She will clean out her locker. She will throw away any old issues of Science she can bring herself to part with, snapped pencils, the wrapper of Oz's witch Pez, some of Buffy's scrawled notes about Angel, Scott, and Angel, again, pellets of recycled Cultures worksheets flung at the back of her head by a bored Xander. The strips of photo-booth shots of she and Buffy will come down, the multiple "Dingoes Ate My Baby" fliers, the cute promotional pictures. What she keeps will flop around in her empty backpack. It now holds only pencils and her favorite pens; tonight she'll add her graphing calculator and candy for munch urges during finals. This part of the ending, at least, feels familiar to her practiced mind.

The leaving and the dying come after the two days of finals.

Sunnydale's graduation is on a Thursday, for some asinine reason, and today is Monday. Thursday, the mayor Ascends--or attempts to, she reminds herself, because the situation isn't completely hopeless yet. Thursday, she leaves Sunnydale High officially. She may barely pass her finals, considering all the non-school-related cramming she's been doing for the last two weeks, but she'll still graduate. Giles told her to cool it a little -- though not in those exact words -- and spend some time with her academic studying. She smiled, nodded, and hugged him with one arm, and he backed down. Giles understands her.

Still, she appreciates his concern, and even shares it in a half-hearted but deeply ingrained way, so she's trying to stuff vectors and torque back into her head in the hope of a C, perhaps even a miraculous B. Physics can't occupy her attention now, though she understands it readily enough when she can force the letters on the textbook page to separate into legible words and phrases. She crosses her legs under her determinedly, stares hard, but it won't work. She keeps thinking about Oz, and Buffy, Xander, Giles, Cordelia, Angel, her parents, everybody's parents, even Amy-the-rat. Do pure demons like rats? Pure demons like virgins. She leans back, running her fingers through her hair, chewing nervously on a hank of it. Dying a virgin. Xander. And Oz.

Oz. What she thinks about most is Oz, the things she loves about him. She thinks about his utter lack of revealed nervousness, the way his hands never shake when he's afraid. Inside her mind, she sees him in his mildewed van, holding out his arms; palms up, baring vulnerable tendons encased in thick translucent skin. She wants him here, now. She wants to lick that skin the way she does in the memory, roughing up his wrists and the dip of his elbow with her teeth, silencing him with her lips and tongue. Tasting the blurred salt-sweet of his skin, like tears.

Will she cry when she is killed? It's impossible for her to decide whether she would rather die before her friends, before Oz, or after they're dead. Buffy will be tortured, and so, probably, will Angel. Giles, maybe. Wesley. She, Xander, Oz, and Cordelia are highly expendable. Maybe the Mayor will split them up--they'll certainly be singled out from the other graduates, but she's not sure she could bear separation from her friends and her love at the time of her death.

The end of it. The idea won't fit, the simple knowledge that she will die in seventy-two hours.
Seventy-six, really. Graduation begins at six-thirty with the mayor's speech. She thinks of them sitting there in their gowns, rumored to be blood-red, all near enough to each other. According to the print-out hanging in each senior classroom, Oz is up two rows, diagonal by a few seats, with Xander up by six or seven rows and Cordelia a few rows ahead of him. She and Buffy altered the list so they could sit side-by-side. She should be able to see all of them, and she will at least be able to hold Buffy's hand.

...when they die. It's like the "in bed" game the Scooby gang plays with fortune cookies; the words get tacked onto the end of each new thought involuntarily. I'll miss all the seniors.. .when we die. I'll miss the soda machine...when I die.

She should be able to think about college without realizing how unlikely it is that she'll ever arrive for Orientation.

A week ago, she and Oz watched Trainspotting again and it made her cry. Then it made her angry. Choose life. CHOOSE life? She did a breathing exercise to calm herself, but here in school in her last class of the day and her last study hall for the rest of her short life she is furious, though she knows she is being unfair, furious at the characters, at anyone who chooses to give up the wonder she aches to keep.

She prays sometimes, too, guiltily and in secret. Her Jewishness is more ethnic than religious, and even that is only half her heritage, but she's afraid. She prays to the firm, detached God of her childhood, to the practical and sexual Goddess of her new religion, to the first star she sees every night, and sometimes the second and third. Every beneficent deity mentioned in her supernatural readings gets a brief devotionary thought.

