by Katie Henry
“Can you spot me, like, fifty cents for a SpongeJeff Yellowpants Popsicle?” Theo asks Sam, digging change out of his pocket.
“SpongeJeff?” I ask.
“They’re not officially licensed, so they’ve got weird names,” Theo says. “But FYI, Speedy the Tree Shrew tastes like Children’s Benadryl.” Sam tosses Theo a couple of coins and they both get to their feet.
Sam spreads his arms wide. “Martin, my man!” he shouts across the park as he and Theo leave. “Tell me you’ve still got Patricio the Plumber left!”
As soon as they’re out of earshot, I turn to Tal and say what I’ve been wanting to tell him all afternoon.
“Hannah told me,” I say. “You don’t have to keep that secret for her anymore. She told me who we’ve really been looking for.” He looks surprised, but doesn’t speak. I guess I have to say the exact words. “Her brother.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I wanted to tell you from the second you said ‘Prophet Dan’ at the library. But it wasn’t mine to tell.”
Right here, right now, I want to tell him about the end of the world. Is that mine to tell? Or is that Hannah’s, too? Sometimes it feels like she’s the sun, and we’re all just orbiting around her.
“I can’t make your choices for you,” Tal says, eyes on the dirt. “I can’t stop you from helping her look. But I can tell you, it’s not doing her any favors.”
“He’s her brother.”
“And he’s got bigger problems than she can handle. This isn’t on her to fix. The longer and harder she tries, the worse it is.” He shakes his head. “It took me and Sam and Theo a long time to figure that out. Our help wasn’t help at all.”
The sun’s going to explode, one day. In five billion years, no matter what happens in December, the sun will burn itself out. There isn’t a thing anyone can do to stop it.
“She . . .” I hesitate, then try again. “She didn’t trust me enough. To tell me the truth from the start.”
“It took her months to tell us,” Tal says. “It’s not a trust thing, it’s a Hannah thing. From what she’s said, it’s practically a Marks family tradition to shut your friends out while you’re dying inside.”
They don’t like being in the house. That’s what Hannah said, about her parents. They’re dealing with Danny’s disappearance just as badly as Hannah is. She’s obsessing over it. They’re pretending it isn’t happening.
“It’s more than that,” I say. “She thought I’d judge her.”
“Honestly?” Tal wrinkles his nose, looking a little guilty. “I might have thought that, too.”
“Wow. Thank you.”
“I would have been wrong! Clearly, she was wrong. You’re a lot less uptight than you first appear.”
“Again. Thank you.”
“Oh God, that’s not what I meant.” Tal holds out his hands. “I’m sorry, okay? Really. I am sorry on both our behalves for wrongly judging your judgy-ness . . .” He stops, noticing the grin creeping across my face. He rests his chin in his palm. “Oh, are you having a good time, watching me grovel?”
Maybe a little. I smile. “Sometimes a girl just loves hearing a good apology, what do you want from me?”
Tal goes still. He stares at the grass for a moment. “What do you want?”
“It’s a figure of speech.”
“I know. But—” He leans forward. “What do you want? More than anything else?”
“What everyone wants. To survive.”
He shakes his head. “No, Ellis. What do you want?”
“Survival is a want.”
“Survival is an instinct,” Tal counters. “Animals survive, bugs survive, bacteria survive. What are you surviving for? What’s going to make it matter that you’re still alive?”
What’s the point of wanting things, when so many are sinful, or impossible, or both? What’s the point of wanting things you can’t have?
“What do you want?” I ask.
“I want—” He leans back on his hands. “I want to meet my dad’s family, in Brazil. I want to get to know them. I want to make sure my half siblings know me, like really know me, even though I don’t live with them and who knows what their dad says when I’m not around. I want my mom to stop worrying about me.”
Me too, I think. Tal takes a breath.
“I want to go to college in a place with actual seasons. I don’t know what I want to study there, and I want people to stop asking that like I should know already. And maybe this is petty,” he acknowledges, “but I want to be fucking happy. I want to be the kind of happy that’s two giant middle fingers at every person who told me I’d never be, unless my life was exactly like theirs. That’s what I want.”
What do I want? Do I want to move closer to him? Or do I want to run away? Could I want opposite things at the same time?
“Is that . . .” I dig my fingers into the dirt, as if that will keep me planted. “Is that all you want?”
“Is that not enough?” he asks with a laugh.
“Yes,” I say. “But . . . is that all you want?”
Tal swallows audibly. “No.”
He pushes himself off his hands and leans forward. There’s an inch of space between us, and less air. Or maybe just I’m holding my breath.
“Survive for something,” Tal says, low and urgent. “Want something, Ellis. Want something.”
We stare at each other for a moment that feels like eons. Tal reaches out for me, hesitant, like you’d do with a skittish cat. I scramble to my feet, all awkward limbs and confusion and a thrum of something warm and terrifying fluttering under my ribs.
“I’m sorry, I—” The feeling beats quicker, loud in its silence, and drowns out whatever lie my brain could think up. “I have to go.”
As I walk away, I grasp for a word, a name for the feeling in my chest. I come up empty.
