You & Me at the End of the World

by Brianna Bourne

  Imagine that. Imagine that. Something safe, normal, boring.

  “Hannah,” Leo whispers, nudging my elbow with his. “Look.”

  I open my eyes. In front of us, gingerly stepping out from behind the underbrush, are two deer. A mother and a baby.

  Specifically a gentle doe and a fawn with white speckles.

  Hannah is frozen beside me.

  I lower my voice to a whisper so I don’t scare the deer off. “See? Nothing to be afraid of.”

  The little one leans down to nibble something, and the bigger one—the mom?—stares straight at us, ready to bolt at any second.

  “Leo? I think I imagined them,” she says, in a voice so low I can barely hear her.

  “No, you’re not imagining things, I can see them too.”

  “No—I mean—I was worried that the rustling noise was a cannibal or something. I was about to panic, so I imagined two deer instead. A mom and a baby.” Her eyes are wide and urgent. “I imagined them into existence.”

  Crap. I thought she was doing better.

  The corners of her mouth wobble down like she’s about to cry. “I’m serious, Leo.” She looks even more freaked out than she did in the museum.

  “There must be tons of deer here,” I say, giving her an out. “It makes sense that you’d think about them.”

  “But we haven’t seen anything else, right? No birds or squirrels or even mosquitos. But right when I focused on the idea of two deer and pictured them in my head, that’s exactly what comes out of the bushes? That’s more than a coincidence.”

  “It is kind of freaky, but probably still a coincidence.”

  Hannah shakes her head violently, eyes swimming with worry. “You have to believe me. I know I made them up. Okay, wait, what about this. Watch—they’re going to leave now. They’re going to run right toward us, leap over the creek, and disappear behind those trees over there,” she says, pointing. Her eyebrows scrunch up as she stares at the deer, so intently I worry laser beams are going to shoot from her eyes.

  Nothing happens. The deer continue to munch.

  “Hannah, deer never run straight at people—”

  I yelp as the two animals jerk their heads up and spring into action. They bolt toward us, and I nearly fall back in fear and surprise. Just like Hannah predicted, they turn at the last second and leap over the creek, disappearing behind the exact clump of trees she pointed at.

  “Um … Hannah? How did you know they were going to do that?”

  “I just—concentrated. Envisioned exactly what I wanted them to do and focused all my attention on them, and they did it. Now do you believe me?”

  My heartbeat chugs faster, faster, faster. This is impossible. Awesome. Ridiculous. Electrifying. I’m trying to wrap my head around it, but my brain is hopping up and down and squealing.

  She was right. She made them up.

  Hannah stares unblinking at the spot where the deer disappeared. There’s a meltdown only moments away. Her breathing gets louder and faster, and her hands fly to her forehead like she’s trying to keep her mind from splitting open.

  If I don’t sidetrack this breakdown, I might not be able to scrape her back together later.

  I put my hands over hers and draw them down. She shakes her head no, over and over, eyes filling with tears.

  “This can’t be happening,” she says. “It’s impossible, Leo.”

  “Don’t overanalyze it. Breathe. Relax.”

  Great. Now she’s starting to wring her hands. Who even does that?

  “Try something else,” I say. I’ve got to get her rolling with this. If we have some awesome superpower, I’m absolutely going to use it. “Come on, Hannah, I want to see what else you can imagine.”

  She shakes her head again and covers her face.

  “Hannah,” I say gently, peeling her hands away. “What would you change, if you could change anything in the whole world?”

  Suddenly, underneath all the worry, I think I see a glowing spark of inspiration. It’s small, but it’s there. It’s the same look she got in the museum when she was cooking up those backstories, and on the swing carousel before we got slammed by the wind. So often, she gets stuck thinking about bad shit, but when she gets carried away on something beautiful, it’s magic. She just needs coaxing out.

  “I can see you thinking about something,” I say. “Go on, try it. Whatever it is. I want to see.”

  She chews her lip. Coming up with reasons why she shouldn’t, probably.

