This Is Where the World Ends(14)

before


SEPTEMBER 18


“Are you coming over?” Piper asks as the school empties into the parking lot. “I have Chobani. And if I don’t learn an entire chapter of calc tonight, I’m going to fail the class.”

“I can’t,” I say. “It’s Thursday! Thursday!” I’ve saved all of my daily allotment of exclamation marks for this moment. (Jeff Martin told me I was too enthusiastic once and tried to limit my exclamation marks. Eventually I told him to f*ck off, but, well . . . you know. Bad habits don’t die young.)

It has been a preposterously long day. Ander faked sick to skip the psych test and totally screwed over Phase Six, Step Fourteen: study hall date, and then I went to my senior studio and found out that three of my bowls had exploded in the kiln, and I had to lie when Mr. Dempsey asked me if I had let them dry before I loaded them, and then I probably failed my word-of-the-day quiz in Spanish, and then the cafeteria didn’t have parfaits at lunch even though they always have parfaits at lunch on Thursdays.

But Thursday is Metaphor Day, Janie and Micah Day, and that’s the only reason I didn’t fake cramps and go home early. Piper waves and I blow a kiss back, and we go off in our separate directions. I love Piper Blythe and everything about our no-commitment, zero-accountability, convenient-as-hell friendship. No one gets mad when texts aren’t answered or plans are blown off, because we both get the big picture. This is high school, and no one really wants to remember high school. In a few months, we’ll walk off the stage at graduation and spend the summer together, we’ll text each other for the first few weeks of college, and then we’ll lose touch. And that’s okay. The world is so much bigger than the two of us.

I throw my backpack in the backseat and the sun comes out—same moment, literally, and I throw my head back and arms out and laugh. People are staring and I drink that in too, because I’m Janie Vivian and I’m alive.

I open my eyes and I see Micah, immediately, two rows across and halfway down the lot. His grin turns all blushy when I catch him, and he tries to turn away but I grab our soul and tug, hard, and his eyes snap back to mine.

“Race you,” I mouth to him, and he’s already in his car because twin telepathy, duh.

“Cheater!” I yell as I dive into my car. People are staring, so who cares? Who cares if I’m loud? We are young and free and careless. We are laughing and reckless and us.

(Not that they know that. They just think I’m crazy and too liberal with exclamation marks, and they’re totally right.)

He’s out of the parking lot before me, but I still have the advantage, because my car probably won’t fall apart if I drive over fifty. Micah’s car proves that miracles are real every time it starts. Also, he’s going to slow down at the crosswalk because he doesn’t want to run over the middle schoolers. Not that I want to, of course, but natural selection was coming for the slower ones, anyway.

(Kidding! Mostly.)

But he does stop at the crosswalk and I floor the gas pedal, and sure, the crossing guard doesn’t scream after him, but he’s not winning anymore either. I roll down the windows and flash loser back at him as I tear through the town, past the tutting grandmothers (one of whom might be mine? I go by too fast. Oops) and the cross country team and the new Moms Who Walk club. My tires set the road on fire and my laughter tickles the sun, and two minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, I’m braking hard and skidding to avoid driving straight into the Metaphor.

I leap out of the car and spin around, ready to do my touchdown dance in Micah’s losing face, but—where is he? Ugh. I knew his car was going to give out. What’s the point of a glorious victory if no one’s there to witness it?

So I sit down against the Metaphor to wait with all the calc notes I didn’t take. I shove a few more rocks in my pockets and lean back, and slowly, the Metaphor starts to swallow me. I tilt my head back and smile at it. “I love you too,” I say.

And I do, truly, madly. We found the Metaphor when we were ten. It was early in the summer and we weren’t supposed to leave the neighborhood, and we didn’t really, if you think about it. The signs at the town limits say WELCOME, NEIGHBOR in a font that looks a little too close to Comic Sans, but if everyone is a neighbor that must mean that all of Waldo is just one neighborhood.

Micah was hesitant and sweet—ugh, so many feelings for ten-year-old Micah. He was floppy-haired and shy and freckly and awkward and newly bespectacled and he just wanted to stay in the backyard, and it was my duty as a citizen of the earth to show him how big it was. (And it still is. The earth is awfully big. I’m going to see all of it) We rode our bikes through evil old Ms. Capaldi’s lawn and down a few roads and took a few turns and then we were at the quarry like magic.

Everyone warns you about the quarry. So a few (dozen) people have died and disappeared here—why does that matter? It’s beautiful here. Sometimes it’s so still that you can feel the earth revolving.

I didn’t see that, at first, or feel it. The first thing I saw was the Metaphor, which wasn’t the Metaphor yet. (It would be in about a minute. Patience, grasshopper.)

It’s big enough to block the quarry, which is enormous. Let’s just willfully disregard that just about anything would have blocked out the quarry to my barely four-foot eye level. It really is huge. At least (or almost) two stories tall on good days, probably. It’s made up of all of the leftover rock scraps from when the quarry still had granite, so the rocks range from pebble to pet sized, and on that day when we were ten years old and the sun was everywhere and that moment was all that mattered, we stopped our bikes at the bottom and looked up and up and up.