This Is Where the World Ends(11)

Ander coughs. His lips are twitching, and he catches Wes Bennet’s eye, and they exchange their jock-y smirks. (Sigh. I have a massive crush on an *. How cliché.) Micah is bright red, and he does his head-duck thing, where he pulls his shoulders to his ears and doesn’t know where to look.

Micah lives like an apology. He blushes when he breathes because he’s taking someone else’s air. It’s like all Micah wants is to disappear, and he thinks if he’s quiet enough, if he keeps his eyes on the ground and barely breathes and treads lightly, people will forget he exists.

But he has it all wrong. Here is how you disappear: you dive into your DNA and rip out everything but carbon. You copy. Carbon copy—see what I did there? And then you keep going. You apply to college because you’re supposed to and then you complain about debt and the classes and the whole system because that’s what everyone else does. You run into businessmen in untailored suits and you marry the lamest one and you move into a nice picture-perfect house full of clock hands that point at the cemetery. Don’t worry. The tide will sweep you right up.

I stare at him, hard, and tug on our soul until he looks at me.

“More than anything,” I mouth to him since no one is looking, and his shoulders relax. He smiles. His eyes and my eyes—our soul is so bright.

Oh, Micah. I’ll never let the tide take us.

But then Ander glances over again and gives me a flashing side grin, there and gone, and I know I’m sitting at a desk and everything, but still—my knees go Jell-O weak.





after


NOVEMBER 19


They meant it. The police, I mean. They meant it when they said that we would talk soon. They ask me about everything. Everything. They ask me about Janie, and that is the same thing.

They tell me about the fire.

They tell me that they think someone set it.

“Yes,” I say. “It was a bonfire. Wasn’t it?”

Yes, they say, impatient. I imagine because they’ve said it before. Yes, it was a bonfire. But the bonfire spread. Someone probably made it spread.

“Who?” I ask.

They tell me there was gasoline.

They tell me that it was everywhere, but especially the second floor. Especially her room.

They ask me if I knew that Janie and I spent that entire night together. They ask me why that was, since we didn’t want anyone to know we were friends. They ask me again why that was.

The truth is I don’t know how to answer. She is Janie Vivian, and I am Micah Carter. I don’t know how to explain it further than that.

Dewey is still babysitting. After the police leave, I go down to the basement and find him playing Metatron again.

“You gotta just stop talking to those *s,” he says when he sees me. “Your dad told me to tell you not to say anything else to them unless they get a search warrant or something.”

I ignore that, because my dad can tell me himself if he ever decides to come home. Where is he again? I don’t care enough to ask. “I want to see her house,” I say.

Dewey plays Metatron with his entire body. He ducks a bullet and a zombie bite and lunges forward to shoot. “Nothing to see,” he says, and ducks again. He hits his head on the edge of the coffee table. “Oh, f*ck.” He pauses the game to glare at me like it’s my fault. “Will you grab a f*cking controller already?”

“Will you drive?” My license is suspended until further notice. I’m almost able to walk in a straight line, though, so the reinstatement is within sight.

“Why the f*ck would I do that?”

“I’m going either way,” I say. “I just don’t want to walk.”

It’s cold, which is weird. I keep walking outside in shorts because I’m still expecting September. But of course it isn’t September.

“Give me a sec,” Dewey says, and starts the game over.

I start back up the stairs.

“All right—all right! I’m coming. Dammit, Micah.”

We head toward the quarry. They’re doing construction on the roads. There’s gravel on the shoulders to prepare for the tar, and I keep looking at it. I don’t know why.

I mention this to Dewey and he tells me that I already know this, and I remember that I do. I think this is a good sign.

It is cloudy today. It is the kind of cloudy that makes everything look colorless. I think about her eyes.

Dewey drives and I check my phone. Janie has not texted me back. I have sent her a text every morning at 7:31, but she has not texted back.

Dewey is a worse driver sober than drunk. He takes the turn into Waldo’s only nice neighborhood, opposite the turn into the quarry, but he takes it sloppily and swerves into the sidewalk just as someone passes.

He almost kills her but doesn’t, and as Dewey swears and honks, I twist in my seat.

“That’s Piper,” I say, but she doesn’t even stop to flip us off. She’s already going. Gone. “She was crying.”

Dewey reverses and gets the car back onto the road. “She wasn’t crying.”

“Why was she crying?”

“She wasn’t f*cking crying,” Dewey says. He doesn’t look at me.

We drive in silence.

The trees here are tall, the houses are nearly taller. They look obscene and hollow. The shutters are fake, and the houses are too far apart to climb from window to window. It’s a new development and most of the houses are empty, because no one in Waldo has the money to live here. Of course Janie hated it.