This Is Where the World Ends

by Amy Zhang

  I didn’t have an answer to that. Most of the time, I didn’t know how to respond to her. Most of the time, I didn’t need to.

  She just shook her head a little and raised the bottle back to my lips. “Drink.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because the universe doesn’t give a shit, Micah,” she said. “So why should we?”

  It takes my eyes a while to focus. I know it isn’t Janie. I know but I still hope, even though her eyes are too dark and her hair is too short and her face is too sharp. Even though she is in running clothes, and Janie does not believe in running. Even though she is crying, and Janie refuses to cry anymore.

  “God,” she says. Her voice is thick with tears and I want her to leave. I want to lie here and squint at the moon until the sky becomes white. “God, I wish I hadn’t, okay? Okay? Stop following me around. Stop looking at me like that. I know she told you, I know she did. I tried to tell her—I tried to apologize but—”

  “Piper?” I ask, because I’m not sure. “Piper?”

  She’s on the ground next to me now, crouching with her head in her arms. Arms on her knees. She gasps out muffled sobs.

  “I was drunk too.” I think this is what she says. “I was drunk, I just wanted to go home. I didn’t mean to—I didn’t mean for him to . . .”

  Home. Home would be a nice place to be. I wish I could get there. Or remember where it is. Or where I am.

  “I left her,” Piper whispers, not that anyone is listening. “I let her go.”

  No, I’m at the Metaphor. I know that. It is December, not September. It is cold, and it will snow soon. Janie moved away on the last day of summer vacation before senior year, which was months ago, and I am still trying to remember. She made wings, and burned them. I burned them. She declared an apocalypse, but it had already started. She believed and stopped believing in love. None of it matters, because she is dead. She fell into the quarry and never quite came out. And on the night she fell into the quarry and never came out, she had a bonfire.

  “I didn’t—I didn’t mean to,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do, what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t—I didn’t know—oh god, I didn’t mean for it to happen, I didn’t. I didn’t. Oh god. She asked me to stay.”

  At that bonfire, I was on the ground.

  Gravel on my palms. Puke in my throat.

  Janie’s dragging me up. She sighs. “Dammit. I forgot how unsteady you get. I wish I could take a shot. I love being drunk. Did you know that? Of course you do. I love it, Micah. I love not giving a shit. God, you’re so tall. I hate that.”

  “Take a shot,” I say, thrusting the bottle at her. She steadies me.

  “Not tonight,” she says.

  We walk for forever. “Why is your driveway so long?”

  She almost laughs. “I had to park far away. Everyone’s going to clog the driveway later and I don’t want to get stuck. We have to get out of here fast. Oh, wait. Here.” She slips my keys back into my pocket. Her fingers are cold.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do we have to get out of here fast?”

  She doesn’t answer. I don’t ask again.

  The house finally comes into view. She drags me into the backyard and over to a lawn chair and goes to light the fire. There are marshmallows on a long table, and other shit, but I only care about the marshmallows. I don’t think I can get to them. I take another swallow of vodka instead.

  Soon there are other kids from school too, everyone from school and maybe I talk to them and maybe I don’t. There are chairs all around, and blankets, and booze. I see the booze. It’s almost like Janie cleaned out her parents’ cabinets and put it all on the table.

  And eventually I see the fire.

  It is at the very back of the yard and the house is behind us. More cars are coming, cars spilling out the senior class of Waldo High. Janie really did invite everyone. They whoop and punch each other, and eventually this turns into chasing each other, and eventually this turns to chasing each other with torches.

  For a while, Janie walks around, talks to people. She smiles. Her eyes are pale, and I watch the fire reflected in them. I start playing a drinking game with myself. Sip every time she laughs and touches someone’s arm. Sip every time she flips her hair over her shoulder. Shot every time she looks back at me.

  Finally she comes back. I don’t remember seeing that. One moment she wasn’t there and the next she was, dark and backlit against the fire. There was a blanket in her arms. She climbed into my lap and threw it over us. We sat and did not speak, but we listened.