  “Well, if you’re not feeling it, I guess I’ll have to try something,” I say. “But just to warn you, I’ll do something boring like make a fully loaded recording studio, or a room full of every awesome vinyl record I’ve ever wanted.”

  That gets her stirring. “Okay, hold on, I’m thinking.”

  She reaches down and plucks a leaf off a plant, holding it in the palm of her hand. Under her stare, petals burst from the center. It’s like watching a time-lapse video of a rosebud unfurling. It grows and grows until she’s holding the most enormous, unreal flower I’ve ever seen, a lush riot of pinks and corals and lavenders. She sets it adrift on the water, and we watch as it floats downstream and out of sight.

  When she turns to me, a whole world of wonder is blooming on her face, as fast and huge as the flower she just created.

  It’s magic. I have no idea what’s happening, or how it’s happening, but I don’t care. This is mind-blowing. Shredtastic. I’ve had some wild moments in my life, but this takes the fuckin’ cake. A mix of euphoria and WTF curdles in my stomach, but now that we’ve started, we can’t stop.

  “Is it hard to do? What does it feel like?” I ask.

  “It took more concentrating before, with the deer. Now it’s easier—like the gears are already in motion.” She looks stricken. “Leo, do you think I’ve been changing things all along and haven’t realized it?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe. Were you thinking about eclipses that day we met?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Then maybe that wasn’t you.”

  I stare down the river at where the flower disappeared. I’m aching to try imagining something, but I have to make sure she’s not going to freak out first.

  “Make something else,” I say.

  She’s already lit up with her next idea. She lies down on the dock, and I stretch out beside her. I like the way her arm fuses against mine, shoulder to elbow.

  She points up to the sky, at the slivers of blue peeking through the branches. Maybe she’ll turn the leaves into flowers too.

  But it’s the color of the sky that changes.

  It shifts to a purple gray, the color of mist and smoke, fog and twilight, and I almost whoop out loud.

  She flips the sky to an intense teal, making the forest feel like an alien planet.

  My ideas were kind of boring. A studio. Records. Maybe a comfy bed or some tasty Chinese food. A seven-speaker surround sound system to listen to Queensrÿche on. I would have never thought to change the color of the sky.

  Hannah springs up, grabbing my hand and tugging me up with her.

  “Come on.” Her face is flushed. “I want to see more of the sky. Not just slices of it through the trees. Let’s get a better view.”

  We cram our sockless feet into our shoes, and she pulls me along the water’s edge, making an ungodly amount of noise as we crash through the woods.

  We end up in a field covered in soft daisy grass.

  “I thought you said your grandparents didn’t have any fields,” I say, spinning around in the open space.

  “They don’t,” she says, eyes sparkling.

  The grass waves softly in the breeze. The blades are so fresh and green they look wet. On closer inspection, it’s not the kind of grass we get in Texas. The color is a little too electric, the scattered white daisy heads a little too picturesque.

  “Did you just make us a whole meadow?”

  Hannah nods, beaming.

  Oh.

  That smile.<
br />
  It’s high-voltage. All teeth and sparkles and crinkles at the corners of her eyes. Is this it? Is this the power chord smile I’ve been chasing? I’m not 100 percent sure, but it still makes me wish I hadn’t left my guitar at the dock, because this smile makes me want to write a thousand songs.

  We wade to the middle of the meadow and lie on our backs, close enough that our shoulders touch.

  Hannah’s hair fans out around her, tangled and wild. She looks so different with it down. Two days ago, she was rocking back and forth on the curb outside the music store, ready to run back home. Now she looks happy.

  She catches me staring.

  “What?” she asks, suddenly shy. The volume on her smile clicks down a notch.

  “You’re having fun. I like it when you jump in, instead of keeping everything up here.” I reach over and tap my finger lightly on her temple. “You should do it more often.”

  A burning blush spreads over her collarbone.

  I look up, and we’re stuck. Eyes locked. She can be so skittish that it surprises me when she holds my stare like this.

  A determined look settles over her face, like she’s summoning up the bravery to do something—

  And then she scoots closer and lays her head on my chest, and I freeze.

