Book: This Is Where The World Ends

• Everything ends. This is obvious. This is the easy part. This is what I believe in: the inevitable, the catastrophe, the apocalypse. What's harder is trying to figure out when it all began to collapse. [Micah]
• Bad things happen to good people and that's not fair. [Janie]
• For a moment all I want to do is turn off the lights and sleep in bed with him in it, like we used to when we were little - climbing through the window and falling asleep together. I know the sound of his breathing better than any lullaby in the world. [Janie]
• Come on, Micah. Let's pretend. Let's pretend, just this one night, that nothing is wrong. That nothing has changed. [Janie]
• And then: sophomore year. We were stupid and invincible. We thought we were everything, and we started getting adventurous.
• 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. [Janie]
• Stars and stars, night after night, secrets spilled in a world too big for sleep. [Janie]
• 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. [Janie]
• "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. [Janie]
• If we can get through tonight, everything will go back to normal. We will be us. He will stop ditching me for Dewey most weekends and I will stop moping in my stupid new house every night. I will drag him into the night, every night. We won't have to worry about going to college and growing apart and forgetting each other in favor of bland significant others, because this is real and always and forever. [Janie]
• I want to explore. I want to go far, far away. [Janie]
• "I miss you." I say, accidentally/not accidentally out loud. Miss, present tense. I'm sitting here and I can still feel distance between us, just folded and crumpled and tangled. Our soul has stretch marks. [Janie]
• But I'm using it for good, see? I'm doing - something. Anything. I'm tired of waiting, and waiting, and expecting things to work out. It never works out. It never works unless you demand. So here I am, demanding. [Janie]
• I love him more than anything, but our soul is so strained right now that it doesn't make sense to pull it even tauter with unnecessary detail. [Janie]
• It's easier like this, just to be us. It's easier like this to see how beautiful the earth and life and we are. We are stars and the purple-red-blue sky is the background. We are streamers and ribbons tied to trees and balloons that dance in the wind. We are shadows, the too-sharp angle of his nose and the frizzy strands of hair falling into my face. [Janie]
• My brain is liquid. They press and press information, but my brain is liquid. They touch the surface and it ripples and then it goes blank again. This is the most frustrating part. I feel it when my brain goes blank, until I forget that too. [Micah]
• I keep trying and trying to remember, but all I can think of is Janie closing her door with her fingertips and the wind from the window and how that was really it. [Micah]
• Ander Cameron is on a ten-phase, month-long, totally non-creepy schedule to fall in love with me. I spent two weeks planning us out on pages 158 to 176 of my last journal, and he - bless his beautiful heart- has rushed ahead this morning. Being the most perfect person in all the inhabitable planets in the universe, Ander Cameron has brought me coffee this morning. He didn't have to do that for another week, but god, isn't punctuality hot? (It totally is.) [Janie]
• He says my problem is that I was born with a thousand beginnings and no endings at all. [Janie]
• People say because too much. You don't always need a reason. [Janie]
• Ander leans a bit more. This is important, the leaning, because it makes my heart so hard it feels like it's going to break a rib. If I die of a heart attack or something one day (GOD FORBID - I will not die of something boring, I won't), it will have been caused by this moment. The corners of his mouth quirk and he shows his gorgeous teeth again, and my insides go all soft because our babies would be the most perfect babies in the history of ever. [Janie]
• But aren't boyfriends - would be, will be - supposed to be like this? Peeking over your shoulder and grinning their lopsided grins, faking interests in your stupid little scribbles. [Janie]
• It's just that - well, we had already drawn lines on our soul and stabbed our little flags into it. We had claimed . Him: music and reality and all the words too shy to be spoken. Me: art and dreams in Technicolor and everything that had ever happened in sunshine and all the secrets exchanged in moonlight. We agreed on all of that before even the dinosaurs stomped around, and he isn't allowed to change that now. [Janie]
• "If there is one thing that science and religion agree on, it's the fact that the world is going to end. Maybe the sun will go out or God will rain his wrath down or a giant wolf will swallow the earth whole, but throughout it all is the pervasive idea of entropy. It's all unraveling. Everything is stumbling toward an ending." [Janie]
• Micah lives like an apology. He blushes when he breathes because he's taking someone else's air. It's like all Micah wants to disappear, and he thinks if he's quiet enough, if he keeps his eyes on the ground and barely breathes and thread lightly, people will forget he exist. [Janie]
• I stare at him, hard, and tug on our soul until he looks at me. "More than anything." I mouth at him since no one is looking, and his shoulders relax. He smiles. His eyes and my eyes - our soul is so bright. Oh, Micah. I'll never let the tide take us. [Janie]
• It is cloudy today. It is the kind of cloudy that makes everything look colorless. I think about her eyes. [Micah]
• She was convinced her parents could have been happy with anyone but each other. [Micah]
• "If there's one person in the world you should be with, there must be one person in the world you shouldn't be with. Well, I mean, a lot of people. But one person in particular. Don't you think it's funny that out of all the people in the whole wide world, my parents ended up with each other? I do." [Micah]
• My head hits the ground. Pain is everything, and that is when Janie comes back. Because she knows that I cannot understand living without her.
