Let's Call It a Doomsday

by Katie Henry

  “Why did you want to know?”

  “I’ve seen you before,” she says, though I’m not sure that answers my question.

  “Where? Did we have class together?” I ask. “Like last year or something?”

  “No,” she says. She nods at the dictionary, still flipped open to kestrel. “What are you reading?”

  “A dictionary.”

  “You’re reading the dictionary?”

  “An etymology dictionary,” I clarify. Like that makes it better.

  “Whose class is that for?” she asks.

  “Oh, no, it’s for . . . fun.”

  “Oh. Okay. Cool,” she says, so now I know she is Hannah, a junior and a liar. Her eyes move to my half-eaten sandwich. “Do you eat lunch in here?”

  I nod.

  “Every day?”

  I nod, slower.

  She sits back on her hands. “You should eat lunch with us.”

  “Who’s ‘us’?”

  She ignores the question. “We hang out in the park. During lunch and usually after school, too. We meet under the tree across from the Little Theatre. Look for knitting needles.”

  I’m overwhelmed by the number of things that don’t make sense here. I’ll start with the most basic.

  “We haven’t had class together, I didn’t even know your name, but you want me to eat lunch with your friends?”

  “We should be friends,” she says. “We’re supposed to be friends.”

  “Supposed to—I don’t—why?”

  She considers this. “I have a couple working theories.”

  I should leave. I should get up and walk away from this weird girl with her cryptic riddles who invaded my secret spot. But I don’t get up. It’s my secret spot, after all. Why should I leave?

  “That’s really nice of you,” I say, and focus back at my book, “but I like eating lunch here.”

  She stirs beside me. “It doesn’t have to be lunch. You could come after school.”

  I stare so hard at the words on the page they blur. “I have chemistry lab.”

  “We could get coffee.”

  “I can’t drink coffee—look.” I close the book. I’ve never had someone work this hard to hang out with me. “You don’t want to be friends with me.”

  She wrinkles her nose. “Yeah, I do.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m not fun, okay? To hang out with. I’m . . . the opposite of fun.”

  “Boring?”

  “Boring is the opposite of interesting, not fun, the word ‘fun’ implies—” I shut my eyes. “Do you see what I mean? Please save yourself. Save us both.”

  I keep my eyes closed for a long moment. When I open them, I expect to see that Hannah’s left, like any normal person would. But Hannah hasn’t moved from her spot on the carpet.

  “Why do you see Martha?” she asks.

  My mouth drops. “You’re not supposed to ask that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s . . . private.”

  “What if I guessed?” she suggests.

  “Um,” I say, which she somehow interprets as “Sure, go ahead.”

  She rests her chin on one hand. “Are you secretly convinced your entire body is made of glass?”

  “No, I’m not—how is that your first guess?”

  “Do you suffer from dancing mania?”

  “I don’t know that means.”

  “Clinical lycanthropy?”

  “Oh my gosh, no, I have anxiety. I see Martha for anxiety.”

  “Oh.” She looks disappointed. “That’s not so bad. Everyone has anxiety, right?”

  I think that’s supposed to make me feel better, but it only makes my temper flare. “No,” I snap. “Everyone feels anxious. Sometimes. About normal things, about tests, or getting into college, or—” I swallow. “I’m anxious about everything.”

  “Not everything,” she says. “I’m sure not every single thing.”

  “I worry that people are talking about me, I worry that people hate me, I worry that the guy sitting next to me on the bus is a kidnapper or a murderer or a Scientologist. I worry that I talk to my lab partner in chemistry too much, I worry I talk to him too little. I’m worried that I’ll fail chemistry and every other class because I’m bad at school, and of course I am, I’m bad at everything, so yeah, I do worry about everything—every single little thing.”

  I suck in a deep breath. Hannah folds her hands in her lap. “That,” she says, “must really suck.”

