This Is Where the World Ends

by Amy Zhang

  We could have cropped out the part where I didn’t like his alcohol and hated his music and wanted the kisses to stay soft. We could have deleted the parts no one wants to see. We could have stopped. We could have stopped.

  Hello, Metaphor.

  You are. You are getting smaller.

  I’m almost gone too.

  There never was a third reason that I named it The Metaphor. I just didn’t want to end at two reasons. I wanted Micah to pretend with me, back then and now, that this was the center of the universe, where it started and where it would end. There’s no metaphor here, and soon there won’t be a Metaphor either.

  I sit there and stare at it for ages and ages, until the sun is high in the sky. It brightens and burns and something inside me splinters. My hands are full of stones and I’m winding up when Micah catches my arm from behind. I know it’s him before he even touches me, and by then I’m already turning to sob into his jacket.

  We stand like that for a long time.

  “It’s like half the size it should be,” I say into his chest, muffled and wet.

  “Yeah,” he says quietly. “They’re grinding it into gravel and using it for the roads. They voted on it a few weeks ago. That’s what my dad said, anyway.”

  I look up at Micah. His eyes are wide and tired, and he stands like he doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t really belong here or there or anywhere. And there, there it is—that’s the real reason that we are us—because the earth is really just a bunch of body holes waiting to be filled, and neither of us can ever find a place to fit except with each other.

  “Why aren’t you more worried?” I ask.

  He ducks his head and shrugs, but his shoulders don’t go all the way down. He scrunches, he’s always scrunched and apologetic. My Micah. Mine. “Are you worried? Won’t you do something to stop it?”

  He makes it sound so easy, but I’m so tired. I’m tired down to my marrow.

  I lean against him. Or really—I fall, and he catches me, and I nestle against him and stare at the shrinking Metaphor.

  “Maybe we aren’t one soul after all,” I say, and it’s even more terrifying out loud.

  His hands fall to his sides, his fingers curling awkwardly and uncurling more awkwardly. He never did know what to do with his hands. They always seemed a bit floppier than hands should be, like there’s a bone missing, the common-sense bone that tells you what to do with your hands.

  “Oh,” he says.

  His sadness is everything. He tries to hide it, like he can hide anything from me, but of course I catch how his breath hitches, the way he stiffens and the way his eyebrows flicker, the way his nostrils widen to suck in a little more air than he would otherwise need. I reach for his hands. I take his awkward fingers and wrap them in my own.

  “Maybe I don’t have a soul at all,” I say.

  He relaxes. Immediately, he unwinds against me.

  “Well,” he says. “You are a ginger.”

  “Maybe I have a ghost.”

  “A ghost,” he repeats dumbly.

  “A ghost,” I confirm, but I don’t elaborate. I’m too tired to think it through. I don’t know what first made me think it, but it sounds right out loud. I don’t have a soul at all.

  I lean my head back against his shoulder and cross my arms, still holding his hands so that his arms come around me. “You were never in love with me, you know.”

  His hands immediately start sweating in mine. His chin fits on top of my head and I feel his throat bob along the back of my skull as he swallows, and it’s kind of comforting. “That’s not true,” he says quietly. “You don’t get to say that. Look, Janie. We don’t have to talk about whatever happened. I won’t even ask, if you want. But god, Janie, if you don’t think that—that I don’t—”

  “You don’t,” I say. I press myself against him, hard, so that his heartbeat bleeds into my body and shakes my spine. “What if you never knew me, Micah? Not really. You love the dreamer and the painter and the ninja who used to jump through your window. What if that girl isn’t real? Then what? You don’t love the bitch. You’ve never even met her.”

  He laughs a low laugh that I feel everywhere. He leans his face into my hair, so that I feel the shapes of his lips when he says, “Trust me, Janie, I have.”

  I don’t argue, but I just don’t think that’s true.

  after

  DECEMBER 6

  “Micah? Micah, are you with me?”

  “I’m with you,” I say. I think I say. “Where are you?”

  Someone sighs. Lately there is always someone sighing around me. The lights are bright, the harsh kind of bright. The lights are spinning but nothing else; nothing is spinning but everything is wobbling.

