“My shit?” I say, my voice rising on every word, every letter. “Yes, I have shit, Micah, you know why? Because I was fucking ra—”
Throat clogged, need plunger. I can’t get the word out. I choke on it. I swallow it back down.
Micah laughs. He rubs his face with the heel of his hand and tries to shake the vodka from his head and pushes me out of the way. “What’s that, Janie? What aren’t you telling me this time?” He shakes his head. “Someone fucked you over, huh? How does it feel?”
And he’s walking down the driveway, and I can’t think about what he said, I can’t; but I also can’t let him go. “Micah,” I say. “Micah, but us. But you and me.”
For ever.
For everything.
Janie and Micah.
Micah and Janie.
“Micah,” I scream. “Micah, more than anything. Do you hear me? I love you more than anything.”
He looks back. He looks straight into my eyes and says, “Don’t. Get the hell away from me, Janie. I’m going home. Just . . . don’t. We should just. We should stop trying, Janie.”
And he does that. He walks away.
I watch him go, and I’m shaking so hard that the world is almost blurring. But I take a breath. I hold it. I pull myself together. Micah will come back, because he has to. For now, I have more important things to do. I have to make sure the universe stays in balance. That the wicked are punished, even if the good are rarely rewarded.
Let the fun begin.
The maximum sentence for rape is hard to find. I know. I looked. It’s hard to find because it’s hard to convict, which is funny. Imagine this: you are a victim. You are a victim, and the person who gave you that bruised label is probably never going to get punished because no one believes you, if you ever even get the chance to say anything at all. He will never go to jail and he’ll never understand what it is to be trapped, to rot.
Rape? Rape is a word that no one wants to shout or hear. But let’s say—
—let’s just say—
That we let dead horses lie and rot and breed maggots. We never say that word out loud again. That’s okay.
There are other crimes.
I’ve wanted to see my room for a while now. To see where it all started and ended, but what a shitty ending. I haven’t gone yet. I didn’t even go upstairs when I was setting up for the bonfire. I didn’t even leave the kitchen. I only needed to pillage the garage for all the stuff to burn. I hadn’t come back at all before today. I haven’t even talked to my parents in ages, so I guess that means they don’t want me back. It’s kind of weird. They spent an awful lot of time tracking my whereabouts for eighteen years, and that all seems like kind of a waste now.
The gas is in the garage, and I go in through a side door. All the lights are off, and we’re too far from the bonfire for anyone to see me, not that anyone would have missed me, anyway. It’ll take minutes. Seconds. I lug the cans upstairs two by two. From the upstairs window, I can see the bonfire and the bright specks of the torches the guys wave around. I take a deep breath.
I push open the door to my room.
Oh god. Oh god—how? How can it possibly still smell like him?
I had this whole dramatic pouring ritual planned out—I was going to soak the bed and then go out in circles around it, but I just run in holding my breath and let loose. The gasoline spills out desperately. It waterfalls.
I do the rest quickly. The living room and the kitchen. The foyer and the den. I do Mom and Dad’s room last. I imagine their faces as I pour, and smile. Their beautiful ugly house in ashes, their ugly beautiful daughter with a story they might finally, finally hear.
And then I go back to my room. I pull Journal Twelve and a match out of my coat pocket. Quick, quick movements, no thinking necessary. I light the match and lay it on the journal pages and drop the journal, and it happens.
I run.
My chest is still tight tight tight, but I’m running. Out the side door, back into the party, where people are still drinking and chasing each other. No one even sees me until I start screaming.
“Fire!”
after
DECEMBER 20
“Micah? Micah, can you hear me? Stay on the line, Micah.”
“Dewey.”
“Yeah, man, it’s me. Where are you? Why aren’t you at home? Are you still at the quarry? Jesus. Have you been there all day?”
“Dewey, I saw you. After Janie. You were by the police cars.”
“Okay, I’m going to call your dad—”
“I told her that I never wanted to see her again. That we should stop trying. Did you know that? I didn’t want to, really. I was really drunk.”
“Are you drunk now? How drunk are you?”
“You shouldn’t have told me that she was a nutcase. I was still trying not to go back. I still loved her. I still do. But she was insane. She set the fire, you know.”
“Okay, great, we can talk about that later—”
“But she kept trying to tell me that I only kept you around because you loved me. I was really sad, Dewey. I was really sad. I thought she might be right. I’m sorry. But she kept telling me.”