This Is Where the World Ends(9)

2. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, he goes to the community college and strips—I mean disrobes—for the drawing class. Ander isn’t beach-boy hot, he’s hand-assembled-by-God hot. He’s made of the kind of angel parts that would have had Michelangelo swooning, and he pretends not to know.

3. Okay, so he’s kind of a douchebag. That’s okay, though. It’s high school. Everyone’s a douchebag.

The bell rings, and someone nasally comes on the PA and says the pledge, and Mr. Markus does attendance, and Micah and Dewey still aren’t here. Mr. Markus sighs when he sees their empty desks (again) and passes a hand over his face. He has time-travel hands, at least twenty years older than the rest of him, wrinkled and veined and knobby, nails like moons. I sketch them on the desk while he talks. (I figure that the no-drawing-on-desks rule mostly applies to penises.)

“The first part of your senior projects is due today,” says Mr. Markus. Collective sigh from the class, but not me, because I’ve talked my way into an extension. We’re supposed to write an autobiography, because you have to understand yourself before you can understand anything else.

But my project is multimedia and my autobio is going to document my process—I’m fracturing fairy tales and fracturing them again until they fit my life, and it isn’t due until the end of the year. Anyway, Mr. Markus couldn’t argue when I told him I knew myself pretty well already.

“As of five minutes ago,” he continues, “I’ve received four. This is pitiful. I want to remind all of you that your senior projects are seventy-five percent of your English grade. Fail this and you won’t graduate. Work.”

Gideon Markus isn’t one to waste words, because he is a genius. A lot of people hate Mr. Markus because he doesn’t bullshit them, but I think they also like him for the same reason.

There’s a pause, and then a mad rush to the laptop cart, but I just lick the chocolate whipped cream from my coffee and open my journal. Journal Number Twelve feels promising. It’s already thick with envelopes and movie stubs and silly things I’ll page through and smile at when I’m gray, which is such a relief after the obsessive, writing-only neatness of Number Eleven. Twelve is a good number, heavy with significance: dancing princesses, brothers turned to swans, doors in heaven. (Number Thirteen will be a different story, but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.)

It’s too early in the day to be actually productive, so I pull out a Skarpie and flip through the index of Virginia Woolf quotes at the beginning of Journal Number Twelve to find one to write on my arm. I’m always covered in Virginia Woolf quotes because I’m in love with her. If I could hook up with one person in all of history, I’d pick Virginia in a heartbeat.

I decide on: Arrange whatever pieces come your way. I think it fits my senior project pretty well, and that’s probably enough work for today. I open Journal Number Twelve to a new page and put the Skarpie to the margin and continue to draw. Planets and universes, fairy tales and girls who arrange the pieces that come to them, and in the center: a star, dissolving, an atom spewing away toward earth with twin souls inside. That’s one atom, singular, with a spastic and dancing electron field brighter than any sun.

Across the room, Mr. Markus is scolding Wes Bennet for not working, and I steal the words and unravel them until he’s narrating in his sandpaper voice.

Once upon a time, he says, and I draw in furious little strokes, in the beginning, there was no such thing as darkness. There were only stars bridged by light, and a single atom with wings.

Wings—they’re going to be my masterpiece. They’re going to blow everyone away, out of the water, into oblivion. Good-bye, Wes Bennet and your f*ck-the-system paper on American education. So long, Piper Blythe and your (admittedly really cool) thesis on cognitive biases and human failure. Even you, Micah, and your apocalypses. My wings are going to put you all to shame.

I start sketching again: wire for the frame, canvas over bamboo, feathers cut from Andersen and Grimm. Fairy-tale monster wings, shaped like butterfly but feathered like bird, clawed like bat and wider than dragon.

Then the Skarpie lines trail and jerk, learning to fly. They morph into birds and trees and veins and dreamers and a few rabid scribble creatures that snarl at the idea of being mistakes. There. I have one wing stretching and another that collapses into the whole wide world.

Mr. Markus almost didn’t agree to my proposal. I wheedled and begged and bribed (with cookies) the yes out of him. He says my problem is that I was born with a thousand beginnings and no endings at all. It’s hard to argue with that, because there’s an awful lot of proof in the senior studio art room. Projects upon unfinished projects: a teapot with no lid, four saucers and one teacup, a clay map of the world minus Australia, seven or eight untrimmed bowls, one ball of wedged clay that I lost and found after it fossilized and covered in Viking runes for luck.

Not this time, though. I will finish the wings if it kills me. I will! You’ll see.

The door bursts open. Dewey struts in with his stupid collar to his chin and Micah trails in behind him with cartoonishly bad bedhead and caffeine in his fingers. You see guys doing the air piano thing all the time, tapping their fingers on the edges of the desk while they sit sprawled in the chair with their legs wide open, thinking they’re so cool. Micah doesn’t do that. Micah is all nervous habit and music that never goes away.

Mr. Markus barely spares them a glance. “Sit down,” he says, and then goes back to typing. That’s another thing about Mr. Markus—he does all of our projects with us. He doesn’t just sit on the computer with the screen turned away so he can grade papers or play games or watch porn.