  A laugh bursts out from somewhere near my rapidly beating heart. “It’s not great.” I sigh. “I don’t mean to make it seem . . . it’s not just silly stuff like that. I worry about big stuff, too. Terrorist attacks, the apocalypse, MRSA—”

  “What?”

  “Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, it’s this bacterium that doesn’t respond to most antibiotics.”

  “No, I know what—” She shakes her head. “The apocalypse? You’re scared of the apocalypse?”

  “Yeah.” She closes her mouth, looking at me intently, purposefully. She looks like someone trying to do multivariable calculus in their head. Or me trying to do math at all.

  “Not the Four Horsemen, specifically.” She only looks more confused. “I mean, not necessarily a biblical apocalypse, though it could be, but it could also be a flood, or an asteroid, or a human-created black hole. I worry about all the ways it could happen.”

  “The end of the world?”

  “Yeah. That’s my biggest one, probably. Doomsday, the apocalypse, the end of the world. That’s what I worry about most.”

  She nods once, then again. “The end of the world. That’s awesome.”

  It’s not awesome. It is not awesome to dream about tsunamis and wake up in a panic. It is not awesome to sweat through your shirt at airport security because there might be a bomb by the baggage carousel. It is not awesome to imagine your skin peeling off in the wake of a nuclear attack.

  I try to say all these things, but I’m so flustered that it comes out more like, “Bflugh.”

  Hannah moves closer to me. “Ellis. You and I were—” She hesitates. When she speaks again, each word is deliberate, like she’s choosing them carefully. “We were meant to meet.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

  She doesn’t hesitate this time. “We were meant to meet. It’s fate.”

  Fate, from the Latin fata, the neuter-plural of fatum. Fate, which broken down literally means a thing spoken by the gods. Fate, a word that people use in both wedding announcements and obituaries.

  “Fate?” I whisper. She nods, but I can’t tell which kind of fate she means.

  The bell rings, sudden and jarring. Hannah jumps up. She tightens her backpack straps, ready to go. The spell’s been broken.

  “I meant what I said. You should hang out with us,” Hannah says, hand on the edge of the Human Anthropology bookshelf, two steps away from turning the corner and out of my view. “You remember where?”

  “The park, a tree,” I say. “But—wait—”

  “Look for knitting needles,” she says, interrupting smoothly. “And dead writer ladies. That’s how you’ll know which tree.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense!” I say, as if one single part of this interaction has made sense. “A dead writer—?”

  “Dead writer ladies,” she clarifies.

  “Let’s go, everyone.” I hear shoes scuffing the floor and Rhonda the Lunch Librarian shooing kids out, from what seems like a million miles away.

  Hannah looks over her shoulder. “I’ll see you soon, Ellis.” She moves to slip around the corner.

  “You didn’t answer my question!” I yell after her, scrambling to gather my things.

  “Which one?” she says.

  Not a bad point, since she barely answered any. “You said we were meant to meet, that it was—fate?”

  She takes her time answering. “You’re afraid of the end of the world.”

  Is that all she can do, repeat what I
already know? I throw down my bag in frustration. “Yes. I am. So what?”

  Hannah takes a step toward me. She leans down, and for the first time since she came into the library, she speaks in a whisper.

  “So I know how it’s going to happen.”

  Four

  MARTHA SWITCHES MY appointment day. She tells Mom it’s because she’s had to rearrange her Monday schedule for personal reasons, but I know it’s really because she doesn’t want me running into Hannah again. Not that it would make a difference at this point. Not that I’ll tell her that.

  I was raised to be honest. Since I was a toddler in the church nursery, someone’s always been telling me to “Choose the Right,” which makes it seem so obvious. What’s right should be clear. Martha might not know Hannah thinks the end of the world is coming. Knows. Hannah is Martha’s client, and Martha deserves to know that kind of thing about someone she’s trying to help. It would be right to tell her.

  But when I sit down on Martha’s couch on Tuesday, and she asks me how my week’s been, I enter a morally ambiguous fugue state. I hear myself say, “Fine.”

  “The first couple weeks of school can be stressful.”