  “Can I go to sleep now?” I ask, and I don’t hear the answer.

  Janie Vivian is dead.

  When I woke up in the hospital on the day after the bonfire, the first thing I asked Dewey was if she was there. I remember that now. My head hurt because it had split open when Dewey punched me and I hit the ground, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t remember anything after the day she moved.

  It was still raining outside and I wanted to know if I could see her. If she was on the same floor as me. Dewey told me that she wasn’t. Eventually, eventually it came out that she was in the morgue, and the world exploded and rebuilt itself without that particular detail.

  The doctors, the nurses telling me again. I remember, and it hurts. I remember how apocalyptically it hurt every time, every single time, they told me she was dead. Janie Vivian is dead. I remember my dad, sitting beside me and saying in his quiet voice that on the night of the bonfire, Janie Vivian fell into the quarry and never came back out. They kept telling me and I kept forgetting.

  Eventually they stopped trying. I could understand a world where she was in Nepal, though I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t text me back. I could understand a world where she was distant but not lost. I couldn’t understand a world without her.

  I remember forgetting.

  And there’s more.

  God, there’s so much more.

  “Dewey? Oh, fuck, Dewey. Dewey.”

  “Yeah, I’m here. Micah, it’s fine. It’s gonna be fine, we’re going to the hospital. We’re in an ambulance because you’re too fucking tall to carry. You idiot. It’s going to be fine.”

  “Dewey, the fire.”

  “Uh, let’s talk about the fire later. Go to sleep. No, wait. Shit, don’t listen to me. Don’t go to sleep. Are you listening? Micah. Stay awake. We’re going to the hospital, okay?”

  “No. No, no no, I don’t want to go to the hospital again. I don’t want to, I don’t want to. Oh, god, Dewey, do they think I set the fire?”

  “It doesn’t matter right now, just shut the hell up—”

  “Dewey, I remember. I’m starting to remember. I remember that Janie’s dead. Oh, god, she’s dead. She drowned. You kept telling me about it.”

  “Yeah, you kept forgetting. You’re really fucked up, okay? Just take it easy.”

  “But I remember the fire too.”

  “Micah, don’t—”

  “I remember the match. Dewey, I remember dropping the match. Did I tell you about that? They think I set the fire, and I remember a match. I just don’t remember when. I don’t.”

  “Micah—”

  “But I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t burn down her house. Why would I do that? I wouldn’t do that, but what if I did? Did I?”

  “Micah, shut your fucking mouth.”

  The memories do not return so much as plunge. Shatter back into place.

  My dad in a suit, his tie too tight. Checking on me before he goes to her funeral.

  Yellow flowers in the school, everywhere and dying.

  People carrying stones in their pockets. Writing Virginia Woolf quotes on their arms.

  The notes people wrote for her and taped to the wall in the cafeteria. The way the soup splattered across them when Ander pushed me.

  Und
erstanding, however briefly, that she was dead. Heading to the quarry to see where the water climbed or she slid, forgetting she drowned halfway there.

  Forgetting was the easy part. Remembering is harder, but not as apocalyptically

  painful

  as knowing that there is more to come.

  THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN

  Morrow and Lietrich Law Offices

  920 Niagara Road

  Waldo, IA 50615

  (319) 555-8372

  Ghomp Schumacher Krumke LLP

  34 Main Street

  Waldo, IA 50615

  (319) 555-3854

  Kirk Olsen, Attorney at Law

  4300 North 14th Street

  Cedar Falls, IA 50613

  (319) 555-0770

  Joshing and Jones LLP

  275 South Bend Boulevard

  Des Moines, IA 50301

  (515) 555-2861

  before

  OCTOBER 13

  I wait in Micah’s car until 7:57, even though we arrive at 7:35 and he gives up asking me why I won’t just go in and leaves at 7:40. I huddle in the passenger seat with my arms around my knees. At 7:57, I untangle myself and sprint for the school. You would think that the hallways would be mostly empty by then, but nope, good job, Janie, way to plan. Everyone is in the halls, rushing and pushing and squeezing, and I know they’re not staring at me but just . . . I wish the halls were empty. I don’t want to touch any of them.

