by Amy Zhang
It has been a preposterously long day. Ander faked sick to skip the psych test and totally screwed over Phase Six, Step Fourteen: study hall date, and then I went to my senior studio and found out that three of my bowls had exploded in the kiln, and I had to lie when Mr. Dempsey asked me if I had let them dry before I loaded them, and then I probably failed my word-of-the-day quiz in Spanish, and then the cafeteria didn’t have parfaits at lunch even though they always have parfaits at lunch on Thursdays.
But Thursday is Metaphor Day, Janie and Micah Day, and that’s the only reason I didn’t fake cramps and go home early. Piper waves and I blow a kiss back, and we go off in our separate directions. I love Piper Blythe and everything about our no-commitment, zero-accountability, convenient-as-hell friendship. No one gets mad when texts aren’t answered or plans are blown off, because we both get the big picture. This is high school, and no one really wants to remember high school. In a few months, we’ll walk off the stage at graduation and spend the summer together, we’ll text each other for the first few weeks of college, and then we’ll lose touch. And that’s okay. The world is so much bigger than the two of us.
I throw my backpack in the backseat and the sun comes out—same moment, literally, and I throw my head back and arms out and laugh. People are staring and I drink that in too, because I’m Janie Vivian and I’m alive.
I open my eyes and I see Micah, immediately, two rows across and halfway down the lot. His grin turns all blushy when I catch him, and he tries to turn away but I grab our soul and tug, hard, and his eyes snap back to mine.
“Race you,” I mouth to him, and he’s already in his car because twin telepathy, duh.
“Cheater!” I yell as I dive into my car. People are staring, so who cares? Who cares if I’m loud? We are young and free and careless. We are laughing and reckless and us.
(Not that they know that. They just think I’m crazy and too liberal with exclamation marks, and they’re totally right.)
He’s out of the parking lot before me, but I still have the advantage, because my car probably won’t fall apart if I drive over fifty. Micah’s car proves that miracles are real every time it starts. Also, he’s going to slow down at the crosswalk because he doesn’t want to run over the middle schoolers. Not that I want to, of course, but natural selection was coming for the slower ones, anyway.
(Kidding! Mostly.)
But he does stop at the crosswalk and I floor the gas pedal, and sure, the crossing guard doesn’t scream after him, but he’s not winning anymore either. I roll down the windows and flash loser back at him as I tear through the town, past the tutting grandmothers (one of whom might be mine? I go by too fast. Oops) and the cross country team and the new Moms Who Walk club. My tires set the road on fire and my laughter tickles the sun, and two minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, I’m braking hard and skidding to avoid driving straight into the Metaphor.
I leap out of the car and spin around, ready to do my touchdown dance in Micah’s losing face, but—where is he? Ugh. I knew his car was going to give out. What’s the point of a glorious victory if no one’s there to witness it?
So I sit down against the Metaphor to wait with all the calc notes I didn’t take. I shove a few more rocks in my pockets and lean back, and slowly, the Metaphor starts to swallow me. I tilt my head back and smile at it. “I love you too,” I say.
And I do, truly, madly. We found the Metaphor when we were ten. It was early in the summer and we weren’t supposed to leave the neighborhood, and we didn’t really, if you think about it. The signs at the town limits say WELCOME, NEIGHBOR in a font that looks a little too close to Comic Sans, but if everyone is a neighbor that must mean that all of Waldo is just one neighborhood.
Micah was hesitant and sweet—ugh, so many feelings for ten-year-old Micah. He was floppy-haired and shy and freckly and awkward and newly bespectacled and he just wanted to stay in the backyard, and it was my duty as a citizen of the earth to show him how big it was. (And it still is. The earth is awfully big. I’m going to see all of it) We rode our bikes through evil old Ms. Capaldi’s lawn and down a few roads and took a few turns and then we were at the quarry like magic.
Everyone warns you about the quarry. So a few (dozen) people have died and disappeared here—why does that matter? It’s beautiful here. Sometimes it’s so still that you can feel the earth revolving.
