This Is Where the World Ends

by Amy Zhang

  Quick, can I get away? No, Micah has already spotted me. His cheeks go red so fast it’s almost funny. My breath catches a little, but I force it out.

  I drop my tray next to Dewey and say, “I don’t flirt with you.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s that whole thing about me not being into girls,” he says. He doesn’t even try to look embarrassed about seeing me. He takes another bite of pizza before he talks again, and not to me. “Do whatever you want, dude. But I’ll be waiting with the I TOLD YOU SO sign when she fucks you over again.”

  Metaphorical sign, I tell myself. They don’t have a real sign.

  Do they?

  “Shut up,” Micah mutters. He doesn’t look at me. Why doesn’t he look at me? I prod him with my soul. He still doesn’t look up. But he does talk in my direction. “What are you doing here?”

  “She’s here because no one back in there wants to sit with her,” Dewey says. Does he always chew with his mouth open? Pepperoni pieces and wet pizza dough between his gnashing, gnashing teeth. “Same reason we’re out here. Right? Cameron’s been telling everyone that he dumped you because you had sex and then you shouted rape because you regretted it in the morning. That true?” He looks straight at me.

  I didn’t exactly mean to dump my lunch tray over his head.

  “Fuck you,” I say. My voice is perfect—so cold, so wonderfully hollow. “Get a life, Dewey, and stop chasing Micah around. He doesn’t love you back.”

  He loves me.

  Then I walk away. Just kidding. I sprint the hell out of there. I go straight to the parking lot, and I dig out my phone and start Googling directions on hot-wiring a car. Micah can find another ride home. I’m stealing his.

  I’m scrolling through the Wikipedia page, holding my breath because I just have to keep it together until I’m in the car driving away, when suddenly—

  “Janie.”

  I yelp and drop my phone and close my eyes and take a moment to tell my heart to freaking chill, because it’s not Ander and it’s not Dewey, it’s just Micah. Just Micah.

  He bends down to get my phone, and his eyebrows furrow. “You were gonna steal my car?”

  “Yeah.” I sigh. “but it’s a lot more complicated than nineties chick flicks would have you believe.”

  “No shit,” he says, and gets in the car. “Come on.”

  I slide into the passenger side. “Metaphor?”

  “Sure.”

  We drive in silence. I study my palms. There are four perfect half moons where my nails dug in, and a fate line that looks normal. Perfectly straight, average length. I used to think that destiny was fluid, because isn’t that the point of every Disney movie and Saturday-morning cartoon? You make your own choices. You decide how life goes. I always thought that your fate line would change if something happened, bam, something goes wrong and the line on your palm goes all wonky to reflect that. Nope. It still looks fine.

  Well, fuck you too, fate.

  I dig my nails into my palms again and look ahead. Staring contest, glaring contest. Let’s go, universe. You and me, right here, right now.

  Micah pulls to a stop farther away than normal, and the Metaphor looks even smaller. I get out of the car. Slam. He closes his door as quietly as he can, as if that’ll make my slam less offensive. I shove my hands into my pockets and start toward the quarry, and he follows, and we stop right at the edge of the rocks. I don’t even need to tilt my head back to squint at the top anymore.

  “You know,” I finally say, “it’s actually really fucking ugly.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” says Micah.

  “It’s really just a pile of shit.”

  But Micah isn’t looking at the Metaphor anymore, he’s looking at me. His eyes are all wide and worried, and he says my name, and I look at the sky and wonder, How many times can a person explode?

  Here’s some metaphorical resonance for you: I don’t want to look up at the Metaphor anymore. You should not look up to shit. You should not want to fucking climb to the top of something that shouldn’t even exist, and this isn’t how I wanted to reach the top anyway. I wanted to reach the top of a mountain. This is barely a pile anymore. It’s a disappearing heap of rejected rocks that should have drowned with the rest of the quarry.

