You & Me at the End of the World

by Brianna Bourne

  But then the meteor pauses on its fall to earth. The orange sky lightens.

  “That’s it—you’re doing it!” I cheer.

  The meteor shrinks. It’s getting farther away.

  And then, with a slap, it just … disappears.

  The broad Texas sky is back, perfectly clear, stretching for miles in every direction.

  Blue. Serene. Under control.

  I let out a nervous laugh. Hannah peels my arms away and collapses to the ground, crumpling into a heap. I follow, landing hard on my butt.

  “Well, that was bizarre,” I say. I rake my hands through my hair. “I think I’m gonna hurl.”

  Hannah grabs two fistfuls of grass, like she’s trying to hold on to the earth. I can’t see her face through her frizzy curtains of hair, but I do hear her sharp, ragged sob.

  I hesitate. I should go hug her or something. But I’m not good in situations like this. I never know what to do, what to say. Before, I could get away with not doing or saying anything at all. That was what everyone expected. Leo: helluva good time, selfish jerk when the going gets rough. But here, with her, I have to try. There’s no one else.

  I crawl over to her and reach out my hand, laying it tentatively on her shoulder. She melts into it and leans against me. I scoot closer and start rubbing her back.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbles miserably. “I shouldn’t have let myself get carried away.”

  “Hey, hey,” I soothe. “That was scary. Undeniably. But a little fear never killed anyone, right? We’re fine. We’re okay. And how incredible were those clouds? Who else can say they’ve sculpted clouds?”

  She relaxes a little. Am I actually saying the right things for once? I keep going, grasping for the upsides. The silver linings. “It was kind of like riding a roller coaster, right? Terrifying but fun once you’ve survived it.”

  I shake my hair out of my eyes, imagining all the awesome stuff we can do now. We painted the sky. How amazing was that shit? It’s about to get a lot more interesting.

  The glittery feeling of possibility I had before comes back, and I laugh. “I can’t believe we can change things.”

  Hannah stiffens.

  Uh-oh. That was not the right thing to say.

  Hannah looks up, her face streaked with tears and dirt. We were so caught up with imagining, we didn’t stop to think about what the fact that we can change things means. She’s thinking about it now, though. I can see the moment she gets to the unavoidable conclusion, because her eyes fill up with tears and her mouth twists down.

  The fact that we can change things is definitive proof:

  This isn’t an ordinary apocalypse.

  It was never an evacuation. It was never a hurricane, or a miscommunication. There’s no possibility left that means we’ll ever be reunited with our families, or with the way things were. In real life you can’t change the color of the sky like freaky magicians.

  I was right. We’re dead.

  Hannah cracks into a million pieces in front of me.

  “No, no, no,” I plead. “Let’s pretend none of that happened. Pretend I didn’t say anything. Hannah, no.”

  “I have to go back,” she croaks. “Please. Leo, we have to go.”

  “Go where?”

  “To Houston. To my house. It wasn’t a hurricane …” She claps her hand over her mouth, stifling another sob. “Was that storm at the museum … was that my imagination? Has everything just been my imagination? Are you— Oh no.” She gives me a weird look then, like she thinks I’m not real.

  This is a disaster. “Hannah—”

  “We have to go. Please,” she begs. She’s shaking all over now. “I need to dance. I need my studio. My shoes. Please.”

  “Okay, okay, calm down. I’ll take you home.”

  We’ll have to stumble back through the woods to get my guitar and grab her painting from the house. At least it’s not raining anymore—it won’t take us three hours to get home.

  I wrap an arm around her and help her stand.

  “Come on. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  We ride home in silence. Hannah’s stiff in the seat beside me, eyes closed to block out the world. My throat is tight with fear.

  At some point, I take one hand off the wheel and grab hers, squeezing hard. I don’t let go until we pull up outside her house a whole hour later.

  When Thunderchicken rolls to a stop in the circular driveway, Hannah cranks her window down and clambers out through it. She runs up to her front door and disappears inside the house.

