Instructions for the End of the World

by Jamie Kain

  There, I’d huddled up under the covers, sobbing, torturing myself with images of starving baby squirrels in a nest somewhere, waiting for their mama or daddy squirrel to come back to them.

  This was not an auspicious start to the hunting career my dad had hoped I would go on to have.

  For years afterward, I had nightmares about the squirrel and its orphaned family. Always, in my dreams, I was happy to be firing the gun until the moment the squirrel hit the ground, and then I would be overcome with a guilt so intense it would freeze me to the spot, powerless as I watched the poor animal in its death throes. I would have the sense, too, that if I could only make myself move, to go to the squirrel and pick it up, take it inside and bandage it up, I could nurse it back to health. But I would wake up then, grieving all over again for my one and only kill.

  After that, for years, I tried everything I could to get out of target practice, but my dad didn’t give up easily on such things. Eventually I returned to gun practice, even graduating to a real rifle on my tenth birthday, and as I got older I began to understand that killing my own dinner was more humane than what happened to animals on factory farms, at least.

  Becoming a vegetarian wasn’t worth the fight in our household—not with my father the big hunter or my mother who had known starvation as a small child and didn’t believe in being picky about food—so as long as I eat meat, I figure I should be okay with killing it. But I don’t enjoy it, much to my father’s disappointment.

  Sometimes I think, for Dad, life has been nothing but one disappointment after another, me being the biggest disappointment of all.

  There is the family he imagined (a whole football team–full of boys, complemented by a few dainty girls to help out Mom in the kitchen), and then there is the family he got (me and my uncooperative sister).

  Now though, I don’t care at all about disappointing my father. Our mother has vanished, and our father has gone off the deep end after her, and everything I thought I knew about them feels like a lie now, and the only way for us to get through this crazy summer is to stop worrying about their rules and make our own.

  Izzy is slumped on the living room sofa, a fan two feet from her face and her bare feet propped on the coffee table in a way we’d never get away with if our parents were around.

  I think about the stupid chore list, and how Dad said we would be getting the house ready for Mom, but she’s clearly not coming back, and I’m finished doing backbreaking chores. Dad can do all of it when he comes back—if he comes back.

  I go to the fridge and pour Izzy a glass of water. She looks like hell. I know she’s been holding out the hope that Mom would come and rescue her from here, but with every day that passes, she seems more despondent, more aware of how unlikely any sort of rescue is now. We are pathetic, if this is how little it takes to do us in. In a real apocalypse, we’d be the first to die.

  “Drink this,” I say when I come back to the living room.

  “Where were you?” she says, an accusation. “I’ve been stuck here all day bored out of my mind.”

  “I didn’t realize you wanted me around for entertainment.”

  “I don’t, dickweed. I just think if you’re supposedly the one in charge, you shouldn’t be running off with your weird boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I say and head for the kitchen, not wanting an argument.

  “That’s not what Mom and Dad will think when they come back. What if they get here when you’re not home? You think I’m going to tell them you’re just out gathering berries in the woods?”

  I think of the letter I haven’t showed Izzy yet. No way should I bring it up now, when she’s already in a crappy mood. But it’s so tempting to use it as a weapon, to hurt her with it.

  “Whatever is going on with Mom’s life now, it doesn’t include us. Maybe she met a guy or something.”

  “Gross!”

  “Well, maybe we don’t really know her. Maybe she’s having a midlife crisis or something. Maybe she’s decided going to graduate school is more interesting than raising a family.” I think of the second letter, the one in Dad’s files about the unwanted baby, and my stomach pitches. I try to imagine showing it to Izzy too, but I can’t. Not for her feelings so much as my own. It’s like if no one else knows about the letter, maybe it isn’t really true.

  I shrug. “It happens.”

  “Mom and Dad are married!” she says, and I clamp my mouth shut tight.

  She’s talking like I would have before I knew about the impending divorce, or the fact that Mom never wanted kids in the first place.

  If I can’t protect myself from the worst of my parents’ mistakes, maybe I can at least protect Izzy. I don’t know how, and I don’t know why I even want to, but right now she’s all I have left for family. So maybe that’s it. We have to stick together, since no one else has stuck by us lately.

