This Is Where the World Ends(47)

“Yes,” he says, almost before I’m done asking.

“I was thinking of having a bonfire,” I say. “Everyone could come over after the dance tomorrow. It’ll be fun.”

“Oh,” he says. “I thought it’d just be us.”

His hand is roaming, roaming, roaming.

I make myself stay. I make myself talk. “Well, they’ll have to leave eventually.”

His face is against mine now and I can feel it when he laughs. “Sounds great,” he says, his voice low, and then he’s kissing me.

He turns so that I’m cornered against the floor and the wall and he’s on top of me, my face in his hands, my lips in his mouth. I let him.

And when I finally break away, when he finally comes up for air and I can make excuses—parents, homework, I don’t know what I say to get out of there, but I’m out of there. I smile and promise and apologize, and then I run like Cinderella from Prince Charming with Ander’s wallet tucked into the front of my jeans.

Life is messy and the universe has an awful lot of people to keep track of. Sometimes things get screwed up. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Sometimes good things happen to bad people.

That isn’t fair.

Bad things should happen to bad people.

And they will. They will.





after


DECEMBER 19


Friday morning, Dewey comes over with pot brownies and shit wine. At that point, I would have chugged piss if it would get my head to stop pounding. It’s easier to get blind drunk and forget everything all over again.

We play Metatron: Sands of Time for a while. We eat a brownie each and Dewey decides that we’re going to walk to the quarry when I tell him that I don’t remember the last time I went outside. We pour the wine into a water bottle and put on our coats.

“I miss her,” I say as we trudge along the road. The wind makes our teeth chatter.

“No shit,” says Dewey. He throws back the wine and stumbles onto the shoulder. The rocks are slippery and he comes up choking. “God. This really is horrible. Here.”

I tilt the bottle and swish it in my mouth. It is too sharp and not strong enough, sweet enough to numb my mouth but not my head.

“No,” I say, “but I don’t usually. Usually I know she’s dead, but not dead enough for me to actually miss her, you know?”

“Not really,” he says, grabbing the bottle. I protest, and he just switches hands so the bottle’s out of reach. “Dude, you’re on the brink of losing your shit again, and I need to be drunk to deal with it.” He waves a hand for me to continue. “You were spilling your heart or something?”

“Fuck off, dude.”

“Touchy.”

“I didn’t ever think it’d feel like this,” I say. My breath hangs in the air, and there are brief pockets of warmth where I walk through the words. “Her dying, I mean. I always figured that I’d die before her. I figured we’d all die before her. Like, she would have been the only one at our hundred-year reunion or whatever.”

“Don’t be a shithead. No one’s going to be at our hundred-year reunion. Hell, no one’s coming back for the five-year reunion.”

That was probably true.

“Look, dude,” Dewey says when the quarry comes into view. “You just gotta, you know. Live like she’s still here or whatever.”

I laugh. “I didn’t live while she was here. I played Metatron and got drunk with you on Friday nights.”

“And you’re very f*cking welcome,” he says, and passes me the bottle again. We get to the quarry and keep walking along the edge. The sun hurts my eyes, and so does the ice, and Janie is still absent. I imagine her, though. If everything had gone right, we might be here anyway, tonight. She might have climbed through my window, and we might have driven to the quarry with stolen ice skates.

It’s a nice thought, and god knows that there aren’t enough of those in the world. So I drink, and I think about that.

“Dude,” Dewey says later, slurring. We’ve almost made it around the quarry. “You’re hogging the shit wine.”

“Am not,” I say. I’m slurring too.

It takes him two tries to snatch the bottle away. He throws it back, and eventually he lowers the bottle, but his head is still raised. “Hey, look. Look at that sun. Asshole.”

I lie back too. The grass is freezing, and the sun is huge. “Is there anything you don’t have a problem with?”

He thinks about it for a while. “Nah,” he says.

“Janie loved the stars,” I tell him. But she never meant it. Or maybe she did, I don’t know. If she loved them, if she loved anything, it was because it burned.

I take another sip of wine, but I tilt it too sharply and it fills my nose and collar. Everything burns. I have swallowed a star.

And I said to the star, consume me.

Did she say that once? I think she did. It was probably Virginia Woolf who said it first.

I take another drink, because it doesn’t matter what the hell Janie Vivian was or wasn’t, because she’s dead.

The sun is so bright.

“Did they find her body?” I ask him later. “Do they know what happened? Was she just so drunk she walked into the quarry?”