It's the End of the World as I Know It

by Matthew Landis

  “Tell him I’m coming over when I get home,” Misty says. “Tell him. Okay?”

  “Will do.” Claudia gives her a hug, then says to everybody else, “There’s a Starbucks on the bottom floor of this place and I’m buying. Let’s go.”

  They all get the hint and head out. It’s just me and Misty.

  “So,” I say.

  “So.”

  Misty pushes up a little in her bed and points to a chair right next to the bed. I sit down. She finishes the second container of tacos pretty fast.

  “This was the room,” she says.

  “What?”

  “My room when I was sick, waiting for my kidney.”

  “Oh man,” I say. “Wow.”

  “I mean, what are the odds that this room was open when they transferred me?”

  “Pretty low, I guess.”

  “Probably one in a billion.”

  “One in a billion billion.”

  Misty motions for me to scoot closer. She grabs a black Sharpie from her side table and scrawls four lines on my cast, then a fifth diagonal one across them, and then two more. “Seven days after.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What are all your people on the blog saying about the volcano?”

  I shrug. “My dad canceled the subscription. And actually, I don’t want to get back on it.”

  “I think you should keep not getting on it,” she says. “I think that never again, for the rest of your life, should you go on it.”

  “Yeah.”

  Misty caps the marker and leans back. “I can’t decide if I should hug you or punch you. I mean, you saved me from dying, but also you almost killed me.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I’m kidding.”

  “No, but really—Misty, I’m so sorry.”

  “Duh.”

  “No. Listen. All my plans, my stuff—that fire extinguisher. The snake box. That stupid door.” Eyes burning. Throat tight. “Everything failed. It was like you said that one day, when you were at the shed.”

  “What did I say?”

  “That’s the sort of stuff that would happen if the world was ending.”

  “That sounds like something I’d say.”

  I shake my head. “Misty. You were trying to help me and then I almost—after you just got better—ah. I can’t even really handle it still.”

  “You didn’t force me to be there,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  “But I forgive you.”

  She grabs a stack of index cards from her side table. Some have writing on them, but most are blank. I watch her write Escaped a burning shed. On the next one she writes Avoided getting eaten by a hungry and very upset ball python named Pete. She thinks for a little and then writes Had CPR done to me and I wince a little.

  “So you’re still doing the cards,” I say.

  “Kind of.” Misty taps her pen on another empty one, then writes Helped a friend stop being a jerk. “That’s you.”

  “Yeah.”

  She thinks for a little before writing Helped a friend stop being so sad. She’s pressing harder now, the marker bleeding a little into the card, making the words stand out.

  Got really nice flowers from Derrick as an apology for almost killing me.

  Ate the world’s best tacos (again).

  Finally figured out what SMH means in a text.

  “Brynn told me today,” she says. “It means ‘shaking my head.’ Isn’t that stupid?”

  “Yeah. It is.” I notice she’s going back to each card and writing the date on them. “So it’s stuff you’ve done? Not stuff you want to do?”

  “Yeah. I’m trying it out. Keeping track in the reverse order so I don’t freak out thinking about all the stuff I have to do still.”

  “Is it working?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugs. “We’ll see. I mean, I’m just getting started. Again.”

  We both smirk.

  “I got you a present,” I say.

  I give her the box and she unwraps it. The wires on her hands get in the way, so it’s slow, but she sees what it is about halfway through and laughs, her choking donkey sounds so loud it draws in some traffic from the hall.

  “How is this even a thing?” she asks.

  “I know.”

  “I’m still going to crush you.”

  “We’ll see.”

  She smooths the covers so the bed is nice and flat. We set up the board and play five rounds of Monopoly: Apocalypse Edition.

  1

  “If the sign is a clue, this is going to be incredible,” Misty says.

  Tommy gawks out the Subaru window as we pull into the Brazilian Steakhouse near the old air base. “Kelly made me eat Tums before I left.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Claudia says.

  “Just remember,” Brock tells us. “You need to pace yourself. There will always be another waiter with more meat. Don’t get sucked into the frenzy.”

  Claudia parks and the five of us pile out. It’s freezing and I throw on this wool hat my mom got me the Christmas before She died. My dad’s truck pulls in and I wave. Ellen’s with him, and it’s not totally weird anymore. It’s still a little weird, but it’s also kind of good. She’s not my mom, but she gets it.

