This Is Where the World Ends by Amy Zhang Page B

beautiful?”
    He opens his mouth to snap something else, but he takes a deep breath instead. “Whatever. Can we just do calc already? We’re like three weeks into school and I’m already going to fail. Do you get this optimization shit? Because I don’t.”
    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.
    â€œOh, forget calc,” I say, and dive into my bag for my book of fairy tales and a pair of scissors. “Here, help me make feathers.”
    He’s paging through his notes, frowning and squinting. The sun makes the pages too bright and the wind blows over the Metaphor to ruffle his hair and his annoyance grows on his face like mold.
    â€œMicah, look.” I wave my hand in his face. “I’m making wings, remember? I told you.”
    â€œHuh,” he says, barely glancing over.
    I sigh, tragic. “Fine. I’ll do it myself. Hey, are you coming to wrestling regionals next week? There’s gonna be a fan bus.”
    We have one of the best wrestling teams in the nation. Maybe because they’re good, but probably because we’re also one of the only schools where wrestling is a fall sport instead of a winter one. Ander tried to explain to me once why we had to be different, but I wasn’t really listening because I was too busy imagining him in a skintight uniform.
    â€œHell no.”
    â€œWhy not? I want you to come. It’ll be fun. I’ve never gone to a wrestling match before.” I don’t really care about wrestling. I’m rooting for the wrestlers because my ten-phase, six-month, totally non- creepy plan requires cuddling on the bus back from regionals, hopefully celebratory, but I’ll take consolidation cuddling too. Ander’s going crazy. It’s adorable. I haven’t seen him in a while because he’s got a scholarship riding on his state ranking, which all depends on regionals. Or something. I don’t know. I just know it’s important to him and I get to see him in a skintight uniform.
    Ander Cameron in a skintight uniform. I sigh and stretchout, and my foot knocks Micah’s notes into the wind.
    â€œ Shit. God, Janie,” he snaps. “I just organized those.”
    And he’s not even a little bit joking. He’s not smiling at all, and when I see that, words flash in neon in my head: how did we get here?
    Micah saved my life once. We were in second grade, and my appendix exploded and the hospital was really ridiculously low on my blood type. (My dad threatened to sue, but my mom didn’t want to and it was her money, and they fought about how he was anal retentive and she didn’t care enough, blah blah blah.) But Micah and I have the same blood type because of course we do, and the doctor knew because there’s only one hospital in Waldo so the doctors know everything. He asked Micah to donate even though he probably still weighed less than a Chihuahua then. Micah thought about it. (Can’t you just picture it? Baby Micah with his head of overflowing curls and his brown-green-gray eyes taking over his face, all scared and determined.) He hugged his dad and told him that he wasn’t really mad about what had happened with his mom, and he went with the doctor.
    Because he thought he was going to die .
    Later, he came to visit me, all wrapped up in bed, and I grinned at him through the meds and said, “Did you really think you would die by donating blood?”
    He muttered something about a movie and blood loss. He said the doctor had had the kind of voice that made everything into an ultimatum and used words that were too big and it had been an honest mistake, and no , he wouldn’t do it again.
    He totally would, though. I knew that.
    I guess