshman year. She was convinced her parents could have been happy with anyone but each other.

  “Isn’t that funny?” she had said. We had just come back from a ninja mission. She was perched on the windowsill, about to climb away. “If there’s one person in the world you should be with, there must be one person in the world you shouldn’t be with. Well, I mean, a lot of people. But one person in particular. Don’t you think it’s funny that out of all the people in the whole wide world, my parents ended up with each other? I do.”

  It’s not a helpful memory. It’s not what I came here to remember.

  “Micah, what are you doing here?” asks Mr. Vivian. He walks up the driveway slowly but doesn’t cross the yellow tape.

  I watch him but keep walking backward. The ash is thickening. It reaches my ankles. It covers my shoes. I look up; the sky is the same color as the ground. “Is this where her room used to be?” I ask him.

  His jaw is tight.

  I look around. The trees are fine, mostly. Some of the branches are burned, but for the most part, they’re okay. They cage the house in.

  “She lied,” I said. “You can’t see the Metaphor from here.”

  “Micah, you know you can’t be here,” he calls. “It’s blocked off for a reason. And you—you especially can’t be here.”

  He’s almost yelling. He says you like it’s shit in his mouth.

  “Will you move back now?” I ask.

  There is a screw in his jawbone and it’s tightening and the tension is too much.

  “Leave,” he tells me, and I wish—I wish I could. But my feet have sunk into the ash. I can only look at him. His eyes are bluer than Janie’s. His hair is dark, but his beard is red like her hair. I can see Janie in him. I would never tell her that. She would never listen. She would probably punch me if I said it. But I can see her in him.

  “Micah,” he says. “I want you off my property. I want you to leave. I never want you near my family again. I don’t ever want to find you here again. The next time I want to see you is in court.”

  You can see the quarry from here, so that part was true. But I can’t see the Metaphor. There’s Old Eell’s barn and so I should be able to see the Metaphor, and Janie wouldn’t lie about that. Janie would never lie about the Metaphor.

  “I have to go,” I say, and I stumble past him and down the driveway, where Dewey is waiting in his car. I don’t remember when he did that. He must have dived in when he saw Mr. Vivian, which doesn’t surprise me. Dewey usually solves problems by getting the fuck out of there.

  I am still walking toward Dewey’s car, I am still staring at my best friend who is an asshole safe inside, I am still wondering why I couldn’t see the Metaphor from the top of the hill.

  But then suddenly I am also in my bed, and the room is dark, and Janie is beside me. We are tangled in the blankets. Her head is in my pillow and she is screaming. Her father is standing in the door, and he fills the room.

  The moment fractures and turns to dust. Ash.

  I stumble into the car.

  “Let’s drive to the quarry,” I tell Dewey, and he does.

  In the car, I remember again. “What did Janie’s dad mean, about court? And me?”

  Dewey hauls ass towards the quarry, away from the tall, empty houses. “He didn’t mean anything.”

  “You didn’t even hear.”

  “So why the fuck are you asking me, then?”

  “Because you’re not telling me something,” I say, and his hands tighten on the steering wheel. “My dad too. He always says he’s too tired to talk when I ask him. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” he says, taking a turn that throws me against the door. “Nothing’s going on. Keep your damn mouth shut and nothing’s going to happen. If you don’t remember it, don’t fucking talk about it. That’s it. It’s easy.”

  “What’s easy?”

  The road is now gravel. Pebbles. “Dammit, Micah. What the hell do you think? Use your stupid busted head. Why the hell do you think the police have been around so much? Why do you think they keep wanting to talk about the fire?”

  When he puts it like that, the answer is obvious.

  They think I set it.

  Dewey slows to a stop by the edge of the quarry.

  The deepest part of the quarry is two hundred and nineteen feet deep. The water rarely gets warmer than fifty degrees in the dead of summer. This used to be the greatest limestone mine in the northern Midwest, which is hard to imagine. It’s hard to imagine anything under the water. It’s too dark.

  The quarry is blocked off by a chain fence that is never closed. There is a NO TRESPASSING sign that is missing most of its letters. On the far side, there is a ledge where stoners dare each other to jump. On this side, there is Old Eell’s barn, where Janie used to store cheap vodka. Next to it was a huge pile of rocks left over from the mining.

