The News from the End of the World by Emily Jeanne Miller

Author:Emily Jeanne Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

16

AFTER KILLING AN HOUR and a half at Eugene’s Beans, nursing a hot chocolate, another hour walking aimlessly around town, and another two at the library, surfing the web and not saving plovers, Amanda waits at the intersection of Eastern and Main for her ride, which turns out to be a Subaru station wagon packed with kids Amanda half knows.

“Party taxi, hop in,” Sybil says, smiling through the open window. She’s sitting up front on some guy’s lap. The back door opens and Amanda squeezes in next to two boys who look familiar and a girl who does not.

It’s not a party at all, it turns out, hardly even a gathering, just some kids sitting around playing video games and getting high. She’s not in the mood to smoke, and she doesn’t give a shit about video games. She’s never understood the appeal, plus it’s always sort of embarrassing how the boys play and the girls sit there, mute, and watch.

After an hour or so she asks Noah, whose house it is, if she can use the bathroom, and she follows his directions through the kitchen and the dining room. All the rooms are painted white, everything’s extremely modern and clean, like you’d see on TV or in one of Gina’s design magazines, with strategic recessed lighting, high ceilings, and no clutter anywhere but lots of bizarre modern art. On the dining room wall hangs a huge black-and-white photograph of a naked girl, maybe nine years old, standing in dark water up to her hips.

She keeps going, entering a long hall whose floor is some kind of polished stone or maybe concrete; whatever material it is, it’s freezing. Noah made everyone take their shoes off when they came in, and she can feel the cold through her socks.

At the end of the hall she opens the third door on the left, a powder room. There’s a modern-looking white toilet and a glass sink, a glass-orb pendant light, and a tall, slim window that looks out over Nantucket Sound.

She doesn’t actually have to pee, for once. She washes her hands with fancy-looking liquid soap and looks at herself in the mirror for a moment, then looks away. From the living room, she hears an eruption of laughter. They’re all pretty stoned. It’s not much fun being the only not-stoned person in the room, but she has no desire to join their ranks. She hasn’t smoked since the soccer-practice debacle—not because she learned a valuable lesson or anything like that. The truth is she only ever really liked smoking with Kevin. In groups, or at a party, it makes her feel too self-conscious. That’s one ironic twist: of the three of them who got busted, she’s the one who smokes the least. She’s probably smoked weed five times in her whole life, not counting with Kevin, whereas Lydia and Candace smoke basically every day. Not that she blames them, or anyone. Like the situation she’s in now, she may have been unlucky, but there’s no one to blame but herself.

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