  For a long time, we stay completely still, both of us pretending to look up at the sky.

  The weight of her cheek against me feels new and fragile and forbidden.

  I shouldn’t be letting her do this. It’s going to blow up in my face. But everything is running hot through my veins and I’m powerless to stop her. I wonder if she can feel my heart tripping over itself.

  My arm, luckily, has a mind of its own, and has no intention of following along with shoulds and should nots. It wraps around her waist, squeezing her to my side. My thumb joins in, stroking the ridge of her hipbone through her pants.

  Her hand drifts up to my chest. Her fingers rest gracefully right over my sternum, and it has everything inside me hitching and thrumming and reverberating.

  We’re lying in a meadow, and I’m holding her, and I can’t stop thinking about our song, about how her words fit perfectly with the notes I wrote years ago, and all I want to do is roll over and kiss her.

  And that’s when the penny fucking drops.

  That’s when I finally figure out what’s going on with me.

  I don’t want to be just friends with her. And I don’t want to be friends with benefits either. It’s more than that.

  I want everything.

  For the first time in the history of Leo Sterling, I actually give a shit about someone besides me. I give … kind of a lot of shits.

  I’m such an idiot. How did I not put it together before now? I’ve listened to enough sappy romantic songs that it should have clicked right away.

  For a second, it’s exhilarating and earth-shattering and then—

  Holy shit.

  Fear hits me square in the chest.

  Because I’m still Leo Sterling, and I still fuck up everything I touch. It’s only a matter of time before I drive Hannah away. Before, I was holding myself back from the flirting and the touching and especially the kissing because I didn’t want to lose a friend. If I lost this? If I had to be alone now?

  Fuck.

  On my chest, Hannah lets out this little happy sigh, and oh my god, everything is different now.

  “What other skies can we make?” she asks, totally oblivious to the core-rocking realization that I just had. Her voice goes straight to my chest, vibrating so low and so deliciously intimate I want her to lie on me and talk for hours.

  “How about night?” she asks, seemingly unbothered by my total inability to answer her question. The world plunges into darkness. The change is so abrupt it nearly makes me throw up, but playing our sky game is a good distraction from thinking about how I’m falling for my end-of-the-world buddy.

  Above us, the stars sparkle too white and too large. It’s freaky. Night when it’s supposed to be day. Hannah must not like it either because it flashes back to daylight.

  “You’re getting faster,” I observe.

  She nods. “It’s getting easier to change things. Do you want to try? Just think about what you want to see, and it’ll happen. You have to be specific, though.”

  If I’m going to have to concentrate, I need her to not be touching me. She’s too distracting. I roll her off my chest until she’s lying flat on her back next to me again, then I narrow my eyes and will the sky to change.

  The sky goes an angry red with acidic-yellow streaks.

  “Bad ozone,” I say. “Your turn.”

  Above us, the sky darkens. Hannah makes it look as easy as turning down the brightness on a phone. A cool breeze sweeps over the meadow. A faraway peal of thunder rumbles, and a fat drop of rain lands on the back of my hand.

  “Hannah? Brighten it up before we get soaked.”

  “Sorry.” Hannah wriggles her shoulders a little, and I have to slam my eyes closed against the pure FeelGood of her moving against my arm. Seriously? For fuck’s sake, Leo, shoulders are not supposed to get people so worked up.

  Flat gray clouds move toward us from the west, sliding in like a tray over the sky.

  Wait—is this a real storm?

  The sky glitches in panic. It strobes through colors, like it forgot what it was supposed to look like and is frantically guessing. Gravity presses me hard against the earth and grass, trapping me under this freak show.

  “Hold on, whose turn is it? Are you doing this?” I ask.

  “No, are you?” I can barely hear her over the roaring of the sky, but there’s a frantic edge to her voice now.

  “Slow it down,” I yell.

  “I can’t!”

  The sky flips faster and faster and faster, slapping image on top of image. We’ve lost control. It’s like we’ve somehow tapped into the cells of our brain that are responsible for holding all our mental images of skies. All our memories.

