by Amy Zhang
It’s a nice thought, and god knows that there aren’t enough of those in the world. So I drink, and I think about that.
“Dude,” Dewey says later, slurring. We’ve almost made it around the quarry. “You’re hogging the shit wine.”
“Am not,” I say. I’m slurring too.
It takes him two tries to snatch the bottle away. He throws it back, and eventually he lowers the bottle, but his head is still raised. “Hey, look. Look at that sun. Asshole.”
I lie back too. The grass is freezing, and the sun is huge. “Is there anything you don’t have a problem with?”
He thinks about it for a while. “Nah,” he says.
“Janie loved the stars,” I tell him. But she never meant it. Or maybe she did, I don’t know. If she loved them, if she loved anything, it was because it burned.
I take another sip of wine, but I tilt it too sharply and it fills my nose and collar. Everything burns. I have swallowed a star.
And I said to the star, consume me.
Did she say that once? I think she did. It was probably Virginia Woolf who said it first.
I take another drink, because it doesn’t matter what the hell Janie Vivian was or wasn’t, because she’s dead.
The sun is so bright.
“Did they find her body?” I ask him later. “Do they know what happened? Was she just so drunk she walked into the quarry?”
Dewey is quiet for a while before he asks, “You sure you want to know?”
“What do you mean?” The words feel slow, deliberate. I am learning to talk. I am remembering the existence of certain words.
“I mean,” Dewey says, “I mean—nothing. Never mind.”
“What? I fucking hate when you do that.”
“Just leave it alone, Micah,” he says. “Just let her be dead. You’ll probably forget right after I tell you anyway, so it doesn’t even matter.”
He reaches for the bottle, and I hand it to him. “Fuck,” he says. Oh, right. Empty. “You asshole,” he says, and then he throws the bottle over the edge. “Look, Micah. The night of the bonfire, you—I mean, we—”
“You punched me,” I say. “You broke my head open.”
He goes quiet. He clears his throat. “Look, Micah, you’re a suspect because you were with her. You guys were alone, which was fucking stupid of both of you, because no one knows that you’re on, like, speaking terms. No one knows what you were doing. Are you listening? Dude.”
I want to look over the edge. I want to see if it was the bottle that shattered or the ice, or the world. Or my head. It might be my head, honestly. But the world is tilting or spinning or falling or all three
and suddenly the air is colder and stuck in my chest and—
But then Dewey’s hand is on my collar and choking me back, and I grin at him and say, “Hey. Thanks. You just saved my life. Again.”
He’s gasping and telling me to fuck myself, and he’s so close and Janie’s back again, finally back, her voice in my ear and her breath tickling my neck, whispering.
“I keep trying to tell you,” she says. “I told you he was in love with you.”
Dewey’s eyes are blue. Very, very blue.
And then I’m kissing him, and all I can think is that I must be very, very drunk, and that he tastes like cigarettes and shitty wine.
On the night of the bonfire, I was walking to my car, and Dewey caught my arm. I wobbled and almost fell, and then shook him off.
“What the hell, man? Are you following me?”
Dewey doesn’t pull his cigarette out to answer. “Jesus, Micah. How much have you had? Do you not remember texting me? Give me the keys.”
He tries to reach into my pocket, and I almost swing at him.
I remember the cold and the dark, and the way Dewey was lit by the tip of his cigarette. I remember this, the anger; the pounding, pressing fury at the spot where my brain stem met my spine.
But not why.
“Dammit, Micah, just get in the car. I want to go to bed.”
His hand is on my arm again and I think about what Janie said, how Dewey was in love with me the way I was in love with her, and how shitty that was. How shitty it all was.
“Get off me,” I snap. “Stop hitting on me, Dewey. I’m not fucking interested.”
He is frozen. His hand is still on my arm, but it’s starting to hurt.
“What did you say?”
“I said, stop fucking hitting on me—”
Then he punched me.
My head breaks open. It fucking bursts.
“Fuck you,” he spits. His eyes are eclipsed. “Just—fuck you, Micah.”
I squint, and the universe lurches before it focuses on his face.
“She said you were in love with me,” I mumble. The fire is too hot. The lights are too bright. The world is melting.
“She’s a goddamn fucking bitch, Micah!”
I am cracking. I am already falling apart.
“She’s psychotic, she can’t stand the idea of sharing you, and you just keep going back to her. You always go back. Why do you think she pulls you away every time I ask you to hang out? God, Micah. Just because—god, like I could see you panting after her and love you, like I could see the fucking toxic way you treat each other and—fuck it. Fuck you.”
It’s the last thing I remember. I wake up in the hospital.
The sun is huge and everywhere and burning my eyes out of their sockets.
“Oh, hell no. No. We’re not doing this shit again.”
But we do. Dewey pushes me, I fall, and this time, he lets me because he’s already leaving. Gone. My head hits the ground and the sun explodes, and I know what will happen next. Or maybe what already happened.
The fire and the girl. I know what happened.
THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN
Once upon a time, a little girl cried Woolf.
Down in the village, people heard, but no one went to help.