  It was not warm or cold.

  It was not dark or bright.

  It just was.

  Here, it is quiet except for Piper’s sniffles. I wish she would stop.

  “Are you staying?” I ask her, because I want to leave.

  Her head snaps up. Her jaw is slack and her eyes are drowning, drowning.

  She slaps me. My head snaps back. When it comes back down, Piper is leaving too.

  And I am drowning, drowning.

  No, wait.

  That’s not right.

  Not quite.

  THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN

  Once upon a time, Sleeping Beauty is raped and only wakes up when she gives birth to twins.

  Once upon a time, the little mermaid dies.

  Once upon a time, true love’s kiss doesn’t work on Snow White, but the prince carts the corpse back to the castle anyway.

  Once upon a time Scheherazade tells stories to stay alive. Rapunzel carts her children around a desert and almost starves. The miller’s daughter is too afraid to say no. Little Red Riding Hood loses her virginity. Janie Vivian tries to remember to breathe.

  The end.

  before

  OCTOBER 16

  The hard part is over. Phase three was the crucial one, everything from buying gas with Ander’s Visa to throwing the card back into his car when I went to hug him hello. I was careful: no one saw me, no one looked twice, I didn’t leave fingerprints.

  Oh, right, I forgot to mention: I have a new plan. A new ninja mission. This one is four phases. Arson is easier than love.

  Phase four is the fun part. It’s also the pot in my yard and the shitty music and the couples probably having sex in our lawn chairs even though it’s so cold that we’ll probably hear about someone having frostbite on his dick tomorrow, but I just have to wait that out. People just need to get a little more drunk.

  Micah’s sprawled in a lawn chair and I’m against him, so that he’s leaning back as far as he can and my head is on his arm and I’m fetal on his chest. He weaves in and out of consciousness and stares at the house. Even in the dark it’s ugly and stupid and obscene. But soon that won’t be a problem anymore, so I try not to think about it.

  His eyelashes flutter. He shakes his head, or tries to, and looks around.

  “This is kind of lame,” he says, and I only understand because I know him so well. His words are garbled and adorable.

  “Yup,” I say. “But the fun part is coming.” Just you wait.

  His head is drooping, and my heart does a funny thudding thing. Maybe I made him drink too much. I tap his cheek. “Micah? Hello? Look at me.”

  He tries, and I know I probably shouldn’t, but I giggle. He’s so confused and sweet, and he’s trying. He really is.

  “Tell me a secret. No, don’t. I don’t want to tell secrets tonight.” We have enough secrets as it is. We have too many. “Tell me about your favorite day.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your favorite day. Us, together. Your favorite day.”

  He tries to scratch his head. He blinks up at me, trying to focus.

  “What are you thinking?” he asks me.

  I almost laugh. What am I thinking? What am I not thinking?

  I am thinking about Ander and the kind of love that starts and ends with lips. I am thinking about Piper and me curled in a bus seat with the same music thrumming in our brains
and our zero-accountability friendship and how I would have stayed with her no matter what. I am thinking about the little girls in Nepal and how there is probably no Micah in their lives. Micah. Most of all, I’m thinking about him. I am thinking of his face in the window across from mine. I am thinking about the conversations neither of us remember. I am thinking about the times I wanted to say thank you but couldn’t find the words and the times I wanted to say I’m sorry but couldn’t find the guts. I am thinking of his face when I kissed Ander at regionals. I am thinking of the way I used him. I am thinking of the way his face tenses when he’s annoyed and the way the same face dimples when he smiles.

  I am thinking about the way we love each other. I am thinking about our soul, one atom and bruised all over now that I have dragged it behind me with my muddy hands.

  “Micah?” I say.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think there are things that can’t be fixed?”

  He shifts against me. I watch the fire, and even though I know him down to his fingertips, I don’t know what he will say next.

  “What do you mean?”

  He tries to push me away, but I can’t, I can’t let go.

  “Do you mean—do you mean us?”

