This Is Where the World Ends(49)

before


OCTOBER 16


“I don’t get it,” Micah says again. “What is all of this stuff? I thought we were going to your house. The bonfire?”

“Just chill,” I tell him for the thousandth time. “All will be revealed in time. Just drive.”

“Fine,” he says. He’s annoyed, he always seems to be annoyed now, we both do. It’s inevitable, considering the amount of time I’m spending in his house, which is ironic since we both thought the problem was that I moved away, but whatever. Tonight is our new beginning. We’re starting over.

Purification.

The silence is humid between us, but he drives toward the Metaphor without me telling him to, and I know it’s all going to be okay. I know it will be because it has to be.

I get out of the car—his, and he didn’t even argue when I got in the driver’s seat, just looked at me like I was going to snap, so I guess that shows how well I’m holding together—and pop the trunk, and he follows me, then stops. I don’t look at him, but I know he’s blinking, rapidly, and each time he closes and opens his eyes, his eyebrows draw a little lower until they’re almost at his nose.

We usually take Micah’s car on ninja missions because of the trunk. You can say a lot of things about Micah’s car, but the trunk could hold a body.

He doesn’t ask.

But he leans into the trunk and grabs a box. The trunk is filled with boxes, most of them open. I got them from my garage earlier—it’s all the stuff I never unpacked because I couldn’t stand being in that f*cking house. But there’s also a big one, an old UPS box I’d scrounged from the recycling bin at school, and it’s filling most of the trunk. That’s the one Micah takes. He has his feet planted and shoulders square, but it’s a lot lighter than he thinks. He flies back with the box, and I almost laugh. This is better. This is Micah, just a little bit off-balance and always embarrassed. My Micah.

Me and you, I think as I walk toward what’s left of the Metaphor. It doesn’t matter. It won’t after tonight. You and me.

That’s all that matters, in the end.

We carry boxes back and forth, stacking them higher and higher beside the Metaphor. Once they’re all there, we start ripping them apart and pulling out the papers: notes Ander and I passed back and forth, from seventh grade all the way to this year. The rest of the fairy tale bullshit and all of the books. And other stuff too, stuff I just don’t want anymore. Old notebooks and loose papers, binders of bio notes with margins full of doodles and Skarpie bleeding through.

“God, I’m an actual hoarder,” I say, dumping a box of coloring books onto the ground.

“Janie,” Micah says.

He’s on his knees, digging through the mess. I think about stopping him, but he should know. No more secrets between us, no more lies.

“Janie,” he says again, and his face is slack with disbelief. “These are your journals.”

I roll my eyes. “I know. I put them in your car, Micah. Duh.”

“But these . . . Janie, these are your journals.”

He flips through Journal Ten, which was back when I was still in my sketchbook journal phase. I see the ink, watercolor, so many sketches. I did a drawing a day for months and months. There must be a hundred Metaphors in there.

“You can’t do this,” he says. He shoves his hands into his armpits to keep warm, and I step closer and tug them out and press them between mine. Not that my hands are warm either, but at least now we’re shivering together.

“You can’t, all of your plans are in here. You want to do all of that shit, draw and go to Nepal and write about it in your journals and—”

“I’m not burning Journal Twelve.” Yet. And I’m not going to Nepal, either. I never was. Micah was right—I would have wished and wanted but I would have been too scared to do anything. Just like everybody else. Everyone says they want to travel and leave home and find themselves or whatever, but they never do it. That’s what high school’s for. You make plans and you don’t follow through. You dream and you can be brave when you’re dreaming, brave enough to imagine that there’s actually a yourself to find, brave enough to finish projects even though you were never born with endings, brave enough to plan volunteer trips even though you’d probably be dead of asphyxiation by the time you’re there because you’re always holding your breath as if that can keep you together. Please. I’m in so many pieces that there’s nothing left to hold. The plane ticket doesn’t change that. I’m still terrified. Maybe Micah can get a refund.

“But the rest of these. What was the point? You always wanted to look at them later. You wanted to look back through them one day, you wanted to remember all of the shit we did, that we’re going to do. You wrote it all down, you can’t just get rid of it, or what’s the point?”

“Oh, Micah.” My hands are clenched tight around his. Our hands are actually sweating now, or it might just be mine. “There was never a point. Don’t you see?”

I drop his hands, reach into my pocket, light a match.

I drop the match and watch as it falls from my fingers.

Watch as the starving flame yearns back toward my fingertips just a little as it falls.

And falls.