by Katie Henry
And I’ve chosen.
Seven
I LOOK FOR Hannah at lunch on Monday, but no one’s seen her. I sit through my afternoon classes and seventh-period chemistry lab in a state of profound agony. Who cares about sines and cosines when the world is going to end? Who cares that my lab experiment bubbled over and oozed brown sludge onto the lab table? In a postapocalyptic society, no one’s going to ask about my junior-year grades.
I escape the classroom as soon as my chemistry teacher dismisses us, all but trampling a tiny freshman on my way out the G-building door. Please, I pray, please let Hannah still be here, please don’t make me wait another day to tell her.
I’m panting by the time I reach the Park, but my breath stops in my throat when I see Hannah’s tree with no one under it. She’s not there. No one’s there.
You missed her. You waited too long. She’ll never tell you what you need to know and the end of the world will come and you’ll die—
“Ellis!” someone shouts behind me. I spin back around, and there’s Hannah, standing by the front gates. I must have run right past her and not even noticed. I try to say “hi” back, but I can’t seem to say anything at all. And maybe Hannah has seen this moment, or maybe she can read the look on my face, because she grabs her backpack and walks over to me without another word.
And though I want to shout it the whole time she’s walking over, I wait until she closes the distance.
“I believe you,” I whisper.
“What?” she says. I don’t know if she can’t believe it, or simply couldn’t hear me.
“I believe you,” I say again, more firmly. As Dad would say, with conviction, a word that means determination but also prison sentences.
“You do?” she says, not sounding surprised, but somehow still relieved. “You do.”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she says on a breath out. “Okay.”
“So you’ll tell me now?” I ask. “You’ll tell me how it happens?”
Hannah opens her mouth, but then hesitates. She sticks her hands in her pockets, then takes them out. Suddenly, she’s speaking rapid-fire. “I don’t really know, I wish I could tell you, but I don’t really know, that’s why we need someone to interpret—they’re so confusing, the dreams are so vague and weird and I have them every night but it never gets any clearer.”
I put out my hands to stop her. “Okay,” I say. “Please breathe.” She takes a deep, audible breath in. “We’ll figure it out, we’ll . . .”
But I don’t know how to finish that sentence. I’ve done so much research into surviving disasters, surviving attacks, surviving all the ways the world could end. I have no idea how to untangle a prophecy. It didn’t seem like a useful skill.
She still looks like she’s having trouble catching her breath. “Let’s sit down,” I suggest, ushering her to the Little Theatre steps, a few feet away. No one’s going to bother us here. More important, no one’s going to overhear us here.
“Is there anything you do know? For certain?” I ask her as she twists her hands in her hoodie sleeves. “A date, a place?”
“Just . . . feelings,” she says.
“Feelings,” I repeat.
“I know how I feel, when it happens. I can remember that.”
“So, what do you feel?”
“Cold,” she says.
“Cold?”
“Because it’s snowing,” she explains.
“Where are we? When it happens.”
“Here,” she says.
I gape at her. “Here?”
“Not in the Park,” she clarifies. “But in Berkeley.”
It doesn’t snow in Berkeley, except maybe a couple flakes way up in the hills. It’s never enough to stick. I’m not prepared for a blizzard, or an Ice Age, or anything like that. I never thought I needed to be.
“What about inside?” I press on. “Like, what do you feel internally?” I pull one of Martha’s favorite lines from the back of my brain. “Can you name the feeling?”
She closes her eyes. “Confusion. Panic. Like someone’s ripping my heart out and I can’t stop them.”
I really hope that’s a simile. Murderous bands of cannibals shouldn’t show up until years into a post-doomsday society. Months, at least.
“What about your senses?” I say. She opens her eyes and frowns. “No, keep them closed.” She obeys. “You’ve only said what you feel. But there’s more to memory than that.”
Smell is the sense most closely connected to memory—I remember writing that in Kenny #11 or #12. We’ll start there. “Smell. What do you smell? Breathe it in.”