  “No,” I say. I wrap my fingers in his shirt and pull him close. “Never us. Never.”

  “Okay,” he says, like thank god, and I hide my smile against his shoulder. “I dunno, Janie. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I sigh. I grab the bottle, take a quick shot myself, just one, and squeeze my eyes closed as I swallow. “Okay,” I say, “how about this. If you could go back in time and redo one thing, what would it be?”

  I catch him off guard. He blinks. His head falls back, and I touch his throat where it quivers with an answer he doesn’t quite want to give.

  “I wouldn’t have gone with my babysitter,” he says, so quietly I barely catch it. “I would have made my dad stay.”

  “But your mom would still be dead.” He flinches. “Wait, sorry. Sorry,” I say again, quieter. I lay my head against his chest and listen to his heart beating, beating, beating. “I just—don’t you see? Everything would still have happened as it happened.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I guess.”

  All of those maybes. All of those could haves, would haves.

  “I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.” I can’t stop, I can’t stop replaying all of the ways this could have gone right, if we had just tried a little harder. If we had made smaller mistakes. “Whatever you do, whatever you redo, it all ends up here. Some things are just unavoidable. No matter how hard you try, the things meant to go to shit still go to shit. Terrible things happen, Micah, and you can’t stop them. You just can’t.”

  So you just do more terrible things.

  “Oh,” he says, frowning. He’s bleary and blinking and trying to focus on me, and my love for him is sudden and sharp and everything. I kiss him on the nose.

  “Favorite day,” I say again. “Story time. I want to hear about your favorite day.”

  “Uh. Um. The fish? You remember the fish?”

  And he stops there. My eyes fly open and I glare at him. “That wasn’t a story. I wanted a story.”

  “Jesus, Janie, grow up.” But he complies. “The night we put fish in Grant Ebber’s car and he didn’t find it for a week?”

  “Tell me about the night,” I mumble. I could fall asleep here. The music is too loud and the smoke is giving me a headache, but it’s not so hard to pretend again, pretend that it’s just us, behind the smoke screen and impenetrable music.

  But then, it’s never hard to pretend.

  “God, Janie, I don’t remember the night. It was raining? Not at first, it was just cloudy, and I was already in bed, and you were—you were so angry.”

  “Of course I was angry,” I say. “The shit they were saying about Myra—it was just. Ugh. People, Micah. People are the worst.”

  He presses on. He’s starting to slur. “Right, he dumped her because he said she was blowing the basketball team for luck. Not that that worked. And people said her breath smelled fishy and you just wanted to prove that it wasn’t true. So we went to Pick ’n Save and bought the two biggest fish we could find. And we put them in his trunk, and then we went back to my house and climbed onto the roof and picked superpowers in the rain.”

  I slide down a bit, rearrange myself so that my head is in the crook of his elbow, and look up at him. I remembered that night too, the heavy, heavy rain on the roof of the car, the cashier with the pink ombre hair who laughed and told us we were crazy kids and told Micah not to let me go. I remember dancing when we got back, waltzing in the driveway and stepping on his feet and him stepping on mine, tripping and stumbling and soaked through, and laughing with our heads thrown back, drinking the rain like we were dying of thirst.

  “But why that day?” I ask. “Why that one?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, and sighs. “I guess. I guess because you were, you know. Insane. Completely crazy. You didn’t care if we were caught, you know? You didn’t care so much that I didn’t care either. We were in the rain and you were warm, and you smelled like cinnamon and vodka and lemons and sleep and, I don’t know, something sharper—why are you smiling all weird?”

  “Oh, Micah,” I say, “you big sap.”

  I didn’t think he noticed things like that.

