I stop then and wait for Janie to say something, but she’s gone too.
“Our birthday, her wings. But the bonfire, Dewey. That night, at her house. What the hell happened?”
He stares at the road. I stare at him.
“We fought,” I say slowly. “You punched me. Did that happen?”
Dewey doesn’t answer for so long that I almost take his silence as a no. But finally he looks away from the road and leans his head on the wheel, and I should be more worried than I am. “Yeah,” he says. I barely hear him.
I stare at him until he lifts his head from the wheel and steers the car back into the right lane.
Everyone has secrets, Janie told me once. “Ours are just bigger than everyone else’s.”
Maybe she was wrong.
“Dewey,” I say. “You have whiskey?”
He nods, and then sighs. “You’re still doing it.”
Presumably we go back to my house and play Metatron: Sands of Time and drink then, but I don’t remember any of it. The next morning we have massive hangovers and an empty bottle of whiskey, but to our credit, neither of us left.
THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN
Once upon a time, there was a princess who didn’t get saved. I don’t really know what to tell you about her because her story was never written down. Maybe the dragon ate her. Maybe the prince just never got around to rescuing her. No one wants to read that fairy tale, so no one wrote it.
Or maybe the truth is that no princesses get rescued, ever. Maybe there are no happily ever afters, not really.
before
OCTOBER 15
Mr. Markus held me after class today to ask why the paper I submitted was nothing like my proposal. He probably also wanted to know why it was only nineteen words long, but I didn’t have a good reason for either.
“This isn’t the project you proposed,” he tells me. “This isn’t even a thesis.”
“You said it was an adaptable project,” I remind him. “Don’t you want it to evolve organically?”
“You still owe me an autobiography,” he reminds me. “Will I be seeing your fractured fairy tales anytime soon?”
“Probably not,” I say. “They’re not very exciting. They’re kind of pathetic, actually.”
He pushes the paper aside and clears the desk so there’s nothing between us. He folds his hands. “How are the wings coming along, Janie?”
The wings.
Oh, the wings.
Actually, they’re beautiful. They’re not finished, not even close, but they’re beautiful. I’ve cut through a volume each of Grimm and Andersen, and I’m starting on Perrault. It’s a much slower process when I do it alone because I always want to read each page before I cut it up. The wings themselves are in the art studio, and only one side is full of feathers. They’re beautiful, but it’s going to take a miracle to finish them.
I just keep getting distracted by the fairy tales, reading them once upon a time to happily ever after, and it’s hard because I’m not finding many miracles anymore. There’s a lot of people who never get saved. There are a lot of people who get toes or heels cut off, who are stuffed in barrels studded with nails and rolled down hills, who are cursed or burned alive or forgotten. Guess how many of them are women.
(Lots.)
“They’re coming along” is all I say. I pick at my nails. I’ve never been much of a nail biter, but they’re pretty mangled at the moment.
“Janie,” Mr. Markus says in his sandpaper voice. “What do you need?”
I almost cry.
So many people have asked me if I’m okay without really wanting an answer, or they ask if they can do anything without meaning it. Carrie and Micah and the girls at our lunch table when I pass them in the halls with my face permanently red from holding my breath. No one has asked me what I need. Not even Micah.
There are a lot of things I’d like. I wish my parents would help me and I wish I hadn’t taken those last couple of shots. I wish I had been born with endings, I wish I had been born with good ones, I wish I could finish the wings, I wish I never had to see Ander again, I wish the Metaphor wasn’t disappearing. I want time to pass faster and I want it to stop altogether, but need? Need is a very different question.
“I need to know the key to happiness,” I say. “I can’t wait until graduation. I need to know now.”
For a second I think he’s going to refuse. But then he leans back in his creaky swivel chair and folds his hands over his stomach. “I didn’t plan on being a teacher,” he says.
I wait.
“I was going to be a stockbroker.”
For a second I am quiet. And then I sigh. “Really? This is the key to happiness? The world really is made of disappointment, isn’t it.”
He laughs.
Mr. Markus has an amazing laugh—it’s a full-body experience. He throws back his head and you see the air move through him, and for a moment, I thought, That’s it. That’s the key to happiness.
“I finished business school, and I was getting ready to move to New York. I had a job lined up, and the van was packed. I was ready to catch my plane when the mover stopped me.”