This Is Where the World Ends (2 page)

When we were seven, I set Micah on fire. Mom always tells the story on our birthday when we blow out the candles together because she thinks it's cute, but it totally isn't because I was making a wish and his hair got in the way and I never got my Skip-It. Lesson learned: bad things happen to good people.

(I mean me, not Micah. He was hardly even burned. And I really, really,
really
wanted a Skip-It. Piper and Carrie and the other girls brought theirs to recess every day even though they weren't supposed to, and I never even got one.)

So, to recap: bad things happen to good people, and that's not fair. Bad things should happen to bad people, like Caleb Matthers.

Cue mustache twirling!

My pockets are full of stones. I drew runes for silence and speed and courage all over my arms and I've wished for
luck on two matches. Usually I only light one before ninja missions, but one isn't enough for tonight.

I park my car on the next street over and run through the Gherricks' yard to our old street, and kick over the
FOR SALE
sign in front of my house before stopping at the door. It's blue, not electric like I'd wanted, but still navy, because we painted it back when my parents acknowledged that I was capable of forming opinions. Not that I'm bitter!

Wait, that isn't even a little bit true. I'm totally bitter. I am brimming with resentment and teen angst.

(And I fucking hate the new house.)

I try my key, but it turns out my parents have already changed the lock. I roll my eyes and hope God will convey the message to my parents, and go to the side of the house. Thankfully, the workmen haven't discovered the loose basement window yet, but it still takes me awhile to coax open the rusted hinges. It's Sneak-Out Route Number Seven, and I don't use it often because of the seasonal spider nest. But you know. Desperate times.

I tumble into the basement and get a face full of carpet, which is still moldy from the flooding last fall. It's all empty—and I go up the stairs and it still smells like the Wonderfully Happy Vivian Family, like scotch and the kind of perfume they spray on supermarket flowers to make them smell brighter than they really do, and dust. I
think that's a good way to describe us: our house smelled like dust even before we moved out.

I light a match to get me up the stairs and to my room because the house is all kinds of creepy without furniture, and I wish for perfection before I open the door, so all I smell is smoke. I take a breath and burst through, eyes forward, so that the only things I see are the desk and the window and the bookshelf, and not how empty the room is. I open the window and frown at the screen.

Kicking it out is the most satisfying thing I've ever done.

The noise it makes brings Micah to his window, and the fury that rises in me is sharp and everything, because this is how it should always be. Us, at our two windows, no screen, sneaking out of the house and driving without headlights just to get over here.

“Janie?” he asks. “Um, what? Are you supposed to be in there?”

I ignore that and slide the shelf across and he holds the other end by habit. I get on my knees and somersault over before I can make a better decision. For a second I'm unsteady and crooked and wondering if I will survive a two-story fall, and a second later I'm tumbling into Micah's room and he's saying “Shit!” on repeat and everything, everything is exquisitely funny.

“Oh my god,” I gasp through laughing. “Micah Carter, it is an honor to be alive with you.”

But he just yawns and starts to fall back into bed, and—
I do not freaking think so.

So I pounce. I land with my knees on either side of him and he yelps and my hair is in his face and we are tangled in his blankets, and his eyes are the first thing I remember understanding.

For a moment all I want to do is turn off the lights and sleep in a bed with him in it, like we used to when we were little—climbing through the window and falling asleep together. I know the sound of his breathing better than any lullaby in the world.

Instead, I put my knee on his chest and say, “You're welcome.”

He is still gasping. “What,” he says, “what the
hell
for?”

I push my knee down harder. “For not killing you,” I explain. “Benji told me that you can kill someone like this. Jump on their chest and land with your knee, break the sternum, et cetera. I just saved your life.”

Benji Arken is going into the navy. He is an asshole. Racist and misogynistic and homophobic, but he is cute, occasionally even funny, and he was a damn good kisser. And he knows how to kill people, which was not why we broke up. We broke up because he didn't shower between
basketball practice and when he came to my house.

