This Is Where the World Ends (6 page)

But then the prince took the princess back to his small kingdom and they became the king and queen, and slowly things began to change. The king's kingdom was small and
poor—there were no cocktail balls for the queen to dance at and no other princesses drowning in pearls for her to talk to, and she was lonely. She sat in the castle by herself most days and nights while the king took her money and left without telling her where he was going. The king and queen fought and cried and the nights began to last longer and longer, because not even the sun could bear to look at them.

When they could no longer stand it, they went to the fairies and begged them to make them happy again. The king and queen thought the fairies were good, but really they were just stupid, and they told the king and queen that if they should have a baby, all would be well again.

All except one. One fairy warned the king and queen that the child would be cursed,
but no one listened to her.

Soon after, a princess was born. The stupid fairies came and cooed over her cradle and the kingdom rejoiced and the sun peeked out again, and the king and queen sat together with smiles pasted on their faces.

Of course it didn't last. One day, the doors burst open and the last fairy flew in, furious. “Fools,” she seethed, one long finger stretched toward the king and queen. “How dare you? This child was cursed from her first breath. She will not save your marriage, and you will ruin her. Listen well. On her eighteenth birthday, at sunset, she will blow out her birthday candle and be gone from you forever. And then what will you do?”

The king and queen trembled and clutched their princess so tightly that she wailed. And as she grew, they held on ever tighter. Because they would never let her out of their sight, the princess grew up watching them scream and sob. She counted the days until
her eighteenth birthday, and the king and queen held on tighter still, avoiding each other's eyes but thinking the same thing:
what will we do then?

“Are you coming over?” Piper asks as the school empties into the parking lot. “I have Chobani. And if I don't learn an entire chapter of calc tonight, I'm going to fail the class.”

“I can't,” I say. “It's Thursday! Thursday!” I've saved all of my daily allotment of exclamation marks for this moment. (Jeff Martin told me I was too enthusiastic once and tried to limit my exclamation marks. Eventually I told him to fuck off, but, well . . . you know. Bad habits don't die young.)

It has been a preposterously long day. Ander faked sick to skip the psych test and totally screwed over Phase Six, Step Fourteen: study hall date, and then I went to my senior studio and found out that
three
of my bowls had exploded in the kiln, and I had to lie when Mr. Dempsey asked me if I had let them dry before I loaded them, and then I probably failed my word-of-the-day quiz in Spanish, and
then the cafeteria didn't have parfaits at lunch even though they always have parfaits at lunch on Thursdays.

But Thursday is Metaphor Day, Janie and Micah Day, and that's the only reason I didn't fake cramps and go home early. Piper waves and I blow a kiss back, and we go off in our separate directions. I love Piper Blythe and everything about our no-commitment, zero-accountability, convenient-as-hell friendship. No one gets mad when texts aren't answered or plans are blown off, because we both get the big picture. This is high school, and no one really wants to remember high school. In a few months, we'll walk off the stage at graduation and spend the summer together, we'll text each other for the first few weeks of college, and then we'll lose touch. And that's okay. The world is so much bigger than the two of us.

I throw my backpack in the backseat and the sun comes out—same moment, literally, and I throw my head back and arms out and laugh. People are staring and I drink that in too, because I'm Janie Vivian and I'm
alive
.

I open my eyes and I see Micah, immediately, two rows across and halfway down the lot. His grin turns all blushy when I catch him, and he tries to turn away but I grab our soul and tug, hard, and his eyes snap back to mine.

“Race you,” I mouth to him, and he's already in his car because twin telepathy, duh.

“Cheater!” I yell as I dive into my car. People are staring, so who cares? Who cares if I'm loud? We are young and free and careless. We are laughing and reckless and
us
.

(Not that they know that. They just think I'm crazy and too liberal with exclamation marks, and they're totally right.)

He's out of the parking lot before me, but I still have the advantage, because my car probably won't fall apart if I drive over fifty. Micah's car proves that miracles are real every time it starts. Also, he's going to slow down at the crosswalk because he doesn't want to run over the middle schoolers. Not that I
want
to, of course, but natural selection was coming for the slower ones, anyway.

(Kidding! Mostly.)

But he does stop at the crosswalk and I floor the gas pedal, and sure, the crossing guard doesn't scream after him, but he's not winning anymore either. I roll down the windows and flash
loser
back at him as I tear through the town, past the tutting grandmothers (one of whom might be mine? I go by too fast. Oops) and the cross country team and the new Moms Who Walk club. My tires set the road on fire and my laughter tickles the sun, and two minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, I'm braking hard and skidding to avoid driving straight into the Metaphor.

