This is Not the End

by Chandler Baker

  I read the ragged wooden sign. It’s barely legible now: Cat Mountain State Park.

  “This is it,” I say, reverently, while dumping my helmet on top of the front wheel.

  Ringo steps over his turned-over bike. “It’s, uh, lovely. Where are we exactly?”

  One more thing. I just have to do this one more thing and then what will be, will be and what I’ll do, I’ll do. “It’s the last full moon of the summer,” I tell him. “That’s when dreams are born.” Because I owe Penny the memory of that much.

  He takes my hand and I pull my dad’s headband lantern from around my neck and onto my forehead. I lead Ringo past the trailhead, where the terrain turns craggy and we have to carefully watch our steps.

  I still expect the ground to feel sacred when we enter the abandoned cougar den. Instead, it just feels like ground. Ringo drops my hand and walks around the cave’s perimeter. “Whoa, you guys came here when you were fourteen?”

  “Almost fifteen,” I correct him.

  Because we have exactly eleven minutes until midnight if we’re to be exactly respectful of Will’s plan, I show him the set of ribs mostly buried in the red dirt, and together we search for the gopher skull, but neither of us can find it.

  We uncover other treasures, though, like a fossilized paw print and a dead lizard being gnawed to bits by ants.

  I watch the clock on my phone as it flips the numbers to midnight. It’s officially my birthday.

  “What now?” asks Ringo.

  “I—I don’t know,” I admit. I turn on the spot. For several long moments, I worry that Will hadn’t gotten to this last part, that the wishes aren’t exactly here. I search the walls of the cave and trace my feet over the perimeter—nothing.

  “Will, Penny, and I, we did this friendship ritual right here years ago, but—”

  “Should we do it?”

  I frown and tuck my hands into my armpits, hugging myself tightly. “I—”

  Then Ringo nods. “It’s your thing. The three of you. You’re right.”

  My shoulders relax, thankful. Yes, he gets it. Almost as well as Will and Penny would have, and for that I’m so fortunate.

  Crickets and cicadas scream in the night around us. I walk to the spot where we cut our hands and rubbed our blood in the dirt. Ringo stays close but doesn’t touch me. I tilt my head up to the moon—a perfect orb of a frosty silver light. “I don’t know,” I say, letting my palms clap against the sides of my legs. “I’m stumped.”

  I think back to that night. It feels like eons ago when the three of us sat here together and vowed to be family. Had we failed? Or am I wrong to feel hurt because, in truth, we had the same issues as every other family?

  The spit grows thick and sticky in my throat. I remember how I’d been all alone—or at least it had felt that way—before I met Will and Penny, and how I’d stood in this same spot, bleeding and giddy, feeling as if I’d just won the lottery.

  But Ringo is looking over my shoulder. He taps my arm. “What’s that?” He points and my heart skips.

  “What’s what?”

  I turn around and, though we are a few feet off from it, see the tip of what looks like a mason jar sticking out of the dirt, barely glinting in the moonlight.

  I go over to it and kneel. I push the dirt away with my hands. Then I use my fingernails to scrape more of the dirt off. I scrabble frantically until finally I’ve unburied enough of the jar so that I can grip my fingertips around the lid and yank it free. I tumble onto my backside, wide-eyed and clutching the jar.

  Inside are three scraps of paper, each with rusty bloodstains on it.

  “The wishes,” I say. “They’re actually here.” I stare at them, disbelieving. How long have they been here? A month? Or maybe they’ve been here all along, for years. I’ll never know.

  Ringo moves closer.

  I bring the jar up to my nose and peer inside, like I’m examining insect specimens.

  “I’m scared,” I say.

  “Of what?” Ringo’s voice is low and quiet.

  “I don’t know exactly.” I shake the jar ever so slightly so that the scraps dance inside. All along Ringo and my parents have been warning me that I’ve been holding too tightly to the idea of the wishes. They told me that grief would make me attach importance to things that really weren’t important. I’d told myself that Will thought the wishes were important and that’s why I had to too. That was reason enough.

