This Is Where the World Ends(40)

Forget fairy tales. Screw Andersen and Grimm and Perrault—I could have built a thousand pairs of wings out of this beautiful bullshit.

I open my journal to a new page. I write THESIS at the top and underline it three times for emphasis and a fourth for luck, out of habit. I start again.

Miracles do not belong to fairy tales. Miracles belong to the desperate, because only the desperate believe in bullshit.

There.

End thesis. I expect my Pulitzer any day now.

Ander is still watching me.

It’s all so familiar, and I am even wearing the same shoes.

My hand shoots into the air. Every single person in the room looks at me, except Mr. Markus.

I cough. He doesn’t look up. “Mr. Markus,” I finally say. Whisper, more like. Come on, voice. Pull it together. “Can I go to the bathroom?”

He nods without looking up from his grading. I grab my stuff and head for the door.

Behind me, someone mutters, “Pregnancy test, Janie?”

It’s Ander. I know it’s Ander.

I don’t look back. I pause at the bathroom and wonder if I do need a pregnancy test, but no, don’t think about that, I will not f*cking cry I will not I will not.

I go to the art room instead. I go to my senior studio closet and I look around. And then I explode.

Here is what Janie guts look like: broken charcoal pencils and empty glaze jars on the floor. And paper, paper everywhere, shredded feathers and scraps of plans. A broken teapot that doesn’t need a f*cking lid. Shattered clay map of a shattered world. Greenware bowls smashed to dust.

And one clay covered in lucky pentagrams and Viking runes and witch-curse-repelling spells that I throw against the wall as hard as I can, so hard, so hard that it doesn’t shatter, it doesn’t crumble, it dissolves. It turns to dust and I sink into it and close my eyes.

I leave the wings alone.

I have to finish the wings.

I have to finish something.

I roll over and push my hair out of my face.

Just one miracle.

I go to lunch because I’m hungry. I’m hungry and I want to eat and they can’t stop me with their bent heads and whispers and staring. I can do what I want. I can do whatever I want.

Even the lunch lady stares at me. She forgets to give me a cookie.

By the time I get to the table, I don’t have energy to sit. I collapse. I am a bag of bones, and I have been robbed of my spinal cord. They were talking about homecoming and dresses and dinner reservations, but they stopped when I was five feet away.

“Hey,” I say, and look around. “Where’s Piper?”

A beat too long of silence. Then, finally, Katie says, “She went home. Cramps.”

“Okay, Janie,” Carrie Lang says. Her long hair droops onto the table as she leans toward me. “What happened? What’s this? Is it Ander?”

Karma. Karma, I knew you were real. I knew filling Carrie’s lawn with balloons was an investment in the future.

“Is it true that you guys had sex and then you dumped him because he sucked?” she asks, and adds, “Not the good kind, obviously.”

Blink. Blink again. “Wait. What?”

“Is that what this is?” she asks. “Janie, you know you could have called us. That was your first time, right? Babe, you should have called me. Is it because it hurt a lot? Or was he really just that bad?”

“What did he say?”

“Ander? I don’t know, he didn’t text me back. But Jizzy said that you guys did it and then you freaked and dumped him. God, Janie, I can’t believe you didn’t call me!”

“He was tiny, wasn’t he,” Blair says, taking a teensy-teensy bite of her salad. “I knew it. The hot ones are always falsely advertised. I keep telling you guys that.”

They’re all leaning in now, Blair and Sadie and Kelsey and Meredith. They blink their big, big eyes and wait for me to tell them all about Ander and me. Ander and Janie.

No.

I imagine sketching the scene: me and an oversized hammer, off-balance and smashing, their Whac-A-Mole heads popping like cherries.

I want to say something, something scathing and brilliant and conversation ending, but let’s talk false advertising. The real picture would look something like this: them and their mole eyes and twitching noses, me with my guts back in my art room and my brain melting out onto my lunch tray and my mouth catching all the flies that buzz around the trash can. And I know then that I did the right thing when I crossed out those lawyer numbers. Who the f*ck would take my side? No one in Waldo. No one here. No one who saw me scuttling after him since freshman year, flirting at every chance, kissing at regionals. Kissing kissing kissing.

I close my mouth and open it again and close it again, and in the end I just take my tray and walk away. I briefly consider the bathroom, but, ugh, who could actually eat lunch in a school bathroom outside of a nineties chick flick? Gross. I can barely walk through the door without gagging.

Hello, universe. I know you don’t give a shit. But you handed me the wrong nineties chick flick.

I don’t want this one.

I don’t freaking want it.

I just can’t stay at this table. I can’t breathe.

But—there! There’s Micah! And Dewey! I’m even glad to see Dewey! I didn’t know they ate lunch in the hallway! Okay, I totally did. But I pretend I didn’t as I walk over. I pretend and pretend and pretend.