  And then they get really bizarre. A sky with clouds dripping red like blood. A sky made of jelly beans. A sky like cracked desert dirt. A kid’s drawing of a sky, with a slice of lemon for a sun. A sky that looks like a virus under a microscope, organisms twitching in a putrid goo.

  And then—the apocalyptic sky of an imagined end of days. Above us, there’s an entire planet about to collide with ours. Darkness falls over the field as the meteor eclipses everything behind it. Hannah grabs my hand and screams.

  It’s going to crush us.

  Then the first piece of rock slams into the field. A plume of dirt flies up as it lands, and the ground rattles under us like the world is breaking up. Chunks fall off the meteor as it swallows up more and more of the sky.

  I scramble off the ground and pull her up with me. “Hannah? Run.”

  We bolt across the field, legs pumping, hands welded together. Another shard of rock slams into the ground ahead of us. The spray of dirt hits my bare arms, stinging like shrapnel.

  I veer left and pull Hannah with me. Bad. Bad. Bad. This is really bad. It’s like in video games where you have to dodge rocks raining down on you, but instead of losing a pixelated heart, we might actually for real die.

  My lungs are full of jet fuel, propelling me toward the trees. I glance over my shoulder, quick, to see if any more rocks are headed for us. Big mistake.

  Hannah turns too, and for a few seconds, we’re both stumble-trotting backward, captivated by the sight above us.

  “Holy shit,” I say. It’s weirdly beautiful. I thought the meteor would hit fast, a split second of terror and light, then darkness. Instead, it looms over us, suspended in the lurid orange sky, taking its sweet time to crush us.

  Another meteor punches through the atmosphere and thumps down on the field. We snap out of it and sprint for the trees.

  “Are you doing this?” I shout.

  “I don’t know,” Hannah yells.

  Another chunk hits off to our right, sending up a geyser of grass. Hannah screa
ms.

  Super. That one was on fire.

  We’re nearly at the edge of the meadow when Hannah slows down. Why is she stopping? Shouldn’t she have more endurance than me? She bends over at the waist, a dead weight on my arm, nearly tugging me to the ground as she gasps, begging for a break.

  “We have to keep moving!” I yell.

  “Just—a sec,” she says, panting. “Don’t know—what’s wrong with me.”

  I pull on her arm again, straining toward the woods. Everything in me wants to keep running. I know a few trees aren’t going to stop a hailstorm of apocalyptic rocks, but it might be better than being out in the open.

  Anxiety crawls up my legs. Hannah’s still bent over, huffing and puffing. I look up at the meteor, and my lungs seize up in my chest. How stupid am I to think we can outrun this?

  This can’t be happening. This CANNOT be happening.

  Hold on. Maybe it’s not. We imagined this. It isn’t real. We can un-imagine it.

  Hannah needs to get this under control. It has to be her, her imagination’s stronger, and now it’s spilling right into the sky without her brain consciously filtering it. I yank on her arm, tugging her over to me. I put my hands on her shoulders and turn us to face the meteor.

  “This isn’t real!” I shout. “I think this is you. Make the sky blue again. Make this go away. Focus. Blue, blue, blue,” I chant.

  She whimpers, recoiling. I don’t blame her—the sight of this thing looming in the sky like an oversized moon in some sci-fi movie is pants-shittingly scary.

  “Breathe, Hannah. It’s not real. Think happy thoughts.” She smashes back against my chest, still trying to escape the sky.

  Maybe I can help her out. I think blue. I will it blue.

  Blue, blue,

  blue, BLUE.

  But I can’t change it. It’s not coming from my imagination.

  “Now, Hannah!” I shout. “Come on! Blue!” I wrap my arms around her, trying to be as calm as I can. “Breathe,” I say.

  She goes still in my arms. Closes her eyes. Takes a deep breath.

  The meteor shudders in the sky.

  Stops.

  It vibrates for a millisecond. Oh shit. Is it going to explode into a billion pieces that will instantly obliterate us?