  I don’t think that now. They were right all along, except for one thing. I think the journey—following the clues, searching for three wishes in a jar—made space for Matt and me where before we’d been trapped by resentment, by ourselves, by a history that had been clogged by the end date of my eighteenth birthday.

  Ringo rubs the center of my back and gives me a pat and I know that I will want to kiss him very soon. “We’ve come this far,” he says.

  I unscrew the top and empty the three scraps out into my hand. I jiggle them until I can make out each of my friends’ handwriting without seeing the full message. I know there are parts of my friends that they had purposefully kept buried from me, but at least these parts they’d wanted me to uncover. I select Will’s first.

  Gingerly, I pull back the edges and read what is written there, like it’s a fortune cookie. “‘I wish to never turn out like,’” I murmur. “It’s crossed out,” I say. “‘I wish to be a hero.’” Followed by a smaller, later scribble that I don’t read aloud. It says, Unlike my dad. I dig my teeth into my bottom lip. Of course this was Will’s wish. It informed everything about him. The grand romantic gestures, the constant effort to be the perfect boyfriend—but at what cost? I wonder how much more quickly he might have moved on to Penny if he hadn’t written down this particular wish. I wonder if he would have felt more himself if he wasn’t letting someone else define him before he even had a chance to become who he truly was. I drop the wish back into the jar and open up Penny’s.

  “‘I wish to be loved, as much as I love.’” There are red thumbprints crisscrossing the words. Penny’s blood. I can imagine fifteen-year-old Penny earnestly scribbling this sentiment. She was so open to the world, in constant danger of taking on enough love to sink her. But Penny loved balance, and whether she knew it or not, the world loved her right back, just as much. Even Will.

  Finally, it’s my turn. I’ve been trying to recall what I’d written down on my wish scrap. So much has happened between then and now that whatever is contained of myself in this miniature time capsule I can’t touch with memory. So I open it up and I read my own writing. “‘I wish for the three of us to be friends. Always,’” I say. I turn my wish over, hoping there is something written on the back. There isn’t. I stare at it, blinking.

  “Is everything clearer now?” Ringo asks.

  I wait. Then I curl up the piece of paper in my fist and drop it into the jar with the other two. “I—I think so….”

  I turned eighteen today. I don’t think there’ll be a party.

  Instead, my ankles dangle off of a rock where I’m leaning back, weight on my hands. The day’s sun has baked the surface so that my palms are warm against it. Pink, purple, and orange spool from the sinking gold as it dips lower and lower, painting the ocean’s horizon with rich streaks of dappled amber.

  It’s taken me 6,570 days and two lives to get to the place where I could watch the sunset on the day of my eighteenth birthday, the choice of a lifetime behind me.

  There’s a spot in my chest too deep to reach that aches with a longing so sharp that there are seconds during which I’m not sure I’ll survive. But each time it passes and I know the next stab won’t be lethal. With any luck, it’ll start to hurt less both with time and repetition.

  I know for sure now that I’ll be haunted by beautiful days. Still, I drink in the one stretched out before me anyway.

  I hear footsteps behind me but don’t turn. A set of cool hands covers my eyes from behind. “Guess who?” I don’t have to. He smells like pine trees with a
touch of vanilla. I hold his fingers and tug them down away from my eyes. I tilt my head back and stare up at Ringo’s mismatched, work-of-art face. “Happy birthday,” he says and pulls two long-stemmed white roses out of his back pocket.

  I bite my lip and gently take the stems from him. “Thank you,” I say. “These are perfect.” I smell each of the roses, then climb off the rock.

  Ringo watches me closely. His hand is protective as it guides my elbow and hips. I’ll be wearing my cast for another couple of weeks. I’m anxious to get it off, since it itches like a dozen mosquitoes have crawled up inside it.

  “Are you all right?” Ringo asks. He doesn’t try to hide the concern that shines through in the crinkles forming at the corners of his eyes.

