This Is Where the World Ends(43)

I could not. So maybe that was why she started leaving me behind.

“So?” said Janie. “What are we looking at?”

Just the sky, really. Above there were only tangles of branches and the sky. And I was about to tell her that when she spread her arms and took a deep breath.

“Oh,” she whispered, and I didn’t need to look up anymore. “I see. I feel it now, Micah. Like the sky is falling down. It makes my lungs hurt. The sky is falling down and my breath is too small to hold the air. Micah—you feel it? The world is growing bigger. I can feel it.”

Then she fell back. The ground thudded and I was freaked, because she said the world was growing bigger, and I thought it would swallow her. Pull her away.

But it didn’t. We just kept staring at the sky and we didn’t get poison ivy.

“The sheep heart looked just like that,” I tell Dr. Taser. “The trees.”

“That does sound like a happy memory,” she says, sounding pleased for the first time. It’s not happy, really, because Janie doesn’t know that the trees looked like a heart and she never will because she’s never going to do the dissection because she’s dead and buried and I still don’t remember most of how that happened. But what a nice note to end on.

I shrug. “I guess. I went back to the bus after that.”

She blinks. “Why?”

“She wanted me to. We were never supposed to talk to each other in public—people stopped rolling down the hill and so I had to go. I left her. That’s what friends do.”

But that’s not what friends do, and Dr. Taser hands me her iPad to Google friendship to prove it. She pushes a notebook into my hands and tells me that it’ll help to write down what I remember. And then, finally, she lets me leave.

In the waiting room, I sit on the couch and wait for Dewey. My license is still suspended and my dad is at work, but Dewey offered to give me a ride, presumably because he’s the reason I’m here.

“Hey,” he greets me as he pulls up in front. “You get your head fixed? Ready to drink responsibly?”

“Screwed on all the way and ready to be deadened by alcohol,” I say, climbing into the passenger seat, “which I feel like you owe me.”

“I’m out of Canadian, but got the cheapest whiskey in Iowa in the trunk. Just . . . take it easy, okay?”

“Janie’s dead,” I tell him.

He keeps his eyes on the road. “You’ve mentioned.”

“I remember the bonfire,” I say. I stare at the backs of my hands, going finger to finger, counting. “The bonfire. I remember most of what happened before, I think. The week of is still fuzzy, but I remember the Metaphor disappearing. God, she was pissed.”

I stop then and wait for Janie to say something, but she’s gone too.

“Our birthday, her wings. But the bonfire, Dewey. That night, at her house. What the hell happened?”

He stares at the road. I stare at him.

“We fought,” I say slowly. “You punched me. Did that happen?”

Dewey doesn’t answer for so long that I almost take his silence as a no. But finally he looks away from the road and leans his head on the wheel, and I should be more worried than I am. “Yeah,” he says. I barely hear him.

I stare at him until he lifts his head from the wheel and steers the car back into the right lane.

Everyone has secrets, Janie told me once. “Ours are just bigger than everyone else’s.”

Maybe she was wrong.

“Dewey,” I say. “You have whiskey?”

He nods, and then sighs. “You’re still doing it.”

Presumably we go back to my house and play Metatron: Sands of Time and drink then, but I don’t remember any of it. The next morning we have massive hangovers and an empty bottle of whiskey, but to our credit, neither of us left.





THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN

Once upon a time, there was a princess who didn’t get saved. I don’t really know what to tell you about her because her story was never written down. Maybe the dragon ate her. Maybe the prince just never got around to rescuing her. No one wants to read that fairy tale, so no one wrote it.

Or maybe the truth is that no princesses get rescued, ever. Maybe there are no happily ever afters, not really.





before


OCTOBER 15


Mr. Markus held me after class today to ask why the paper I submitted was nothing like my proposal. He probably also wanted to know why it was only nineteen words long, but I didn’t have a good reason for either.

“This isn’t the project you proposed,” he tells me. “This isn’t even a thesis.”

“You said it was an adaptable project,” I remind him. “Don’t you want it to evolve organically?”

“You still owe me an autobiography,” he reminds me. “Will I be seeing your fractured fairy tales anytime soon?”

“Probably not,” I say. “They’re not very exciting. They’re kind of pathetic, actually.”

He pushes the paper aside and clears the desk so there’s nothing between us. He folds his hands. “How are the wings coming along, Janie?”

The wings.

Oh, the wings.

Actually, they’re beautiful. They’re not finished, not even close, but they’re beautiful. I’ve cut through a volume each of Grimm and Andersen, and I’m starting on Perrault. It’s a much slower process when I do it alone because I always want to read each page before I cut it up. The wings themselves are in the art studio, and only one side is full of feathers. They’re beautiful, but it’s going to take a miracle to finish them.