by Amy Zhang
Dewey only has to remind me of that a few times before I can remember on my own. I’m starting to remember better, I think. The police help too. I know now that the fatter one is Gibbs. I’m still working on the other one.
They are at school the day I go back. The doctors said my memory probably wouldn’t get better anytime soon because they can’t figure out why I keep forgetting things. They think it might help if everything just goes back to normal. I guess that’s okay, because I’m bored of Metatron.
It’s a Monday when I go back. It’s raining. I don’t remember much else. I probably go to English and calc, and it doesn’t matter that I don’t remember because I wouldn’t have learned anything anyway. The police are here and pulling people out of class for the arson investigation. It’s official now. They can only talk to people over eighteen who want to talk back. Dewey tells them I don’t want to, but that isn’t true. I do want to help, because I can’t stop thinking about being a suspect.
Mostly I wonder if Janie is ignoring the police like she is ignoring me. I text her every day and she never responds, and I guess it must be because she doesn’t get service in Nepal or something. I wish she would just talk to the police so they know that we didn’t do anything. I wish she would just come back and help me remember. I wish she would just come back.
I asked Dewey if she can even refuse to talk to the police when they’re investigating arson, if she’s even allowed to be out of the country, and he told me to shut up.
He also told me that Ander is a suspect too, because he’s Janie’s boyfriend and because they traced the gas purchase to his credit card. Wes Bennet swears they had already left the party when the fire started, and Ander says he lost that credit card before wrestling regionals. But nobody knows whether or not they should believe them yet.
I don’t remember wrestling regionals, but Dewey tells me we lost.
The less fat detective tells me that it took less than ten minutes for the house to burn.
Gibbs tells me that it started on the second floor. It didn’t spread from the bonfire like everyone thought.
He tells me that someone spilled and spilled gasoline there, so much gasoline that there is nothing left of her room at all.
He tells me and watches me for a reaction, as if these things will help me remember.
He also tells me that I’m a good kid, but I figure if I really did start the fire, that won’t matter much.
He also asks me what I knew about Ander and Janie.
“Nothing,” I tell him. “I knew she liked him. She had this plan to get the two of them together. It worked, huh?”
“Was he ever violent? Specifically with Janie,” he asks me.
I blink. “I don’t know. Was he?”
Gibbs shifts and looks uncomfortable. “We talked to some of her friends. You know, Carrie Lang, Katie Cross. They said—” He pulls out a notebook and flips through it. “They said that she was upset. Maybe afraid. They think he might have hurt her.”
“Oh,” I say. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
Gibbs sighs and closes the notebook. “Her parents don’t know anything, either, so we can’t do anything if he did.”
He watches me for a reaction. I don’t really have one. I just don’t remember.
Eventually he sends me back to class.
I don’t go back to class. I go to the art room instead. If anyone asks, I’ll say that I forgot which class I was supposed to go to. Or that I forgot how to get there.
The art room is in the workshop wing. The senior studios are a series of closets next to it. Down the hall, Dewey is probably smoking in the metals lab with other slackers. Janie skips class all the time here too, but not really. She just bats her eyelashes and tosses her hair and teachers write her passes to wherever she wants.
I go to the art room, but I don’t remember how I get there.
Her studio is empty. I’ve only been here one other time, at the beginning of the year. I stepped inside and filled it; it was tiny and dingy and badly lit and had no windows and she must have loved it, because I had barely been there for five seconds when she started shrieking that I was bumping into things and ruining it all. Back then it was already full to bursting. I remember. Her weird-ass crap spilled off the shelves.
There’s only dust here now.
I close the door. The movement stirs the air, and I smell her. The room still smells like cinnamon and vodka. Like lemons and sleep. Like her shampoo and the overpriced tea she ordered from a website that gave her computer viruses. I keep telling her that she’s probably drinking bong water, and she keeps ordering it.
It’s so empty.
I wonder if she brought it all to Nepal with her.
I wonder if she is happy in Nepal.
I wonder why she will not text me back.
I sit down and the dust puffs up. I cough. My eyes water. I blink and blink. Maybe I blink for a few seconds or maybe I blink for hours, but when I stop, I see rocks in the corner. Rocks from the Metaphor, and they are in my hand though I don’t quite remember reaching for them. I have to blink a few more times. It’s very confusing. I keep thinking that I’ve finally gotten used to it and then I forget again and it’s confusing again.
I turn the rocks over and over in my hands and think about how she only left rocks in places she’d probably never see again.
I sit there with the rocks in my hands until the lunch bell rigns.
It rings and keeps ringing. I put the rocks in my pocket and go to the cafeteria. I don’t remember getting there, either. I guess it doesn’t matter much. The hallways are ugly anyway.
The cafeteria is loud and full of people. It is too full of people, because I run straight into someone else.
Janie always says that my main problem is that I don’t know how to walk away from things. I think she’s wrong. Walking away isn’t the hard part. Turning around is.
I should have turned around.
I should have turned and kept my head down before Ander Cameron could see that it was me.
“You,” he said.
Me.