• I love Piper Blythe and everything about our no-commitment, zero-accountability, convenient-as-hell-friendship. No one gets mad when texts aren't answered or plans are blown off, because we both get the big picture. This is high school, and no one really wants to remember high school. In a few months, we'll walk off the stage at graduation and spend the summer together, we'll text each other for the first few weeks of college, and then we'll lose touch. And that's okay. The world is so much bigger than the two of us. [Janie]
• "Cheater!" I yell as I dive into my car. People are staring so who cares? Who cares if I'm loud? We are young and free and careless. We are laughing and reckless and us. [Janie]
• What's the point of a glorious victory if no one's there to witness it? [Janie]
• Micah was hesitant and sweet - ugh, so many feelings for ten-year-old Micah. [Janie]
• Of course I don't. Neither of us is meant for calculus. I can't see the world in numbers or molecules. I just can't. When I look around, I see colors smells motions beginnings. I see sky and wind and hope like birds and art like fire and every desperate wish ever made. [Janie]
• I guess what bothers me now is that I don't know if he would do it again. Sometimes at lunch I watch him and Dewey flicking food at each other and I just can't remember how we got here. We used to know each other to the bone. But now that we're not talking every single day because I live across town in a house I fucking hate and we can barely look at each other in school, I think he's starting to realize how differently we grew up, and in different directions. [Janie]
• Instead I take a breath. I push the feathers and calculus aside and scoot until I'm sitting in front of him, our legs crossed and knees touching. He doesn't look up, but it takes effort now. He wants to; I want him to too, and our soul is so tired of straining. [Janie]
• He watches me and I watch the sky, and I smile because it doesn't feel like the world is ending at all. [Janie]
• I wish she would just come back and help me remember. I wish she would just comeback. [Micah]
• I keep thinking that I've finally gotten used to it and then I forget again and it's confusing again. [Micah]
• In researching for my stupid senior project on apocalypses, the only thing I really found interesting was all of the different ways people think the world is going to end. I read Wikipedia pages and collected catastrophes. An enormous snake is going to swallow the world. Fire and brimstone is going to fall from the sky. Freezing. Flooding. Four horsemen and a whore. Falling stars and empty oceans. It doesn't end like that, though. What it actually feels like when the world explodes, the instant it explodes, is nothing. The explosion doesn't hurt at all. It doesn't hurt until you hit the ground. Again. [Micah]
• It was raining again. It's okay. We've always liked water. No, that's not right. Janie loved fire. She loved markers and rocks and fire. I like water, though. I like the way it waits, and when you touch it, it both moves away and clings to your finger. I like the way it rises, like memory, or fear. [Micah]
• Some things are easier to forget that other things, I'm noticing. [Micah]
• My fingers were in her hair. I always liked touching her hair, because sometimes it was hard to believe she was real. [Micah]
• "I want a bottle of wine so big that the cork can plug the hole in the ozone layer." she says. "I want a poem, or a poet. I want the world with a bow on top. What about you?" You. I didn't say that, but I think it. I think it with everything I am.