I wonder if there are some things even the dictionary can’t define.
Nineteen
THAT NEXT MONDAY, Hannah finds me in the courtyard before first period.
“I’ve got something to show you,” she says. I wait for her to pull something from her pocket, or out of her backpack, but she stands there, unmoving.
“Where is it?” I glance around, but there’s nothing behind her, either.
“The City.”
Berkeley is a city, Oakland is a city, even Piedmont is technically a city. But there is only one City. “San Francisco?”
“Yep.”
“What is it?”
“It’s not a thing,” she says. “More like an experience.”
I would follow Hannah into the depths of hell—I probably will end up following her there—but sometimes her vagueness is truly irritating. “I can’t go after school. It’s family home evening.”
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s go now.”
“But . . .” I look back toward the C-building, where first-period chemistry is waiting for me. “We have school.”
She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I know. We’ll skip.”
My parents have never explicitly told me I wasn’t allowed to skip school, but I think it was implied.
“We’ll be back by sixth period,” Hannah promises.
“And when my parents get the absence email?”
“It’ll say you missed one or more periods. You’ll tell them you had a sub in history. They must have messed up the attendance sheet.”
“Does that work?”
“It’ll work once, for sure.”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you ever skipped before?” she asks. I shake my head. “Don’t you think you should have the experience once in your life?”
Skipping class: part of a complete and balanced high school experience. Like house parties with red cups. Or making improbable friends in Saturday detention. I’m not likely to be invited to any parties before the end of the world, and my school doesn’t even have regular detention, so skipping class it is.
“Okay,” I say, and Hannah’s face blooms
into a smile. “Lead the way.”
“Uh, you don’t know where the front gate is?”
My eyes go wide. “We can’t go out the front!” I say, but she’s already walking toward the gate. I scramble to catch up. “Someone will stop us!”
She throws a glance back at me, then skids to a halt. “They will if you look like that.”
I look down at my outfit. It’s jeans and a coat. Not all that suspicious.
“The way you’re standing,” Hannah says with a shake of her head. “You look guilty. You look like you’re asking to get caught.”
I shrug at her helplessly.
“Walk like you’ve got somewhere to be,” Hannah says. “Head high, eyes ahead, stand up straight.”
I cringe at that last one. Stand up straight. Hannah’s not looking down at me disapprovingly or prodding my spine as she says it, but I hear my mom anyway. I always thought she insisted on perfect posture because she wanted us to look graceful and happy, so everyone else would see us that way. I’d never considered it could be useful to me and me alone. I’d never considered that in her own strange way, she might have been trying to show me something. Gift me something.
I touch my fingertips to my hair, to my shoulders, to my waist, then let them fall to my sides. My spine straightens. Not like a cord being yanked, but like a sail being unfurled. I draw my chin up and look Hannah in the eye.
She smiles. “Perfect.”
We walk across the courtyard, past the administration building, and out the open front gate.
No one stops us.
Our BART train is crowded, so Hannah and I hang on to the straps. This is another thing I like about being tall—I don’t have to stand on my toes to reach them, like Hannah does. When the train pulls into Embarcadero, the first stop in San Francisco, I look to Hannah for guidance. She shakes her head and snags two newly empty seats.
“How far are we going?” I ask.
Hannah looks out the window, into the darkness of the tunnel. “I was thinking Colma.”
“That’s what you wanted to show me? The giant cemetery city where the dead outnumber the living?”
“Where the dead outnumber the living,” Hannah repeats. “You can be so dramatic.”
“We’re not really going that far, are we?”
“I was kidding about Colma, but we are going far. First Golden Gate Park. Then the Outer Richmond.”
That’s practically in the Pacific Ocean. “What for?”
“It’s a surprise.”
I fold my arms. “If I’m going all that way, you have to do something for me.”
“Name it.”
“Missionary work.”
She looks pained. “Come on.”
“We’ll be in Golden Gate Park anyway. It’s a perfect opportunity.” Hannah wrinkles her nose, but I’m not backing down. I hold out my hand. “That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
She rolls her eyes, but shakes my hand.
Golden Gate Park should be the perfect environment for some light doomsday preaching. This is San Francisco, and we passed two other street preachers on our way here. At least we’re not telling anyone they’re hell-bound, like the man in the cowboy hat by the BART station was. At least we’re not telling people their brains have already been infected by alien invaders, like the guy at the entrance to the park was, showing off the tinfoil on the inside of his winter coat. Ours is a friendlier doomsday. Peace, love, and armageddon. What could be better?
But the tech bros lounging on a fleece blanket and eating burritos just laugh. “Like the zombie apocalypse?” says the one wearing a Patagonia fleece. “I could do that. I’m hella good at Overwatch.”
“Dude, the government would just bomb them,” says his friend in the same Patagonia fleece, just a different color.
“They’d already be dead, man. They don’t care if they get radiation, you’d just end up with something that could eat your brains and give you leukemia.”
“I’ll tell you what’s a sign of the apocalypse,” says an elderly man playing chess with an even more elderly friend. “That new tower they just built downtown. A thousand feet tall. Ugly as sin.”
“They said it’s the tallest piece of public art in the world,” the other man says.