  “Janie, what are you—Janie, what the hell? Janie, stop, Janie—”

  I dig my hands in and I pull. I grab, I throw, I kick, I plunge again and again and I swear, I swear, I fucking swear, I will tear this thing to the ground.

  I don’t know when I started crying, but I don’t care anymore, I don’t care that I can’t stop, I don’t care that I can’t see. I don’t need to see. I just need to get rid of it. I need to break it apart. I need—I need—

  And then Micah is pulling me away and I might be screaming, a whirlwind, limbs and fists and bursting, but this time he knows exactly what to do with his arms, and they’re around me. My face is in his coat and his coat smells like Dewey’s cigarettes and rain and maybe a little bit like pot, but mostly it smells like him, like wood polish and honeycomb and mine.

  “God,” I blubber into him. “God damn it all, Micah.”

  He puts his chin on top of my chin. “What’s wrong?” he asks quietly. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “No,” I sob. Because what’s the point?

  And that’s the thing about Micah. He leaves it at that.

  after

  DECEMBER 15

  Court-mandated alcohol therapy is not the worst sentence for underage drinking. As far as hearings go, mine is easy. They just send me back to Dr. Taser for a few more sessions.

  Dr. Taser says that now that I have started to remember, I can start to heal too. This is bullshit, because this is not the first time I’ve pushed crap completely out of my mind.

  “My father picked my first name for his father and my mom picked my middle name for her favorite month,” I told her last time I was here. “She died when I was three years old, and I don’t remember her at all. I should, but I don’t. You’re supposed to start remembering shit when you’re, what, two?”

  “Language, Micah,” Dr. Taser said gently.

  “Yeah, sorry. So my mom died in this car accident. There had been, like, an ice storm the day before or something, and she wanted to check on my grandparents, and she was going to spend the day there, right? And my dad was having this affair with some lady who lived in the neighborhood. She used to make us lemon bars. These, like, really fantastic lemon bars, right? So while my mom was dying, he was having sex with some lady down the street and I was with my babysitter, who also lived down the street. And when they called him from the hospital, he didn’t answer because his phone was downstairs and he was upstairs having sex—yeah, okay, you get it. So he finishes what I hope was damn good sex, it better have been fucking worth it—”

  “Micah—”

  “—and hears that his wife is dead, and he never gets over it. He picks us up and moves us to Waldo. And he tells me all of this in, like, third grade. A confession or whatever, like that’ll fix his shit, and I just . . . I don’t know. The next day, I forgot about it. And he kept telling me and telling me and I kept forgetting. I don’t remember when I finally started remembering what really happened to him and Mom. I stopped talking to him when I did, though. It’s not like I had that much to say to him before, anyway. But fuck, I know I should care, but I don’t. So, yeah, that’s me. Oh, and I feel fine now. This therapy is really helping.”

  Today is the last time I have to be here. I have paid the money I owe the government for harming my body with more than fourteen drinks per week, I have gone to the therapy sessions, I have nodded and agreed to be responsible from now on. I go to Dr. Taser’s office, where she is already waiting with her iPad.

  “Can I get you anything?” she asks me. “Water? Coffee?”

  “The hell out of here,” I say, and smile as if I were joking. I’m unconvincing and she’s not convinced, but what the hell. We both keep smiling.

  “Sorry,” I s
ay. “Tons of strain.”

  Dr. Taser nods sympathetically. “Do you feel more like talking about Janie today? Maybe we can try a happy memory again?”

  I look up. Her eyes are dark, her head is cocked, her posture as welcoming as posture can be. I ask her, “You ever dissect a sheep heart?”

  She looks startled, but I plow on. “I haven’t either. We were supposed to for Anatomy and Physiology, but—well. It doesn’t matter, I never wanted to. I took the class because Janie was taking it. Anyway, I did the dissection online today, and there was this picture of a human heart without fat or muscle in the introduction to the lab. It was just the veins.”

  “And you wish Janie could have seen it?” asks Dr. Taser, typing away on her iPad.

