And then I grab a fistful of rocks and throw on my jacket. I grab my keys and run down the stairs and I figure that since I don’t fall, I’m sober enough to drive. I’ve probably puked up the vodka anyway. I don’t look at the muddy footprints on the carpet or the empty bottles on the breakfast bar. I have to get out of here. I shouldn’t have put the sheets in the wash. His smell has gotten all the way through the house. I just need to hold it together for a little while longer.
To be honest, I don’t remember driving all that much. I remember the dark going by quickly, much faster than the speed limit, holding my breath for as long as I can, and then I’m in Micah’s driveway, out of the car and heading for the door on the back porch, slipping into his pitch-black house and sprinting up the stairs. I am quiet by default. I am small and wincing and I’m still holding my breath.
Micah’s room is bright. He sleeps with the window open and the moonlight is streaming and awful. There’s a pizza box on top of books on top of binders on top of clean clothes on top of dirty, and I almost cry again because it’s unfamiliar too, and his room is never unfamiliar. But then there’s Micah, a lump under the covers, and my breath whooshes out. He’s slept like that for as long as either of us can remember, with the blanket over his head and all of the sides tucked in. Is it safer? Is that why he sleeps like that?
I creep across the room and perch on the edge of the bed and poke him with a finger. I think the moonlight makes it shakier and paler than it really is, but who knows? “Micah,” I whisper. “Micah.”
He doesn’t move, and I can’t stand it anymore. The sobs are rising and my throat is thick and shivering, so I crawl next to him and tug on the blankets. He stirs, he turns, he opens his eyes and blinks up at me.
“Janie?”
His voice is heavy with sleep and my tears spill over. Micah, my Micah.
“What is it?” He tries to sit up, but I’m sitting on the covers and he’s tangled, and for a moment it’s so ironic and strange that I can’t move or answer or see him. “What’s wrong? Janie—”
“You’re hogging the blankets,” I manage, and I crawl in with him before he can say anything else. For a moment he hesitates, but he doesn’t ask any more questions. He just scoots to give me room and throws half of the covers onto me, and I drag them over my head and pull his arm around me.
“What,” he says. “What—”
“Shhh,” I say. His lips are soft on my finger. “Shh, I just want to sleep. That’s all. Okay?”
And that’s what we do. He holds me and I cry and close my eyes and it’s like we’re on the boat again, like I never left. That Thursday never turned to Friday and Piper and Wes and Jude and Gonzalo and Jizzy and Ander never came over at all, ever. And it feels so possible, easy, to wish time back to the quarry with all of our secrets spilling out into the water, that I keep rewinding and rewinding time. We are babies, embryos. The blanket is a womb, and we’re waiting to be born. The world is waiting, and none of this—not last night, not him, not anything—has happened yet.
And who knows?
Maybe it never will.
“Janie Grace Vivian!”
Micah jumps awake beside me. He groans and blinks and then he sees me, and falls off the bed.
“Jesus,” he gasps. “What the hell? What are you—are you crying? What’s wrong?”
My dad’s voice comes again, louder.
“Shit,” I whisper. “Shit shit shit.” I can see our car parked outside, remember their early morning flight. “Oh god, oh god.” If they came here, it means they knew I wasn’t at home, which means they’ve seen the house and the vodka bottles and the mess and everything else and oh god oh god oh god.
Footsteps are coming up the stairs. Micah looks terrified, and I am about to puke again. I’m twisting and tying his blanket into nooses. We turn to look at each other, and then the door bursts open.
“We weren’t having sex” is the first thing I say. “I was just sleeping over.”
But my father is already red in the face and screaming, and it doesn’t matter what I say, it’s never mattered, and I understand that now, I understand, so while he shouts about the bottles he found, about how worried he and Mom were to go home and find me gone, how irresponsible I am, how disappointed he was, so on and so forth, loudly enough to shake the entire house and make Micah cower with the covers to his ears, and I twist around and grab a pillow, and I bury my face in it and scream as loudly as I can, and the sound is trapped and I am trapped and also going deaf, and in that moment I realize that the universe does not give a single shit about us.
“What—what’s going on here?”
I raise my head to see Micah’s dad coming through the doorway, haggard from work. Behind him, my mom, twisting her earring. I put my head back down in the pillow because the sun is too bright and I can’t do this right now or ever, I can’t, I can’t.
“Your son is in bed with Janie,” I hear my dad yell. “I told you, Karen, I told you that boy was a horrible influence, I told you this would happen. Janie, go downstairs. Get in the car right now or—”