  I walk into Mr. Markus’s room. I go to my seat, next to Ander.

  Right next to him.

  I sit down. I cross my legs and fold my arms into knots.

  He’s sprawled, spilling over the side of his desk and his legs spread wide open and just everywhere, and I can feel his heat, I can hear his breathing. I sit and I hold my breath as long as I can, and when I can’t, I’m gasping, I can smell it. I can smell his maggot soul.

  I might puke. I might run. I might explode and cover the room with Janie guts.

  But I will not fucking cry.

  He will never, ever, ever make me cry again.

  I decided that this morning while getting ready for school in Micah’s basement. (Which was totally a fun arrangement, by the way. Much better than my brilliant plan of sleeping by the Metaphor. There was this little ledge out of the wind under the bridge, and there was something almost romantic about that: sleeping under the stars, just me and the world and hypothermia. I would have done it. I’m never living with my parents again.)

  I don’t know how he explained it to his dad. He dragged me back to his house after my meltdown at the Metaphor. He and his dad chatted for a minute while I sat in the other room and picked at my nails, and then Mr. Carter poked his head in said hi and waved his awkward, common-sense-boneless hand and asked me if I needed anything, and I said no, and he left for his shift at Pick ’n Save and Micah and I watched more cartoons under an afghan his grandmother made him.

  Ander turns. He’s looking at me. His maple syrup eyes are wrapping me in webs of sap. I look around for Piper, quick, words, talk to someone, look away, but she’s not in the seat next to me.

  No, she’s not there. She’s all the way across the room with a Starbucks cup in her hand.

  And. She. Didn’t. Bring. Me. One.

  “All right,” Mr. Markus says from his desk. “Well, as the three people who utilize the English Twelve website will know, today was supposed to be a peer review day for the first draft of your thesis papers, but seeing as the same three people are the only ones who have sent me drafts, this is clearly not going to happen.” He sighs, a long sigh that carries all of the disappointment in the world that I have not already staked out for myself. “Well? Get laptops. Write.”

  I don’t. I pull out my journal and start paging through. In there, in bits and pieces, spread across pages and pages, are my fractured fairy tale autobiography and a mostly done paper about fairy tale miracles with all of my sketches of universes and oceans and heart variations.

  Miracles, one of them begins, do not belong to religions. Miracles belong to the desperate, which is why every religion, every philosophy, and most importantly, every fairy tale always has a moment of salvation, a eureka, an enlightenment. We are all chasing and chasing tails, running and running in circles, until a wolf or the witch or the stepmother jumps out and trips us, and we fall flat, splat, and we lie bare and bleeding and breathless and finally, finally look and see whatever it is—salvation or eureka or enlightenment or a hunter or a prince or a glass slipper—in front of us. And that’s what miracles are. Not solutions, but catalysts. Not answers, but chances.

  Forget fairy tales. Screw Andersen and Grimm and Perrault—I could have built a thousand pairs of wings out of this beautiful bullshit.

  I open my journal to a new page. I write THESIS at the top and underline it three times for emphasis and a fourth for luck, out of habit. I start again.

  Miracles do not belong to fairy tales. Miracles belong to the desperate, because only the desperate believe in bullshit.

  There.

  End thesis. I expect my Pulitzer any day now.

  Ander is still watching me.

  It’s all so familiar, and I am even wearing the same shoes.

  My hand shoots into the air. Every single person in the room looks at me, except Mr. Markus.

  I cough. He doesn’t look up. “Mr. Markus,” I finally say. Whisper, more like. Come on, voice. Pull it together. “Can I go to the bathroom?”

  He nods without looking up from his grading. I grab my stuff and head for the door.

  Behind me, someone mutters, “Pregnancy test, Janie?”

  It’s Ander. I know it’s Ander.

  I don’t look back. I pause at the bathroom and wonder if I do need a pregnancy test, but no, don’t think about that, I will not fucking cry I will not I will not.

  I go to the art room instead. I go to my senior studio closet and I look around. And then I explode.