• He smells rancid, but I hug him tight around his perfectly narrow hips and tell him that it'll be all right, all right, all right, all right. All right? [Janie]
• "I love you, Ander Cameron." I whisper, trying them on my tongue. They taste like ice. They melt in my mouth and disappear. Stomach butterflies and air. I thought they would taste more like peppers and chocolate and pop rocks, like putting a Mento in your mouth and washing it down with Diet Coke. I thought it would be bubbles and breath and heat and spinning. [Janie]
• But they're words, little moments, and they pass. That's okay. That's what moments do. And I want to remember moments, bright and perfect, because you're allowed to do that. [Janie]
• He mutters something to Dewey and then he's coming down the bleachers, and I'm all frowny and awkward trying to figure out what to say to him. What? Yes, I know that Micah is in love with me. Of course I know. I will be in love with him someday too. That's obvious. We're predestined. But can't that wait? Can't I just kiss my sweaty scary angel boy in the meantime? [Janie]
• My throat closes. I blink, rapidly, but what's the point? Micah probably felt my tears before I did. He walks away, and I let him go. [Janie]
• How do you feel today? How do you feel right now? How do you fucking feel? [Micah]
• I know she isn't here. I know she isn't real. And yet her fingertip on my knee, shifting and feather light, is the only thing that keeps me grounded. [Micah]
• Ander and I are a whirlwind. Of glitter and puppies and everything that's good and right in the world. We are perfect and beautiful and I've already gone through two tubes of Chapstick. It's like every day I date him is the best day of my life. [Janie]
• Ander kissed me when I told him, or maybe I kissed him. Who cares? Literally everyone because they were all watching because the two of us are too damn perfect. [Janie]
• And now that we are Officially Going Out, it's everything I thought it would be. It's so damn easy. Zero percent commitment, a hundred percent fun. [Janie]
• And best of all, he pretends with me. He pretends that we're crazy in love, pretends that the air is our love and we're swimming in it, and it's just easy. [Janie]
• I get a now. I deserve a now, don't I? I do. [Janie]
• We love each other with the kind of love that begins and ends with our lips. [Janie]
• It was always Micah. Always, anything, everything. [Janie]
• Drink to forget. [Janie]
• The whiskey is horrible in my mouth pleasant in my chest fire in my stomach. [Micah]
• She's goddamn insane, man. But I love her, Dewey. God, I don't know how to stop loving her. Sometimes it fucking hurt to look at her, you know? You ever love someone like that? [Micah]
• I look to the side and Janie is looking up at me and everything is blurry and she is the only clear thing in the world. [Micah]
• And then I'm falling and falling and falling but in the wrong direction. [Micah]
• And now I'm rushing too, and I can't stop grinning. My half of the soul is dancing, my half is light, and I dive into myself and tell it to shut up, because Micah's half is totally going to feel it, and the surprise will be ruined. Nope nope nope. I won't allow it. I spent too much effort on this. On us. [Janie]
• I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night. [Janie]
• I remember that the stars were huge. Enormous. They were worlds, and that night, ours was as bright as any of them.
• It's quiet now, just the wind and us. The rest of the world has stopped existing. This is it: the quarry and the boat and the curving sky, and our confessions to each other. Our soul is bare, and we are spilling everything. [Janie]
• "Us" I say. "You and me. We're the last element, you idiot. I love you more than anything." [Janie]
• How she was waiting. How I always expected her to be waiting. Needed her to be waiting. [Micah]
• I can't claim to know Janie Vivian. I don't know if our souls are connected. But I do know this: she would never go anywhere without this rock in her pocket. [Micah]
• I don't know how long it takes me to realize that I'm alone. [Micah]
• Forgetting is the easy part. This should be unsurprising, but it surprises me. Forgetting was easy. Remembering is endless and it hurts, endlessly. [Micah]
• "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." [Micah]
• 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. [Micah]
• I nearly kissed her, but didn't. I nearly told her that it was okay, but didn't. [Micah]
• "More than anything." [Micah]
• The fire was in her eyes. The fire. No one was paying attention to the fire. But it was growing in her eyes, and spitting. [Micah]
• And there, there it is - that's the real reason that we are us - because the earth is really just a bunch of body holes waiting to be filled, and neither of us can ever find a place to fit except with each other. [Janie]
• "Maybe we aren't one soul after all." I say, and it's even more terrifying out loud. [Janie]
• "Maybe I have a ghost." - "A ghost." he repeats dumbly. - "A ghost." I confirm, but I don't elaborate. I'm too tired to think it through. I don't know what first made me think it, but it sounds right out loud. I don't have a soul at all. [Janie]
• I remember, and it hurts. I remember how apocalyptically it hurt every time, every single time, they told me she was dead. Janie Vivian is dead. [Micah]
• I could understand a world where she was distant but not lost. I couldn't understand a world without her. [Micah]
• I remember forgetting. And there's more. God, there's so much more. [Micah]
• The memories do not return so much as plunge. Shatter back into place. [Micah]
• Forgetting was the easy part. Remembering is harder, but not as apocalyptically painful as knowing that there is more to come. [Micah]
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