after

DECEMBER 6

Forgetting is the easy part. This should be unsurprising, but it surprises me. Forgetting was easy. Remembering is endless and it hurts, endlessly.

On the night of the bonfire, on the last night that anyone saw Janie Vivian, it was too cold to be outside. I was in bed with my laptop on my chest when Janie came up the stairs. She had been gone all day. She was gone most days, actually. I see less of her now that she’s living in the basement than I did when she was at the new house.

She stood in the doorway, and I knew something was wrong.

Her eyes were almost colorless. Her hands were deep in her pockets and her pockets were full of stones. I could see them, knuckles and rocks.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her. “Where have you been?”

She leaned her head against the doorframe. “What are you doing?”

“Senior thesis,” I said. “Have you heard of Thomas Müntzer? He said the world was going to end in 1525. Listen to this: he dies under torture and gets his head cut off, so I guess it was pretty damn apocalyptic for him.”

“Shouldn’t you be getting ready for homecoming?”

I shrug. “I’ve got time.”

“Micah,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

I blinked up from my screen. Her hair was falling into her eyes and she didn’t move it away. “What?”

She sighed. “Don’t be that guy, Micah. I said I was sorry, okay?”

“I know, I just mean—” She always said that guilt lived in my side of the soul. Janie never had anything to apologize for. People forgave her without being asked. I squinted at her. “Is that my sweatshirt?”

She looked down. “Yeah, I guess. They don’t make sweatshirts like this for girls, you know?”

“Uh, not really,” I said. I pushed my laptop aside and started to get up. She crossed her arms and curled over a little. She looked small. I wanted to shake her awake.

“Oh, you know,” she said, and I wondered why she kept crushing her chest, if it made her voice so shaky. “Girls’ sweatshirts are too thin and don’t do shit to keep you warm. Girl things are just like that. They don’t work right. They’re just there to—you know. Look nice. And this. This is just nice, you know? This is a nice sweatshirt.”

“Janie,” I said.

“Don’t,” she said, flinching. I wasn’t anywhere near her; my hand twitched from across the room and she flinched away from it. I swallowed. My spit was cold.

She took a breath, and I heard it rasp into her lungs without filling them. “Sorry,” she said. Her voice was small. Her voice was microscopic. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Do you ever feel like you just can’t win?”

Of course I did. I lived in fucking Waldo, Iowa. I went to Waldo High School and didn’t play sports. I was not particularly rich in friends. I was poorly endowed in just about every possible area of life. Of course I fucking did.

“Oh, stop that,” said Janie, a little closer to normal, which meant that she was annoyed. “I can hear you thinking.”

“Stop what?”

“Your poor little white boy nice guy act. Don’t be the cliché, Micah. You’re better than that.”

“Janie,” I said. I took another step forward and she took another step back.

“Stop,” she said, and I did. She took another breath. “Don’t. I’m fine.”

It was a lie.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” I said, and she laughed, or she tried. It didn’t matter how many breaths she took to steady herself. She tried to laugh and choked.

“Oh, please. You don’t want to know what’s wrong, Micah. If you wanted to know, you would have—” She stopped. She blinked, and tilted her head to the ceiling so the tears wouldn’t fall out. “What isn’t wrong? The world is ending. I’m not even being dramatic. The world is fucking ending. You know that, don’t you? That’s why you picked apocalypses, isn’t it? The bees are dying. The ozone layer has more holes than I do. Some idiot could press the wrong button tomorrow and start a nuclear war. 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.”

“Um,” I said. “I guess?”

Her voice is smaller than I’ve ever heard it when she says, “What are the odds that you’d ditch Maggie and the dance tonight and do something with me?”

“What?” I ask.

“Do you trust me?”

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.

“Just let me text Maggie,” I said. “And I have to change.”

She smiled. She crossed the room, finally, and wrapped her arms around me. She smelled like she was burning when I put my head on hers. Sometimes I forgot how small she really was. She barely reached my chin. She looked up and her lips were curved and her eyes were too bright and I—

I nearly kissed her, but didn’t.

I nearly told her that it was okay, but didn’t.

I nearly said scientists were working pretty hard on the bee problem, but didn’t.

I did what I always did. I waited until she moved away, until her eyes were a normal brightness and her breath was regular again, and I waited for her to take my hand and pull me after her.

Her hand was cold and sweating.

“I’m having a bonfire,” she said. She reached up to push my glasses back up my nose, and kept her hand on my face. “I have marshmallows. Everyone’s coming. You’re coming, right?”

I hadn’t really planned on it. Janie’s “everyone” had little overlap with my “everyone.” But she didn’t let go of my hand until we were in her car, until she stuck her key in the ignition and looked at me, hard. By then my fingers going white in her fist.

“More than anything,” she said.

“More than everything,” I replied.

On the night of the bonfire, the air was at odds with itself. The wind hurt and the smell of beer was heavy. The cold was sharp and the smoke kept growing.

People were shouting. People were chasing each other with shots and torches.

Janie was curled against me, and her hair kept making me sneeze. In the morning she would pretend this never happened and I would read too much into it, as always.

“Micah?” she said. Her voice was sudden, hitched, almost a gasp, almost a whisper. “Do you think there are things that can’t be fixed?”

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.

“What do you mean? Do you mean us?”

All of a sudden she was upright. Her tailbone dug into my thigh; I winced and tried to move away, and she wouldn’t let me go. “No. Not us. Not ever.”

On the night of the bonfire, it rained too late. The water pasted her hair to her neck and shoulders. It soaked through my sweatshirt.

She screamed my name.

She screamed, “Do you hear me? More than anything, Micah. Anything.”

On the night of the bonfire, there was a match between my fingers.

This I remember clearly: the match, burning toward my fingertips. I remember the heat on my nails, and then the burning. I remember the flame, teased high by the wind, made clear by the cold.

I remember letting go.

I remember the match falling.

“Everything,” I said as it hit the ground.

What a night to forget.

What a night to remember.

THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN

What do you think happened to Sleeping Beauty’s bed?

No, really. I want you to answer.

Do you think she ever slept in it again?

She couldn’t get up for a hundred years. She was stuck there, tangled in the covers, crushed into that fucking mattress for a hundred fucking years. She couldn’t get up. She wanted to, she fought and kicked and clawed and couldn’t get out of that hundred-year nightmare.

Do you really think she could ever fall asleep there again?