She breathes. “It’s like . . .” She hesitates. “It’s like my mom’s perfume.”
“Is she there?” I ask. “Is she with us?” Maybe our families come with us.
“I don’t think so,” Hannah says. “It’s like her old perfume, when I was little. She has a new one now, but it’s not that.”
“Do you remember what it was called?”
Hannah shakes her head. “It was in a green bottle. That’s all I remember.”
Okay, well, that was a bust. “What do you hear?”
“Wind.”
“What do you taste?”
“Salt.”
Somewhere near the ocean, somewhere that smells like perfume. I’ve got nothing. One last sense, one last shot. “What do you feel?” I ask. “Not inside, but . . . touch. What do you feel?”
She is still for a long moment. “Your hand, in mine. I feel you grabbing my hand, and holding on tight.”
That’s as comforting as it is terrifying. On the one hand, I won’t be alone when the world ends, and neither will Hannah. On the other hand, that means that I’ll be there, unprotected, on some sea cliff. It’s fated. Fate takes the uncertainty out of things, but it doesn’t take the fear.
“You’re sure?” I ask Hannah. “You’re sure I’m there?”
“It’s about the only thing I am sure of.”
That shouldn’t make me happy. It should worry me, that she’s not sure when the world is ending, or how it’s ending. It should completely freak me out that all she knows is I’ll be there. It shouldn’t make my heart swell. But it does.
“That’s why we need to find someone who can help us interpret,” she says. “Like I said before.”
I nod. “I remember.”
“I know you like our school library,” she says, “but what about the public one?”
“Which branch?” I ask, as though I haven’t made it to half the branches at some point.
She seems confused by the question. “Up the block.”
The Central branch. “All the time, I go there all the time.” I’m talking too fast, too eagerly. I don’t even know why she’s asking, but I’m desperate to be helpful all the same.
“Great,” she says, nodding to match my eagerness. “That’s great. I’ve got a lead that the guy we’re looking for—”
“Prophet Dan?”
“Yeah, Prophet Dan. I’ve got a lead that he hangs out there, sometimes. And since you know the place . . .” She trails off.
“Okay,” I say. “When do you want to check it out?”
She gets to her feet. “How about now?”
As we walk to the library, Hannah gives me the lowdown on Prophet Dan.
“Brown hair, brown beard, brown eyes,” she says. “Tan-ish skin. Five foot ten. He might be wearing a red buffalo plaid coat.”
“Buffalo plaid?”
“Red and black, checked.”
“It’s too hot for a coat, though,” I say. But then again, Hannah’s wearing a hoodie. I’ve never seen her without it on, now that I think about it.
“He’ll be wearing the coat,” she says. “It’s kind of a protection . . . thing.”
“Protection from what?” I ask, slowing down.
“Nothing real.” She looks at me out of the corner of her eye. “So does it matter?”
It suddenly occurs to me that this might not be the sa
fest plan in the world. “Are you . . .” I hesitate. “Are you sure he’ll be okay talking to us, if we find him? Because if he’s paranoid or something, maybe we should leave him alone.”
Hannah spins and grabs my arm. I stop. “We need him,” she insists. “He knows about this stuff, okay? He studied it at Cal, mysticism and religion and prophecies and everything. He’s good. He’s, like . . .” She pauses. “A legend.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
She tilts her head. “Yeah, I don’t think he exactly runs in your circles.”
Fair point.
“Look,” Hannah says, hands in front of her, like she’s worried I’ll bolt. “He won’t judge us. He won’t call our parents. And he’s not dangerous, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“How do you know that, though?” I ask.
She chews on the inside of her cheek. “We have friends in common.”
It’s not as much reassurance as I’d like, but it’s better than nothing. I start walking again. “Well, okay, I guess.”
Hannah heaves a sigh of relief. “Great. Good. How many floors is the library?”
“Six.”
“I guess you’ll have to check them all.”
