This Is Where the World Ends Read Online Free PDF Page B

whatever pieces come your way . I think it fits my senior project pretty well, and that’s probably enough work for today. I open Journal Number Twelve to a new page and put the Skarpie to the margin and continue to draw. Planets and universes, fairy tales and girls who arrange the pieces that come to them, and in the center: a star, dissolving, an atom spewing away toward earth with twin souls inside. That’s one atom, singular, with a spastic and dancing electron field brighter than any sun.
    Across the room, Mr. Markus is scolding Wes Bennet for not working, and I steal the words and unravel them until he’s narrating in his sandpaper voice.
    Once upon a time , he says, and I draw in furious little strokes, in the beginning, there was no such thing as darkness. There were only stars bridged by light, and a single atom with wings.
    Wings—they’re going to be my masterpiece. They’re going to blow everyone away, out of the water, into oblivion. Good-bye, Wes Bennet and your fuck-the-system paper on American education. So long, Piper Blythe and your (admittedly really cool) thesis on cognitive biases and human failure. Even you, Micah, and your apocalypses. My wings are going to put you all to shame.
    I start sketching again: wire for the frame, canvas over bamboo, feathers cut from Andersen and Grimm.Fairy-tale monster wings, shaped like butterfly but feathered like bird, clawed like bat and wider than dragon.
    Then the Skarpie lines trail and jerk, learning to fly. They morph into birds and trees and veins and dreamers and a few rabid scribble creatures that snarl at the idea of being mistakes. There. I have one wing stretching and another that collapses into the whole wide world.
    Mr. Markus almost didn’t agree to my proposal. I wheedled and begged and bribed (with cookies) the yes out of him. He says my problem is that I was born with a thousand beginnings and no endings at all. It’s hard to argue with that, because there’s an awful lot of proof in the senior studio art room. Projects upon unfinished projects: a teapot with no lid, four saucers and one teacup, a clay map of the world minus Australia, seven or eight untrimmed bowls, one ball of wedged clay that I lost and found after it fossilized and covered in Viking runes for luck.
    Not this time, though. I will finish the wings if it kills me. I will! You’ll see.
    The door bursts open. Dewey struts in with his stupid collar to his chin and Micah trails in behind him with cartoonishly bad bedhead and caffeine in his fingers. You see guys doing the air piano thing all the time, tapping their fingers on the edges of the desk while they sit sprawled in the chair with their legs wide open, thinking they’re so cool . Micah doesn’t do that. Micah is all nervous habit and music that never goes away.
    Mr. Markus barely spares them a glance. “Sit down,” he says, and then goes back to typing. That’s another thing about Mr. Markus—he does all of our projects with us. He doesn’t just sit on the computer with the screen turned away so he can grade papers or play games or watch porn.
    Micah ducks his head and slides into a desk while Dewey mutters something about how it’s not his fault that Micah drives a piece of shit. Micah catches me licking whipped cream off my finger and smiles, but I have to ignore him because right then—
    â€œHey,” Ander whispers. He leans over, and his angel smile makes me feel just right: quirky but not hipster, talented but not cocky, sunshine without the burn. “I like those shoes on you.”
    Such adorable bullshit. Ander is the worst flirt in the world, and he has no idea at all. Being with him is like riding a hot air balloon inflated by his ego—the view is great, the heat is everywhere. I don’t know why I like him, just that I do, and that’s okay. It is! People say because too much. You don’t always need a reason. I want cliché