Free This Is Where the World Ends by Amy Zhang

hallways are ugly anyway.
    The cafeteria is loud and full of people. It is too full of people, because I run straight into someone else.
    Janie always says that my main problem is that I don’t know how to walk away from things. I think she’s wrong. Walking away isn’t the hard part. Turning around is.
    I should have turned around.
    I should have turned and kept my head down before Ander Cameron could see that it was me.
    â€œYou,” he said.
    Me.
    â€œWhat the hell did you do, you little shit?” he demands. “You two, the two of you. What the hell did you do? The police won’t fucking leave me alone because of you.”
    What did I do?
    What did we do?
    Hell, what didn’t we do?
    For a moment, it’s funny. I smile by accident.
    Ander Cameron takes another step toward me and swings his fist at my face. It connects with my jaw. My tray goes flying and so do I.
    In researching for my stupid senior project on apocalypses, the only thing I really found interesting was all of the different ways people think the world is going to end. I read Wikipedia pages and collected catastrophes. An enormoussnake is going to swallow the world. Fire and brimstone is going to fall from the sky. Freezing. Flooding. Four horsemen and a whore. Falling stars and empty oceans.
    It doesn’t end like that, though.
    What it actually feels like when the world explodes, the instant it explodes, is nothing.
    The explosion doesn’t hurt at all. It doesn’t hurt until you hit the ground.
    Again.
    My head cracks on the linoleum and my tray lands on my face and the soup is in my nose. Somewhere above me Ander Cameron is telling the unlucky bastard on lunch duty that I slipped, and perhaps for the first time in his life, no one backs him up. The monitor drags him away, but I am still on the floor.
    I understand why Janie did the things she did. I understand why she wanted everyone to like her.
    It sure as hell beats this.
    There are people all around me, and it’s hard to focus on most of them. I think Dewey must be there, because someone has been swearing for the last five minutes. I look around, and around, and I see Piper. She hangs back with fingers pressed to white lips.
    Janie would never have done that. She would never standback and watch. Janie would have been brimming with wrath. For her friends, she would have done anything. Anything. She didn’t kick or punch. She flayed, slowly, with eyes too bright.
    Sorry, I tell her. Sorry you made such shitty friends.
    Something moves above me and I figure it’s someone else telling me to get up, but it’s not. It’s Janie.
    â€œGod,” she says. She sits on one of the tables and grips the edge, legs swinging. She looks at me. “So many assholes. Asshole here and an asshole there. Old Waldo had a farm and called it high school.”
    She jumps off the table and lands beside me. Her head is cocked to the side and her hair is spilling across her collarbones. I wait for her to reach out a hand and pull me up. She doesn’t.
    What she does is lie down beside me, so that we’re both on the floor in the spilled soup. Her fingertips reach out to brush mine, and I pull away because my hands are still covered in clay dust. She would freak if she knew I’d been in her studio.
    We just lie there.
    Neither of us helps the other up.
    Eventually the lunch monitor does get me up. She sends me to the nurse, who tells me to call my dad to take mehome, or maybe to the hospital in case my stitches have split again. I pretend to talk to him, and go to the lobby to wait.
    I wait until no one is watching me and then I walk out the door, and keep walking.
    It has stopped raining.
    I walk through the park, which takes me a street over from my house. But I keep walking. The quarry is only 0.72 miles from our houses. Her old house and my house. Really, the new one was just down the street.
    It starts raining again. It’s okay. We’ve