She sighed. “Don’t be that guy, Micah. I said I was sorry, okay?”
“I know, I just mean—” She always said that guilt lived in my side of the soul. Janie never had anything to apologize for. People forgave her without being asked. I squinted at her. “Is that my sweatshirt?”
She looked down. “Yeah, I guess. They don’t make sweatshirts like this for girls, you know?”
“Uh, not really,” I said. I pushed my laptop aside and started to get up. She crossed her arms and curled over a little. She looked small. I wanted to shake her awake.
“Oh, you know,” she said, and I wondered why she kept crushing her chest, if it made her voice so shaky. “Girls’ sweatshirts are too thin and don’t do shit to keep you warm. Girl things are just like that. They don’t work right. They’re just there to—you know. Look nice. And this. This is just nice, you know? This is a nice sweatshirt.”
“Janie,” I said.
“Don’t,” she said, flinching. I wasn’t anywhere near her; my hand twitched from across the room and she flinched away from it. I swallowed. My spit was cold.
She took a breath, and I heard it rasp into her lungs without filling them. “Sorry,” she said. Her voice was small. Her voice was microscopic. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Do you ever feel like you just can’t win?”
Of course I did. I lived in fucking Waldo, Iowa. I went to Waldo High School and didn’t play sports. I was not particularly rich in friends. I was poorly endowed in just about every possible area of life. Of course I fucking did.
“Oh, stop that,” said Janie, a little closer to normal, which meant that she was annoyed. “I can hear you thinking.”
“Stop what?”
“Your poor little white boy nice guy act. Don’t be the cliché, Micah. You’re better than that.”
“Janie,” I said. I took another step forward and she took another step back.
“Stop,” she said, and I did. She took another breath. “Don’t. I’m fine.”
It was a lie.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” I said, and she laughed, or she tried. It didn’t matter how many breaths she took to steady herself. She tried to laugh and choked.
“Oh, please. You don’t want to know what’s wrong, Micah. If you wanted to know, you would have—” She stopped. She blinked, and tilted her head to the ceiling so the tears wouldn’t fall out. “What isn’t wrong? The world is ending. I’m not even being dramatic. The world is fucking ending. You know that, don’t you? That’s why you picked apocalypses, isn’t it? The bees are dying. The ozone layer has more holes than I do. Some idiot could press the wrong button tomorrow and start a nuclear war. It’s just—it’s a lot of stuff, Micah. And we can’t really change it. Isn’t that the worst part? We can’t really change any of the stuff that matters. Just think about how much sleep we lost trying to fix stuff no one can ever really fix.”
“Um,” I said. “I guess?”
Her voice is smaller than I’ve ever heard it when she says, “What are the odds that you’d ditch Maggie and the dance tonight and do something with me?”
“What?” I ask.
“Do you trust me?”
Of course I trusted her. And of course I would go with her—it wasn’t a question. Maggie was cute, but she wasn’t Janie.
“Just let me text Maggie,” I said. “And I have to change.”
She smiled. She crossed the room, finally, and wrapped her arms around me. She smelled like she was burning when I put my head on hers. Sometimes I forgot how small she really was. She barely reached my chin. She looked up and her lips were curved and her eyes were too bright and I—
I nearly kissed her, but didn’t.
I nearly told her that it was okay, but didn’t.
I nearly said scientists were working pretty hard on the bee problem, but didn’t.
I did what I always did. I waited until she moved away, until her eyes were a normal brightness and her breath was regular again, and I waited for her to take my hand and pull me after her.
Her hand was cold and sweating.
“I’m having a bonfire,” she said. She reached up to push my glasses back up my nose, and kept her hand on my face. “I have marshmallows. Everyone’s coming. You’re coming, right?”
I hadn’t really planned on it. Janie’s “everyone” had little overlap with my “everyone.” But she didn’t let go of my hand until we were in her car, until she stuck her key in the ignition and looked at me, hard. By then my fingers going white in her fist.
“More than anything,” she said.
“More than everything,” I replied.
On the night of the bonfire, the air was at odds with itself. The wind hurt and the smell of beer was heavy. The cold was sharp and the smoke kept growing.
People were shouting. People were chasing each other with shots and torches.
Janie was curled against me, and her hair kept making me sneeze. In the morning she would pretend this never happened and I would read too much into it, as always.