The Edge of Everything (Untitled #1)(49)

“Jonah, control yourself,” her mother said. “Please.”

“Only I know if I hate school,” he said. “So Zoe shouldn’t say I don’t hate it. I hate it if I say I hate it.”

Zoe got out of bed, and stalked across the room, allowing herself a childish outburst of her own. She was carrying around enough pain already. She couldn’t add her brother’s misery to the pile. Not this time. It wasn’t fair. Didn’t Jonah know that she missed X, too? Didn’t he know that she was thinking about him with every breath?

On her way to the door, she kicked over the idiotic fan with her bare foot. Behind her, Jonah said, “See how she just left? Nobody says good-bye.”



The morning was a nightmare. Zoe avoided Jonah as she printed an essay for English, but she could hear his shouts of “I hate it if I say I hate it” ringing through the house. He wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t brush his teeth, wouldn’t get dressed. Zoe felt her mother’s impatience rise. As she passed Jonah’s bedroom, she saw her mom trying to dress him herself. Jonah refused to cooperate. He stiffened his body like a war protester.

Zoe motioned for her mother to come into the hall.

“I can’t believe he’s being so heinous,” she said.

“He’s in pain, Zo,” said her mom. “We all process pain differently.”

“Yeah—and he processes it heinously,” Zoe said.

“Anyway, look, there’s no way I can go to work today,” said her mom.

“Can you afford to take a day off?” said Zoe.

“No, but I can’t afford a sitter either,” said her mother. “And who could I call? All the sitters are going to be in school, which is where children are supposed to be.”

Jonah must have overheard them because he called out from his room.

“Could Rufus be my babysitter, maybe?” he said. “I would never be heinous at Rufus.”

Zoe’s mom didn’t like the idea. She didn’t want to take advantage of Rufus’s crush on her, probably. But Zoe thought it was genius, and she wanted this morning, this crisis, this escalating Jonah nonsense over with.

She called Rufus herself. He sounded surprised by the request—chain-saw artists are rarely asked to babysit—but before she could say never mind he had declared the idea to be rad.

“Thank god,” said Zoe. “I was afraid you’d think it was gnarly.”

“You’re making fun of me, I know,” said Rufus, laughing, “but tell my man Jonah to prepare himself for an epic hang.”

Twenty minutes later, Rufus’s van could be heard negotiating the mountainside. Zoe saw the wooden bear affixed to the roof as it rose above the treetops, waving like the queen.



At last she was free. She drove the decrepit Struggle Buggy to school as if it were a race car. Every nerve in her body seemed to be humming. Every song on the radio seemed to be about X.

Zoe’s and Jonah’s schools were nestled next to each other in Flathead Valley near a dense settlement of chain stores (Target, Walmart, Costco) and beef-slinging restaurants that Zoe’s mom referred to as the Cannibal Food Court (Sizzler, Five Guys, House of Huns). Students were allowed to eat lunch at the mall once they became juniors. For everyone else, it merely shimmered across the highway like an unreachable promised land. Zoe was a junior, but the thrill of eating in the Cannibal Food Court had lost its shine. It was partly because her mother’s ethics had sunk in over the years—Zoe wasn’t a vegetarian, but she felt a cloud of guilt whenever she ate meat—and partly because House of Huns was where she’d told Dallas she didn’t want to go out anymore.

Val had begged Zoe not to see Dallas in the first place. She thought he was cocky and kind of a douche. But Val’s relationship with Gloria was so intense that she had a skewed idea of what was generally possible in 11th grade. Zoe loved that Dallas was a caver like her and her dad, that he was fun and uncomplicated, and that—so sue her—you could see his triceps through almost any shirt. When she told Val that she was going to give him a chance, Val said simply, “I weep for you.”

They began dating in September, and Zoe soon discovered that there were many sweet things about Dallas: His favorite color was orange. He still slept in pajamas. He used a photo of his mom for the wallpaper on his laptop. Val didn’t want to hear any of it. Once, when Zoe and Dallas passed her in the hallway, Zoe sang out, “Still dating!” Val nodded, and sang back, “Still weeping!”

In November, when her dad died and she was crying constantly and everything was so raw and dizzying that she felt like she’d been thrown out of a moving car, Zoe decided to strip away everyone who wasn’t essential to her life. And Dallas just wasn’t. She broke the news to him at House of Huns, which was a Benihana-type place where shirtless men grunted like barbarians in front of a massive circular grill. At first, Dallas flatly refused to be dumped. He told Zoe she was in too messed-up a state to be making “mega-life-altering decisions.” Zoe had face-palmed—she couldn’t help it—and said, “Dude, this is in no way a mega-life-altering decision. I know what a life-altering event is, okay? My father just died.”

“I’m sorry,” said Dallas. “I didn’t mean to compare this to—to that. To your dad. I just think you’re a badass. And you’re hot. And those are, like, the two best things.”