  They park and Ellen opens the rear cab door so Max can get out. He stays pretty close to her until he sees me, and then runs over. We high-five and do the bodybuilder flex pose we usually do when we watch Ukrainian guys pull buses on ESPN3. We make snowballs out of the leftover stuff from last week’s storm and peg a light pole until Misty’s parents and Brynn show up.

  “I’m so hungry,” I say as we walk inside. “I didn’t eat all day just for this.”

  “Pace. Yourself,” Brock says.

  My dad gives the hostess our name and we follow her to this back room that’s kind of separate. It has a big long table with some regular chairs, but on the ends are these giant ones that look like thrones.

  “And where are the birthday girls?” the lady asks. Misty shoots her hand up and marches to one of the thrones.

  I look down at the second one. The one that will be empty. “The other one isn’t gonna make it,” I say.

  “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah. It sucks.” I clear my throat. “But we’re dealing with it.”

  We all get seats and the waiter points to this salad bar that is bigger than our entire downstairs and then these guys bring out platters of meat. Brock keeps telling people to take it easy, but then forks like six pieces of steak onto his plate and says I don’t even care and eats with both hands. I see Misty doing the same, grinning as sauce gets all over her face. Tommy close talks with Max about snakes. Brynn and Claudia show each other pictures on their phones and probably talk about college.

  “Hey,” my dad says. “You doing okay?”

  We’re across from each other, on either side of the empty throne.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m good.”

  “Dee,” Brock shouts. “Forget everything I said. Just eat whatever you can until they kick us out.”

  “You’re lucky,” my dad says. “Some people never have one good friend. You’ve got three.”

  “Yeah. I know.” I eat some more and then say, “You think all this snow is going to hurt the grass we planted out back?”

  He shakes his head. “But if spring comes and it’s patchy, we’ll just put down some more seed.”

  “Right.”

  We sort of catch each other looking at the empty seat.

  “I just—” I say, but a waiter puts more meat platters in our faces and of course we take some.

  The main restaurant gets full and loud and everywhere is the smell of incredible food. I see Ellen reach for my dad’s hand and confirm that the Great Red Spot has stopped
raging for good. Then the waiters burst in with this incredible cake, candles lit, and they’re singing and clapping and headed right for Misty. She’s clapping with them—she’s standing on her chair and conducting them like a choir director. They love it and go into another verse and then we all sing the regular happy birthday song. Misty blows the candles out like a boss, then presents appear. Most of them are gift cards or money toward one of the ridiculous things from her old Buffet List. Coffee comes and people start yawning and checking watches because we’ve been here for like three hours, but nobody leaves. They just keep digging at the cake or sipping water. Brock is trying to lie down on an empty chair. Max chucks rolled-up straw wrappers at his head.

  There’s this calm over everything, like this was the perfect night and we could all just go home and say it was epic and be done with it.

  But there’s this weird sense too that things aren’t done. Like that grass we planted where the shed was out back—something has to spring up to cover what was there before. To close it out for good. So everybody knows we’re living with the gaps and trying to get over it.

  I stand up but bump the table, so the glasses clang and the dishes bang and a couple people look over. Now I’m standing for real, next to the empty throne, my hand on its back, looking down the gigantic table. Everybody is stopping their conversations. Brock sits up—they’re all sitting up. Straight, like they were waiting for some kind of closure. I look at Claudia and she nods.

  “Uh,” I say. “Okay.” Dead quiet. I do some quick math in my head. “Four hundred and some days ago, Misty came over to borrow some gas for her dad’s mower. It was the day we found out about my mom. That She’d been killed.” I land on Claudia again. She gives me this tiny smile.

  “About a month later, Misty got sick,” I say. Her parents look at each other. I see her dad reach over and grab Misty’s hand. “I didn’t remember that. And to be honest I didn’t really care.” That stings, bad. But it’s true. I needed to say it. “I was sort of lost in my own thing. Brock and Tommy could tell you about that. My dad and sister too. Probably everybody. Really, I was a pretty bad friend and brother. Basically I was a Real Big Jerk to most people.”

  My voice shakes a little, and I take a second to steady it.

