The Girl at the End of the World by Richard Levesque Page A

the key into the ignition with my right. The car started right away, and then I took a few seconds to think about the steps. Brake, gear, let the brake up, and then a little gas.
    My fingers gripped the wheel tightly as I felt the car roll forward. I didn’t step on the gas even though I wanted to get away, as fast and as far as I could from the smoke and the flames and shouts and screams and the dead man on the lawn across the street.
    But I kept my calm and just let the car roll forward for a few feet, forgetting to check the mirrors before pulling out into the street and then remembering in a panic at the last second. Of course, no one was coming. No cars, and certainly no fire engines.
    A dog ran across the street right in front of the Nissan, and I punched the brakes in panic even though it was gone before I’d had time to react. If I’d been going faster, if I’d stepped on the gas the way I’d wanted to, I probably would have killed the dog, so I was glad for that.
    I let the car roll on slowly past a couple more houses and then gingerly pushed on the gas. The little Nissan picked up speed, and I told myself I’d get the hang of this quickly.
    Three houses down, a woman I recognized but had never spoken to was standing on her lawn, her hands over her mouth as she looked in horror at the burning houses behind me. She turned toward me as I drove past, and I saw a look of anger come over her.
    I was abandoning the street, the neighborhood. I was running away. It filled her with rage, not any kind of reaction a normal person would have, but probably something you’d think if you were sick, if you had a fungal growth pressing on your brain. Her rage would likely have come out over anything, or anyone, but it came out over me driving by in my sister’s car, barely doing ten miles an hour.
    When I saw her turn and start running across her lawn toward the street, an incomprehensible bellow coming from her still-open mouth, I didn’t hesitate, but punched the gas and felt the little Nissan leap. In seconds, I was beyond her reach and driving away as fast as I thought was safe. If she hadn’t come after me, I might have forgotten to look in the rearview mirror for one more glimpse of the street I’d grown up on. And as I did, I saw no trace of the good memories I had, just an angry woman standing in the middle of the street, waving a fist impotently at me as I sped away, burning houses on either side of the street behind her.

Chapter Five
     
    I didn’t know where to go at first.
    The police station, I thought. Or a fire station. Or a hospital. Any of those places made sense, but when I pictured myself walking in and asking for help, I imagined how many others would be there wanting the same thing and decided against it.
    Then I thought about my school. The last place a fifteen-year-old girl would want to go voluntarily when she didn’t have to, but somehow it also seemed a safe place at the moment. Still, the thought of the empty halls and classrooms now made me shudder.
    So, for lack of anywhere better, I ended up at Jen’s.
    It felt strange pulling up to the curb in a car I was driving, not being dropped off by my mom. It felt like I was some time-warped version of myself, arriving the way I would a few years in the future if everything hadn’t gone so horribly wrong.
    Stranger still, though, was the way the house looked with green plastic trash bags taped up inside all the windows, almost like the house had been blasted with holes where the windows had been.
    I stopped the car, careful not to hit the curb, ending up almost two feet into the street. It didn’t matter. I got out and looked around. Almost every other house nearby had the windows covered, too, some with white trash bags, some with clear plastic.
    Behind me, dark columns of smoke reached into the sky. My neighborhood going up. Jen’s neighborhood was separated from mine by about a mile and a half and one major street that I doubted the fire would