  “Fuck,” I say, shaking my head. Then I lurch into action, grabbing my stuff from the back seat in record time so I can go after her. I decide to take Hannah’s painting too, lugging it into the house in awkward steps. Maybe it will help her.

  After setting Starburst down in the living room, I hear Hannah rustling around in the kitchen. Her theory board cabinet is open, and she’s ripping the sticky notes down and stuffing them in the trash can. She pushes the lid down so hard the plastic snaps.

  “Hannah, wait—”

  “I’m sorry—I know I’m freaking out, but—” Her lips tremble. “I just need—”

  She shoves past me and bolts down the basement stairs, leaving me standing in the kitchen. Alone.

  The silence is extreme.

  I pace the kitchen, running frantic hands through my hair. I want to barf. Bright piano music starts up, muffled by the closed basement door. It’s the wrong music for this moment. I fumble around in my pocket and pull out my phone. My thumb shakes as I scroll through my music to find something loud and angry. Ozzy, Nine Inch Nails, Metallica. I ram my earbuds in. There must be some alcohol in this house, right? I don’t need to follow Hannah down her brand of rabbit hole. I’ve got my own coping strategies. I fling open the nearest cabinet and grab a jar of marshmallow creme and dig my fingers in, scooping glob after glob into my mouth as I open drawer after drawer. Finally—bingo—under the island, I find her parents’ stash, six half-empty bottles of fancy whiskey. I grab one and head toward the living room, jar of marshmallow creme abandoned, wiping my sticky fingers on my shirt, bottle dangling from my hand.

  The floor shakes, and I don’t have to take my earbuds out to know that the rhythmic thudding is Hannah jumping. Doing her little switchy-feet ballet hops.

  I look over at the couch. The nest of comfy pillows. I really want to shut this out. Before I start thinking about all the things I’m never going to see again. The things I’ll never get to do.

  But.

  Hannah.

  She can’t go back to doing what she was doing before we met. She thinks she was doing okay, but what’s less okay than living in your basement for the rest of your nonlife? She’ll be miserable. She didn’t see what I saw when we were lying there under the sky, shaping clouds. The power chord smile was so within reach.

  And I … I care about her too much to leave her down there on her own. Even if it means plunging into something hard and messy. It’s physically hurting me to think of what she’s doing down there. I’ve never in my life felt like this about anyone.

  Fuck, I’m so out of my element.

  I take a deep breath. Set the bottle on the kitchen counter.

  And open the door to go downstairs.

  The spotlights above the barre shoot down into sharp pools on the floor, but the rest of the studio is dark. I can see the outline of my body in the mirror, but my face—and my tears—are in shadow.

  Everything in me is vibrating, clamoring to explode, like a pot of boiling water. I force myself to breathe. Inhale. Exhale.

  Demi-pliés. Down, up. Gradual, controlled.

  Repeat.

  The sprinkling piano music makes me clench my teeth together, and my clammy hand sticks to the wooden barre.

  Grand pliés, Hannah. Just keep dancing.

  My legs are steady and strong as I bend with excruciating slowness.

  I’m about to flow into the next part of my routine when my arm stops in midair, han
ging awkwardly like a broken wing.

  I can’t remember what’s next.

  How is that possible? I know I haven’t been practicing enough, so I might be a little rusty, but how can I not remember what’s after PLIÉS?! I’ve known what’s after pliés since I was in kindergarten.

  All the blood drains out of my head. Have I forgotten how to dance?

  I force myself to breathe. Slow. One. Two. Three.

  Tendus. Of course. Tendus are next.

  When I slide my foot forward, I lose my balance and have to grab the barre to keep from falling.

  This isn’t working. I can still see the searing orange of the sky as the meteor headed straight at us. This is why I stuck to ballet. See what happens when I let my imagination loose? Before everyone disappeared, it just made people laugh at me and think I was pathetic, but now it makes the sky fall.

  I sink to the floor and crawl over to the sound system, ripping out wires to stop the incessant music.

  When I was tearing down my theory board upstairs, I stuffed all the sticky notes in the trash—except one. I wedged it into my phone case, and now, with trembling fingers, I pull it out. I stare down at the single word written on it, tracing the lines of the neat capital letters.

