I climb off the bed and drag him up with me. “Come on,” I say. “I told you midnight. Why aren’t you dressed? Where’s your mask?”
“Dude, I have a calc test tomorrow,” he says, rubbing his eyes and yawning with too much effort to be genuine.
“Dude, I have the same calc test. Stop whining.” I throw open his closet and grab our emergency sheet rope (escape route number nine) and one of his (too) many black T-shirts from a wrinkled stack. I toss the T-shirt at his face. He doesn’t catch it.
“Where are we going?”
I blink, and I see the scene from his eyes. No, not his eyes. Camera lens. The Janie and Micah Show.
Me, standing by the wide, wide window staring at the wide, wide world, eyes closed and arms spread. Him, by the bed, pulling the T-shirt over just his face and tying it into a ninja mask, complaining that it makes his glasses fog over but fingers tapping, because we both knew. We could both feel it. The . . . the suspension. Something is going to happen.
Come on, Micah. Let’s pretend. Let’s pretend, just this one night, that nothing is wrong. That nothing has changed.
Janie and Micah. Micah and Janie.
Can you feel it? I can feel it, like we’re swinging and caught at the top of the arc, and we’re not falling but our stomachs are. The butterflies are going crazy, reacting a thousand times more violently than they ever will again. They’re fluttering up and up, and now they’re caught in my ribs and throat and head, and they’re so alive because they’re flirting with something so much more interesting. They’re flirting with life itself.
I pull the bookshelf into his room and tie the sheets to his bedpost, and I hold on tight and throw my leg out the window before I whirl around to meet his eyes—whoosh, shampoo commercial hair. Eyes glittering, light dimming, and just my voice, siren to sailor: “Come, my fellow ninja. We’re going on an adventure.”
Exit Janie, end scene.
Except—
“Wait, Micah! Micah. We have to take your car. I’m out of gas.”
It started small. I think we made a plate of cookies and left them on Michael Wong’s front porch because his girlfriend had dumped him on the first day of freshman year. His mom made him throw them out because she thought they might have had pot in them (which obviously they didn’t, or I would have kept them for myself), but it was the thought that counted. After that it was cliché: raking someone’s leaves, leaving heads-up pennies on the sidewalks by the elementary school, putting an extra quarter in parking meters.
And then: sophomore year. We were stupid and invincible. We thought we were everything, and we started getting adventurous. There was the whole library fiasco, and I guess it snowballed from there. We started wearing masks. We started thinking bigger, brighter, like there was nothing in the world the two of us together couldn’t do, and sometimes I still think we were right.
Because we are freaking badasses.
We have a hit list, and we are damn creative. We are Justice. We do right, and we reward the deserving. There was the time we sneaked into the petting zoo and protested animal captivity and the time we hid lollipops all over Grant MacFarther’s house and the time we hung Christmas ornaments in Jade Bastian’s car in July. And there were other nights too. Quiet ones, just us, Micah and me, me and Micah. Swimming in the quarry. Shadow tag in the parking lot by the baby wipe factory. A reenactment of Les Mis in the rain. Stars and stars, night after night, secrets spilled in a world too big for sleep.
Micah is taking forever.
I sit on the hood of his car, and when he finally appears—through the door, what the hell? He knows doors are against the rules—I smack the top of his car and yell, “Driver!”
He only says, “You can’t call driver, it’s my car. And get off. I just washed it.”
“As if you care,” I say, but when I climb back onto the ground, he dusts my footprints from the paint. I put my hand in my pocket and squeeze my rocks and wonder if there is a word for the marks you get on your palm when you squeeze something so hard that the skin is on the verge of ripping.
“Micah Carter,” I say, and he does look up, right at me. And his eyes are the same green-gray-brown that they always have been, and he still has eleven freckles (two on the left cheek, nine on the right), and his glasses are in their perpetual state of sliding down his nose, and this is my Micah August Carter. This is the boy who climbed onto his roof when we were five to hear the wind better. This is the boy who, due to a small miscommunication, donated blood during my appendectomy even though he thought it would kill him. This is the boy who is both my impulse control and my very best ideas.