  “It’s pretty cool that Misty’s birthday is a day after my mom’s. It’s really cool, actually. I think my mom would love to share Her party with somebody who is such a good friend to me. I think She would say, ‘That Misty is a little off. And she’s awesome.’ ”

  People start clapping and Misty gets up on her throne doing the Middle Ages bow with the really low head and wide hands. She waves me over to stand with her, but I shake my head, so she yells something at Brock and Tommy and they drag me over. Misty hauls them up too and now we’re all standing on this giant throne thing, holding on to each other so we don’t fall off as people take a million pictures. She raises her glass toward the empty throne at the far end and everybody looks down the table at it. The room goes sort of quiet.

  “Happy birthday, Mom,” I say.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I wrote this book because I love postapocalyptic stories. But other people already wrote a ton of good ones, so I had to dig elsewhere. What I found was actually two stories, both somewhat taken from my classroom.

  Twelve years teaching middle school has brought me a few Derricks and Mistys—kids who have lost a parent or survived a potentially fatal illness. I wanted to tell you about them. I wanted to write a story—perhaps not their specific one—where you might imagine their situation. Where you could feel what it might be like, as Derrick calls it, “to live with the gaps.” Where you could see their struggles and strengths and ability to go on despite having stared down the barrel of The End. I will tell you that they amaze me, these thirteen-year-old survivors, who shoulder unbelievably heavy loads. They teach us all about true suffering. They teach us all to live differently.

  But this is still a story, and therefore not meant to speak for survivors of parental loss or serious illness. As any clinical therapist will tell you, trauma impacts everyone differently. I am grateful to the mental health professionals who offered guidance on the story, specifically Liz Kornberg and Katie Hurley, as well as the therapists who have sat across from me on many a couch.

  I did a lot of pushups while writing this book. I also found myself stockpiling water in my basement because North Korea was threatening their EMP strike again, and I’d read a book about what that would do and I was totally freaked out. Like Derrick, I live with anxiety; once I considered stopping this project. But then my wife reminded me of all the cognitive behavioral therapy exercises I’d spent money to learn, and things got better. You should check those out, they’re really good. Also I prayed a lot, because God has a lot to say on the subject of worrying—notably, that he’s near to the brokenhearted and those trapped by worries. People like me. Maybe like you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A lot of incredible people made this book possible. My wife, Kristy, acts as the great balancer of this whole writing thing; more than once the themes and deadlines of this project turned me into a Real Jerk, and she offered grace instead of wrath—a skill I am still honing. My agent, Lauren Galit, deserves lots of credit for this book too. She’s that sort of agent who is really your first editor, and she stewarded this story the whole way. Enormous credit lies with my editor at Dial, Dana Chidiac, who both greenlit this project and then helped me age it down to make the story sing for my audience. Dana has this ability to ask the exact right question that doesn’t just diagnose a narrative problem, but leads to a solution. It’s fairly amazing, and my stories are better because of her guidance. And you must know about Regina Castillo. She has a PhD in catching minute errors during copyediting—she rules. I am also grateful to Lauri Hornik, el jefe in chief, for offering both insight to the story and a home for it at Dial, and all the staff who had a hand in Derrick and Misty’s story, including Nancy Mercado, Mina Chung, Tony Sahara, Kristin Boyle, Tabitha Dulla, Ashley Spruill, and Carmela Iaria and her team.

  I annoyed two medical experts pretty frequently: my sister-in-law, Helen Rominiecki, a transplant nurse, who provided meticulous detail on the kidney disease known as familial FSGS (focal segmental glomerulosclerosis) that Misty survived, and my friend Julia Pray, who worked as a nurse in the Pediatric ICU at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where Misty was treated. Likewise, I consulted two service members on military matters: my sister, Dr. Sarah Wilson (Major, USAF), and my friend Dr. Trevor Smith (Major, USAF). Both have been spared deployments, and thus shielded their families from the specific trauma that Derrick endured. Many other military families have not been so fortunate. They live in the gaps daily.

  Finally, I need to thank school guidance counselors everywhere, specifically my friend and colleague Jeff Klein, who answered my many guidance-related questions with spreadsheet precision. Jeff and his people walk with students under these heavy circumstances, supporting and seeking their ultimate good—all of which allows them to learn when they get to the classroom. As a teacher, but mainly as a dad, I am glad there are guidance counselors like Jeff. I pray that my kids never need him like Derrick did, but should they, it will be to their ultimate good.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Matthew Landis slays boredom wherever it lurks in his eighth-grade social studies classroom. He lives in Doylestown, PA, with his wife and four kids, some chickens, and a boxer that acts much like the forgotten eldest child.

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