I feel like shit. The doctors didn’t pump my stomach because they were too busy sewing my scalp together, which split open. No one has told me how the hell that happened yet. I’m still nauseous enough to be clutching the bedpan, but the real pain is deeper, somewhere around the place where my brain stem meets my spine. It hurts my eyes when I stare at my phone, but I keep staring. Janie has to text back soon.
“Dude, stop texting and grab a controller.” Dewey brought my extra. It’s the shitty one that my dog chewed up before he died. “Listen to me. You’re keeping the bench warm in T-ball, and she’s in the major leagues. You got it?”
Dewey is an asshole. Some people are musicians or dreamers; Dewey is an asshole. He smokes a pack of cigarettes a day and wears his collars popped up and he does shit like play video games with the volume all the way up while you’re in the hospital. He’s my best friend because we are the only two inhabitants of the ninth circle of social hell. We didn’t have options.
“My point is, you’re not getting to any bases. You’re not in the same league.” His voice shakes. His avatar gets filled with bullet holes.
“What?” I ask. “What’s wrong?”
Dewey swallows. He won’t look at me. He puts the controller down. A nurse comes in. He picks the controller up again.
“How’re you doing, love?” she asks as she tries to fluff my pillows.
“Is Janie here?” I ask her. “Is she okay?”
“You just worry about yourself for now, all right?” she says. Her voice is honey, and I swallow quickly so I don’t puke. “Doctor’s going to come check you again soon. All right?”
He’ll check me everywhere and say things like “selective retrograde amnesia.” I’ll try not to puke in his direction and splatter his coat anyway.
The nurse checks the IV in my arm before moving away and closing the door.
“Do you know who else is here?” I ask Dewey.
His eyes are fixed on the screen.
“Is Janie here?”
He shoots a Nazi zombie in the head. “I already told you,” he says. “No, I don’t know who the fuck is here, Micah.”
“But weren’t you there last night?”
“No, I wasn’t. Stop asking me.”
Dewey’s avatar ducks behind a crumbling wall. His avatar is bleeding from its leg but still walks fine. His supplies are low. The zombies are coming. They surround him. He sighs. “Oh, fuck it.”
He jumps out from behind the wall and his avatar fills with bullets. He goes down like a rock. A jingle plays. Game over. World fucked.
“Apocalypse music,” I say.
Dewey starts a new game. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say. Nothing. I don’t know what’s coming out of my mouth. No, wait. It’s more vomit. It tastes like vodka I don’t remember drinking.
“Shit, man,” Dewey says, pausing the game and leaning away. “Jesus. You’re disgusting. I fucking told you not to go last night, I—”
He swallows again. “Go back to sleep,” he says eventually.
I guess I listen. My eyes are closed, but I don’t really remember closing them. Nurses come and go, and doctors, and policemen. I guess I must open my eyes to see them, but I don’t remember that either.
Apocalypse music.
Janie declared an apocalypse.
She declared an apocalypse and told me I could pick the music. The leaves were the color of her hair and she stood on top of a mountain of rocks. She was laughing. Her fists were full of stones and she was stuffing them into her pockets.
“So what do you think?” she asks me. Her eyes are two shades brighter than ice, bluer than normal. “Everything needs a good soundtrack, Micah. The apocalypse most of all.”
I don’t remember what I said.
I don’t remember if it happened at all.
THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN
Once upon a time, a little girl built a house out of Skarpie markers. They were cheaper than the name brand and much more permanent—you had to shed a whole layer of skin to get rid of it. She sat on the floor of her house and drew on her arms until her parents huffed and puffed that markers were for paper, not skin. Besides, they told her, she would get ink poisoning.
So the little girl put her markers in her pocket and went on to build a house of matches. She shook them out of their boxes and watched them burn closer to her fingertips. She made wishes and blew them out. She stacked them in little rickety stacks and imagined them going up in flames, because she thought it’d be beautiful. She stacked the matches higher and higher until her teachers huffed and puffed that little girls shouldn’t play with dangerous things. Besides, they told her, it was against school rules.
So the little girl put her matches in her pocket and went on to build a house out of rocks. Her parents and her teachers and the whole town huffed and puffed, but no one could knock this house down and no one could keep her away. She named the house of rocks the Metaphor and spent every moment she could there with a boy who never huffed and never puffed. She always kept a marker and a match and at least five rocks in her pocket: the marker to write, the match to wish and burn, and the rock to keep her grounded.
And they all lived happily ever after, probably.
before
SEPTEMBER 8