  “It’s been okay,” I say.

  She knows, she knows you’re a lying liar who lies. Bail. Bail on this lie. Bail on this therapy session. Set the couch on fire as a distraction.

  “I think you can give me more than okay,” she says gently.

  She knows you’ve been stalked by a doomsday prophet. She knows you want to talk to Hannah again. Immolate this polyester blend sofa and run.

  But I’m scared of fire, so I decide on something less destructive but still evasive. “I did the assignment you gave me. On eschatology.”

  “On—what?”

  “Eschatology. The study of things at the . . . end. End of life, end of eras, end of the world. It’s a good word, right? I’d never heard it before.”

  “It’s a great word,” she says. “So what did you discover?”

  “It’s weird,” I admit, “reading all these accounts of people who are so sure the end of the world is coming—and knowing it won’t. Because it hasn’t.”

  “But they believed it, very strongly,” she says. “How does that make you feel, when you read about these . . . true believers, you might call them?”

  She wants you to call them stupid, she wants you to call them gullible. Hannah knows you’re stupid and gullible, that’s why she found you in the library. It’s a joke, a big practical joke. If you even went to find Hannah in the park, she wouldn’t be there. It’s been a week. She’s probably forgotten about you.

  I look away. “The hoaxes are actually more interesting.”

  Martha tilts her head. “The hoaxes?”

  “People who knew the world wasn’t ending but wanted other people to believe it was.”

  “Can you give me an example?”

  “Okay.” I pull out Kenny #14 and flip through, looking for the page. “So in 1806, there was this woman named Mary Bateman. She lived near Leeds, in England, and everyone in the area knew her as a—well, as a witch, but a good one. Someone who could cure curses. No one wanted to burn her or anything. But then she started telling people that the end of the world was coming. Because of her chicken.”

  “Her chicken?”

  “Its eggs. Her hen started laying these eggs and they all said ‘Christ is coming’ on them.”

  Martha laughs, and then I do, too. Because it is ridiculous, hearing it out loud.

  “How did her neighbors react, when she told them?” Martha says.

  “Oh, they freaked out. People started coming from miles around and paid money for a glimpse of the prophet hen laying its miracle eggs. Everyone started getting real religious. But then, one day, two visitors dropped by the farmhouse. Early in the morning. And they saw Mary Bateman writing on a fresh egg and stuffing it back inside the hen.”

  Martha leans forward. “Really?”

  “Really. It was all an elaborate hoax.” I pause. “And also animal abuse.”

  “So what happened to all those people? The ones who had believed Mary?”

  “I don’t know. No one wrote about them. Just Mary.”

  “But what do you think?” she presses. “Do you think they were relieved?”

  I shrug.

  “Well,” Martha says, “they were scared the world was ending. And now they knew it wouldn’t. I’d be relieved.”

  I shake my head. “They only knew this wasn’t how the world was ending. I think . . .” I pick at the couch threads. “I think maybe they were more relieved before. When they thought they knew for sure. Maybe they wanted to know, even if it was bad.”

  “That’s important to you, having as much information as you can,” Martha says.

  “You can’t do anything unless you have all the facts. You can’t make choices.” No, that’s not exactly right. “You can’t make the best choice.”

  “What about the choices the townspeople made?” Martha asks. “Do you think they made the best choices?”

  Not the people who paid money to see fake prophetic eggs. Why would a woman who believed the apocalypse was imminent want money? What would she do with money, during Armageddon? They should have seen they were being played. But—

  “The two men,” I say. “They made the best choice, those two men who caught her in the lie. They didn’t go along with everyone else, they didn’t believe or disbelieve anything based on what other people told them to. They went and looked for themselves.”

  “So when you’re looking for answers,” Martha asks, “what do you think your next step will be?”

  Hannah believes the world is ending. Maybe she’s Mary Bateman in twenty-first-century clothes, a hoaxer waiting to shake me down for money. Or maybe she’s a true believer, like the Leeds townspeople who desperately cleansed their souls. And maybe she’s wrong.