  I called Penny’s parents this morning and then Will’s mom and told them what I planned to do. They all cried, but that’s okay. They’re only at the beginning of their journey. Maybe they’ll go to therapy. Maybe I will too. What I hope is that Tessa and Ms. Bryan will be friends again, perhaps even best friends. And while I know that won’t make them whole again, neither would bringing back only one of their dead children.

  “I will be,” I say.

  At the edge of the cliff I’ve put together two side-by-side pyramids of rocks that each support crosses made of driftwood and twine. The scavenger hunt is over, but this is where it really ends.

  I can hear Will’s voice in his last message that led me to the wishes. There probably would have been a present at the end. It doesn’t bother me that I’ll never know what it was. I kneel in front of the crosses that I’ve built at the cliff we used to jump from. There, I rest a rose beside each, then stand and clasp Ringo’s hand in my own.

  I think it’s true what they say, that misery loves company—Matt taught me that—but it’s only because to crawl out of any hole, there needs to be one person to offer a boost up, and another to stick around long enough to help pull the first one up after them.

  In the end, I picked the path that led to healing. The best that I could anyway. Matt gave me that. It turns out my brother has made more sacrifices than any human being I have ever known. I don’t know when he’ll be back. Tomorrow I’ll be able to talk to him, once he knows this is over and we can have the space we need to find our way to what comes next.

  In the meantime, I hope someday to memorize all the different inlets of Ringo’s face like they are spots on a continent I live on. He’s become my home in very different ways from Penny and Will, but that doesn’t make either any less real. There are a million ways I’ve been wrecked over the last few years. My new wish is that by facing them head-on, we’ll all be better off.

  Ringo pulls me closer and rubs small circles on my bare arm with his thumb. My great, big, epically magnificent, cowabunga awesome birthday surprise.

  I get another one of the chest pains and have to wait it out before I can breathe comfortably again. Ringo must feel this, because he squeezes me tighter. I rest my head on him. “Well?” I say. “What song fits the mood for today?”

  Ringo turns his two-toned face and presses his lips to my hair. “Today,” he murmurs, “has to be ‘Here Comes the Sun.’”

  I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, exactly like Penny—my best friend—taught me. “I think I like the sound of that.”

  Many authors have what we call a “book of the heart,” and this one’s mine. I’m grateful to have a team who has adopted it into their hearts as well.

  My agent, Dan Lazar, read This Is Not the End and became its greatest champion. It has meant the world to me to have someone who so fully understands this book and the characters in it.

  Thank you also to Laura Schreiber for always crying while reading the same part that I cried while writing and for an incredibly long, but incredibly thoughtful edit letter that inspired many of my now favorite pieces of the story.

  Emily Meehan, Mary Ann Naples, Cassie McGinty, Tyler Nevins, Mary Mudd, Deeba Zargarpur, Dina Sherman, and the rest of the team at Hyperion, thank you for making Disney such a welcoming and collaborative place to create books.

  Torie Doherty-Munro at Writers House gave me some particularly smart notes in the early stages, as did Charlotte Huang and Lori Goldstein, who both helped me figure out what this story was really about.

  Thank you also to the girls in my book club who read early copies and gave me much-needed encouragement, with a special shout-out to Lisa McQueen and her eagle-eye editing skills.

  I wrote the entirety of this book in a fit of inspiration while on maternity leave, so I need to thank my daughter for being an exceptionally easy baby, and my husband, Rob, for supporting me in my crazed insistence on writing, even with a newborn.

  Keep reading for a sneak peek at Chandler Baker’s young adult thriller, Alive!

  I was fifteen when my heart betrayed me. Like with all truly masterful betrayals, I didn’t see it coming.

  I had my eye trained on the outside world—bad grades, horny teenage boys, college admissions—and all the while the real danger was lodged square between my rib cage and spine. It hatched its plan, welcomed the poison in like a Trojan horse that pumped the disease through every artery, atrium, and valve until it turned my whole body against me.

  That was two years ago. Life really isn’t fair.