“Janie,” Micah said, and he was looking up at me and his eyes were wide and his pupils were dark and widening, and—

Not yet.

I climb off the bed and drag him up with me. “Come on,” I say. “I told you midnight. Why aren't you dressed? Where's your mask?”

“Dude, I have a calc test tomorrow,” he says, rubbing his eyes and yawning with too much effort to be genuine.

“
Dude
, I have the same calc test. Stop whining.” I throw open his closet and grab our emergency sheet rope (escape route number nine) and one of his (too) many black T-shirts from a wrinkled stack. I toss the T-shirt at his face. He doesn't catch it.

“Where are we going?”

I blink, and I see the scene from his eyes. No, not his eyes. Camera lens.
The Janie and Micah Show.

Me, standing by the wide, wide window staring at the wide, wide world, eyes closed and arms spread. Him, by the bed, pulling the T-shirt over just his face and tying it into a ninja mask, complaining that it makes his glasses fog over but fingers tapping, because we both knew. We could both feel it. The . . . the suspension.
Something is going to happen.

Come on, Micah. Let's pretend. Let's pretend, just this one night, that nothing is wrong. That nothing has changed.

Janie and Micah. Micah and Janie.

Can you feel it? I can feel it, like we're swinging and caught at the top of the arc, and we're not falling but our stomachs are. The butterflies are going crazy, reacting a thousand times more violently than they ever will again. They're fluttering up and up, and now they're caught in my ribs and throat and head, and they're so
alive
because they're flirting with something so much more interesting. They're flirting with life itself.

I pull the bookshelf into his room and tie the sheets to his bedpost, and I hold on tight and throw my leg out the window before I whirl around to meet his eyes—
whoosh
, shampoo commercial hair. Eyes glittering, light dimming, and just my voice, siren to sailor: “Come, my fellow ninja. We're going on an adventure.”

Exit Janie, end scene.

Except—

“Wait, Micah!
Micah.
We have to take your car. I'm out of gas.”

It started small. I think we made a plate of cookies and left them on Michael Wong's front porch because his girlfriend
had dumped him on the first day of freshman year. His mom made him throw them out because she thought they might have had pot in them (which obviously they didn't, or I would have kept them for myself), but it was the thought that counted. After that it was cliché: raking someone's leaves, leaving heads-up pennies on the sidewalks by the elementary school, putting an extra quarter in parking meters.

And then: sophomore year. We were stupid and invincible. We thought we were everything, and we started getting adventurous. There was the whole library fiasco, and I guess it snowballed from there. We started wearing masks. We started thinking bigger, brighter, like there was nothing in the world the two of us together couldn't do, and sometimes I still think we were right.

Because we are
freaking badasses.

We have a hit list, and we are damn creative. We are Justice. We do right, and we reward the deserving. There was the time we sneaked into the petting zoo and protested animal captivity and the time we hid lollipops all over Grant MacFarther's house and the time we hung Christmas ornaments in Jade Bastian's car in July. And there were other nights too. Quiet ones, just us, Micah and me, me and Micah. Swimming in the quarry. Shadow tag in the parking lot by the baby wipe factory.
A reenactment of
Les Mis
in the rain. Stars and stars, night after night, secrets spilled in a world too big for sleep.

Micah is taking forever.

I sit on the hood of his car, and when he finally appears—through the door, what the hell? He knows doors are against the rules—I smack the top of his car and yell, “Driver!”

He only says, “You can't call driver, it's my car. And get off. I just washed it.”

“As if you care,” I say, but when I climb back onto the ground, he dusts my footprints from the paint. I put my hand in my pocket and squeeze my rocks and wonder if there is a word for the marks you get on your palm when you squeeze something so hard that the skin is on the verge of ripping.

