This Is Where the World Ends(29)

“Janie?”

I scream.

Micah yelps too, and he drops everything he’s holding, and I’m out of the boat and his flashlight is in my face and I’m screaming again, screaming, “Did you break the vodka? Is the bottle broken?”

“Jesus Christ the vodka is fine I am having a f*cking heart attack!” he yells back, and then we’re in the grass and laughing, and everything is okay, okay, okay.

“You took forever,” I tell him when I can breathe again.

“Yeah, I wandered around that goddamn forest for a while. You couldn’t have done this, like, during the day?”

Well, we could have, if you were home. But I don’t say that. I say, “But it was more fun in the dark,” and he shakes his head and smiles and says, “I guess.”

“Well, we’re not done. Come on. Last clue,” I say impatiently, trying to tug both of us back into the boat. But Micah digs his feet in.

“Wait,” he says. “That’s the boat from the barn.”

“Get in the boat, Micah.”

“I’m not getting into the boat. No. No way.”

I consider stomping my foot. Overload? Overload. I glare at him instead. “Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t really want to drown tonight.”

“You’re not going to drown,” I say impatiently. “I keep telling you, it’s totally safe. Alex Brandley takes girls out in this boat all the time. We’ll be fine. You’re like, half his size. If it doesn’t sink while Alex has sex in it, it won’t sink with us in it.”

“Oh, great,” he says. “Unstable and ridden with STDs.”

But he pushes the boat into the water and climbs in, and then I run and leap into it, and the boat wobbles and we cling to each other, but it doesn’t tip over, and we don’t drown. We are nervous laughter and fast breath and faster heartbeats, alive alive alive.

And then we calm and become a different kind of alive, the kind that requires music, so we take out the Walkman and push earbuds into our ears.

“Indie shit,” Micah complains, but he hums along. And the next track is Liszt, and his fingers tap against my palm. Eventually we are on our backs, hands pressed together.

We are Janie and Micah, Micah and Janie.

“Let’s play a game,” I whisper. I am the quiet and the quiet is me. “Let’s play Secrets.”

“Okay,” he says, like I knew he would, like he always does. “You start.”

“I peed in the quarry before you got here.”

He quickly retracts the hand he had been trailing in the water. “God, Janie.”

“What? I had to pee. Before I got in the boat. Or else I would have peed in the boat, and—”

“Okay, okay,” he says. “Um. Uh . . . I still do the lightning bug thing. Like, you know. Put them in jars with grass and stuff.”

“That doesn’t count,” I say. “I already knew you did that. I’ve seen them on your dresser.”

“It does count,” he says, sounding annoyed. He’s not, really. Just embarrassed, which he shouldn’t be. I think it’s adorable, and mostly I was just mad that I didn’t think of it first. “It just has to be something you’ve never told anyone before.”

“Fine,” I say. “I ordered a pair of Hunter boots even though I swore I’d never get a pair.”

“Yeah, I’d probably care more if I knew what Hunter boots are. I stuck a cockroach in Dewey’s sandwich at lunch yesterday.”

“Ew ew ew,” I say, and the boat rocks as I try to wriggle the word off. Cockroach. “Ugh, where did you even find one?”

“What, the cockroach? I just—”

“Stop saying that word. I hate that word.”

“—grabbed one out of the empty locker next to mine. There’s always five or six in there. Cockroach cockroach cockroach.”

I try to push him out of the boat. He tries to pull me in with him. We splash each other and we both end up soaked.

“I tried to pierce my own belly button.”

“You used that last time,” he says. “You always try to use that one.”

“Yeah, because I tried to pierce it again.”

“Yesterday I told my dad that I couldn’t believe he grabbed his one opportunity to have an affair, while Mom had so many more and never did.”

It’s quiet now, just the wind and us. The rest of the world has stopped existing. This is it: the quarry and the boat and the curving sky, and our confessions to each other. Our soul is bare, and we are spilling everything.

Well, not everything.

But he’s holding stuff back too.

“I flushed my mom’s Tiffany earring down the toilet,” I say. “Then I went online. It cost five thousand dollars.”

“Did you really?”

“Well, I only flushed one, so I guess it was only twenty-five hundred. So now she just wears the one and leaves her hair down over the other one.”

“I told Dewey that we couldn’t hang out tonight because my dad’s taking me out to dinner.”

“My parents think I’m at Piper’s because they didn’t want me to be alone in the house that they should never have bought, and I’m glad I’m not.”