  Here is what Janie guts look like: broken charcoal pencils and empty glaze jars on the floor. And paper, paper everywhere, shredded feathers and scraps of plans. A broken teapot that doesn’t need a fucking lid. Shattered clay map of a shattered world. Greenware bowls smashed to dust.

  And one clay covered in lucky pentagrams and Viking runes and witch-curse-repelling spells that I throw against the wall as hard as I can, so hard, so hard that it doesn’t shatter, it doesn’t crumble, it dissolves. It turns to dust and I sink into it and close my eyes.

  I leave the wings alone.

  I have to finish the wings.

  I have to finish something.

  I roll over and push my hair out of my face.

  Just one miracle.

  I go to lunch because I’m hungry. I’m hungry and I want to eat and they can’t stop me with their bent heads and whispers and staring. I can do what I want. I can do whatever I want.

  Even the lunch lady stares at me. She forgets to give me a cookie.

  By the time I get to the table, I don’t have energy to sit. I collapse. I am a bag of bones, and I have been robbed of my spinal cord. They were talking about homecoming and dresses and dinner reservations, but they stopped when I was five feet away.

  “Hey,” I say, and look around. “Where’s Piper?”

  A beat too long of silence. Then, finally, Katie says, “She went home. Cramps.”

  “Okay, Janie,” Carrie Lang says. Her long hair droops onto the table as she leans toward me. “What happened? What’s this? Is it Ander?”

  Karma. Karma, I knew you were real. I knew filling Carrie’s lawn with balloons was an investment in the future.

  “Is it true that you guys had sex and then you dumped him because he sucked?” she asks, and adds, “Not the good kind, obviously.”

  Blink. Blink again. “Wait. What?”

  “Is that what this is?” she asks. “Janie, you know you could have called us. That was your first time, right? Babe, you should have called me. Is it because it hurt a lot? Or was he really just that bad
?”

  “What did he say?”

  “Ander? I don’t know, he didn’t text me back. But Jizzy said that you guys did it and then you freaked and dumped him. God, Janie, I can’t believe you didn’t call me!”

  “He was tiny, wasn’t he,” Blair says, taking a teensy-teensy bite of her salad. “I knew it. The hot ones are always falsely advertised. I keep telling you guys that.”

  They’re all leaning in now, Blair and Sadie and Kelsey and Meredith. They blink their big, big eyes and wait for me to tell them all about Ander and me. Ander and Janie.

  No.

  I imagine sketching the scene: me and an oversized hammer, off-balance and smashing, their Whac-A-Mole heads popping like cherries.

  I want to say something, something scathing and brilliant and conversation ending, but let’s talk false advertising. The real picture would look something like this: them and their mole eyes and twitching noses, me with my guts back in my art room and my brain melting out onto my lunch tray and my mouth catching all the flies that buzz around the trash can. And I know then that I did the right thing when I crossed out those lawyer numbers. Who the fuck would take my side? No one in Waldo. No one here. No one who saw me scuttling after him since freshman year, flirting at every chance, kissing at regionals. Kissing kissing kissing.

  I close my mouth and open it again and close it again, and in the end I just take my tray and walk away. I briefly consider the bathroom, but, ugh, who could actually eat lunch in a school bathroom outside of a nineties chick flick? Gross. I can barely walk through the door without gagging.

  Hello, universe. I know you don’t give a shit. But you handed me the wrong nineties chick flick.

  I don’t want this one.

  I don’t freaking want it.

  I just can’t stay at this table. I can’t breathe.

  But—there! There’s Micah! And Dewey! I’m even glad to see Dewey! I didn’t know they ate lunch in the hallway! Okay, I totally did. But I pretend I didn’t as I walk over. I pretend and pretend and pretend.

  “Look, I’m just saying,” Dewey is saying as I get closer, “that’s who she is. Hell, she’s been—that for so long that she probably doesn’t even fucking remember what the truth is. She didn’t fucking change, Micah. The two of you are just so goddamn parasitic that you can’t even see it. Get your head out of your ass. Just because she flirts with you doesn’t mean you stand a chance. She flirts with everyone.”