This Is Where the World Ends(19)

What she does is lie down beside me, so that we’re both on the floor in the spilled soup. Her fingertips reach out to brush mine, and I pull away because my hands are still covered in clay dust. She would freak if she knew I’d been in her studio.

We just lie there.

Neither of us helps the other up.

Eventually the lunch monitor does get me up. She sends me to the nurse, who tells me to call my dad to take me home, or maybe to the hospital in case my stitches have split again. I pretend to talk to him, and go to the lobby to wait.

I wait until no one is watching me and then I walk out the door, and keep walking.

It has stopped raining.

I walk through the park, which takes me a street over from my house. But I keep walking. The quarry is only 0.72 miles from our houses. Her old house and my house. Really, the new one was just down the street.

It starts raining again. It’s okay. We’ve always liked water. No, that’s not right. Janie loved fire. She loved markers and rocks and fire. I like water, though. I like the way it waits, and when you touch it, it both moves away and clings to your finger. I like the way it rises, like memory, or fear. You told me once that I was made of water, I think. I don’t remember. I don’t remember again but

what if

it just

doesn’t

matter?

My head hurts.

My head hurts a lot and the world is spinning because of it. By the time I get to the quarry, it has turned upside down twice.

I have to sit down or I’ll puke on the Metaphor, except—oh, of course. It isn’t there anymore.

Some things are easier to forget than other things, I’m noticing.

I sit at the edge of the quarry and look over the water. The loose rocks left behind from the Metaphor that is gone dig into my ass. The water seeps into my shoes.

The water climbs higher, or I slide lower.

Oh, look. A memory.

Her hair in my lap. My feet in the water, which is cold but not unbearably. The sun is burning our skin. A book of fairy tales is open on her stomach while she scrolls through her phone, which keeps vibrating. The wind is turning the pages back and forth.

“Does the Metaphor look smaller to you?” she asks me.

She is squinting up. Her hand shades her eyes. “Maybe it just looks smaller. Do you think it could be sliding lower?” she asks. “Or the water’s climbing higher?”

“It doesn’t look different to me,” I say. I am too lazy to turn around to look. My fingers were in her hair. I always liked touching her hair, because sometimes it was hard to believe she was real. Her hair was soft and smelled like lemons.

“There are only four weeks and two days until our birthday,” she announces. “Did you know that? I have a countdown. Can you believe how warm it is? I love the sun, Micah. I love it as much as it loves me. Are you listening? Stop looking at my phone.”

I catch the words Nepal and volunteer trip before she closes the tab.

“Four weeks and two days, Micah,” she says. “We’re going to be adults. We’re going to drink tea with our pinkies up and do whatever the hell we want because that’s what adults do. That’s all I want for my birthday this year. Ha ha, just kidding.”

I touch her hair. The strands both move away and cling to my finger.

“What do you want, then?”

“I want a bottle of wine so big that the cork can plug up the hole in the ozone layer,” she says. “I want a poem, or a poet. I want the world with a bow on top. What about you?”

You.

I don’t say that, but I think it. I think it with everything I am.

“I think the Metaphor is getting smaller,” she says again, and that’s all I remember, except her eyes, which are only blue because they reflect the sky, or the water.

The water.

The water climbs higher, or I slide lower.

The water is cold, and the rain is turning to snow. The sky is falling down. The sky is falling faster.

“Janie,” I try. Her name is stuck in my throat blocking my breath.

My breath comes too fast and too shallow.

The water climbs higher, or I slide lower.





THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN

Once upon a time, there were twelve princesses. No, wait. There was only one princess, and one prince. They snuck out of the house at night and danced in the moonlight. They climbed pebble mountains. They put masks over their faces and punished the wicked.

They loved each other. They loved and loved and loved, and the whole point wasn’t the dancing, really, or the climbing, or the punishing.

The point was each other. They knew each other in their atoms, and the point was that they were together. They never talked about it, but they both knew what they feared. More than anything, they feared that they wouldn’t have each other someday.

And without each other, there wouldn’t be much of a point at all, would there?





before


OCTOBER 3


Regionals! Thank you, universe, because I didn’t have a non-regionals backup plan. We’re at the two-week mark, and everything is perfectly on schedule. We’ll take the bus to regionals and we will win, and on the way back, I’ll get one of the wrestlers to take the fan bus so I can sneak on to theirs. Ander and I will curl up in a ripped bus seat that smells like snotty kindergarteners and cuddle all the way home.