This Is Where the World Ends(18)

He watches me for a reaction. I don’t really have one. I just don’t remember.

Eventually he sends me back to class.

I don’t go back to class. I go to the art room instead. If anyone asks, I’ll say that I forgot which class I was supposed to go to. Or that I forgot how to get there.

The art room is in the workshop wing. The senior studios are a series of closets next to it. Down the hall, Dewey is probably smoking in the metals lab with other slackers. Janie skips class all the time here too, but not really. She just bats her eyelashes and tosses her hair and teachers write her passes to wherever she wants.

I go to the art room, but I don’t remember how I get there.

Her studio is empty. I’ve only been here one other time, at the beginning of the year. I stepped inside and filled it; it was tiny and dingy and badly lit and had no windows and she must have loved it, because I had barely been there for five seconds when she started shrieking that I was bumping into things and ruining it all. Back then it was already full to bursting. I remember. Her weird-ass crap spilled off the shelves.

There’s only dust here now.

I close the door. The movement stirs the air, and I smell her. The room still smells like cinnamon and vodka. Like lemons and sleep. Like her shampoo and the overpriced tea she ordered from a website that gave her computer viruses. I keep telling her that she’s probably drinking bong water, and she keeps ordering it.

It’s so empty.

I wonder if she brought it all to Nepal with her.

I wonder if she is happy in Nepal.

I wonder why she will not text me back.

I sit down and the dust puffs up. I cough. My eyes water. I blink and blink. Maybe I blink for a few seconds or maybe I blink for hours, but when I stop, I see rocks in the corner. Rocks from the Metaphor, and they are in my hand though I don’t quite remember reaching for them. I have to blink a few more times. It’s very confusing. I keep thinking that I’ve finally gotten used to it and then I forget again and it’s confusing again.

I turn the rocks over and over in my hands and think about how she only left rocks in places she’d probably never see again.

I sit there with the rocks in my hands until the lunch bell rigns.

It rings and keeps ringing. I put the rocks in my pocket and go to the cafeteria. I don’t remember getting there, either. I guess it doesn’t matter much. The hallways are ugly anyway.

The cafeteria is loud and full of people. It is too full of people, because I run straight into someone else.

Janie always says that my main problem is that I don’t know how to walk away from things. I think she’s wrong. Walking away isn’t the hard part. Turning around is.

I should have turned around.

I should have turned and kept my head down before Ander Cameron could see that it was me.

“You,” he said.

Me.

“What the hell did you do, you little shit?” he demands. “You two, the two of you. What the hell did you do? The police won’t f*cking leave me alone because of you.”

What did I do?

What did we do?

Hell, what didn’t we do?

For a moment, it’s funny. I smile by accident.

Ander Cameron takes another step toward me and swings his fist at my face. It connects with my jaw. My tray goes flying and so do I.

In researching for my stupid senior project on apocalypses, the only thing I really found interesting was all of the different ways people think the world is going to end. I read Wikipedia pages and collected catastrophes. An enormous snake is going to swallow the world. Fire and brimstone is going to fall from the sky. Freezing. Flooding. Four horsemen and a whore. Falling stars and empty oceans.

It doesn’t end like that, though.

What it actually feels like when the world explodes, the instant it explodes, is nothing.

The explosion doesn’t hurt at all. It doesn’t hurt until you hit the ground.

Again.

My head cracks on the linoleum and my tray lands on my face and the soup is in my nose. Somewhere above me Ander Cameron is telling the unlucky bastard on lunch duty that I slipped, and perhaps for the first time in his life, no one backs him up. The monitor drags him away, but I am still on the floor.

I understand why Janie did the things she did. I understand why she wanted everyone to like her.

It sure as hell beats this.

There are people all around me, and it’s hard to focus on most of them. I think Dewey must be there, because someone has been swearing for the last five minutes. I look around, and around, and I see Piper. She hangs back with fingers pressed to white lips.

Janie would never have done that. She would never stand back and watch. Janie would have been brimming with wrath. For her friends, she would have done anything. Anything. She didn’t kick or punch. She flayed, slowly, with eyes too bright.

Sorry, I tell her. Sorry you made such shitty friends.

Something moves above me and I figure it’s someone else telling me to get up, but it’s not. It’s Janie.

“God,” she says. She sits on one of the tables and grips the edge, legs swinging. She looks at me. “So many *s. Asshole here and an * there. Old Waldo had a farm and called it high school.”

She jumps off the table and lands beside me. Her head is cocked to the side and her hair is spilling across her collarbones. I wait for her to reach out a hand and pull me up. She doesn’t.