“What the hell did you do, you little shit?” he demands. “You two, the two of you. What the hell did you do? The police won’t fucking leave me alone because of you.”
What did I do?
What did we do?
Hell, what didn’t we do?
For a moment, it’s funny. I smile by accident.
Ander Cameron takes another step toward me and swings his fist at my face. It connects with my jaw. My tray goes flying and so do I.
In researching for my stupid senior project on apocalypses, the only thing I really found interesting was all of the different ways people think the world is going to end. I read Wikipedia pages and collected catastrophes. An enormous snake is going to swallow the world. Fire and brimstone is going to fall from the sky. Freezing. Flooding. Four horsemen and a whore. Falling stars and empty oceans.
It doesn’t end like that, though.
What it actually feels like when the world explodes, the instant it explodes, is nothing.
The explosion doesn’t hurt at all. It doesn’t hurt until you hit the ground.
Again.
My head cracks on the linoleum and my tray lands on my face and the soup is in my nose. Somewhere above me Ander Cameron is telling the unlucky bastard on lunch duty that I slipped, and perhaps for the first time in his life, no one backs him up. The monitor drags him away, but I am still on the floor.
I understand why Janie did the things she did. I understand why she wanted everyone to like her.
It sure as hell beats this.
There are people all around me, and it’s hard to focus on most of them. I think Dewey must be there, because someone has been swearing for the last five minutes. I look around, and around, and I see Piper. She hangs back with fingers pressed to white lips.
Janie would never have done that. She would never stand back and watch. Janie would have been brimming with wrath. For h
er friends, she would have done anything. Anything. She didn’t kick or punch. She flayed, slowly, with eyes too bright.
Sorry, I tell her. Sorry you made such shitty friends.
Something moves above me and I figure it’s someone else telling me to get up, but it’s not. It’s Janie.
“God,” she says. She sits on one of the tables and grips the edge, legs swinging. She looks at me. “So many assholes. Asshole here and an asshole there. Old Waldo had a farm and called it high school.”
She jumps off the table and lands beside me. Her head is cocked to the side and her hair is spilling across her collarbones. I wait for her to reach out a hand and pull me up. She doesn’t.
What she does is lie down beside me, so that we’re both on the floor in the spilled soup. Her fingertips reach out to brush mine, and I pull away because my hands are still covered in clay dust. She would freak if she knew I’d been in her studio.
We just lie there.
Neither of us helps the other up.
Eventually the lunch monitor does get me up. She sends me to the nurse, who tells me to call my dad to take me home, or maybe to the hospital in case my stitches have split again. I pretend to talk to him, and go to the lobby to wait.
I wait until no one is watching me and then I walk out the door, and keep walking.
It has stopped raining.
I walk through the park, which takes me a street over from my house. But I keep walking. The quarry is only 0.72 miles from our houses. Her old house and my house. Really, the new one was just down the street.
It starts raining again. It’s okay. We’ve always liked water. No, that’s not right. Janie loved fire. She loved markers and rocks and fire. I like water, though. I like the way it waits, and when you touch it, it both moves away and clings to your finger. I like the way it rises, like memory, or fear. You told me once that I was made of water, I think. I don’t remember. I don’t remember again but
what if
it just
doesn’t
matter?
My head hurts.
My head hurts a lot and the world is spinning because of it. By the time I get to the quarry, it has turned upside down twice.
I have to sit down or I’ll puke on the Metaphor, except—oh, of course. It isn’t there anymore.
Some things are easier to forget than other things, I’m noticing.
I sit at the edge of the quarry and look over the water. The loose rocks left behind from the Metaphor that is gone dig into my ass. The water seeps into my shoes.
The water climbs higher, or I slide lower.
Oh, look. A memory.
Her hair in my lap. My feet in the water, which is cold but not unbearably. The sun is burning our skin. A book of fairy tales is open on her stomach while she scrolls through her phone, which keeps vibrating. The wind is turning the pages back and forth.
“Does the Metaphor look smaller to you?” she asks me.
She is squinting up. Her hand shades her eyes. “Maybe it just looks smaller. Do you think it could be sliding lower?” she asks. “Or the water’s climbing higher?”
“It doesn’t look different to me,” I say. I am too lazy to turn around to look. My fingers were in her hair. I always liked touching her hair, because sometimes it was hard to believe she was real. Her hair was soft and smelled like lemons.
“There are only four weeks and two days until our birthday,” she announces. “Did you know that? I have a countdown. Can you believe how warm it is? I love the sun, Micah. I love it as much as it loves me. Are you listening? Stop looking at my phone.”
I catch the words Nepal and volunteer trip before she closes the tab.
“Four weeks and two days, Micah,” she says. “We’re going to be adults. We’re going to drink tea with our pinkies up and do whatever the hell we want because that’s what adults do. That’s all I want for my birthday this year. Ha ha, just kidding.”
I touch her hair. The strands both move away and cling to my finger.
“What do you want, then?”
“I want a bottle of wine so big that the cork can plug up the hole in the ozone layer,” she says. “I want a poem, or a poet. I want the world with a bow on top. What about you?”