  DEAD.

  My stomach lurches. Leo was right.

  No, no, no.

  It’s not possible. I can’t be dead.

  Of all the swirling, toxic thoughts in my head, one stands out from the rest: I’m going to miss the audition if I’m dead.

  It’s finally sinking in. That audition won’t be happening in this Houston. It’ll be happening in the Houston that’s still full of people. The Houston where my mom is sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of milky sweet English tea, her gray-streaked bun bent over her phone as she reviews my latest rehearsal video. The Houston where Astrid is leaning on the counter at Devil’s Advocup, flirting with Jacob, the barista she has a crush on, her red Doc Martens swinging underneath her chair. The Houston where my dad is slouching on the couch in his rumpled work shirt, eating pizza and watching a rockumentary, arm slung around David Lee Sloth.

  But if I’m not there—if I’m dead—what will they all be doing then? Will they be huddled together around some made-for-TV cemetery, all black umbrellas in the rain? Will they be blank with shock or crumbling in on themselves?

  God, I miss them. I lie down on the floor and cry so hard for a second that I go silent, everything in my body seizing up tight.

  I used to wake in the middle of the night, suddenly intensely aware of one single fact: that one day I’d be dead. Every time, the hugeness of that thought sucked out my breath and replaced it with dread. On those nights, the only thing that could comfort me was the thought that I wouldn’t know I was dead. What am I supposed to do now? I don’t know how to deal with knowing.

  And then a hand lands on my shoulder, and I jump out of my skin.

  “It’s just me! Just me,” Leo says.

  I scramble up to my knees and rub my eyes, but there’s no chance I can hide the fact that I’ve been crying from him.

  “You didn’t have to come down.” I cover my face. I’m such a disaster. This whole situation is a disaster.

  “I wanted to,” he says. “I have no idea how to help, but I …”

  The corners of my mouth turn down without my permission, but I keep it together and nod.

  I can only stare as Leo weaves his fingers through mine. We’re locked together now, and his candle-smoke smell envelops me. I feel better. Just a tiny bit. It could be worse—I could be alone.

  “Sorry I’m such a mess,” I mumble. “I swear I’m really not usually like this, falling apart every five seconds. It’s just … it’s not every day you find out that you’ve died.” I wipe my nose. It would be really great if I could not look like a total sniveling wreck in front of the guy I like.

  I bet the girls he likes would be putting their hands on their hips and jutting out their chins. They’d be giving this whole situation a huge middle-finger fuck you.

  Leo peels the crushed yellow sticky note out of my hand. Unfolds it so he can read it. “Dead, huh?”

  I give him a sad look. “You know it’s the most likely explanation.”

  “Not little alien kids playing video games?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Leo folds the sticky note in half. “So what if we’re dead? No big deal.”

  My hiccup/laugh makes me sound unhinged. “No big deal?” Maybe for him. He doesn’t seem to miss anyone. He hasn’t said a single nice thing about his family to me. It occurs to me—have I said anything nice about mine to him?

  We’re quiet for a minute.

  “In the car … I couldn’t stop thinking about how it might have happened. How I … died …” I say, trailing off into a whisper.

  His thumb flutters over my knuckles. “It doesn’t matter how it happened. We’re here now, okay? We can’t think about why, or we’ll fall apart.”

  Only one of us is falling apart, though.

  “How are you not thinking about it?” I ask. “Aren’t you sad about everything we can’t go back to? About everyone we’ll never see again?”

  “Well, I’m pretty experienced with hard-core distraction tactics. Remember Leo’s LifeHack? I was about to chug half a bottle of whiskey up there.”

  “You didn’t have to come down.”

  “What, am I supposed to let you wither away down here like a hermit?”

  “I guess you could,” I say, sniffling.

  “Hannah. Come up and have something to eat. I promise it’ll get easier. My mom always says that if you stuff your face, have a little fun, sweep it under the rug, you’ll wake up the next day and whatever’s wrong won’t seem so bad. It’ll get easier and easier to sweep under the rug until there’s nothing left to sweep.”

