The Way It Ends
Prologue
This is the way the world ends – not with a bang, but with a whimper.
A whimper that exists metaphysically, I suppose, but only physically manifests itself inside of me – deep down where nothing can reach, nothing but her and her pale skin and her smiles that only I can produce. My world has ended and I sit on a park bench and think, and I try not to think of her.
I am only prolonging the inevitable, I suppose.
.
It all begins and ends with a girl, I suppose, only my girl, if I am still conventionally allowed to describe her as such, does not subscribe to any stereotypes. She walks with the grace of a proud gazelle and talks as if she's the only one who is allowed to speak, without regard to anyone else. A lot of people, I have found, despise her. It must say something about me that I was attracted to her with the force that exists between opposite poles on a magnet.
In my head I alternated between a million different things to say, but of course, being the uneducated freshman that I was, what spilled out was, "Hi, I'm Beck."
Her eyes met mine and I was nearly knocked over by the force of her revulsion. A fierce blue glow seemed to practically exude from her eyes. She scowled. "I don't believe I asked."
"Um, well, I wanted to introduce myself." My words were spilling out before I could filter them; something about her enticed that spirit in me. My confidence was dwindling faster than sand in an hourglass. "Like I said, I'm Beck, and I had just noticed you around school and I guessed –"
"Whatever you guessed, it was probably wrong." Her eyes twinkled. I realized that she somehow took pleasure in torturing poor, helpless guys like me, and I startled. Her game had gone wrong this time, however; she had taken on the wrong guy.
"Maybe." I smiled my typical charming smile, not expecting it to sweep her off her feet, but issuing it as a challenge – you can't scare me away, I thought. "I was just wondering if you'd, I don't know, want to have lunch or something."
"Sure, I'll have lunch," she replied, and for a second I thought that it was going to be an easy victory won, before she completed her sentence with, "only not with you."
At this point, I suppose, any other boy would have quit and gone on his merry way, realizing that she wasn't interested and there was no point in pushing it. Unfortunately, as a child, I had never been too keen on losing. I suppose I should regret my next decision. (I don't.)
"Dinner?" I pressed. "I've been told I make a mean macaroni soufflé." Here I was attempting to make a misguided attempt at humor, only I must have failed because apparently such a dish exists. She did not catch it, either, further supporting my hypothesis that any career in professional humor I might attempt would be fairly short-lived.
"I've been told numerous things about you as well, Sir Oliver. You're not exactly the type of guy I want to be seen lunching with, nor do I consider eating with your posse to be at the top of my to-do list," she replied mockingly, meeting my eyes again - and the power in them nearly knocked me down. She was not going to back down, I realized, and neither was I. In such situations, then, where two powers refuse to surrender, the only solution is compromise.
"How about I eat with you instead, then?" I offer, keeping my hands in my pockets and my eyes wide and sincere in a failed attempt to appear harmless, as one does when approaching a rabid animal. "I'll eat – or lunch, however you say it – wherever you do, and since I've never really seen you at lunch I won't harm your rep or whatever. It's a win-win situation, as I see it."
"What if I don't enjoy your company?" She challenges.
"Then I'll leave you alone after today," I concede, allowing her, if you will, a trial period. One lunch period to convince her, I think, and I figure I have to turn up my charm to full blast. "Come on. It's only one lunch, and after that you'll never have to see me again if you don't want to."
"Fine." She gazes at me openly now, scrutinizing every little flaw – the barely noticeable scar on my left cheek from the time I'd been deeply scratched by some stray cat, the tiny mole under my nose, the grease in my hair from my nervous habit of running my hand through my hair. (It drove her crazy.) At last, her gaze leaves my face, and I feel my breath return to my lungs. "See you later, Beck," she says as she leaves, and my world turns on its axis again.
Beck. I sound out the word, but it doesn't sound as good coming from my lips. I have never heard my name pass those lips before.
Coming from her lips, which usually spew disdain, my own name sounds positively melodious.
.
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
It is one of Newton's laws of thermodynamics, I believe, that every isolated system must move toward entropy. That law in itself should give me comfort, because of course it wouldn't have worked anyway – but then again maybe we were special, because there was entropy from the beginning and sometimes it seemed as if we were moving toward our own kind of equilibrium and -
.
From my sparse recollections, the lunch went well. It must have, because she agreed to go out with me that Friday night, and I honestly had never been more nervous about a date. I spent an inane amount of time on my hair – inane, really, considering she told me later that she was constantly amused by the fuss over my hair, since she loved nothing more than to mess it up.
By the time I picked her up at her house, I was sweating profusely, and every cell in my incompetent body felt as though it was on fire. I rang her doorbell, and I felt as though I could melt away right there on the sidewalk. Thankfully, I did not have to face her dad on the first date. She opened the door, and she took my breath away.
Perhaps it was the short purple dress she had on or the natural look of her chestnut hair. Either way, it took all that was in me to merely say, "Y-you look great."
"As do you." She smirked, and once again I was taken aback, not knowing if she was serious or just employing her grand mastery of sarcasm. "Well, where are we going?"
I recollected myself, knowing that any stuttering or loss of words would be counted as a fault on my part, and forced a confident expression onto my face. "Does Avanti Ristorante sound all right to you?" The restaurant was one of the most prestigious in the area, and although my pockets were constantly near empty due to the unsteady nature of my lawn care service, I was willing to splurge a little if it meant impressing her.
