after

DECEMBER 19

Friday morning, Dewey comes over with pot brownies and shit wine. At that point, I would have chugged piss if it would get my head to stop pounding. It’s easier to get blind drunk and forget everything all over again.

We play Metatron: Sands of Time for a while. We eat a brownie each and Dewey decides that we’re going to walk to the quarry when I tell him that I don’t remember the last time I went outside. We pour the wine into a water bottle and put on our coats.

“I miss her,” I say as we trudge along the road. The wind makes our teeth chatter.

“No shit,” says Dewey. He throws back the wine and stumbles onto the shoulder. The rocks are slippery and he comes up choking. “God. This really is horrible. Here.”

I tilt the bottle and swish it in my mouth. It is too sharp and not strong enough, sweet enough to numb my mouth but not my head.

“No,” I say, “but I don’t usually. Usually I know she’s dead, but not dead enough for me to actually miss her, you know?”

“Not really,” he says, grabbing the bottle. I protest, and he just switches hands so the bottle’s out of reach. “Dude, you’re on the brink of losing your shit again, and I need to be drunk to deal with it.” He waves a hand for me to continue. “You were spilling your heart or something?”

“Fuck off, dude.”

“Touchy.”

“I didn’t ever think it’d feel like this,” I say. My breath hangs in the air, and there are brief pockets of warmth where I walk through the words. “Her dying, I mean. I always figured that I’d die before her. I figured we’d all die before her. Like, she would have been the only one at our hundred-year reunion or whatever.”

“Don’t be a shithead. No one’s going to be at our hundred-year reunion. Hell, no one’s coming back for the five-year reunion.”

That was probably true.

“Look, dude,” Dewey says when the quarry comes into view. “You just gotta, you know. Live like she’s still here or whatever.”

I laugh. “I didn’t live while she was here. I played Metatron and got drunk with you on Friday nights.”

“And you’re very fucking welcome,” he says, and passes me the bottle again. We get to the quarry and keep walking along the edge. The sun hurts my eyes, and so does the ice, and Janie is still absent. I imagine her, though. If everything had gone right, we might be here anyway, tonight. She might have climbed through my window, and we might have driven to the quarry with stolen ice skates.

It’s a nice thought, and god knows that there aren’t enough of those in the world. So I drink, and I think about that.

“Dude,” Dewey says later, slurring. We’ve almost made it around the quarry. “You’re hogging the shit wine.”

“Am not,” I say. I’m slurring too.

It takes him two tries to snatch the bottle away. He throws it back, and eventually he lowers the bottle, but his head is still raised. “Hey, look. Look at that sun. Asshole.”

I lie back too. The grass is freezing, and the sun is huge. “Is there anything you don’t have a problem with?”

He thinks about it for a while. “Nah,” he says.

“Janie loved the stars,” I tell him. But she never meant it. Or maybe she did, I don’t know. If she loved them, if she loved anything, it was because it burned.

I take another sip of wine, but I tilt it too sharply and it fills my nose and collar. Everything burns. I have swallowed a star.

And I said to the star, consume me.

Did she say that once? I think she did. It was probably Virginia Woolf who said it first.

I take another drink, because it doesn’t matter what the hell Janie Vivian was or wasn’t, because she’s dead.

The sun is so bright.

“Did they find her body?” I ask him later. “Do they know what happened? Was she just so drunk she walked into the quarry?”

Dewey is quiet for a while before he asks, “You sure you want to know?”

“What do you mean?” The words feel slow, deliberate. I am learning to talk. I am remembering the existence of certain words.

“I mean,” Dewey says, “I mean—nothing. Never mind.”

“What? I fucking hate when you do that.”

“Just leave it alone, Micah,” he says. “Just let her be dead. You’ll probably forget right after I tell you anyway, so it doesn’t even matter.”

He reaches for the bottle, and I hand it to him. “Fuck,” he says. Oh, right. Empty. “You asshole,” he says, and then he throws the bottle over the edge. “Look, Micah. The night of the bonfire, you—I mean, we—”

“You punched me,” I say. “You broke my head open.”