You.
I don’t say that, but I think it. I think it with everything I am.
“I think the Metaphor is getting smaller,” she says again, and that’s all I remember, except her eyes, which are only blue because they reflect the sky, or the water.
The water.
The water climbs higher, or I slide lower.
The water is cold, and the rain is turning to snow. The sky is falling down. The sky is falling faster.
“Janie,” I try. Her name is stuck in my throat blocking my breath.
My breath comes too fast and too shallow.
The water climbs higher, or I slide lower.
THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN
Once upon a time, there were twelve princesses. No, wait. There was only one princess, and one prince. They snuck out of the house at night and danced in the moonlight. They climbed pebble mountains. They put masks over their faces and punished the wicked.
They loved each other. They loved and loved and loved, and the whole point wasn’t the dancing, really, or the climbing, or the punishing.
The point was each other. They knew each other in their atoms, and the point was that they were together. They never talked about it, but they both knew what they feared. More than anything, they feared that they wouldn’t have each other someday.
And without each other, there wouldn’t be much of a point at all, would there?
before
OCTOBER 3
Regionals! Thank you, universe, because I didn’t have a non-regionals backup plan. We’re at the two-week mark, and everything is perfectly on schedule. We’ll take the bus to regionals and we will win, and on the way back, I’ll get one of the wrestlers to take the fan bus so I can sneak on to theirs. Ander and I will curl up in a ripped bus seat that smells like snotty kindergarteners and cuddle all the way home.
Piper and I squish into a seat and she takes out her iPod and hands me an earbud. There’s another thing I like about Piper: she has great music. I trust people with great music.
“Hey, Pipes!” someone calls from the back of the bus. “Do you know that Wes has one of your bras in his backpack?”
A lot of girls hate Piper, probably because she leaves her bras lying around in backpacks. There was something about her going out with a senior during our freshman year, and then she cheated on him with another senior, and by the end of the year she’d had sex with half the senior class, which wasn’t true. Piper’s hymen is more intact than mine is, probably. But Piper is very pretty and she’s also very aware of it, and people just don’t seem to like her very much.
But I like her.
And people like me.
The boys start using her bra as a slingshot, and I think about telling them that bras are freaking expensive, but Piper just keeps playing a game on her phone, and I figure that if she doesn’t care, I don’t need to worry, either. Under Piper’s amazing playlist, the game plinks away.
“Hey, Pipes,” I say a few miles later. “How’s Wes?”
“Stupid,” she says. “Like usual. We went camping last week, though. Having sex in a tent? Not fun.”
Okay, so maybe not quite as intact as mine.
She sighs and takes out her earbud and twists it around her finger. “And then he told me that he just wants to be friends with benefits. Who even says that? ‘Friends with benefits’? He can’t just say ‘hook up’ like a normal person? He’s a tool. And now my mom wants to get me on the pill, but her gyno is such a freak, you know? And she doesn’t want me to go anywhere else.”
I didn’t, really, because my parents would never have let me go camping with Micah, let alone Ander.
“Not fun?” I asked. “Not at all?”
“Well, more fun than this is going to be.”
/>
I elbow her, harder than I probably need to. “Stop stomping on my dreams,” I say. “This is going to be fabulous. Ander in a skintight uniform all over another hot guy? Um, yes.”
She puts the earbud back in. “Just wait.”
Oh.
Okay, I see.
Wrestling is really gross. And . . . a little terrifying? All I can really see is a tangle of arms and butting heads, and Piper is laughing at my expression as I lean back as far as I can. The sweat is flying. My body is practically between the legs of the guy behind me, but he doesn’t really seem to mind.
Ander is on top, on the bottom, on the ground, on his knees, back on his feet, slammed on the ground again, clawing back up. Ander is strong, muscles, clenched arms flashing in a way that I thought would be hot but actually makes me wonder if I want to cuddle with him at all, if it’s totally completely one hundred percent safe. He’s brutal, hands around sweat-slicked shoulders, arms around neck—is he supposed to do that? Do people die at these things? Are there ever any audience casualties?
“Oh my god oh my god ohmygod,” I say, as the other guy rams his shoulder into Ander’s chest and they go flying, literally flying, and hit the floor so hard I feel it in the risers. Piper looks bored.
“I told you,” she said. “I said we should go to Starbucks, but nope.”
The ref does the whole floor-slapping thing and then everyone (not us) is cheering, so I guess that means it’s over. I catch sight of Ander’s face when he finally peels it off the ground, and I know it’s over.
He’s not going to state. He’s not getting his scholarship.
He stumbles toward the risers like he barely remembers he has feet. He rips off his helmet and his blond angel hair is plastered tight to his scalp. I’m moving before I know why, running down the rickety stairs and calling his name.
He stumbles right into my arms, and he clutches the back of my (favorite, now sweaty) dress and his hot, hot tears bleed through the fabric and right into my heart. He smells rancid, but I hug him tight around his perfectly narrow hips and tell him that it’ll be all right, all right, all right. All right?