  “She already saw it,” I say, and both Dr. Taser and Janie frown at me. “She saw it in seventh grade at Lorraine Bay National Park.”

  I told her about us, about that day. Ander Cameron’s mom had been our chaperone. She had been a decent person. She brought us cookies. Not sure what happened to Ander. Anyway, we collected rock samples and dirt samples and identified plants and shit, and then we had lunch on this big hill. Janie had Lunchables, the nacho kind that came with a candy bar for dessert. I remember because I was jealous. My dad packed me a hot ham sandwich that wasn’t supposed to be hot. Afterward, everyone started rolling down the hill. Dewey dragged me into it, but it actually really hurt—it wasn’t, like, some groomed country club hill. There were trees. There were branches sticking up and bugs under rotting leaves and poison ivy. So eventually Dewey ditched me, which he always seemed to do, and I sat at the top of the hill and looked up.

  “What are you doing?”

  I jumped when Janie plopped down next to me, and then I looked around. “No one’s paying attention,” Janie said by way of explanation. “They’re too busy rubbing themselves in poison ivy. I hope Robbie gets it on his dick.”

  She and Robbie had just broken up. God, I just remember looking over at her, looking and wondering how she did it, how she was so damn comfortable. We’d just watched the sex video thing the week before, and Mr. Endero made us say penis three times without laughing to get into the room. I told Janie about it later, and she looked at me straight in the eye and said, “Penis. Penis. Penis. Grow up, Micah.”

  I could not. So maybe that was why she started leaving me behind.

  “So?” said Janie. “What are we looking at?”

  Just the sky, really. Above there were only tangles of branches and the sky. And I was about to tell her that when she spread her arms and took a deep breath.

  “Oh,” she whispered, and I didn’t need to look up anymore. “I see. I feel it now, Micah. Like the sky is falling down. It makes my lungs hurt. The sky is falling down and my breath is too small to hold the air. Micah—you feel it? The world is growing bigger. I can feel it.”

  Then she fell back. The ground thudded and I was freaked, because she said the world was growing bigger, and I thought it would swallow her. Pull her away.

  But it didn’t. We just kept staring at the sky and we didn’t get poison ivy.

  “The sheep heart looked just like that,” I tell Dr. Taser. “The trees.”

  “That does sound like a happy memory,” she says, sounding pleased for the first time. It’s not happy, really, because Janie doesn’t know that the trees looked like a heart and she never will because she’s never going to do the dissection because she’s dead and buried and I still don’t remember most of how that happened. But what a nice note to end on.

  I shrug. “I guess. I went back to the bus after that.”

  She blinks. “Why?”

  “She wanted me to. We were never supposed to talk to each other in public—people stopped rolling down the hill and so I had to go. I left her. That’s what friends do.”

  But that’s not what friends do, and Dr. Taser hands me her iPad to Google friendship to prove it. She pushes a notebook into my hands and tells me that it’ll help to write down what I remember. And then, finally, she lets me leave.

  In the waiting room, I sit on the couch and wait for Dewey. My license is still suspended and my dad is at work, but Dewey offered to give me a ride, presumably because he’s the reason I’m here.

  “Hey,” he greets me as he pulls up in front. “You get your head fixed? Ready to drink responsibly?”

  “Screwed on all the way and ready to be deadened by alcohol,” I say, climbing into the passenger seat, “which I feel like you owe me.”

  “I’m out of Canadian, but got the cheapest whiskey in Iowa in the trunk. Just . . . take it easy, okay?”

  “Janie’s dead,” I tell him.

  He keeps his eyes on the road. “You’ve mentioned.”

  “I remember the bonfire,” I say. I stare at the backs of my hands, going finger to finger, counting. “The bonfire. I remember most of what happened before, I think. The week of is still fuzzy, but I remember the Metaphor disappearing. God, she was pissed.”

  I stop then and wait for Janie to say something, but she’s gone too.

  “Our birthday, her wings. But the bonfire, Dewey. That night, at her house. What the hell happened?”