“Public art? Carl, it looks like a damn dildo.”
“Well, so does the Washington Monument, Bob.”
While I’m contemplating just how many phallic-shaped buildings there are, Hannah, who hasn’t said a word so far, suddenly huffs and stomps away. I race after her, leaving the two old men in a heated, dildo-centric argument.
“What is your problem?” I say when I catch up to Hannah. She’s been distracted since the moment we got here, eyes darting around, not even bothering to engage with our street contacts.
She keeps walking, hands jammed deep in her coat pockets. “I said I didn’t want to do this.”
“You didn’t, technically.”
“As if you couldn’t tell.”
I’m not the prophet, here. I’m not a mind reader, either. “Hannah, wait.”
“What was the point?” she mutters, walking faster. “What was the point of that?”
“People have a right to know,” I say. “We have a duty to tell them, to warn them—”
She spins around. “Why?”
I step back. “What do you mean why?”
“The world will end,” she says, steely and sharp. “Whether people know about it or not, whether we tell them or not, it’s going to happen and there’s not a thing they can do to stop it.”
“They could be prepared.”
“Prepared,” she says scornfully. “God, you love that word. It’s like your fucking teddy bear.”
Heat creeps onto my face and the back of my neck. “Don’t.”
“You can’t protect yourself against everything. Sometimes terrible shit just happens and there’s nothing you can do.”
“Great advice,” I snap back. “Why don’t you take it?”
She throws up her hands. “What?”
“You gave away everything you owned.” She takes a step back. “You gave up your phone, and haircuts, and a normal life. You made yourself a sixteen-year-old hermit, and why? Because you’ve made some cosmic bargain with the universe? Because you think it’ll bring him back?” I close the gap between us. “Hannah. It won’t.”
She turns away from me. I’m instantly hit with a wave of guilt. I didn’t need to say those things. It didn’t help, even if it was true.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and touch her shoulder.
“What do you want?” she mutters, shrugging me off.
“Same thing as everybody,” I say, trying for a weak joke. “Basic survival.”
Hannah shakes her head. “Survive for what?”
I pause, thinking of Tal. He told me to survive for something. Hannah’s using the same words, but she’s not asking what I’ll survive for. She’s asking, why bother?
“Hannah,” I whisper, but then don’t know what else to say.
“So what if the world ends?” she says, quieter, calmer. “Not like it’s a great world, anyway. It’s mean, and cold, and so unfair that sometimes I can’t believe it’s lasted this long.”
Her shoulders are quivering. So is her mouth. I know, without asking, that she’s thinking of her brother. Alone, and in pain, and likely in danger. She’s thinking of herself, alone and in pain, too, and powerless to help him. She’s right. It is unfair. That word didn’t always mean “inequitable.” In the Old English, unfægr; it meant something ugly. Deformed. Hideous. And the world is unfair like that too. It can be so hard to see any beauty in it.
“I know,” I tell her. “I know. But it’s the only world we’ve got.”
She nods, wiping the back of her hand across her nose. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“That was so shitty, I’m sorry.”
“I shouldn’t have made you do that,” I say. “You didn’t want to. I’m sorry, too.�
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Hannah scans the park. “We can go home, if you want,” she says, every word brittle. “He isn’t here.”
Oh. That’s why we’re in this park. I don’t know how it took me so long to notice.
“Did someone see him?” I ask. “Did someone call you?”
“He’s been here before, and it’s the one place I hadn’t looked in a while, so I thought—” She focuses her gaze on the wet grass. “No. No one’s seen him in weeks.”
“Not even Chris?”
She shakes her head. “It’s never been this long before.”
Hannah doesn’t have to say it out loud for me to understand. Her brother has really and truly vanished. That word comes from a Latin root, evanescere. It means “to pass away,” that polite way to say death. That polite way to speak something unspeakable.
“I’m so sorry, Hannah. I’m so sorry.”
She keeps her eyes trained on the grass. We have to get out of this park. She’ll only see him everywhere. I grasp her forearm lightly and take a step forward, a step west.
“Where are we going?” she asks, but doesn’t dig in her heels.
“You tell me,” I say. “Where are we going, Hannah?”
I’ve never been in the Outer Richmond, walking or driving. Hannah knows where she’s going, so I follow in her stride, just a step behind. My dad always told me not to be a follower. Thinking back on it, though, there are plenty of people he’d like me to follow. Him, for one. Jesus, for another. It’s such an odd thing parents do, make pronouncements that beg for exceptions.
But I listened, didn’t I? I never followed anyone. I holed up in the library stacks. I made myself a nest inside my own brain. Then Hannah went and shook the tree branches, sending that nest toppling down. My parents are mad at her for doing it, and madder at me for letting her. But everything leaves its nest, eventually. Sometimes it takes a push.
We walk through block after block of houses with red stucco roofs, big sunroom windows drawing light and warmth inside. I wonder what we look like to someone sitting in the window seat. Do we look like truant kids, sneaking around the city? Do we look like the failed evangelists we are? Or do we just look like two girls, unremarkable and unnoticeable? I’ve always wondered what it would be like, to see myself from the outside.