  The hospital bed mattress squeaks beneath me as I try to wriggle my way upright, digging my heels into the paper sheets. Even that makes me tired. I feel my breath get short and wait, still, until my pulse slows. A Bachelor rerun blares in the background. I’ve been on a two-day bender—the hospital only gets a handful of channels—and I’m holding out hope that DeAnna wins this season, only I’m not sure I’ll be around long enough to find out. I suppose I can Google it, but even the thought of that feels self-defeating.

  I’ve been joking with Mom that I’m contestant material now. My athletic five-foot-nine frame has shrunk to a frail 112 pounds, burning calories overtime to keep the rest of my body functioning. Turns out not dying takes a lot of work.

  I drum my fingers on the plastic side rail of my bed and Mom glances up from the magazine she’s been pretending to read. She’s been doing that a lot lately. I can tell by the way she keeps glancing toward me or the cardiac monitor—anywhere but actually at the magazine. She’s put on makeup for the first time in days. Blush sweeps across her cheekbones and the bridge of her straight nose. She must have snuck out her compact while I was sleeping. Wisps of her black hair still stick out at her temples, though, and she looks the most tired I’ve seen her in ages.

  Dad took Elsie downstairs fifteen minutes ago, since she’d been crying like it was her heart that was about to get ripped out. That kind of attention-hoarding behavior is what makes Elsie the perfect replacement child. She fills up practically every nook and cranny of my parents’ attention.

  I’m getting antsy when Dr. Belkin walks in, white tennis shoes squealing along the speckled tile floor. “How’s the patient?” he asks, making a beeline for the little digitized screens that will tell him exactly how “the patient” is doing. I don’t say anything, since I don’t really know. For the two years since my diagnosis with cardiomyopathy, computers have proven a much more reliable indicator of my overall health, seeing as I feel pretty much the same as always—kind of crappy, but not terrible.

  “Her color’s good.” Mom folds the magazine without marking her page and sets it on the table next to her. She puts a lot of stock in my color. She adjusts the trendy Kate Spade glasses perched on her nose and reaches mechanically for her big stack of research, the voluminous file she keeps on Yours Truly. Career criminals have case reports that are shorter than my medical records.

  Dr. Belkin offers a thin smile. “Everything’s still on track,” he says kindly, which is nice of him to say and all—only one problem: which track? The one where Stella Cross goes on to stay up late nights watching reality TV, attend college, and lose her virginity, or the one where she dies, like twenty-five percent of other transplant patients, but
in utter teenage obscurity, having never done a single thing with her life? Ever? “Are you ready, Stella?” he asks, apparently unable to read my mind. Dr. Belkin has bushy blond eyebrows and reddish skin, the face of a man who would sunburn in Alaska.

  My rotten heart hammers at the inside of my chest. “So…I’m going to be dead?” I ask, even though I know the answer. “As in, one hundred percent not living?”

  “Stella!” Mom shushes me like I’ve said something offensive instead of totally true. She’s always on me about asking too many questions.

  “Yes, technically.” Dr. Belkin checks the tube that trails out of my left arm. I can’t say I like him much—not personally anyway—but we reached an understanding a long time ago. We’re on the same team, he and I. It’s my job to maintain a pulse and his job to see that I do and, believe me, I’m all too happy to be another bump in his success rate.

  “What we’ll do is prepare the cavity in your chest. A spot for the new heart to sit.” Dr. Belkin draws a circle in the air and I picture a bunch of people in white face masks hovering over me at an operating table, scraping out my insides like I’m a human jack-o’-lantern. My palms start to sweat at the thought of the foreign heart. I dig my fingernail into the white flesh underneath my forearm, the spot where the blue veins push up into a plump little bulb at the base of my wrist, and scratch a cherry-red line. A nervous habit I picked up during my sickness. Illness upon illness, that’s how it works. “Once your new heart is positioned, we’ll sew it in place and stitch together the arteries.” He locks his fingers together to demonstrate and my stomach performs a flip-flop.

  “I’ll look like Frankenstein.” I feel the sting on my skin leftover from my fingernail, and picture it fading away from red to pink to white. Then gone.