This Is Where the World Ends(26)

“Fourteen,” I say. “The last one was Patty Keghel in 1972. I remember. I was looking up local apocalypses and came across her name because she was a big Herbert Armstrong follower. She believed every one of his false apocalypse predictions and once she ran naked through Waldo to alert everyone. She used to fish in the quarry and she made her own rafts, but I guess not good ones because that’s how she drowned.”

Dewey goes quiet, so I keep talking.

“Janie and I saw her grave. Freshman year, we saw her grave. It’s in the cemetery. Do you want to see? We should go see. We can go now.”

“What the hell are you on right now—”

“And again,” I say, spitting again, “again this year, we came here. Here.”

“Yeah, I know we’ve come here before. We get drunk here all the time because we’re the biggest shits on the planet.”

“Not you and me. Us. Janie and me. Me and Janie. I remember that. I remember now, it was our birthday. We came and there was a boat. You made a treasure hunt and it led to you.”

“Micah. What the f*ck are you even saying? Are you talking to her?”

“Yeah,” I say, and I turn to Dewey but a little too fast, and his hand is on my arm and I am leaning on him because I can’t feel my feet. “She won’t—she won’t leave me alone.”

“Oh, stop exaggerating, Micah,” Janie says. “You don’t want me to leave you alone.”

“She’s my soul mate,” I say, and I say it again, but I can’t make it clearer. The words are mashed in my head, vomit in my mouth. “My soul mate. Or not soul mate. She said that we shared a soul. What does that mean? She said that we were an atom. I don’t know, Dewey. I think she’s crazy.”

“I am crazy,” Janie says. “So are you. All of the best people are. Who said that?”

“Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll said that.”

Dewey is holding his cigarette so tightly that it’s disintegrating in his fingers. Maybe he’s imagining that it’s me. Squeezing all of the insanity away. “Micah, seriously—”

“She’s goddamn insane, man. But I love her, Dewey. God, I don’t know how to stop loving her. Sometimes it f*cking hurt to look at her, you know? You ever love someone like that? No, you haven’t.”

“You don’t know that,” Dewey says. All of a sudden, his voice is so sharp. He cuts through the haze, and it hurts, hurts everywhere.

“It hurts,” I say, and it’s almost a sob, it sounds like a sob. Am I crying? I don’t know. I don’t know. “It hurts, Dewey, it hurts so f*cking bad. It feels like I’m dying, Dewey, like my head is f*cking tearing itself apart. I just want her to come back. I just want to know why she didn’t ask me to go with her, I just need her to text me back—”

I’m on my feet and the ledge is higher than I thought and I’m staring down and down and it’s too dark because there’s no moon tonight just like there was no moon that night and I can’t see anything but the height. I look to the side and Janie is looking up at me and everything is blurry and she is the only clear thing in the world.

And then I’m falling and falling and falling

but

in

the

wrong

direction.





THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN

Once upon a time, there was a boy in a tower. His hair never grew long enough so that he could climb out, so for a long time, he just watched. He watched and watched until he knew the angle of the moonrise and where the stars crossed and how the geese flew. He watched anything, everything.

Which was nice and all, but someone had to show him that there was more to life than watching. Someone had to drag him out.

That’s where the girl comes in. The girl was the best kind of crazy. She got her luck from matches and threw rocks at his window and coaxed him out, one word at a time. She did it because she wanted to, because she needed to, but also because she didn’t want to be alone. It wasn’t fair to keep that kind of boy locked away.

But life’s not fair. So there’s that.





before


OCTOBER 9


Yes, fine, I still feel guilty. What? I do have a heart. A big, messy, bleeding-like-a-volcano heart. If you pulled it out of my chest, it would be covered in escaped butterflies and black holes and weeds that look like flowers.

It has been six days since I’ve talked to Micah. That has to be some kind of record.

And tomorrow is our birthday.

Sure, Ander fills me full of butterflies that get all tangled in my heartstrings, but Micah adds gravity to all of my black holes. He waters my weeds.

He hasn’t even looked at me since regionals. And he has such nice eyes.

Insert grumble here. Oh, all right. They could almost even be called bedroom eyes. Maybe.

So, I don’t know. Maybe it’s guilt or maybe it’s just that I want him to talk to me again or maybe it’s our freaking birthday tomorrow, but I skip school today, after my parents climb into their cab to the airport arguing about who was in charge of printing out the boarding passes, to set up a treasure hunt for him. I write a note in ink with a pen that has a real nib (which is totally not the one that Mr. Markus is still looking for), and I stain it with coffee and burn the edges and everything. I sneak into his house through the door on his deck and leave it on his bed, along with an ancient Walkman with a CD inside and earbuds wrapped around, and a note that says BRING ME. I swipe his binoculars from inside his desk too, because I couldn’t find mine, and settle in his bushes to wait.