“The wolves around here are nice wolves,” said one of the villagers. “They wouldn’t hurt a soul.”
“She just wants attention,” said another. “There probably isn’t a wolf at all.”
“Maybe she was wearing a red hood,” offered another. “Red attracts wolves. Everyone knows that. If she was wearing red, she was just asking for it.”
“She was probably flirting with the wolf,” yelled another from the back. “She flirts with all the wolves!”
And so the villagers ignored her and went on with their lives.
From then on, the little girl held her breath and her tongue. She carried matches in her pockets, so that if the villagers didn’t come the next time she cried wolf, maybe they’d show up for the fire.
before
OCTOBER 16
“I don’t get it,” Micah says again. “What is all of this stuff? I thought we were going to your house. The bonfire?”
“Just chill,” I tell him for the thousandth time. “All will be revealed in time. Just drive.”
“Fine,” he says. He’s annoyed, he always seems to be annoyed now, we both do. It’s inevitable, considering the amount of time I’m spending in his house, which is ironic since we both thought the problem was that I moved away, but whatever. Tonight is our new beginning. We’re starting over.
Purification.
The silence is humid between us, but he drives toward the Metaphor without me telling him to, and I know it’s all going to be okay. I know it will be because it has to be.
I get out of the car—his, and he didn’t even argue when I got in the driver’s seat, just looked at me like I was going to snap, so I guess that shows how well I’m holding together—and pop the trunk, and he follows me, then stops. I don’t look at him, but I know he’s blinking, rapidly, and each time he closes and opens his eyes, his eyebrows draw a little lower until they’re almost at his nose.
We usually take Micah’s car on ninja missions because of the trunk. You can say a lot of things about Micah’s car, but the trunk could hold a
body.
He doesn’t ask.
But he leans into the trunk and grabs a box. The trunk is filled with boxes, most of them open. I got them from my garage earlier—it’s all the stuff I never unpacked because I couldn’t stand being in that fucking house. But there’s also a big one, an old UPS box I’d scrounged from the recycling bin at school, and it’s filling most of the trunk. That’s the one Micah takes. He has his feet planted and shoulders square, but it’s a lot lighter than he thinks. He flies back with the box, and I almost laugh. This is better. This is Micah, just a little bit off-balance and always embarrassed. My Micah.
Me and you, I think as I walk toward what’s left of the Metaphor. It doesn’t matter. It won’t after tonight. You and me.
That’s all that matters, in the end.
We carry boxes back and forth, stacking them higher and higher beside the Metaphor. Once they’re all there, we start ripping them apart and pulling out the papers: notes Ander and I passed back and forth, from seventh grade all the way to this year. The rest of the fairy tale bullshit and all of the books. And other stuff too, stuff I just don’t want anymore. Old notebooks and loose papers, binders of bio notes with margins full of doodles and Skarpie bleeding through.
“God, I’m an actual hoarder,” I say, dumping a box of coloring books onto the ground.
“Janie,” Micah says.
He’s on his knees, digging through the mess. I think about stopping him, but he should know. No more secrets between us, no more lies.
“Janie,” he says again, and his face is slack with disbelief. “These are your journals.”
I roll my eyes. “I know. I put them in your car, Micah. Duh.”
“But these . . . Janie, these are your journals.”
He flips through Journal Ten, which was back when I was still in my sketchbook journal phase. I see the ink, watercolor, so many sketches. I did a drawing a day for months and months. There must be a hundred Metaphors in there.
“You can’t do this,” he says. He shoves his hands into his armpits to keep warm, and I step closer and tug them out and press them between mine. Not that my hands are warm either, but at least now we’re shivering together.
“You can’t, all of your plans are in here. You want to do all of that shit, draw and go to Nepal and write about it in your journals and—”
“I’m not burning Journal Twelve.” Yet. And I’m not going to Nepal, either. I never was. Micah was right—I would have wished and wanted but I would have been too scared to do anything. Just like everybody else. Everyone says they want to travel and leave home and find themselves or whatever, but they never do it. That’s what high school’s for. You make plans and you don’t follow through. You dream and you can be brave when you’re dreaming, brave enough to imagine that there’s actually a yourself to find, brave enough to finish projects even though you were never born with endings, brave enough to plan volunteer trips even though you’d probably be dead of asphyxiation by the time you’re there because you’re always holding your breath as if that can keep you together. Please. I’m in so many pieces that there’s nothing left to hold. The plane ticket doesn’t change that. I’m still terrified. Maybe Micah can get a refund.
“But the rest of these. What was the point? You always wanted to look at them later. You wanted to look back through them one day, you wanted to remember all of the shit we did, that we’re going to do. You wrote it all down, you can’t just get rid of it, or what’s the point?”
“Oh, Micah.” My hands are clenched tight around his. Our hands are actually sweating now, or it might just be mine. “There was never a point. Don’t you see?”
I drop his hands, reach into my pocket, light a match.
I drop the match and watch as it falls from my fingers.
Watch as the starving flame yearns back toward my fingertips just a little as it falls.
And falls.
All that paper sure burns awfully fast.
It burns and burns and burns.