I leap out of the car and spin around, ready to do my
touchdown dance in Micah's losing face, but—where is he? Ugh. I knew his car was going to give out. What's the point of a glorious victory if no one's there to witness it?

So I sit down against the Metaphor to wait with all the calc notes I didn't take. I shove a few more rocks in my pockets and lean back, and slowly, the Metaphor starts to swallow me. I tilt my head back and smile at it. “I love you too,” I say.

And I do, truly, madly. We found the Metaphor when we were ten. It was early in the summer and we weren't supposed to leave the neighborhood, and we didn't
really
, if you think about it. The signs at the town limits say
WELCOME, NEIGHBOR
in a font that looks a little too close to Comic Sans, but if everyone is a neighbor that must mean that all of Waldo is just one neighborhood.

Micah was hesitant and sweet—
ugh
, so many feelings for ten-year-old Micah. He was floppy-haired and shy and freckly and awkward and newly bespectacled and he just wanted to stay in the backyard, and it was my duty as a citizen of the earth to show him how big it was. (And it still is. The earth is awfully big. I'm going to see all of it) We rode our bikes through evil old Ms. Capaldi's lawn and down a few roads and took a few turns and then we were at the quarry like magic.

Everyone warns you about the quarry. So a few (dozen)
people have died and disappeared here—why does that matter? It's beautiful here. Sometimes it's so still that you can feel the earth revolving.

I didn't see that, at first, or feel it. The first thing I saw was the Metaphor, which wasn't the Metaphor yet. (It would be in about a minute. Patience, grasshopper.)

It's big enough to block the quarry, which is enormous. Let's just willfully disregard that just about anything would have blocked out the quarry to my barely four-foot eye level. It really is huge. At least (or almost) two stories tall on good days, probably. It's made up of all of the leftover rock scraps from when the quarry still had granite, so the rocks range from pebble to pet sized, and on that day when we were ten years old and the sun was everywhere and that moment was all that mattered, we stopped our bikes at the bottom and looked up and up and up.

“Janie? What are you—”

I was already climbing, or at least I was trying. The pebbles looked steady from the ground, but they started to crumble as soon as I started climbing, and I was back on the ground within a few seconds, probably, but they were worth it.

“Oh my god,” I said, my voice all hushed and awed because there was something holy about the pile of rocks but also because I was still breathless from the fall. “It's
like a metaphor for our lives, Micah. Wait—that's perfect! The Metaphor for Our Lives. That's what we'll call it!”

“What?”

We had just learned about metaphors that day, and Micah clearly hadn't been paying attention. I was obsessed. I wrote a whole page of them in my notebook and didn't listen while the teacher explained why they were useful, because some things should just be beautiful and useless.

I ticked them off. “Metaphor one: it's impossible to climb. Inevitably, you end up on the ground with your breath knocked out of you. Metaphor two: see these?” I picked up a rock and held it up to him, but when he reached for it, I retracted my hand. I didn't actually want to let go of it. I put it in my pocket. (Later, I'd write a Virginia Woolf quote on it:
Fear no more.
In case you doubted that this was the beginning of everything.) “See how smooth they are? Smooth and all the same, like thoughts that people kick around until they're smooth and all the same. Metaphor three—”

“They're not all the same,” Micah argued, squatting and squinting at the base of the Metaphor. “You're just not looking close enough. Most of them aren't even the same size.”

“You're ruining my moment,” I said, and we argued back and forth like we still do, and we never did get to the third
Metaphor. But the point is that that was the first time I climbed and fell off the Metaphor, that was the first time I had a rock in my pocket, that was the first time we were really and truly free and alive and us. We were born that day.

I kick my calc stuff aside and get to my feet and start climbing again. I was going to wait for Micah, but I can't stand it any longer. Climbing is always the first and last thing I do here. One of these days, I'll get to the top. I will. But today I'm only a few feet up when I finally hear Micah pull up. His door slams, and I hop back onto even ground before the Metaphor can throw me.

“Late much?” I ask him as he comes toward me. He has a piece of paper crumpled in his fist. I frown. “What is that?”

“This? This is a goddamn speeding ticket,” he snaps. “You rushed ahead and almost killed a fourth grader and got the attention of every grandma in Waldo, and now I have to pay a fucking two hundred dollar fine for
speeding
.”

