This Is Where the World Ends(53)

I catch him off guard. He blinks. His head falls back, and I touch his throat where it quivers with an answer he doesn’t quite want to give.

“I wouldn’t have gone with my babysitter,” he says, so quietly I barely catch it. “I would have made my dad stay.”

“But your mom would still be dead.” He flinches. “Wait, sorry. Sorry,” I say again, quieter. I lay my head against his chest and listen to his heart beating, beating, beating. “I just—don’t you see? Everything would still have happened as it happened.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I guess.”

All of those maybes. All of those could haves, would haves.

“I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.” I can’t stop, I can’t stop replaying all of the ways this could have gone right, if we had just tried a little harder. If we had made smaller mistakes. “Whatever you do, whatever you redo, it all ends up here. Some things are just unavoidable. No matter how hard you try, the things meant to go to shit still go to shit. Terrible things happen, Micah, and you can’t stop them. You just can’t.”

So you just do more terrible things.

“Oh,” he says, frowning. He’s bleary and blinking and trying to focus on me, and my love for him is sudden and sharp and everything. I kiss him on the nose.

“Favorite day,” I say again. “Story time. I want to hear about your favorite day.”

“Uh. Um. The fish? You remember the fish?”

And he stops there. My eyes fly open and I glare at him. “That wasn’t a story. I wanted a story.”

“Jesus, Janie, grow up.” But he complies. “The night we put fish in Grant Ebber’s car and he didn’t find it for a week?”

“Tell me about the night,” I mumble. I could fall asleep here. The music is too loud and the smoke is giving me a headache, but it’s not so hard to pretend again, pretend that it’s just us, behind the smoke screen and impenetrable music.

But then, it’s never hard to pretend.

“God, Janie, I don’t remember the night. It was raining? Not at first, it was just cloudy, and I was already in bed, and you were—you were so angry.”

“Of course I was angry,” I say. “The shit they were saying about Myra—it was just. Ugh. People, Micah. People are the worst.”

He presses on. He’s starting to slur. “Right, he dumped her because he said she was blowing the basketball team for luck. Not that that worked. And people said her breath smelled fishy and you just wanted to prove that it wasn’t true. So we went to Pick ’n Save and bought the two biggest fish we could find. And we put them in his trunk, and then we went back to my house and climbed onto the roof and picked superpowers in the rain.”

I slide down a bit, rearrange myself so that my head is in the crook of his elbow, and look up at him. I remembered that night too, the heavy, heavy rain on the roof of the car, the cashier with the pink ombre hair who laughed and told us we were crazy kids and told Micah not to let me go. I remember dancing when we got back, waltzing in the driveway and stepping on his feet and him stepping on mine, tripping and stumbling and soaked through, and laughing with our heads thrown back, drinking the rain like we were dying of thirst.

“But why that day?” I ask. “Why that one?”

“I don’t know,” he says, and sighs. “I guess. I guess because you were, you know. Insane. Completely crazy. You didn’t care if we were caught, you know? You didn’t care so much that I didn’t care either. We were in the rain and you were warm, and you smelled like cinnamon and vodka and lemons and sleep and, I don’t know, something sharper—why are you smiling all weird?”

“Oh, Micah,” I say, “you big sap.”

I didn’t think he noticed things like that.

“Okay, my turn,” I say, scooting closer. “My favorite day ever was the time we went to the petting zoo freshman year. I sat next to the cute German exchange student on the bus. Remember him? Hans? He got sent back after a few months because he got caught with pot too many times? We took a trip to the petting zoo and the farm for bio, and you and I got partnered up, and we ran off to the edge of the orchard while everyone else dissected apples, and we climbed into this one tree and ate all the apples we could and everything tasted like sunshine. There was this old barn, they were halfway through tearing it down, and I wanted to explore it, but you said we couldn’t, we had to get back. So we did, and everyone was at the petting zoo part, feeding lambs and stuff. And Mr. Marvin was talking to the farmer, and we overheard them saying that the tagged ones, the tagged animals were going to become lamb steaks and veal, and it was so shitty, Micah. I wanted to cry. I think I did cry. So we went back that night. We slid under the fence with masks and picket signs and a thermos of hot chocolate and graham crackers and marshmallows, and we stood under the single security camera and protested. You remember? The signs were kind of lame—”

“You made them!”

“Like, SAVE THE ANIMALS and WE WILL NOT BE CAGED and stuff like that. And after, after we did our part for the planet or the cause or whatever, we went to the old barn, and you said there would be rats and snakes and crap, but we went anyway, and we opened the thermos and it was hot chocolate and we dumped the marshmallows in and dunked the graham crackers and watched the stars chase the moon across the sky.”