“Not necessarily,” I say. “If he’s really big into mysticism and that kind of stuff, all those books are on the first floor.”
Hannah raises an eyebrow. “Did you memorize all the rooms in this library?”
“No,” I say, feeling heat rise on my cheeks, “just the Dewey Decimal System.”
“See,” she says with a smile, “this is how I knew I needed you.”
Well. That, and the apocalyptic nightmares.
“Wait,” I say, my mind jumping back to an earlier comment. “Did you say I’d have to check them all?”
“No, not if you know which floor.”
I slow down, because we’re just about to reach the library. “Are you not coming in with me?”
She stops in her tracks. “Oh, shit,” she whispers, looking past me. I follow her gaze to the benches in front of the library. Right by the flower planters are Sam, Theo, and Tal.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“Don’t tell them who we’re looking for,” she says, her eyes still on the boys.
“Maybe they could help,” I suggest.
She shakes her head. “Nope.”
“But—”
Just then, Sam turns his head and spots us. He waves.
“We’ll just hang out for a minute,” Hannah says to me as she waves back. “I’ll keep watch on the door. Just in case.”
I open my mouth to ask fourteen different questions—Why don’t you want your friends to help? Don’t you want your friends to know what you do? Don’t you want to protect them, don’t you—but Hannah’s already walking over. So I just sigh and follow.
“I think I bombed our pop quiz in chemistry,” Theo’s telling Sam as Hannah and I reach them.
“The last time you said that, you got a B,” Sam reminds him.
“There was a dead spider in the corner this time. It was distracting.” Theo shudders.
“If it makes you feel better,” Sam says, “it might not have been dead. It might just have been a shed exoskeleton, which means it’s still alive, only now it’s bigger.”
“Why,” Theo says, with a full-body recoil, “would that make me feel better?”
“Why do you only know the grossest things about animals?” Tal asks Sam, making room for Hannah and me on the flower planter. I sit next to Hannah, careful not to block her view of the library doors.
“Spiders aren’t animals.”
Tal chooses to ignore this. He turns to Hannah. “Where were you two going?”
“We were looking for you,” Hannah says with such cool nonchalance I almost forget it’s fake.
Tal looks skeptical. He nods over at me. “Then why does she look so uncomfortable?”
“You can have that effect on people, Tal,” Sam says. Tal throws a leaf at him. Hannah laughs.
And then I think—maybe Hannah hasn’t told them because the second she did, moments like this would disappear. Maybe Hannah wants more time, just a little bit more time, to pretend like everything is normal. I can understand that.
“You guys want to play Five-Word Books?” Sam asks. “It’s more fun with more people, anyway.”
“Sure, I’m game,” Theo says.
“What’s Five-Word Books?” I ask.
“Just what it sounds like,” Sam says. “Without using the title, the author, or any character names, describe a book in five words and the rest of us see if we can get it.”
“We play it at Quiz Bowl practice,” Theo says. “But Ms. Jacobs never lets us swear or make sex jokes, which takes all the fun out of it. I’ll start. Two horny teens ruin everything.”
“Romeo and Juliet,” Tal says. “One horny teen hates phonies.”
“The Catcher in the Rye. Mass-murdering teen in love triangle.”
“That was six words,” Theo says to Sam.
“‘Mass-murdering’ is hyphenated.”
“Fine. The Hunger Games.”
“Orphan boy, obvious Jesus allegory?” Theo says.
“Oliver Twist?” Sam guesses.
“I was thinking Harry Potter,” Theo says. “But yeah, Dickens did love angelic orphans.”
“And corpses,” I add.
“What?” Theo asks.
“Did you say corpses?” Hannah asks.
“Yes,” I say. “He liked to visit the Paris morgue and stare at them. The corpses. He also went to Italy and asked—asked—to see an execution by guillotine and study the headless body. He liked looking at corpses so much that one time, he went to the morgue on Christmas.”
“Well, damn,” Sam says.
“If A Christmas Carol had ended like that, I might’ve liked it better,” Tal says.