I didn’t see that, at first, or feel it. The first thing I saw was the Metaphor, which wasn’t the Metaphor yet. (It would be in about a minute. Patience, grasshopper.)
It’s big enough to block the quarry, which is enormous. Let’s just willfully disregard that just about anything would have blocked out the quarry to my barely four-foot eye level. It really is huge. At least (or almost) two stories tall on good days, probably. It’s made up of all of the leftover rock scraps from when the quarry still had granite, so the rocks range from pebble to pet sized, and on that day when we were ten years old and the sun was everywhere and that moment was all that mattered, we stopped our bikes at the bottom and looked up and up and up.
“Janie? What are you—”
I was already climbing, or at least I was trying. The pebbles looked steady from the ground, but they started to crumble as soon as I started climbing, and I was back on the ground within a few seconds, probably, but they were worth it.
“Oh my god,” I said, my voice all hushed and awed because there was something holy about the pile of rocks but also because I was still breathless from the fall. “It’s like a metaphor for our lives, Micah. Wait—that’s perfect! The Metaphor for Our Lives. That’s what we’ll call it!”
“What?”
We had just learned about metaphors that day, and Micah clearly hadn’t been paying attention. I was obsessed. I wrote a whole page of them in my notebook and didn’t listen while the teacher explained why they were useful, because some things should just be beautiful and useless.
I ticked them off. “Metaphor one: it’s impossible to climb. Inevitably, you end up on the ground with your breath knocked out of you. Metaphor two: see these?” I picked up a rock and held it up to him, but when he reached for it, I retracted my hand. I didn’t actually want to let go of it. I put it in my pocket. (Later, I’d write a Virginia Woolf quote on it: Fear no more. In case you doubted that this was the beginning of everything.) “See how smooth they are? Smooth and all the same, like thoughts that people kick around until they’re smooth and all the same. Metaphor three—”
“They’re not all the same,” Micah argued, squatting and squinting at the base of the Metaphor. “You’re just not looking close enough. Most of them aren’t even the same size.”
“You’re ruining my moment,” I said, and we argued back and forth like we still do, and we never did get to the third Metaphor. But the point is that that was the first time I climbed and fell off the Metaphor, that was the first time I had a rock in my pocket, that was the first time we were really and truly free and alive and us. We were born that day.
I kick my calc stuff aside and get to my feet and start climbing again. I was going to wait for Micah, but I can’t stand it any longer. Climbing is always the first and last thing I do here. One of these days, I’ll get to the top. I will. But today I’m only a few feet up when I finally hear Micah pull up. His door slams, and I hop back onto even ground before the Metaphor can throw me.
“Late much?” I ask him as he comes toward me. He has a piece of paper crumpled in his fist. I frown. “What is that?”
“This? This is a goddamn speeding ticket,” he snaps. “You rushed ahead and almost killed a fourth grader and got the attention of every grandma in Waldo, and now I have to pay a fucking two hundred dollar fine for speeding.”
I shrug. “Wouldn’t be a problem if you drove faster.”
He throws his hands in the air. “That doesn’t even make sense! Janie, I’m serious, I have no idea how the fuck I’m going to pay for this and my dad is going to kill me—”
“Oh, don’t be a
drama queen, Micah,” I say, waving the ticket away. “You still have money from Pizza Rancheroo.”
“God dammit, Janie, this happens every single fucking time! You get away with shitloads and I’m left with—”
“Shhhhh,” I say, throwing back my head. “Micah. Hey, Micah. Look at that.”
He looks up without thinking and squints. “What?” He still sounds annoyed. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”
“Nothing. Just the sky. Isn’t it beautiful?”
He opens his mouth to snap something else, but he takes a deep breath instead. “Whatever. Can we just do calc already? We’re like three weeks into school and I’m already going to fail. Do you get this optimization shit? Because I don’t.”