  He stares at the road. I stare at him.

  “We fought,” I say slowly. “You punched me. Did that happen?”

  Dewey doesn’t answer for so long that I almost take his silence as a no. But finally he looks away from the road and leans his head on the wheel, and I should be more worried than I am. “Yeah,” he says. I barely hear him.

  I stare at him until he lifts his head from the wheel and steers the car back into the right lane.

  Everyone has secrets, Janie told me once. “Ours are just bigger than everyone else’s.”

  Maybe she was wrong.

  “Dewey,” I say. “You have whiskey?”

  He nods, and then sighs. “You’re still doing it.”

  Presumably we go back to my house and play Metatron: Sands of Time and drink then, but I don’t remember any of it. The next morning we have massive hangovers and an empty bottle of whiskey, but to our credit, neither of us left.

  THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN

  Once upon a time, there was a princess who didn’t get saved. I don’t really know what to tell you about her because her story was never written down. Maybe the dragon ate her. Maybe the prince just never got around to rescuing her. No one wants to read that fairy tale, so no one wrote it.

  Or maybe the truth is that no princesses get rescued, ever. Maybe there are no happily ever afters, not really.

  before

  OCTOBER 15

  Mr. Markus held me after class today to ask why the paper I submitted was nothing like my proposal. He probably also wanted to know why it was only nineteen words long, but I didn’t have a good reason for either.

  “This isn’t the project you proposed,” he tells me. “This isn’t even a thesis.”

  “You said it was an adaptable project,” I remind him. “Don’t you want it to evolve organically?”

  “You still owe me an autobiography,” he reminds me. “Will I be seeing your fractured fairy tales anytime soon?”

  “Probably not,” I say. “They’re not very exciting. They’re kind of pathetic, actually.”

  He pushes the paper aside and clears the desk so there’s nothing between us. He folds his hands. “How are the wings coming along, Janie?”

  The wings.

  Oh, the wings.

  Actually, they’re beautiful. They’re not finished, not even close, but they’re beautiful. I’ve cut through a volume each of Grimm and Andersen, and I’m starting on Perrault. It’s a much slower process when I do it alone because I always want to read each page before I cut it up. The wings themselves are in the art studio, and only one side is full of feathers. They’re beautiful, but it’s going to take a miracle to finish them.

  I just keep getting distracted by the fairy tales, reading them once upon a time to happily ever after, and it’s hard because I’m not finding many m
iracles anymore. There’s a lot of people who never get saved. There are a lot of people who get toes or heels cut off, who are stuffed in barrels studded with nails and rolled down hills, who are cursed or burned alive or forgotten. Guess how many of them are women.

  (Lots.)

  “They’re coming along” is all I say. I pick at my nails. I’ve never been much of a nail biter, but they’re pretty mangled at the moment.

  “Janie,” Mr. Markus says in his sandpaper voice. “What do you need?”

  I almost cry.

  So many people have asked me if I’m okay without really wanting an answer, or they ask if they can do anything without meaning it. Carrie and Micah and the girls at our lunch table when I pass them in the halls with my face permanently red from holding my breath. No one has asked me what I need. Not even Micah.

  There are a lot of things I’d like. I wish my parents would help me and I wish I hadn’t taken those last couple of shots. I wish I had been born with endings, I wish I had been born with good ones, I wish I could finish the wings, I wish I never had to see Ander again, I wish the Metaphor wasn’t disappearing. I want time to pass faster and I want it to stop altogether, but need? Need is a very different question.

  “I need to know the key to happiness,” I say. “I can’t wait until graduation. I need to know now.”

  For a second I think he’s going to refuse. But then he leans back in his creaky swivel chair and folds his hands over his stomach. “I didn’t plan on being a teacher,” he says.

  I wait.

  “I was going to be a stockbroker.”

  For a second I am quiet. And then I sigh. “Really? This is the key to happiness? The world really is made of disappointment, isn’t it.”