“Micah Carter,” I say, and he
does
look up, right at me. And his eyes are the same green-gray-brown that they always have been, and he still has eleven freckles (two on the left cheek, nine on the right), and his glasses are in their perpetual state of sliding down his nose, and this
is
my Micah August Carter. This is the boy who climbed onto his roof when we were five to hear the wind better. This is the boy who, due to a small miscommunication, donated blood during my appendectomy even though he
thought it would kill him. This is the boy who is both my impulse control and my very best ideas.

If we can get through tonight, everything will go back to normal. We will be us. He will stop ditching me for Dewey most weekends and I will stop moping in my stupid new house every night. I will drag him into the night, every night. We won't have to worry about going to college and growing apart and forgetting each other in favor of bland significant others, because this is real and always and forever.

He turns away and gets into the driver's seat, and I glare at him for a solid ten seconds before I stomp to the other side. Pick the battles, win the war.

We don't back out of the driveway, we
tear.
His engine shreds the sky. We're going to get caught before we start. “Oh my god, we're going to wake your dad. Micah. I just started my Common App. I don't want to write that I have a felony.”

This is a little bit of a lie, which I feel a little bit terrible about. Micah and I swore in fourth grade never to lie to each other about the important things, and maybe lying about starting the Common App is a small thing, but not planning to go to college right away is a much bigger one. I did start
an
application, just less one for college and more one to volunteer in Nepal for women's rights. I want to
rebuild orphanages and teach English and sex ed. Not that I know much about rebuilding orphanages or teaching, but I'll figure it out, and I'll hike and take pictures and draw and buy souvenirs in open markets. I'll fill my journal so full of paint and gesso and charcoal and color and Skarpie and words and stories that it won't close. I want to explore. I want to go far, far away.

“Felony?” He sounds annoyed, which makes me annoyed. “Janie, you said this would be fast.”

“It will be,” I say. “Felony was hyperbolic. If anything, it'll be a misdemeanor, and only if we're caught. I can't believe you're done with college apps. That's ridiculous. They're not due for months. And—turn turn, MICAH, TURN,” I scream and the wheels scream and I
think
the mailbox was already on the ground, I don't
think
we knocked it over, but we don't stick around to figure it out. “Okay, next left, second house on your right. Got it?”

“I get it, I'm not an idiot.”

“No,
left
, MICAH. Left! LEFT!”

Update: we are not dead, and Micah still doesn't know left from right.

He finally pulls to a stop on the wrong side of the road, and I'm laughing and I can't stop, because, God—

“I miss you,” I say, accidentally/not accidentally out loud. Miss, present tense. I'm sitting here and I can still
feel distance between us, just folded and crumpled and tangled. Our soul has stretch marks.

Wanted: stretch mark cream for the soul. The stuff that actually works, not the telemarketing crap.

Micah gets all blushy and awkward, but I don't say anything about it because we don't have time. We have a mission tonight. Eyes on the prize. I half kick open the car door—badassery—and jump onto the sidewalk.

Micah gets out too and squints at the house. “Where are we?”

“Carrie Lang's. Come on. I put the helium tank in your trunk already.”

“But—how did you get into my car? I finally got the lock fixed.”

Oh, please. What a silly question. I pull my lockpick from my back pocket and flash it at him. It was two bucks on Amazon, so of course I got one. I think there's a criminal streak in me. I think it's wide.

But I'm using it for good, see? I'm doing—something. Anything. I'm tired of watching, and waiting, and expecting things to work out. It never works out. It never works unless you demand.

So here I am, demanding.

“Hurry, Micah!”

He's chewing on his lip all uncertain-like, and I tap my
foot on the curb until he sighs and comes to stand next to me.

“Ready?” I ask him.

We pop open the trunk, and I hop in and struggle with the helium tank. Thank god for Party City. Micah sighs, and then he climbs in with me and opens the package of balloons, and when our eyes meet, my smile lights up the entire world.

Carrie Lang is one of my best friends, I think. She called me both times she lost her virginity and if that doesn't constitute a place on the best friend tier, I don't know what does. She is blond and tall and pretty and cartoonishly in love with Caleb Matthers, or at least she will be until she finds out that he cheated on her with Suey Park.