This Is Where the World Ends(16)

Ander Cameron in a skintight uniform. I sigh and stretch out, and my foot knocks Micah’s notes into the wind.

“Shit. God, Janie,” he snaps. “I just organized those.”

And he’s not even a little bit joking. He’s not smiling at all, and when I see that, words flash in neon in my head: how did we get here?

Micah saved my life once. We were in second grade, and my appendix exploded and the hospital was really ridiculously low on my blood type. (My dad threatened to sue, but my mom didn’t want to and it was her money, and they fought about how he was anal retentive and she didn’t care enough, blah blah blah.) But Micah and I have the same blood type because of course we do, and the doctor knew because there’s only one hospital in Waldo so the doctors know everything. He asked Micah to donate even though he probably still weighed less than a Chihuahua then. Micah thought about it. (Can’t you just picture it? Baby Micah with his head of overflowing curls and his brown-green-gray eyes taking over his face, all scared and determined.) He hugged his dad and told him that he wasn’t really mad about what had happened with his mom, and he went with the doctor.

Because he thought he was going to die.

Later, he came to visit me, all wrapped up in bed, and I grinned at him through the meds and said, “Did you really think you would die by donating blood?”

He muttered something about a movie and blood loss. He said the doctor had had the kind of voice that made everything into an ultimatum and used words that were too big and it had been an honest mistake, and no, he wouldn’t do it again.

He totally would, though. I knew that.

I guess what bothers me now is that I don’t know if he would do it again. Sometimes at lunch I watch him and Dewey flicking food at each other and I just can’t remember how we got here. We used to know each other to the bone. But now that we’re not talking every single day because I live across town in a house I f*cking hate and we can barely look at each other in school, I think he’s starting to realize how differently we grew up, and in different directions.

Eventually he takes the book of fairy tales. After he reorganizes his notes and opens the textbook to the review pages and writes down the problem numbers and acts like he’s actually going to work, like either of us understands optimization and related rates, like that’s what we’re actually here for. And then he does that thing where he doesn’t sigh, but the air comes out of his nose with a little more force than necessary, and he finally takes the book from between us.

“Okay,” he says. “So, what? Just ovals?”

“Here, I already made the pattern. It’s not that difficult.”

He glances at me, and then down again. I don’t look at him. I cut a little harder than I have to and snip off the edge of a nail by accident. I chew on the inside of my lip, and Micah sighs, really sighs this time, and his breath makes the feather I’m cutting flutter. He gives in. “Oh, fine. Tell me about the wings.”

“Okay,” I say, and he laughs because it comes out so quickly. “You know Leo da Vinci’s flying machine?”

“The one that didn’t work?”

“Yeah, that one,” I say. I reach across the fairy tales and start sketching on Micah’s calc review. “See,” I say. “I’m using wire and bamboo for the main frame, and these”—I draw the wing fingers—“these here are going to be just wire. You remember the pantyhose and wire sculpture I did? Freshman year? With the spray paint? It’s going to be like that, but bigger, a hundred times, with feathers instead of spray paint. I think I might call it Icarus.”

“Why?” he asks. “Icarus’s wings didn’t work either. And that’s not really a fairy tale.”

Why is he stomping all over my dreams?

“They did work,” I say. Keep calm. “They totally worked. Daedalus made it across the sea fine. You know what Icarus’s problem was? He loved the sun too much. He loved fire, like me. He saw the light and he loved it more than anyone. There are things worth dying for.”

Micah leans back against the Metaphor and raises his hand to block the sun from his face. “Oh, come on, Janie. What happened to hating clichés and all that?”

“Huh?”

“Dying for love?” He rolls his eyes and shakes his head at the same time, so it just looks like his eyeballs are loose. “You’re such a romantic, Janie. Is that part of your whatever-step plan with Ander? Fall in love, die for him to prove your devotion?”

“You’re such an *, Micah.”

I didn’t mean to say it. But I don’t take it back.

I want to take his condescension and shove it up his nose.

Instead I take a breath. I push the feathers and calculus aside and scoot until I’m sitting in front of him, our legs crossed and knees touching. He doesn’t look up, but it takes effort now. He wants to; I want him to too, and our soul is so tired of straining.

“You know Mr. Markus’s key to happiness?” I ask him.

Every year, on the last day of classes, Mr. Markus tells the seniors the key to happiness. That’s it, really—no one knows anything else, because the seniors have never spilled, ever. No one has ever teased the secret out of Mr. Markus before he was willing to tell it, and the suspense has been driving me crazy since we were freshmen.