You & Me at the End of the World

by Brianna Bourne

  During the windstorm, the sun went down too early, and now it’s not coming up. This is bad. End-of-the-world bad.

  I touch Leo’s shoulder. Something shuddery runs through me when I realize there’s only a thin layer of fabric between my hand and that tattoo that I’m aching to see, but it’s not enough to derail me from my task. I start shaking him in earnest.

  He blinks, groggy and confused. “What’s happening? What’s going on?”

  “It’s dark.”

  “Mm. Nights tend to be like that,” he mumbles, then rolls back over and closes his eyes.

  I shake him again. “Leo, the sun’s supposed to be up already.”

  “What do you mean?” He finally pulls himself up to sitting. He rubs his eyes, blinking away the last bit of sleep.

  “See? My phone says it’s eleven.” I press the home button and show it to him. The sun should be blazing high up in the sky.

  “That can’t be right,” Leo says, still drowsy. “Maybe it’s a glitch in the cell towers or something. Probably from the storm.”

  Oh. Of course. I should have thought of that. I was imagining the worst, nuclear fallout, apocalypse, end of days. But the simplest explanations are usually right.

  “I feel stupid,” I say.

  His hand lands on my knee, patting in a way that seems like he’s trying to comfort me, but there’s a gracelessness to it that makes me think it’s not something he’s done many times before. It’s a small thing, but it’s kind, and I love it.

  “Hey,” he says suddenly. “Your hair.”

  He reaches over and twines his finger around a strand. His wrist brushes against my shoulder. “It’s longer than I thought it’d be,” he says. He tugs gently on the hair wound around his finger. The sensation shimmers through me, and everything in my head scatters except for this feeling.

  That’s when I notice—it’s not night-dark anymore. The first tinge of golden-gray morning light is seeping into the room.

  Leo gently unwinds his fingers from my hair, then gets up and goes to the window. “It stopped raining.”

  He turns to face me, half leaning against the windowsill, in his rumpled shirt and jeans.

  “I did some thinking last night, and I’ve decided that we’re going to have an awesome day today.” He’s bright and awake and more like himself again. “I want you to show me around this old farm.”

  “There’s not really a lot to see,” I say. “And besides—I think I’d rather stay here. Every time we go out something horrible happens.”

  “You left the house and found me. That was good, right? Then we got to ride on the swing carousel like you wanted—”

  “And nearly got killed,” I say.

  “Meh. Small detail. Let’s see what we can get up to out there. If we stay in here, I’ll either shrivel up or have a breakdown.”

  I bite my lip. My instincts are telling me to stay inside, but I don’t want him to think I’m totally unhinged. Something tells me Leo Sterling isn’t the kind of guy who likes girls who lock themselves inside and never have any fun.

  The morning light glows orange. Yesterday is over. The rain is gone, and it’s only a matter of time before everyone comes back. They’ll be in awe that we held our ground and survived the storm.

  “Okay, fine,” I say. “Let me get changed, then we can go outside. But only for a little bit, okay?”

  Leo grins.

  Ten minutes later, I follow Leo onto the porch, crossing my arms as I scan the trees around the house. Thunderchicken sits patiently in the driveway, the raindrops on her hood sparkling in the morning light. Everything looks normal, but I have this weird sense that the sun is climbing too fast. And that’s not a glitch that could be caused by faulty cell phone towers.

  Leo trots down the steps, his guitar case slung over his back. “Where to?” He smiles like today is going to be the best day ever. “Is there a barn?” he asks.

  “Yeah, a small one. But it’s not red, and it’s not full of hay.”

  I think he has the wrong idea about this place. There’s a lot of land, but it’s all woods. My great-grandparents called it a farm because they kept goats and pigs and chickens and sold dusty pecans in brown-paper bags at the farmers market. They were dirt-poor until the oil money started coming in. To our left, the rusted red metal top of the nodding donkey rises over the tree line. When I was little, I watched it pump up and down, sucking crude oil up out of the earth, but it’s motionless now.

