This Is Where the World Ends(4)

I pull the bookshelf into his room and tie the sheets to his bedpost, and I hold on tight and throw my leg out the window before I whirl around to meet his eyes—whoosh, shampoo commercial hair. Eyes glittering, light dimming, and just my voice, siren to sailor: “Come, my fellow ninja. We’re going on an adventure.”

Exit Janie, end scene.

Except—

“Wait, Micah! Micah. We have to take your car. I’m out of gas.”

It started small. I think we made a plate of cookies and left them on Michael Wong’s front porch because his girlfriend had dumped him on the first day of freshman year. His mom made him throw them out because she thought they might have had pot in them (which obviously they didn’t, or I would have kept them for myself), but it was the thought that counted. After that it was cliché: raking someone’s leaves, leaving heads-up pennies on the sidewalks by the elementary school, putting an extra quarter in parking meters.

And then: sophomore year. We were stupid and invincible. We thought we were everything, and we started getting adventurous. There was the whole library fiasco, and I guess it snowballed from there. We started wearing masks. We started thinking bigger, brighter, like there was nothing in the world the two of us together couldn’t do, and sometimes I still think we were right.

Because we are freaking badasses.

We have a hit list, and we are damn creative. We are Justice. We do right, and we reward the deserving. There was the time we sneaked into the petting zoo and protested animal captivity and the time we hid lollipops all over Grant MacFarther’s house and the time we hung Christmas ornaments in Jade Bastian’s car in July. And there were other nights too. Quiet ones, just us, Micah and me, me and Micah. Swimming in the quarry. Shadow tag in the parking lot by the baby wipe factory. A reenactment of Les Mis in the rain. Stars and stars, night after night, secrets spilled in a world too big for sleep.

Micah is taking forever.

I sit on the hood of his car, and when he finally appears—through the door, what the hell? He knows doors are against the rules—I smack the top of his car and yell, “Driver!”

He only says, “You can’t call driver, it’s my car. And get off. I just washed it.”

“As if you care,” I say, but when I climb back onto the ground, he dusts my footprints from the paint. I put my hand in my pocket and squeeze my rocks and wonder if there is a word for the marks you get on your palm when you squeeze something so hard that the skin is on the verge of ripping.

“Micah Carter,” I say, and he does look up, right at me. And his eyes are the same green-gray-brown that they always have been, and he still has eleven freckles (two on the left cheek, nine on the right), and his glasses are in their perpetual state of sliding down his nose, and this is my Micah August Carter. This is the boy who climbed onto his roof when we were five to hear the wind better. This is the boy who, due to a small miscommunication, donated blood during my appendectomy even though he thought it would kill him. This is the boy who is both my impulse control and my very best ideas.

If we can get through tonight, everything will go back to normal. We will be us. He will stop ditching me for Dewey most weekends and I will stop moping in my stupid new house every night. I will drag him into the night, every night. We won’t have to worry about going to college and growing apart and forgetting each other in favor of bland significant others, because this is real and always and forever.

He turns away and gets into the driver’s seat, and I glare at him for a solid ten seconds before I stomp to the other side. Pick the battles, win the war.

We don’t back out of the driveway, we tear. His engine shreds the sky. We’re going to get caught before we start. “Oh my god, we’re going to wake your dad. Micah. I just started my Common App. I don’t want to write that I have a felony.”

This is a little bit of a lie, which I feel a little bit terrible about. Micah and I swore in fourth grade never to lie to each other about the important things, and maybe lying about starting the Common App is a small thing, but not planning to go to college right away is a much bigger one. I did start an application, just less one for college and more one to volunteer in Nepal for women’s rights. I want to rebuild orphanages and teach English and sex ed. Not that I know much about rebuilding orphanages or teaching, but I’ll figure it out, and I’ll hike and take pictures and draw and buy souvenirs in open markets. I’ll fill my journal so full of paint and gesso and charcoal and color and Skarpie and words and stories that it won’t close. I want to explore. I want to go far, far away.

“Felony?” He sounds annoyed, which makes me annoyed. “Janie, you said this would be fast.”

“It will be,” I say. “Felony was hyperbolic. If anything, it’ll be a misdemeanor, and only if we’re caught. I can’t believe you’re done with college apps. That’s ridiculous. They’re not due for months. And—turn turn, MICAH, TURN,” I scream and the wheels scream and I think the mailbox was already on the ground, I don’t think we knocked it over, but we don’t stick around to figure it out. “Okay, next left, second house on your right. Got it?”

“I get it, I’m not an idiot.”

“No, left, MICAH. Left! LEFT!”

Update: we are not dead, and Micah still doesn’t know left from right.

He finally pulls to a stop on the wrong side of the road, and I’m laughing and I can’t stop, because, God—