Of course I don’t. Neither of us is meant for calculus. I can’t see the world in numbers or molecules. I just can’t. When I look around, I see colors smells motions beginnings. I see sky and wind and hope like birds and art like fire and every desperate wish ever made.
“Oh, forget calc,” I say, and dive into my bag for my book of fairy tales and a pair of scissors. “Here, help me make feathers.”
He’s paging through his notes, frowning and squinting. The sun makes the pages too bright and the wind blows over the Metaphor to ruffle his hair and his annoyance grows on his face like mold.
“Micah, look.” I wave my hand in his face. “I’m making wings, remember? I told you.”
“Huh,” he says, barely glancing over.
I sigh, tragic. “Fine. I’ll do it myself. Hey, are you coming to wrestling regionals next week? There’s gonna be a fan bus.”
We have one of the best wrestling teams in the nation. Maybe because they’re good, but probably because we’re also one of the only schools where wrestling is a fall sport instead of a winter one. Ander tried to explain to me once why we had to be different, but I wasn’t really listening because I was too busy imagining him in a skintight uniform.
“Hell no.”
“Why not? I want you to come. It’ll be fun. I’ve never gone to a wrestling match before.” I don’t really care about wrestling. I’m rooting for the wrestlers because my ten-phase, six-month, totally non-creepy plan requires cuddling on the bus back from regionals, hopefully celebratory, but I’ll take consolidation cuddling too. Ander’s going crazy. It’s adorable. I haven’t seen him in a while because he’s got a scholarship riding on his state ranking, which all depends on regionals. Or something. I don’t know. I just know it’s important to him and I get to see him in a skintight uniform.
Ander Cameron in a skintight uniform. I sigh and stretch out, and my foot knocks Micah’s notes into the wind.
“Shit. God, Janie,” he snaps. “I just organized those.”
And he’s not even a little bit joking. He’s not smiling at all, and when I see that, words flash in neon in my head: how did we get here?
Micah saved my life once. We were in second grade, and my appendix exploded and the hospital was really ridiculously low on my blood type. (My dad threatened to sue, but my mom didn’t want to and it was her money, and they fought about how he was anal retentive and she didn’t care enough, blah blah blah.) But Micah and I have the same blood type because of course we do, and the doctor knew because there’s only one hospital in Waldo so the doctors know everything. He asked Micah to donate even though he probably still weighed less than a Chihuahua then. Micah thought about it. (Can’t you just picture it? Baby Micah with his head of overflowing curls and his brown-green-gray eyes taking over his face, all scared and determined.) He hugged his dad and told him that he wasn’t really mad about what had happened with his mom, and he went with the doctor.
Because he thought he was going to die.
Later, he came to visit me, all wrapped up in bed, and I grinned at him through the meds and said, “Did you really think you would die by donating blood?”
He muttered something about a movie and blood loss. He said the doctor had had the kind of voice that made everything into an ultimatum and used words that were too big and it had been an honest mistake, and no, he wouldn’t do it again.
He totally would, though. I knew that.
I guess what bothers me now is that I don’t know if he would do it again. Sometimes at lunch I watch him and Dewey flicking food at each other and I just can’t remember how we got here. We used to know each other to the bone. But now that we’re not talking every single day because I live across town in a house I fucking hate and we can barely look at each other in school, I think he’s starting to realize how differently we grew up, and in different directions.
Eventually he takes the book of fairy tales. After he reorganizes his notes and opens the textbook to the review pages and writes down the problem numbers and acts like he’s actually going to work, like either of us understands optimization and related rates, like that’s what we’re actually here for. And then he does that thing where he doesn’t sigh, but the air comes out of his nose with a little more force than necessary, and he finally takes the book from between us.
“Okay,” he says. “So, what? Just ovals?”
“Here, I already made the pattern. It’s not that difficult.”
He glances at me, and then down again. I don’t look at him. I cut a little harder than I have to and snip off the edge of a nail by accident. I chew on the inside of my lip, and Micah sighs, really sighs this time, and his breath makes the feather I’m cutting flutter. He gives in. “Oh, fine. Tell me about the wings.”