  “The barn is over that way,” I say, pointing. “Past the pecan grove. Or we can go down to the creek.”

  “What’s your favorite?” he asks.

  “The creek, I guess.”

  “Lead the way.”

  We crunch along a stick-covered path until we’re deep in the woods. At one point, Leo trips over a root and stumbles, swearing about his crappy sense of balance. I have to smother down my smile.

  All around us, the trees are spindly and hungry-looking, and the sunlight lances down in shades of green and gold.

  The woods look exactly like I remember. That’s strange—it’s not wet out here. The leaves lining the forest floor should be a matted, soggy mess, but they’re not. It’s like the storm didn’t touch this area.

  I lag behind for a second to bend down and adjust my shoe. When I look up, I’m swamped with the urge to pull out my phone and take a picture, to save this image of Leo in the forest. The guitar strapped to his back rides at an angle, bobbing along with his casual stride, and his bedhead catches a few beams of light. For a moment, I feel totally inadequate. Kicked in the lungs. How can I like the way someone walks so much?

  Leo notices that I’ve stopped just as I pull myself together enough to jog after him.

  “Shoe malfunction,” I explain when I catch up to him.

  He nods, and then he presses his fingertips against the small of my back to guide me to go ahead of him. The touch makes me freeze in total sensory overload. Stupid, disobedient muscles. First they were moving without my permission, and now they’re not moving.

  Breathe. Keep walking, Hannah.

  Somehow, I get my legs going again, and we pick our way through the trees until we get to the creek. It’s nestled in the kind of dappled shade that reminds you why people used to live near water. There are fish, sometimes, darting under the surface, and the current moves fast enough to keep the mosquitos away.

  My dad and my uncle Craig built a wooden dock out here when they were kids. It juts halfway out over the widest part of the creek. Leo takes off his shoes and socks and sits on the end of the dock. I do the same, sticking my bare feet into the creek before he can get a good look at them. Underwater, they almost look like normal feet. Pale instead of splotched red, smooth instead of bony. They’re not as misshapen as my mom’s yet, but in another year or two, they will be.

  Leo wiggles his toes. “I’m not really an outdoorsy person, but this is gorgeous,” he says.

  He’s right. All along the banks, leaves hang down like fingers, trailing lines in the water.

  “I’m going to mess around with my guitar a little, but I brought you some stuff to read. Maybe it’ll help keep your mind off things.” He pulls three paperback books out of his case.

  At first I can’t speak. My chest aches a little, because it’s so thoughtful.

  “Thank you,” I say. Then he hands me something else. A battered pink spiral notebook with a cartoon pointe shoe on the front.

  I freeze. “Where did you find that?”

  Leo’s eyes are soft and encouraging. “It was on the shelf back at your grandma’s. I swear I haven’t read anything.”

  I take the book, and we’re quiet for a long time.

  “ ‘Hannah’s Writing,’ huh?” he prompts.

  “I used to write stories when I was younger. I had kind of a vivid imagination.”

  “You don’t say,” he says, throwing me a teasing grin. I give him a little smack on the knee.

  I trace the outline of the pointe shoe on the cover of
the notebook. After what happened with Flower Magic, I only ever wrote during the summer, out here at my grandparents’ house, when I was far away from school and ballet. It feels like the words in this book were written by an entirely different Hannah.

  “I brought it out here so you could write Starburst’s story down,” Leo says. “If you want to.”

  I nod, but I just got the lid back on my imagination. Why would I want to take it off again? Instead, I thumb through the paperbacks as Leo gets his guitar out.

  He takes off his rings and starts to put them in his pocket, but then he stops. He holds his hand out, gesturing for me to take the rings instead. My hand meets his, and the rings drop into my palm. I close my fingers tight over them. For a second or two, the metal is warmer than my skin.

  He tunes, then claps his hand on the hollow belly of the guitar and starts picking out a country beat.

  I raise an eyebrow.

  Leo keeps strumming. “What? We’re out in the country; we gotta have country music.”