“What, with Tiny Tim getting embalmed?” Theo says.
“‘What’s today, Mr. Scrooge?’” Tal says in an awful British accent. “‘Why, it’s Christmas Day, sir, and the morgue is open for tours!’”
“Too dark, you guys, too dark,” Hannah says. And this coming from a girl who regularly dreams about the apocalypse.
Thinking about the apocalypse makes me remember why we’re actually here. Hannah said she’d keep an eye on the door, but it can’t hurt if I do too. I twist around to see the entrance. Nothing. Ten seconds later, I do it again, even though I know it’s excessive.
“You looking for something?” Tal asks me, flicking his eyes to the library doors and back.
“Um,” I say.
“Ellis wanted to look for a book,” Hannah cuts in smoothly. She nudges me with her foot. “It’s cool. Go ahead. We won’t leave or anything.”
“I don’t want to go alone,” I say through gritted teeth. “You didn’t tell me I’d have to . . .” I trail off at the look on Hannah’s face. Just for a second, it’s gone from cool and composed to something panicked and pleading. It says, help. Just a flicker of real need. But I see it.
No one’s ever needed my help before. It’s always been the other way around. I get up.
Inside, I pass by the low-cost bookstore by the front entrance—they sell books for dimes and dollars, but still, I’m guessing Prophet Dan uses the library as a place to rest, not just a place to read. I scan the checkout line briefly, but no luck.
“What’s it called?” says a voice behind me.
When I turn around, Tal’s standing there. I don’t understand why he’s here. He looks like he might not understand, either.
“Uh,” I say.
“Your book,” he clarifies. “The one you’re looking for.”
“That’s okay, I don’t need help.”
“I’m sure you don’t.” He sticks his hands in his pockets. “But you said you didn’t want to go alone.”
“Oh.” It seems wrong to default to suspicion. I try not to. “Okay.”
He nods at the reference computers. “You need to
look it up?”
“No, I’ll . . . figure it out.”
I lead Tal on a quick sweep of the first floor, and we end up in the stacks at the back, housing “Nonfiction 000-899,” Computer Science all the way through Austronesian & Other Literatures.
I run one hand along the shelves as we walk through the aisles, stealing as many glances as I can at the reading tables. I don’t see anyone matching Prophet Dan’s description. Next to me, Tal paws through the Astronomy section. He holds up a book called The Seven Planets.
“I wonder if they cut the pages about Pluto out of this. Since it got demoted from planet status.”
“Do you know where that word comes from? ‘Planet’?” It’s got such a good etymology I can’t help myself. “Earlier astronomers noticed that some stars in the sky weren’t fixed. They moved around. So they called them asteres planetai. ‘Wandering stars.’”
“All stars are wandering.” I must look confused, because he adds, “They only look fixed, to us. When we think we’re seeing a star, we’re really seeing where it was thousands of years ago. That’s how fast they’re traveling, and how much light they leave behind.” And then I must look surprised, because he ducks his head and mumbles, “Whatever, I like stars.”
Stars. Who would have guessed. It’s so . . . wholesome.
“Huh,” I say. “Theo’s into nineteenth-century literature. Sam knows some terrible things about spiders. And you like stars.”
“I do.”
“You’re just full of surprises.” And then, in case it wasn’t clear: “Not bad ones. Good ones.”
“Thanks,” Tal says, returning the book. “Next time you see my stepdad at church, you should tell him that. He’ll be horrified.”
My shoulders drop, remembering what Em told me. I can’t imagine how hard that must be. My parents might not be thrilled with my general personality, but they’d never, ever treat me like that. No matter who I kissed at summer camp.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He shrugs it off. “I try not to take it personally. I’m a bad influence on Caroline and Matt? He drinks, like, eight Red Bulls a day and wears tube socks with shorts. But sure, the things I do are godless and unnatural.”
“Is that why you left the church?” I ask. I drop my voice. “Because you’re gay?”
