I don’t even notice the fire until Piper screams that our lab sheet is burning.
Someone pulls the fire alarm before Mr. Kaplick can tell us to chill, and we’re rushing into the hallway and out the door into the sun that keeps the day just above chilly, and I can’t stop laughing as the rest of the school pours out. I’m about to lie down and start making grass angels when someone catches my hand.
Ander spins me around with his finger on his lips. I pull it away and kiss him, hard, and he pulls me away and we sprint for the parking lot.
We go to the diner down the road and lounge in greasy seats talking about nothing in particular for hours. He plays with my hair and I order every milkshake on the menu so we can taste them all. His favorite is Clementine Dreaming and mine is NuTELLA Like It Is.
After, he drives me home, and I tell him to stop where the road forks between my new house that I fucking hate and the quarry.
He listens, because that’s what boyfriends do. He turns off the car and smiles his crooked smile and leans over and we start making out. I melt like girlfriends do, wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing him back. We love each other with the kind of love that begins and ends with our lips.
Outside the car, the lamplight is fighting the rain. The Metaphor is just down the hill, and I imagine it while he kisses me, the perfect scene: the two of us dancing under shy streetlights, spinning closer to the water, hand in hand, climbing my mountain of rocks and falling flat on our perfect asses. Can’t you just see it? I can.
Maybe we even make it to the top together.
I always knew I’d make it to the top one day. I had painted the moment of triumph in watercolor, in oil, in acrylic; I had sculpted it in clay and stone and plaster, welded it in copper and iron; I had dreamed it in color and sepia, oversaturated and in black-and-white. And never once had Ander been there with me.
It was always Micah. Always, anything, everything.
We kiss for a while, until Ander starts getting frisky and I pull away. He never stops grinning at me, not even when he drives me up the hill to my new house, where all the lights are on because my parents have probably been waiting for me to come home for hours now. My lips are swollen and I use the last bit of my third tube of Chapstick. He kisses me again before I get out of the car, and he gives me his jacket to run to the house so I don’t get wet.
At the front door, I turn back to blow him a kiss good-bye, but he’s already gone.
after
DECEMBER 5
Dewey is in my house again.
Why is Dewey always in my house?
“Dude,” he says. “You gotta get out of bed. You smell like ass. You haven’t even been getting up to shit, have you. Goddamn, Micah. I brought Metatron: Sands of Time. It’s zombie Confederates this time. Come on, get up.”
“No,” I say.
“Yeah, you know what? We need to get you out of this house. We need to get you some air or something.”
“There’s air here,” I say. I take a breath to prove it. Look at me, breathing. Look at me, breathing. I’m not a vegetable.
“Vegetables still breathe,” says Dewey.
“Did I say that out loud?”
“Yes, you goddamn said that out loud. Jesus, Micah.”
“Oh,” I say.
“Jesus,” he says again, and glares at the ceiling like Jesus is right there. “Come on, Micah. We’re gonna do something. What do you want to do?”
“I want to lie here,” I say.
“We could go to the diner,” he says, like he didn’t hear me. I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe I didn’t say it out loud that time. I try to remember, but I already forgot. “Or we could drive somewhere, run over some kids like Janie liked to do, crazy bitch—WHAT THE FUCK, MAN?”
I throw an apple at his head, hard. It’s rotten; it splats.
“Oh, fuck it, Micah,” Dewey howls, “they were right about you. Goddamn, goddamn, you actual fucking ass, what the hell? Fuck. You’re going goddamn crazy, man. You’re one seriously fucked-up little son of a bitch, and—screw you, Micah. God, my fucking face.”
But he still doesn’t leave.
“Get the fuck out of bed,” he says, seething, looking around for a clean shirt to wipe his face on. He snatches one up, finally. I think about telling him it’s not clean, but I guess he’ll figure it out. “You know what? We are going out tonight. I’m going to throw your sorry ass over a cliff.”
“I don’t want to get out of bed,” I say. Yes, out loud, I hear the words out loud. “I want to stay here and feel sorry for myself and imagine the apocalypse.”
Apocalypses. Apocalypses are safe.
“Let me tell you about the apocalypse,” Dewey says. He strides to the bed and throws my covers back. I shiver and he gags. “Jesus. Jesus. You know what, Micah? You’re not going to live to see the fucking apocalypse. You’re going to get your filthy ass out of bed and we are going to go see this shitshow of a world, or I’m going to murder you right here and you’ll never see anything again. Got it?”