For some she performs rituals. This happens frequently enough that the new owner of the Wiccan supply store beams every time she enters, and she herself is sporting a permanent bruise inside one elbow from drawing blood for sacrifices. Giles gave her hell for that once, too, but hasn't said anything since, which frightens her more.

She wishes that she had a fervent, fierce belief in something. She wishes she could cling. None of the group are particularly religious, so she can't even leech hope from someone else. Faith, she thinks, was raised Catholic, or maybe as a born-again Christian -- it's a big difference, but she can't remember, and, considering Faith, it's a moot point anyway.

Rescue from an outside source seems improbable. She feels simultaneously watery and dry, made of dust and thin streams, unstable.

Each urge of life has strengthened. She eats hugely and runs in the mornings. She loves life, and Oz, and her friends. She craves the maximum amount of contact with each of them; closer contact. She had never seriously considered touching Giles, or Buffy, or even Cordelia, in anything other than comfort and friendship. Other near-death experiences left her erotically unmoved -- until she could cling to Oz in her darkened bed, or his, and cry, and kiss the smooth dense muscles of his arms and

chest and thighs. But friends-other-than-Xander awakened no twinges of desire in her belly until these last few months. Buffy rolled her on the grassy ground in feverish excitement over her loyal college choice and she noticed lean legs tangled with hers, the enveloping scent of Buffy's Anna Sui perfume. She caught herself gazing at Cordelia's breasts. And Giles, her dear intellectual soulmate Giles, floored her with a brilliant-eyed Ripper stare when he found her in the stacks, dancing with desperate abandon to the slamming beat of a techno CD she'd borrowed from Amy's collection. Suddenly everyone she loves makes her hot. She doesn't want to leave them. They are all so helpless in the looming face of their shared fate.

She shifts and sighs, looking at the clock, which informs her blankly that another twenty-five minutes of her life have been used up. Symbols in dark blue pen line her notebook pages. Clumps of unfinished problems lie strewn there. Direction, force...she has neither, the world spins on in its own gravity and she has nothing to do with it.

But she is alive.

This makes her grin as she thinks of it. She is alive. Right now she is sitting here, unfolding her legs from the uncomfortable chair, blood slipping through every vessel in her body, shining in her cheeks. In seventy-five hours she may not be alive, but in this moment she feels as invulnerable as the mayor and as magical.

She bounces gently in her seat, twining her legs together and tightening all her muscles in a silent shriek of delight. Alive! if not for much longer. Full of heat and excitement, surrounded by unaware students who are all ALIVE. She flips back to the beginning of her notebook and writes the word across the three laws of thermodynamics. A-l-i-v-e, a flourish at the end.

Then she reads what's under it: "In any process, energy can be changed from one form to another (including heat and work), but it is never created or destroyed," in her own neat, absent handwriting. "In a spontaneous irreversible process, the total entropy of the system and its surroundings always increases; for any process, the total entropy of a system and its surroundings never decreases." Chaos reigns, she had doodled along the margin of the paper, using a hole for the "o." "The third law of thermodynamics considers perfect order, and it states that the entropy of a perfect crystal is zero only at absolute zero." These sentences are helpfully underlined in places, color-coded for ease in studying. When she wrote this, she cared.

Her own descent into chaos threatens now, but her fear is receding. She'll panic later. A bubble of joy rises in her chest and crawls around her throat, and she captures a corner of her lower lip in her teeth to prevent it from erupting in shouts and hisses of celebration.

She will die, but she isn't dead yet. Chaos reigns, she says to herself, but order persists, if not forever.

In other words, fuck the mayor.

Ah. There is a faint scratch at the classroom door, and Oz's face fills the rectangular window, wearing an unusually wide grin. He is alive, too. She loves him. She smiles, then purses her lips in an exaggerated kiss. Even through the glass she can see his eyes darken, the tip of his tongue touching the firm line of his upper lip. He presses one fingertip to the window, flattening it white against the glass, pointing at her. You, he mouthes. She understands.

He smiles his lupine smile and is gone. She looks back up at the clock, blinks to see that the minute hand is at fifty-one. One minute to pack her loose bag, as she closes the physics binder, shoving the pencil in its spine and smiling, in her short time to be alive.