I watch for a while before I open the last box. The big one. No, that’s not true. I don’t open it, I tear it apart. I use fingers and feet and teeth and I destroy it, rip the sides out and throw them into the water. The fire is at my back and spreading into my bloodstream—I am furious. I am rabid.
When it’s sufficiently mauled, I step back.
Behind me, Micah inhales—a sharp sound that I swear makes the fire lean toward him.
“What?” I say. “I had to. I couldn’t get them into the box.”
His hands are up, eyes wide. “Janie. Janie, stop. You can’t do this.”
“Watch me,” I say. He reaches for my shoulders to hold me back, and I flinch away, and snarl, “Get the fuck off me, Micah.”
His hands drop away like I have turned to fire. I wish, but alas.
“But you were going to finish them,” he says. His eyes are too big for his head. “Janie, they—they’re beautiful. Just . . . come on, Janie. Don’t do this. You can finish them, I know you can.”
“Art isn’t finished,” I tell him. “It’s abandoned. Who said that?”
“Da Vinci,” he says, so quietly I almost don’t hear.
“Exactly. And if it’s going to be abandoned, it might as well burn.”
And I hand him the match.
His face goes white. “What? No.”
“Just do it. I can’t do it, so you have to. You have to. For me.”
“Janie, you don’t know what you’re saying—”
“I do know. Why is that so hard to believe? I know. I know what I want and what I want is for you to take this match and light it and drop it. Okay? Micah. Please. I love you more than anything. Please just do it.”
He’s biting the inside of his cheek so hard that he must be bleeding. He can’t hold himself back from asking. “But why?”
I don’t look at him. “Stop it. You don’t want to know why.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see him almost. Almost ask why again. Almost press the issue. Almost change my mind. But he doesn’t. He leaves it at that.
And he lights the match.
And he drops it.
“Everything.”
They burn quickly, feathers first, curling black. Then the bamboo. It only takes a minute or so until there’s nothing to save.
Purification. You burn everything, you burn and burn and burn, and you start over. This fire isn’t quite big enough for that. This fire is just for me, for everything Janie Vivian ever was. I stare for a little longer and then I go to the barn for vodka and buckets. When I come back out, Micah’s eyes are on me, wary and uncertain, but waiting all the same.
“I think most people are embers,” I say.
He takes a deep breath, and doesn’t answer for a long time. When he does, finally, it’s just to say, “Okay.”
“Embers. Most people are just waiting for a breath to coax them to life. Some of the lucky ones are the breath. But some people aren’t either.”
I hand Micah a bottle of vodka, and he starts drinking right away. I wait for him to take at least what I estimate to be six shots before I fill the buckets in the quarry. The fire screams as I put it out, and it makes me want to cry.
I don’t, though. I take Micah’s hand and lead him to the car. I drive us to my house, where people are already arriving.
after
DECEMBER 19
When everything comes back into focus, it is nearly dark. The moon is huge and rising. I am freezing. I can’t feel my fingertips.
I remember and then I don’t.
I forget and then it all comes rushing back.
I lose count of how many times I throw up.
I lose track of when I stop counting.
I don’t know how I got there but I am lying in the grass. Then I am lying on the rocks. Then the grass. The world is vertical and horizontal and nothing but sky. I don’t know what’s happening but it might be that nothing is happening at all.
“Janie,” I whisper. The stars a
re cold and burning, like her. The stars are unreachable and everything, like her. “Janie, Janie.”
“Micah? Is that you?”
Janie was driving. It was my car, but Janie was driving. Her hair was wild; the windows were rolled down even though it was cold already. It would snow soon. I remember thinking about that as I took another shot.
“All right!” Janie screamed. I jumped. The bottle was already at my lips and I gulped down more cheap vodka than I could handle, and I could handle a lot. I coughed, almost choked, almost puked.
Janie’s head was half out of the window and she was driving too fast. Her hair streamed behind her, brighter than her wings on fire.
Her wings on fire. I had set her wings on fire.
“You and me,” she screamed as the car swerved back and forth and I tried to keep the vodka in the bottle. “You and me, universe! Let’s fucking go!”
I remember the relief. She was insane, and this was Janie. This was the Janie who loved fire and carried rocks. This was the Janie Vivian who trusted rarely but deeply, and hoped with everything she was. This was the Janie Vivian, who I had loved with every atom in every cell in my body before memory was relevant.
Maybe she heard me think that. Maybe she had always been right about our souls being joined, because she came back into the car and ran a finger down my arm, shoulder to elbow, feather light, and down to my knuckles. She stopped when our fingertips met and kept them there until we pulled into her driveway. We had to park at the bottom because it was already clogged with cars.
It wasn’t until she moved away to pull the keys out of the ignition that I realized that she had been shaking.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, voice barely audible. The lights in the car were dimming, and she was going dark.
“We can fix this,” I said. My tongue was thick. “You and me.”
We can do anything, she always said. Anything, everything. You and me against the world.
“Don’t,” she said. There was a flash of light as she lit a match and blew it out. “Don’t do that. Don’t pretend. That’s my thing. You’re supposed to be the one person who never pretends. So why are you pretending?”