  But maybe she isn’t.

  “Ellis?” Martha prompts. “What will you do?”

  I look at Martha straight on. “I’ll do exactly what they did,” I say. “I’ll investigate.”

  My mom has this saying: “Avoid the appearance of evil.”

  She didn’t make it up, it’s a church thing. Basically, it means you should be careful about where you find yourself. It’s not enough just to technically avoid breaking the rules; you shouldn’t even look like you might be breaking them. Like my cousin Sarah, who won’t buy hot chocolate from Starbucks because people might think she was drinking coffee. My mom rolled her eyes when Sarah told her that, but I think she’d feel differently about Civic Center Park.

  Everyone at school just calls it “the Park.” During lunch and after school, it transforms from a public park into a bacchanalian fun-fest of drugs, cigarettes, and the occasional bottle of something clear and very alcoholic on special occasions like St. Patrick’s Day. Or so I’ve heard.

  At the edge of the park, the corner closest to my bus stop, I scan the groups of kids on the grass, looking for Hannah.

  Everyone’s looking at you. Everyone sees you’re alone. Everyone’s looking at you and if they aren’t looking at you it’s because they’re embarrassed for you and how alone you are.

  She’s nowhere to be seen, and neither are knitting needles or dead literary figures. For a second, I lock eyes with Paloma from English class, lounging with the rest of the field hockey girls, their sticks tossed in a pile behind them. She smiles at me, and I make myself smile back, closemouthed, before looking down at the ground.

  Don’t stare at her. Why were you staring at her?

  I squeeze my eyes shut. I have to make a choice, either way. The longer I stand here at the edge, the more people are going to stare at me, and the worse I’ll feel. Hannah mentioned being close to the Little Theatre, I think, which is almost one block south, along the park. I’m not going to happen upon her by chance. I’ll have to look for her. I’ll have to want to find her. With the tips of my shoes on the grass and the rest of me still on the concrete sidew
alk, I wonder if I’m the person who walks forward or walks away.

  I walk forward, shoes squishing into damp grass, past kids I know and kids I’ve never seen before, until I’m standing with the Little Theatre behind me and a particularly sturdy tree in front of me. There are three boys under it, none of whom, obviously, are Hannah.

  “I’m not saying you’re wrong, Theo, but—no, you know what, you are wrong,” says a boy with sandy hair who I half recognize. Sam. He sat in front of me in Latin freshman year and spent the whole time drawing party hats and astronaut costumes on the portraits of Roman emperors in our textbook.

  “You are wrong like people who recline their airplane seats,” Sam says to the lanky kid next to him. “You are wrong like pineapple on pizza.”

  The boy—Theo, I guess—looks unmoved. “I don’t know why you think ad hominem tactics will convince me.”

  “I don’t know why you think I know what that means,” Sam says.

  “It means you’re attacking Theo, not his argument,” says the third boy, tan and curly haired and oddly familiar, though I don’t think we’ve had a class together. “You might know if you hadn’t skipped AP Language and Composition today.”

  Sam throws up his hands. “You skipped with me!”

  “Yeah, but I did the reading.”

  From behind him, Theo pulls out a periwinkle ball of yarn and two shiny knitting needles.

  Wait. Knitting needles?

  Just like Hannah said. Maybe she’s around here after all. I take a couple of steps closer to the tree and pull out my phone, pretending to text someone.

  “Ms. Heaney’s having after-school tutoring today. You should go,” Theo says. “Maybe she could help you construct a better argument than ‘If you don’t jizz yourself over Jane Austen, you might as well be an actual monster.’”

  “She’s a genius,” Sam says. “The way she writes dialogue. Revolutionary.”

  “It’s just people being dicks to one another. But they’re British, which makes it culture, I guess.”

  “You don’t give her enough credit,” Sam says. “So she’s not all serious and dark and borderline sanctimonious like the Victorian princess of your heart, George Eliot.”

  “Now, she was a genius,” Theo says.