He goes quiet. He clears his throat. “Look, Micah, you’re a suspect because you were with her. You guys were alone, which was fucking stupid of both of you, because no one knows that you’re on, like, speaking terms. No one knows what you were doing. Are you listening? Dude.”

I want to look over the edge. I want to see if it was the bottle that shattered or the ice, or the world. Or my head. It might be my head, honestly. But the world is tilting or spinning or falling or all three

and suddenly the air is colder and stuck in my chest and—

But then Dewey’s hand is on my collar and choking me back, and I grin at him and say, “Hey. Thanks. You just saved my life. Again.”

He’s gasping and telling me to fuck myself, and he’s so close and Janie’s back again, finally back, her voice in my ear and her breath tickling my neck, whispering.

“I keep trying to tell you,” she says. “I told you he was in love with you.”

Dewey’s eyes are blue. Very, very blue.

And then I’m kissing him, and all I can think is that I must be very, very drunk, and that he tastes like cigarettes and shitty wine.

On the night of the bonfire, I was walking to my car, and Dewey caught my arm. I wobbled and almost fell, and then shook him off.

“What the hell, man? Are you following me?”

Dewey doesn’t pull his cigarette out to answer. “Jesus, Micah. How much have you had? Do you not remember texting me? Give me the keys.”

He tries to reach into my pocket, and I almost swing at him.

I remember the cold and the dark, and the way Dewey was lit by the tip of his cigarette. I remember this, the anger; the pounding, pressing fury at the spot where my brain stem met my spine.

But not why.

“Dammit, Micah, just get in the car. I want to go to bed.”

His hand is on my arm again and I think about what Janie said, how Dewey was in love with me the way I was in love with her, and how shitty that was. How shitty it all was.

“Get off me,” I snap. “Stop hitting on me, Dewey. I’m not fucking interested.”

He is frozen. His hand is still on my arm, but it’s starting to hurt.

“What did you say?”

“I said, stop fucking hitting on me—”

Then he punched me.

My head breaks open. It fucking bursts.

“Fuck you,” he spits. His eyes are eclipsed. “Just—fuck you, Micah.”

I squint, and the universe lurches before it focuses on his face.

“She said you were in love with me,” I mumble. The fire is too hot. The lights are too bright. The world is melting.

“She’s a goddamn fucking bitch, Micah!”

I am cracking. I am already falling apart.

“She’s psychotic, she can’t stand the idea of sharing you, and you just keep going back to her. You always go back. Why do you think she pulls you away every time I ask you to hang out? God, Micah. Just because—god, like I could see you panting after her and love you, like I could see the fucking toxic way you treat each other and—fuck it. Fuck you.”

It’s the last thing I remember. I wake up in the hospital.

The sun is huge and everywhere and burning my eyes out of their sockets.

“Oh, hell no. No. We’re not doing this shit again.”

But we do. Dewey pushes me, I fall, and this time, he lets me because he’s already leaving. Gone. My head hits the ground and the sun explodes, and I know what will happen next. Or maybe what already happened.

The fire and the girl. I know what happened.

THE JOURNAL OF JANIE VIVIAN

Once upon a time, a little girl cried Woolf.

Down in the village, people heard, but no one went to help.

“The wolves around here are nice wolves,” said one of the villagers. “They wouldn’t hurt a soul.”

“She just wants attention,” said another. “There probably isn’t a wolf at all.”

“Maybe she was wearing a red hood,” offered another. “Red attracts wolves. Everyone knows that. If she was wearing red, she was just asking for it.”

“She was probably flirting with the wolf,” yelled another from the back. “She flirts with all the wolves!”

And so the villagers ignored her and went on with their lives.

From then on, the little girl held her breath and her tongue. She carried matches in her pockets, so that if the villagers didn’t come the next time she cried wolf, maybe they’d show up for the fire.