  I laugh. He grins, like he’s accomplished some secret goal.

  “I wish I had my viddle,” he says as he thumps along in a twangy rhythm.

  “What the heck’s a viddle?”

  He flashes me a smile. “You know Mrs. Jankowski, the band teacher? She tried to bribe me into joining concert band by giving me a secondhand violin, but I replaced the strings with steel so it would sound more like a fiddle.”

  “Right. Of course.” I laugh again, shaking my head, and he looks so pleased that I go shy, ducking away from his sight.

  “Tell me what else your dad played that you liked,” he says, shifting out of the country beat and into something new.

  I look up at the shifting leaves as I think. “What about that slow Guns N’ Roses one, with all the whistling? I always liked that one.”

  “ ‘Patience’?” He sings a verse.

  “That’s the one.”

  “You have excellent taste,” he says. He tamps the strings, then starts the song from the beginning. This time he doesn’t sing, but I can hear the words in my head.

  Something between us feels fresher and easier. The constant stomach-cramp-inducing nervousness of being around him has melted into a buzzy happiness. I wonder if it’s because of my decision last night. There’s more at stake now, but since I’m not actively fighting my feelings for him anymore, I can just enjoy these moments. Enjoy being with him, looking at him.

  The sun stabs down through the treetops, turning the creek to liquid silver. After he finishes “Patience,” Leo slides into a soothing pattern of chords, the notes changing as slowly and smoothly as the currents in the stream.

  I’m holding a book open in my lap, but I’m not reading. For now, I’m happy to just listen to the water and the guitar.

  The past seven days fade into a hazy mist. Today is perfect, bright and fresh, not a single storm cloud in the sky.

  If I was going to write something about Starburst, what would I write? I think about her wild swirls of hair, about her lost feet. What’s her story?

  I take my own feet out of the water and scoot around so I’m lying with my stomach on the dock. I spread the notebook open in front of me and stare out into the trees.

  And then I start to write. Four clunky sentences appear on the page. I cross them out. Two more come. They’re better, but they’re still not right. Leo’s music matches the scratching beat of my pen. Finally I grab something solid, pulling it out of his rhythm and onto the page.

  We stay like that for a long time, him playing his guitar and me writing. The words come faster and faster, until my wrist aches.

  I don’t stop until six pages are full. I sit up as Leo gathers his music back to himself. His last chord resonates through the woods, then he claps his fingers down across the strings to silence them.

  He tosses his hair out of his eyes. “You okay over there?”

  I smile. “Mm. Really good. You?”

  “I’m great. It was nice hearing you scribble away.”

  I think about what he said before, about how he feels when he shares new songs.

  “Do you want to read it?” I ask, fighting down a wave of seasickness as I hold the notebook out.

  “Absolutely. Only if you’re sure you want me to, though.”

  I nod. He asked for a story about Starburst; the least I can do is share it with him.

  As he reads, I try not to watch the way his eyes flick from side to side. When he finishes, he smooths his hand over the page.

  “Wow. She’s got a whole life. And you totally sucked me in again, just like with Lonely Girl in the museum. Made me feel. That’s the point, right?”

  Pride rises in me like an iridescent bubble. Usually people’s reactions to the things I’ve written are … less encouraging. Flower Magic was only my first failure. Like in eighth-grade English, we had to write short stories and read them out loud. No one else took it seriously and spewed out junk that was designed to make one another laugh. When it was my turn, a bored silence fell over the classroom. After a minute, my classmates started exchanging glances—WTF glances.

  But Leo is smiling, flicking through my notebook. He mentions a couple of sentences he really liked, and that gets me feeling even more stupid and giddy. I get so much praise for ballet, but it never makes me feel like this. When I dance, I’m just repeating steps that aren’t mine. But these six pages about Starburst? They are mine.

  “What kind of stuff would you write if you were a writer?” Leo asks.

  “Umm … I don’t know if it’s really worth thinking about,” I say. “Ballet Chick, remember?”