Always unpredictable, though, she laughed. She actually laughed. At first I thought she was mocking my poor selection in restaurants, but she quickly clarified by asking, "Can you afford that, Beck?"
Slightly thrown off by her use of my name and also a bit miffed, I quickly replied, "I do a bit of lawn care every now and again, so I have enough saved up, yes."
"Save it." The command, to anyone else, might have seemed off-putting, but to me it seemed as though she was being somewhat caring, a side of her I had never before glimpsed within the overarching halls of our high school. "You don't have to try to impress me, Beck. It's the thought that counts, I guess, and the thought that you'd spend that much on me is pretty impressing already. Now save it; I'm not much for Italian food, and I have a craving for an In-N-Out Burger about right now."
She was amazing, was all I could think. She was brilliant and beautiful , and every positive adjective within my admittedly small capability flashed through my mind at that very moment. Of course it was only a little thing, and to someone else it would have seemed practically nothing, but to me, a lovesick little freshman, it meant the world, and I swear I probably lit up like a child on Christmas morning, but all I could manage was a simple "I can make that happen."
So we went to In-N-Out burger, and she became the first girl I had ever seen devour a burger that big in so little a time frame. ("I like meat," she explained crossly after she caught me gazing her way, although I guess she couldn't have known it was out of admiration.)
Afterward I took her to one of my favorite places in the world. It may seem a cliché thing to do, but again, to a lovesick freshman it seemed the best way to repay his dream girl for an amazing date, and so I drug her to the top of my own private hill (or so I called it). She looked around, but for once, not with a critical eye – taking everything in, I suppose – and then she looked back at me. "This place isn't terrible," she told me, and those words were euphonic to my sore ears.
It took me the rest of the night, sat on that hill with my arm around her and her entertaining stories gracing my ears, to build up the courage to kiss her, and when I did the whole world stopped for a moment in its immutable rotation before speeding up to catch up with her. She looked at me, and for a second I wondered if she was debating whether to slap or castrate me.
She didn't do either, though. She merely kissed me again, and that was when my world began.
.
From then on we were basically inseparable. There was neither I nor her, but simply the two of us coexisting as one, living, breathing, kissing. It was innocent enough at first: nights spent up talking on the phone about anything under or above the sun, stolen kisses behind the locker doors so that other freshmen wouldn't be scandalized, notes passed from a tanned hand to a paler one. Don't get me wrong; it wasn't, in a conventional sense, easy – but then nothing worth having ever is, and what I've come to realize through the years (and what I should have realized before) is that easy is boring. She was her and I was me, and that was all we needed.
With the maturity of a relationship well beyond our limited years, though, our relationship flourished, and soon I was faced with the difficult task of officially asking her to be my girlfriend. Although we behaved as a couple already, in our high school the typical thing to do was to extravagantly propose dating (as though it were a marriage proposal) and gain the ever-coveted "best boyfriend" card from every other girl in school. Already throughout my first year I had seen fireworks decorate the sky writing "date me, Joyce?" and "go out with me, Rose" spelled out in roses. It would take a lot to top that.
I was debating between a hot air balloon and a painted chest when she approached me. "Beck," she said, leaning forward to rest her head on my shoulder. "Are we dating?"
The question caught me off-guard. Never before had a girl flat-out asked me if we were dating. Always they had passively waited for me to ask them to date me, and then with some sort of overdramatic flair accepted. It was practically expected here. Dumbfounded, I asked, "What?"
"I asked if we were dating." I could practically feel her rolling her eyes behind me at my general lack of competence whenever we were together. It was just the effect she had on me.
"Oh. Well." I was basically at a loss for words. "I mean, do you want to be?"
"Duh." Her voice oozed irritation at my slowness. Always she seemed as though she was one step ahead of me, and was waiting somewhere behind for me to catch up. "Otherwise I wouldn't allow you to have the immense pleasure of kissing me."
Impishly, I smiled. "Well, I guess there'll be more when that came from, then."
"We'll see," she said, and from that moment on it was a generally known fact that we were dating. It was never really stated, as per the conventions of our school, but then again we were known for being fairly unconventional – her the aggressively sarcastic weirdo from the local musicals, me the aspiring actor with a penchant for attracting females.
At times I wish I had gotten the chance to ask her, but she told me later she'd never really been much for the public kind of proposals. The private ones, she said, were much more intimate and authentic, and she absolutely despised that sort of pressure and artificialness. I decided early on I would utilize that information later in life, since I hadn't gotten to earlier.
And that unconventional beginning, my friends, was the beginning of a relationship that would transcend time and the universe and somehow, the end.
.
Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice. I side with neither.
The world ended with her, with Jade West, and so did I.
.
A/N: I shouldn't be posting another multichapter fic. I really shouldn't. But I wanted something with a more serious tone and, well, this was what I ended up with. I hope you could tell, but in case you couldn't, it's told through flashbacks. And also I don't own the quotes you may recognize – from TS Eliot, Yeats, and Frost, respectively. I hope you liked it, and if you did, leave a review and tell me what you thought. I'll attempt to reply to everyone! Plus, it motivates me to update.