“Okay,” I say, and he laughs because it comes out so quickly. “You know Leo da Vinci’s flying machine?”
“The one that didn’t work?”
“Yeah, that one,” I say. I reach across the fairy tales and start sketching on Micah’s calc review. “See,” I say. “I’m using wire and bamboo for the main frame, and these”—I draw the wing fingers—“these here are going to be just wire. You remember the pantyhose and wire sculpture I did? Freshman year? With the spray paint? It’s going to be like that, but bigger, a hundred times, with feathers instead of spray paint. I think I might call it Icarus.”
“Why?” he asks. “Icarus’s wings didn’t work either. And that’s not really a fairy tale.”
Why is he stomping all over my dreams?
“They did work,” I say. Keep calm. “They totally worked. Daedalus made it across the sea fine. You know what Icarus’s problem was? He loved the sun too much. He loved fire, like me. He saw the light and he loved it more than anyone. There are things worth dying for.”
Micah leans back against the Metaphor and raises his hand to block the sun from his face. “Oh, come on, Janie. What happened to hating clichés and all that?”
“Huh?”
“Dying for love?” He rolls his eyes and shakes his head at the same time, so it just looks like his eyeballs are loose. “You’re such a romantic, Janie. Is that part of your whatever-step plan with Ander? Fall in love, die for him to prove your devotion?”
“You’re such an asshole, Micah.”
I didn’t mean to say it. But I don’t take it back.
I want to take his condescension and shove it up his nose.
Instead I take a breath. I push the feathers and calculus aside and scoot until I’m sitting in front of him, our legs crossed and knees touching. He doesn’t look up, but it takes effort now. He wants to; I want him to too, and our soul is so tired of straining.
“You know Mr. Markus’s key to happiness?” I ask him.
Every year, on the last day of classes, Mr. Markus tells the seniors the key to happiness. That’s it, really—no one knows anything else, because the seniors have never spilled, ever. No one has ever teased the secret out of Mr. Markus before he was willing to tell it, and the suspense has been driving me crazy since we were freshmen.
Micah snorts. He’s a disbeliever. He still won’t look at me, either, so that’s annoying. He’s doing it on purpose.
“I’ve decided that I’m going to get it early,” I tell him. “I don’t
care what it takes.”
“I’m sure you will.” It’s not a compliment.
I leap to my feet. I give up. I don’t want to leave and I don’t want him to leave, but right now the friction on our soul is making me itchy. I glare at the Metaphor.
You and me, I think, and begin to climb again.
The stones do the same sliding thing, and there’s nothing to hold on to. The whole thing is crumbling as I climb, so I climb faster. I use our soul as an anchor and a rope—friction is useful that way. The Metaphor crumbles, and I climb faster. The rocks fly all over, but I keep going, and—
“Janie? What the hell are you—holy shit.”
And that makes it all worth it. I’m not at the top—not yet—but I’m higher than either of us has been before, and I beam down at Micah before I spread my arms and shout, “Right here.”
“Right here what?” asks Micah.
I drop my arms and blow him a kiss. “Don’t you feel it? Just listen. Don’t you feel it, Micah? This is where the world is going to end. I’m giving you a front-row seat to the apocalypse. So what do you think? Music, Micah. Everything needs a good soundtrack. The apocalypse most of all.”
He thinks for a long time. That’s one of my favorite things about Micah—he always takes these kinds of questions seriously. He always thinks that I deserve an answer. “Rachmaninoff, maybe? ‘Prelude in G Minor.’”
“Really?” I say. I can almost touch the sky. I’m stretching so hard that I feel the tension in every cell, every atom. “I would have gone with the Beatles. ‘Let It Be.’”
He watches me and I watch the sky, and I smile because it doesn’t feel like the world is ending at all.
after
NOVEMBER 24
I’ve been thinking a lot about being a suspect. Some about how I’ve never been one before. Some about how it could be true.