  Leo narrows his eyes. “Hmm. Thought your name was Hannah.”

  I plop my feet back into the water and stare at them. I have no idea how you even start to become a writer. But it’s pointless to think about now—ballet is my life. Everything I’ve done over the past twelve years was preparation for my career, and it’s too late to turn back now.

  I muster up a thin smile. “Anyway, I’ll never be a writer. It’d be a big change, and I’m not brave enough.”

  “What? You’re brave.”

  I scoff. “You of all people know that I’m not.” Over the past couple of days, he’s seen me at my worst.

  He cocks his head. “What’s that saying again? Bravery isn’t the absence of fear; it’s the ability to say, ‘Hey, fuck off for a second, Fear. I got shit to do.’ Or something like that.”

  “Ah yes, that old adage,” I say.

  I reach up to smooth my hair back and startle when I find it loose. I forgot I took it down in the bathroom this morning.

  “Can I read some more?” Leo asks.

  A fresh jolt of adrenaline fizzes through me. “Sure, but the other stuff is from before freshman year. It might be kind of ridiculous.”

  “I’m sure it’s not.”

  As he flips through the notebook, I focus on our feet, pale and swaying in the water.

  “I love this,” he says, showing me a page that I dog-eared. I cringe—I should have known he’d find my messy attempts at poetry.

  “These lines are so good,” he says. “There aren’t many words, but they’re all important. You know … these could be lyrics. I wrote a song last year—well, just a tune—but I could never get words to stick.”

  He closes his eyes, thinking hard. “Yeah, these would definitely work as lyrics. May I?” He plucks the pen out of my hand and writes vertically in the margin, simmering my words down, letting the steam escape, leaving behind only the most flavorful verses. Then he picks up his guitar, and in some miracle of music and language, he turns my words into a song.

  As he plays, I stop breathing. It’s magic, and I can’t tear my eyes away from him. When he gets to the end, he sings the whole thing over again.

  My words, his notes.

  My story, his voice.

  We’ve created something together, and it’s intoxicating.

  When he finishes, he makes this noise that can only be described
as a purr. “I like it, Hannah,” he says, blue eyes blazing into me.

  “I like it too,” I say softly. “I feel like … you’re me.” I shake my head, wishing I could take it back. “I know that’s ridiculous, because we’re so different.”

  “We’re not all that different, I don’t think,” he says.

  He leans a little, and suddenly we’re touching from shoulder to elbow. I’m hyperaware of every millimeter of contact. How can such an insignificant touch feel so good? Leaves rustle overhead. I could stay in this moment forever.

  But before his warmth can spread all the way through me, he moves away. There’s this strange pulling sensation when his arm disconnects from mine, like what happens when you pry two magnets apart.

  Leo scrapes his guitar pick along a crack in the dock’s old wooden boards, and I can tell he wants to say something. The words are right there in the air between us.

  We’re swinging our feet in the water and looking out through the trees when something rustles in the bushes a few yards away from us.

  Everything in my body goes still.

  “What was that?” I whisper.

  Leo shrugs and speaks at normal volume. “Probably a squirrel or something.”

  But we haven’t seen a squirrel since everyone disappeared. Or any other animal, for that matter. I stare hard at where the sound came from. What could be out there?

  It’s just your imagination. It’s just your imagination.

  But then I hear a growl.

  I swear the air gets colder.

  What do we do if it’s something horrible? An enormous rabid boar or a cougar or a cannibal serial killer on the prowl for someone to eat? We’re the only living breathing things in all of Texas, and if they’re hungry …

  I clutch at Leo’s arm. How will we get away from it? We won’t have time to put on our shoes, and the forest will rip our feet to shreds.

  Stop it. It’s just your imagination.

  Wait. If it’s just my imagination, then I can imagine that growl turning into a cute snuffle. I can imagine something sweet and harmless. A deer, maybe, rooting around for mushrooms. Yes—a gentle doe and a fawn with white speckles. I squeeze my eyes shut.