  “Okay, my turn,” I say, scooting closer. “My favorite day ever was the time we went to the petting zoo freshman year. I sat next to the cute German exchange student on the bus. Remember him? Hans? He got sent back after a few months because he got caught with pot too many times? We took a trip to the petting zoo and the farm for bio, and you and I got partnered up, and we ran off to the edge of the orchard while everyone else dissected apples, and we climbed into this one tree and ate all the apples we could and everything tasted like sunshine. There was this old barn, they were halfway through tearing it down, and I wanted to explore it, but you said we couldn’t, we had to get back. So we did, and everyone was at the petting zoo part, feeding lambs and stuff. And Mr. Marvin was talking to the farmer, and we overheard them saying that the tagged ones, the tagged animals were going to become lamb steaks and veal, and it was so shitty, Micah. I wanted to cry. I think I did cry. So we went back that night. We slid under the fence with masks and picket signs and a thermos of hot chocolate and graham crackers and marshmallows, and we stood under the single security camera and protested. You remember? The signs were kind of lame—”

  “You made them!”

  “Like, SAVE THE ANIMALS and WE WILL NOT BE CAGED and stuff like that. And after, after we did our part for the planet or the cause or whatever, we went to the old barn, and you said there would be rats and snakes and crap, but we went anyway, and we opened the thermos and it was hot chocolate and we dumped the marshmallows in and dunked the graham crackers and watched the stars chase the moon across the sky.”

  Micah just watches me. He flicks my hair. “You’re lying,” he says. “Your eyebrow is doing the . . . the thing.”

  “The thing?” I say, and he affirms, “The thing,” and I laugh because he’s right.

  “I’m lying,” I say, and then I hook my foot around his scrawny hips and pull myself upright so that we’re face to face. My hands are on his chest and I can feel his heart, thudding thudding thudding. “I’m lying,” I say again, “you’re right. My favorite day, my favorite favorite day ever, is this one.”

  And I kiss him.

  It’s soft and hesitant and yielding.

  He doesn’t move and I still don’t quite breathe.

  And then—

  And then—

  He leans, I push. He is rainwater and smoke and wishes. He is honey and wind and bitter as truth and sharp with hurting and endlessly, unbearably sweet. He is air, finally, endlessly. Ease—that’s what it is, that’s what we are, we snap into place, or we glide, or we fall. His fingers are careful, light, resting on my back and my waist, ba
rely touching. My hands are over his lungs and his heart, pressing. He is Micah and I am Janie, and this is how we should have done it years and years ago.

  We kiss like that for a long time. Centuries, maybe. Eons.

  But then there’s a whistle. Not a nice one. It’s sharp and rising and it pierces the music and slices into my eardrums, and I let go of Micah and look up, and it’s Ander and Piper, and he’s grinning the ugliest grin in the world, and she just looks like she wants to get out of here.

  Again.

  And suddenly I’m cold. I am carved out of ice.

  “Jeez, Janie,” Ander says. He leans his elbows on the back of the lawn chair with his cup crooked in his hand, dribbling onto us. “Micah Carter? Seriously, who won’t you fuck?”

  But I’m looking at Piper. Staring her down, even if she won’t look at me.

  The fury is sudden and harsh and rising. It’s impulse. I look straight at Piper and I spit out, “Wait. Stay.”

  Ander grins, and kisses me.

  I am too surprised to stop him.

  I am too slow to say no.

  And Piper.

  Piper finally looks at me, and she doesn’t stop him.

  He pulls me out of the chair with his stupid, stupid wrestler body as he keeps kissing me, and the blanket falls off and the cold hits me everywhere and all at once, and his stubble stabs my face and his breath is stale booze, and I wish he were grosser so that I could puke in his mouth.

  And he obliges. He reaches for the bottom of my shirt and I’m not frozen, I’m drowning in liquid nitrogen, I’m frostbitten, I’m cryogenic.

  But I still feel it when something shifts behind me, and all of a sudden, I don’t care about Piper or Ander. But by the time I push Ander away, by the time I can breathe enough to get away from them, Micah is disappearing into the dark.

  “Micah,” I try, but my voice is stuck somewhere deep inside me, rotting away with all of the stomach butterflies that had reanimated for a few seconds when Micah and I touched. But they’re good and safely dead again, and clogging my throat.