This Is Where the World Ends(10)
Micah ducks his head and slides into a desk while Dewey mutters something about how it’s not his fault that Micah drives a piece of shit. Micah catches me licking whipped cream off my finger and smiles, but I have to ignore him because right then—
“Hey,” Ander whispers. He leans over, and his angel smile makes me feel just right: quirky but not hipster, talented but not cocky, sunshine without the burn. “I like those shoes on you.”
Such adorable bullshit. Ander is the worst flirt in the world, and he has no idea at all. Being with him is like riding a hot air balloon inflated by his ego—the view is great, the heat is everywhere. I don’t know why I like him, just that I do, and that’s okay. It is! People say because too much. You don’t always need a reason. I want cliché and simple. I want Journal Number Twelve to be heat and moments. Condensation gathering on Starbucks cups with my name spelled wrong. White people almost kissing. Boyfriend in plaid. Hot dog legs and sunshine.
Ander leans a bit more. This is important, the leaning, because it makes my heart beat so hard it feels like it’s going to break a rib. If I die of a heart attack or something one day (GOD FORBID—I will not die of something boring, I won’t), it will have been caused by this moment. The corners of his mouth quirk and he shows his gorgeous teeth again, and my insides go all soft because our babies would be the most perfect babies in the history of ever.
“Hey,” he says again, catching sight of my sketches. He pushes my hand back to look at the scribbles, the universes and wings and stars, and I freeze. “That’s really pretty. Needs a rocket ship, though. Vroom.”
No. You don’t get to look, angel boy. You don’t get to push my hand aside.
But I don’t snatch it away. I swallow and I—
What do I do?
I add a rocket ship. I add a goddamn rocket ship.
(Side note: did he say vroom?)
“Now go write your paper,” I say, bumping my shoulder against his. Not even to touch him—okay, a little bit to touch him—but to angle myself away.
But aren’t boyfriends—would be, will be—supposed to be like this? Peeking over your shoulder and grinning their lopsided grins, faking interest in your stupid little scribbles. I wanted this so badly when I was dating Jeff Martin, who only ever wanted to make out, which would have been fine if he didn’t nibble so much.
“Mr. Carter,” Mr. Markus says sharply. “Why bother coming to class at all? You show up late, and you make no effort at all to even pretend to work. Your classmates, at least, give that much. I can only assume that you’re finished with your paper, as you and Mr. Dewey seem far more preoccupied by rubber bands than your education.”
Micah’s head snaps up. His entire head this time, not just his eyes, and it looks painful. Everything Micah does looks painful. He moves too quickly, and everything looks like a flinch. I can’t decide if Micah is cute or not, but once I heard a couple of sophomores saying that he has bedroom eyes.
Not that I was jealous or anything.
It’s just that—well, we had already drawn lines on our soul and stabbed our little flags into it. We had claimed. Him: music and reality and all the words too shy to be spoken. Me: art and dreams in Technicolor and everything that had ever happened in sunshine and all the secrets exchanged in moonlight. We agreed on all of that before even the dinosaurs stomped around, and he isn’t allowed to change that now.
And it’s not like they noticed before. Before his acne cleared up and the barber gave him that undercut (which I maintain is really a Hitler Youth haircut) and hipster glasses were suddenly in. I did. I always knew that his best feature was his eyelashes. And that his glasses prescription is wrong, so when he’s squinting and his eyelashes get all tangled and he does that rapid fluttery blinking thing, it’s because he can’t see, not because he understands you, stupid little sophomores.
But anyway.
“Um,” says Micah. His rubber-band gun drops onto his desk.
Next to him, Dewey mutters, “Yeah, rubber bands trump this shithole.”
“Fantastic,” says Mr. Markus, leaning back in his chair and motioning for Micah to go to the podium in the front. “Then, please. Read us your papers. We’ll have group critique.”
Dewey claps Micah on the shoulder. “All you, man.”
I can see Micah swallow from across the room.
It takes him an eternity, two, to make his way to the front. His throat clenches and his paper wrinkles in his hands, and someone giggles. I glare in the general direction. My glare razes—I’ve spent too long perfecting it in the mirror for it not to. Kelsey Davenport quivers.
The razing is okay. It’s politeness, really, to make sure no one makes fun of Micah. We’re very good about our interaction now, in school. Seventh grade was the hardest, when I got boobs and he got pimples, and we needed each other more than anything but couldn’t even talk in school because I thought I was too cool. But it really is better this way. I think. It’s easier for both of us to have our own friends at school and not try to combine them, but maybe a little easier for me than for him.
“If there is one thing that science and religion agree on,” he begins, stutters, coughs, clears his throat. “If there is one thing that science and religion agree on, it’s the fact that the world is going to end. Maybe the sun will go out or God will rain his wrath down or a giant wolf will swallow the earth whole, but throughout it all is the pervasive idea of entropy. It’s all unraveling. Everything is stumbling toward an ending.”