This Is Where the World Ends by Amy Zhang
Dedication
To the girls with matches in their fists
and fire in their hearts
PART I
ONCE UPON A TIME
after
NOVEMBER 15
Everything ends. This is obvious. This is the easy part. This is what I believe in: the inevitable, the catastrophe, the apocalypse.
What’s harder is trying to figure out when it all began to collapse. I would argue that it has always been going to shit, but this is when we finally began to notice:
On the last day of summer before senior year, Janie Vivian moved away. We sat at our desks facing each other through windows thrown open. A bookshelf was balanced between the sills, but she didn’t crawl over. She didn’t cry, either. She was thinking, hard. That was worse.
“You could always just move in with me,” I said. I wasn’t quite joking.
She didn’t answer. She sat still except for her fingers, which hadn’t stopped rubbing her favorite rock from the Metaphor since her parents had told her to pack up her room. Her thumb was black from all the marker ink on it.
The new house was on the other side of town and much bigger. The back was almost entirely windows, and she could see the quarry and the top of the Metaphor from her room. Her grandpa had finally died, which meant that they finally had money again. It was everything her mother wanted. These were the things she had told me in pieces. She rarely talked about it, and I didn’t ask. I hadn’t seen the new house yet, and I never wanted to.
“It’s going to be okay.” She said it slowly. Her thumb rubbed circles on the rock, smudging the writing. Behind her, the room was empty. She was leaving the desk and the shelves because her parents had bought her new ones.
Downstairs, her dad shouted her name again.
It was humid. I shifted, and there was sweat on my desk in the shape of my forearms. It had been the hottest day of the year. Janie had said it was a sign.
“This isn’t it,” she said. She was glaring at me. “I know what you’re going to say, and this isn’t it.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” I said. “I was going to say that I’ll see you in English tomorrow.”
“No, you weren’t.”
She was right. I wasn’t.
“It’s just across town,” she said, and she was still glaring, but not at me. She was rubbing her thumb raw. “That’s nothing. Nothing’s going to change, okay? Okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, but she wasn’t listening.
Her name came again in a singsong. “Jaaaaaaaaanie!”
Her mom. Janie’s fist went white.
“It’s not really even across town,” I said. “Really, it’s just down the road.”
She reached into her pocket for a new rock, a clean one. She pulled out a marker, scribbled something in tiny letters, and then she opened her top drawer and dropped the rock in. She always did that. She trailed rocks behind her.
She stood. She stared at me. Her hair was frizzing from the heat, and her pockets bulged with stones.
“You and me,” she said. “You and me, Micah Carter.”
Then she reached for the board between our windows. She pulled it back into her room, and I thought, This is it. Our eyes met, and she said, “More than anything,” before she banged the window shut between us.
“More than everything,” I said, but of course she couldn’t hear me. I felt a ripple in the air; the window closing made the only breeze we’d had in days. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes again, she was leaving. Her journal was tucked under her arm and her hair was swinging, and she didn’t slam the door as she always did—she closed it with her fingertips, and everything was still. The world had already begun to end.
When I wake up in the hospital and they ask me what happened, that’s what I tell them. It’s the last thing I remember.
People are here for smoke inhalation and alcohol poisoning. A lot of people have burns. A lot of the burns are bad. At least one person sprained an ankle, and a few people have broken fingers.
That’s what the nurses say, but they don’t tell me what happened. They just keep saying there was an accident. Every time they leave, Dewey flips off the door. Dewey never f*cking leaves. He brought the new Metatron and my Xbox, and he sits there and shoots Nazi zombies at full volume while my head explodes.
“Look, man,” he says again. “You were an idiot. That’s not an accident. You got too shit-faced and you’re goddamn lucky you didn’t drown in your own puke.”
He’s lying. His fingers twitch. Cigarettes strain against his front pocket. The nurse told him he’d have to leave if he tried to smoke in here again.
I feel like shit. The doctors didn’t pump my stomach because they were too busy sewing my scalp together, which split open. No one has told me how the hell that happened yet. I’m still nauseous enough to be clutching the bedpan, but the real pain is deeper, somewhere around the place where my brain stem meets my spine. It hurts my eyes when I stare at my phone, but I keep staring. Janie has to text back soon.
“Dude, stop texting and grab a controller.” Dewey brought my extra. It’s the shitty one that my dog chewed up before he died. “Listen to me. You’re keeping the bench warm in T-ball, and she’s in the major leagues. You got it?”