I shrug. “Wouldn't be a problem if you drove faster.”

He throws his hands in the air. “That doesn't even make sense! Janie, I'm serious, I have no idea how the fuck I'm going to pay for this and my dad is going to kill me—”

“Oh, don't be a drama queen, Micah,” I say, waving the ticket away. “You still have money from Pizza Rancheroo.”

“God dammit, Janie, this happens every single fucking time! You get away with shitloads and I'm left with—”

“Shhhhh,” I say, throwing back my head. “Micah. Hey, Micah. Look at that.”

He looks up without thinking and squints. “What?” He still sounds annoyed. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“Nothing. Just the sky. Isn't it beautiful?”

He opens his mouth to snap something else, but he takes a deep breath instead. “Whatever. Can we just do calc already? We're like three weeks into school and I'm already going to fail. Do you get this optimization shit? Because I don't.”

Of course I don't. Neither of us is meant for calculus. I can't see the world in numbers or molecules. I just can't. When I look around, I see colors smells motions beginnings. I see sky and wind and hope like birds and art like fire and every desperate wish ever made.

“Oh, forget calc,” I say, and dive into my bag for my book of fairy tales and a pair of scissors. “Here, help me make feathers.”

He's paging through his notes, frowning and squinting. The sun makes the pages too bright and the wind blows over the Metaphor to ruffle his hair and his annoyance grows on his face like mold.

“Micah, look.” I wave my hand in his face. “I'm making wings, remember? I told you.”

“Huh,” he says, barely glancing over.

I sigh, tragic. “Fine. I'll do it myself. Hey, are you coming to wrestling regionals next week? There's gonna be a fan bus.”

We have one of the best wrestling teams in the nation. Maybe because they're good, but probably because we're also one of the only schools where wrestling is a fall sport instead of a winter one. Ander tried to explain to me once why we had to be different, but I wasn't really listening because I was too busy imagining him in a skintight uniform.

“Hell no.”

“Why not? I want you to come. It'll be fun. I've never gone to a wrestling match before.” I don't really care about wrestling. I'm rooting for the wrestlers because my ten-phase, six-month, totally
non-
creepy plan requires cuddling on the bus back from regionals, hopefully celebratory, but I'll take consolidation cuddling too. Ander's going crazy. It's adorable. I haven't seen him in a while because he's got a scholarship riding on his state ranking, which all depends on regionals. Or something. I don't know. I just know it's important to him and I get to see him in a skintight uniform.

Ander Cameron in a skintight uniform. I sigh and stretch
out, and my foot knocks Micah's notes into the wind.

“
Shit.
God, Janie,” he snaps. “I just organized those.”

And he's not even a little bit joking. He's not smiling at all, and when I see that, words flash in neon in my head:
how did we get here?

Micah saved my life once. We were in second grade, and my appendix exploded and the hospital was really ridiculously low on my blood type. (My dad threatened to sue, but my mom didn't want to and it was her money, and they fought about how he was anal retentive and she didn't care enough, blah blah blah.) But Micah and I have the same blood type because of course we do, and the doctor knew because there's only one hospital in Waldo so the doctors know everything. He asked Micah to donate even though he probably still weighed less than a Chihuahua then. Micah thought about it. (Can't you just picture it? Baby Micah with his head of overflowing curls and his brown-green-gray eyes taking over his face, all scared and determined.) He hugged his dad and told him that he wasn't really mad about what had happened with his mom, and he went with the doctor.

Because he thought he was
going to die
.

Later, he came to visit me, all wrapped up in bed, and I grinned at him through the meds and said, “Did you really think you would die by donating blood?”

He muttered something about a movie and blood loss. He said the doctor had had the kind of voice that made everything into an ultimatum and used words that were too big and it had been an honest mistake, and
no
, he wouldn't do it again.

He totally would, though. I knew that.

I guess what bothers me now is that I don't know if he
would
do it again. Sometimes at lunch I watch him and Dewey flicking food at each other and I just can't remember how we got here. We used to know each other to the bone. But now that we're not talking every single day because I live across town in a house I fucking hate and we can barely look at each other in school, I think he's starting to realize how differently we grew up, and in different directions.

Eventually he takes the book of fairy tales. After he reorganizes his notes and opens the textbook to the review pages and writes down the problem numbers and acts like he's actually going to work, like either of us understands optimization and related rates, like that's what we're actually here for. And then he does that thing where he doesn't sigh, but the air comes out of his nose with a little more force than necessary, and he finally takes the book from between us.