  I pick at the frayed end of my pointe shoe. “Is that really the best way to deal with things? Ignore them?”

  He peeks around my bedraggled mess of hair and says gently, “Isn’t that what you’re trying to do? Just in a different way?”

  When I don’t answer, he sighs. “Come upstairs. We don’t have to change anything. Just come up. You can’t fall apart on me, Hannah.”

  I take a deep breath. He’s right. If I stay down here, I’m going to dissolve into myself. These are the kind of terrible thoughts that don’t end. They’ll spiral, dragging me deeper and deeper down. I’ll do anything to stop thinking about being dead. Anything.

  If dancing isn’t working, I might as well try it Leo’s way.

  “Okay,” I say, wiping under my eyes and taking one last breath, straightening my back.

  Leo beams and squeezes my hand. We pull ourselves up off the floor and head for the staircase. I look down at our fingers, still woven tight.

  I might never let go of him again.

  Upstairs, I shiver and wrap my arms around myself as Leo turns on the lights. He fills the kettle and sets it to heat on the stove, then he knocks around in the cabinets for the chamomile tea.

  “This is probably a better choice than whiskey,” he says.

  I spot an open jar of marshmallow creme, but I don’t have the energy to ask him about it.

  Leo shepherds me over to the couch. When we pass the french doors, the pitch-black expanse of night outside makes my steps falter.

  “Nope, not allowed to worry,” Leo says, nudging me onward. “Go. Sit.”

  I sink down on the couch and draw my knees up to my chin.

  He comes back and hands me a mug, his fingers brushing up against mine, before he sits down next to me. There’s an easy familiarity with this now, in the way we pass each other drinks.

  “Is the tea helping?” he asks.

  “Maybe a little,” I lie.

  He waits patiently until I’ve finished. I set my empty mug down on the coffee table, and suddenly his hand is reaching for mine and—oh—he’s tugging me over to him.

  My head lands right in the cozy spot between his chest a
nd shoulder. For a fleeting moment, I wonder if my hand feels heavy to him where it rests on his rib cage. His arm wraps around me, his hand solid and warm just above my hip.

  He sighs, eyes closing with bliss. “Let’s do this all the time,” he says.

  I’m afraid to move, because the want in me is so big I’m afraid it will burst. I want everything. I want this bright, easy friendship. I want this closeness, this touching, this laughing.

  If he thinks this is what friends do, and how friends touch … I can be okay with just being friends. Friends probably don’t listen so intently to the heart beating under their ear, but whatever.

  I match my in breaths and out breaths to Leo’s and try to memorize this snapshot view: my hand on his chest, fingertips catching on the raw edge where he cut the collar off his shirt. His long, black-jeaned legs stretched out, his feet a little farther away than my own.

  His thumb starts moving on my side, rumpling my shirt and then smoothing it. It’s soothing: a slow, gentle arc, the way someone would pet a cat. It feels incredible, like a Fourth of July sparkler’s been lit inside me.

  God, I wish he liked me as much as I like him.

  “I’m going to dream you up a desk next,” he says. “A big serious one with a thousand pens.”

  I sniffle, mustering up the courage to play along.

  “And I’ll get you a harp,” I say. “It’ll be taller than us, and gold. With naked cherubs all over it.”

  Leo laughs. “And after I master this naked cherub harp,” he says, “I’ll start in on the kazoo. I’ll imagine myself up a different instrument every few hours. Dulcimer, balalaika, Caribbean steel pan.”

  “Alphorn,” I add.

  He nods sagely. “Ooh, yes. And then bagpipes, and bongos. And—”

  His voice falters. I tilt my head up to look at him. His mouth is drawn tight, and there’s a look on his face I haven’t seen before. There’s nothing left of that Leo brightness in his eyes.

  What happened? A moment ago, he was eager and bouncing, and now he’s … not.

  “Leo? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, fine,” he says. He hitches his smile back into place, but something’s definitely wrong. He starts listing more instruments. He’s putting on a good show, but I can tell it’s an act.