  The reason I couldn’t see it from Janie’s house is that it’s not there.

  “Micah,” Dewey says as we pull up. “Listen, don’t freak out—”

  I am already out of the car.

  The Metaphor was enormous and ugly and now it’s only missing.

  Dewey follows me.

  His hands are in his pockets when I turn and stare at him.

  “Where is it?” I ask.

  He kicks the ground. Technically it is still littered with the stupid rocks, but the mountain is gone. The entire landscape is different. It almost looks nice now.

  “What the hell happened? Does Janie know?”

  Dewey doesn’t look at me. “Of course she knew. She threw a fucking tantrum. Not like that made a difference.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before? Why didn’t you tell me about this first?”

  I turn and look around. It shouldn’t come as a surprise now, everything disappearing. But it does, my blood is in my head and I don’t remember which way is up anymore.

  I start forward toward the rough rock-strewn circle, darker than the rest of the shore, where Janie and I spent every Thursday afternoon since fourth grade.

  Gravity is irrelevant.

  My head hits the ground. Pain is everything, and that is when Janie comes back. Because she knows that I cannot understand living without her.

  Her fingers are in my hair, her lips at my ear. “Of course I know that.”

  I don’t open my eyes.

  “Of course I know.”

  But if I were to open them, she’d be there. Her hair like fire falling into my eyes as she leans over me.

  “Janie,” I say. “Janie.”

  She smells like cinnamon and vodka. Lemons and sleep.

  Someone is dragging me to my feet. Dewey is swearing in my ear, so it can’t be Janie. But I keep my eyes closed still.

  It’s crazy. I’m going crazy.

  “You’re not going crazy,” she whispers to me. “You’ve been here for ages.”

  THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN

  Once upon a time there were two beautiful kingdoms. The prince of the first kingdom was golden and kind and the pride of the kingdom. The princess of the second kingdom was good and lovely and had a very large trust fund dowry. The fell in love at first sight and swore to love each other forever, because of course they would. Of course. He gave her flowers for her hair and she gave him gold for his treasury, and they were horribly, desperately happy. On their wedding day, both kingdoms rejoiced, and their day went on far longer than it should have because not even the sun could bear to stop smiling at them.

  But then the prince took the princess back to his small
kingdom and they became the king and queen, and slowly things began to change. The king’s kingdom was small and poor—there were no cocktail balls for the queen to dance at and no other princesses drowning in pearls for her to talk to, and she was lonely. She sat in the castle by herself most days and nights while the king took her money and left without telling her where he was going. The king and queen fought and cried and the nights began to last longer and longer, because not even the sun could bear to look at them.

  When they could no longer stand it, they went to the fairies and begged them to make them happy again. The king and queen thought the fairies were good, but really they were just stupid, and they told the king and queen that if they should have a baby, all would be well again.

  All except one. One fairy warned the king and queen that the child would be cursed, but no one listened to her.

  Soon after, a princess was born. The stupid fairies came and cooed over her cradle and the kingdom rejoiced and the sun peeked out again, and the king and queen sat together with smiles pasted on their faces.

  Of course it didn’t last. One day, the doors burst open and the last fairy flew in, furious. “Fools,” she seethed, one long finger stretched toward the king and queen. “How dare you? This child was cursed from her first breath. She will not save your marriage, and you will ruin her. Listen well. On her eighteenth birthday, at sunset, she will blow out her birthday candle and be gone from you forever. And then what will you do?”

  The king and queen trembled and clutched their princess so tightly that she wailed. And as she grew, they held on ever tighter. Because they would never let her out of their sight, the princess grew up watching them scream and sob. She counted the days until her eighteenth birthday, and the king and queen held on tighter still, avoiding each other’s eyes but thinking the same thing: what will we do then?

  before

  SEPTEMBER 18

  “Are you coming over?” Piper asks as the school empties into the parking lot. “I have Chobani. And if I don’t learn an entire chapter of calc tonight, I’m going to fail the class.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “It’s Thursday! Thursday!” I’ve saved all of my daily allotment of exclamation marks for this moment. (Jeff Martin told me I was too enthusiastic once and tried to limit my exclamation marks. Eventually I told him to fuck off, but, well . . . you know. Bad habits don’t die young.)