  I sit down on the couch beside Izzy and put my feet up too. I’m tired from the long hike, and I’m hungry, but I don’t want to spend another night eating beans for dinner.

  “What if I take some of the money Dad left and we walk to town and have a pizza or something?” I offer.

  “Walk all the way to town?” She looks at me like I’m insane. “We could hitch a ride.”

  I bite my lip. It sounds like the exact opposite of what we should be doing, but I don’t want to be stuck here for another depressing night.

  So I shrug. “Okay, why not.”

  Izzy looks at me doubtfully, but then a slow smile spreads across her lips.

  “Dad will freak if he finds out, you know,” she says.

  “I know. But he’s not here, is he?”

  She studies her newly painted hot pink fingernails. “Why do you think Dad was acting so crazy before he left?”

  She asks me like she knows the answer and I don’t. “Stress?” I say. “He doesn’t quite know what to do with himself without the military.”

  “Do you really think he’ll make us keep living here? Like forever?”

  I do, but I don’t want to say so right now.

  “He just wants our life to feel like an adventure, I think.”

  Guys like our dad, they need to feel like the survival of the whole world rests on their shoulders. They need to feel like things are more meaningful than they really are. So they daydream about the coming apocalypse when they can act like heroes again, slaying bad guys and protecting their territory from marauders.

  She sighs.

  “Come on,” I say. “Let’s go hitch ourselves a ride to a pizza joint.”

  Twelve

  ISABEL

  When I hear gravel crunching under tires, my stomach nearly jumps into my throat. I look up from the can of chicken noodle soup I’m heating over the stove at the window but can’t see the driveway from here. I imagine Mom’s car, or Dad’s, or maybe … I don’t even care who it is. I drop the wooden spoon into the pan and rush over to the window to stretch myself over the sink to see who’s coming.

  It’s an old gray minivan that looks like something a homeless person would live in. I recognize it immediately as Pauly’s.

  “Nic!” I call out, stupidly.

  I don’t even know if she’s in the house. I’m too excited to think straight, because no one fun has ever come here to the house before.

  I remember to turn off the stove, super-responsible girl that I am, and I rush into the hall and yell for her again. But I hear only silence in the house. Then I remember she said she was going out to the barn for something.

  By the time I get to the front door I see that the van has stopped, and I feel giddy when Pauly climbs out the front passenger door. It’s the whole group of kids from Sadhana Village, I can see now. Pauly and Kiva and Wolf and Laurel. I’m about to rush out the door when I realize I’m wearing a bleach-stained tank top and shorts from my morning of being a slave girl cleaning the house. And I must stink, thanks to no real showers in a while. I finally broke down and went down to the stupid creek to swim
and wash off, but it was kind of disgusting washing in the same water the fish pee and poop in, and it’s been a couple of days since then anyway.

  Nicole comes out of the barn and walks up to their van, with her stupid hunter girl posture and her serious face, and I take that opportunity to hurry upstairs and try to clean myself up before I lose the chance to talk to normal humans.

  Okay, no, those kids aren’t normal, but they’re better than my brainwashed sister anyway. A lot more fun.

  Maybe they’re here to invite us somewhere, which would be like the best thing that’s happened since we moved to this horrible place, aside from the party they had.

  In the bathroom I hurry to put on deodorant and smooth my hair back in a ponytail and brush my teeth and put on lip gloss.

  Then I rush into my bedroom and grab a clean top and shorts and am still zipping and buttoning the shorts as I hurry back down the stairs. I’ve heard no more crunching gravel, so I know they’re still here. At the front door I pause and take a deep breath and make like I’m just all casually coming out to see what’s up.

  All the kids are out of the van now. Laurel and the guy I don’t know are leaning against it, and I’m struck by how impossibly cool Laurel always looks. It’s not like I’d even want to wear the kind of weird clothes she wears—today it’s some kind of white sarong thing—and I definitely wouldn’t want my hair to be all tied up in scarves all the time, but she’s so pretty and so different from every other girl I’ve ever seen, it’s like she’s this whole other species.

  I used to hate my stick-straight hair, my boring brown eyes, my narrow boy hips. But then puberty hit, and everything about my body got curvy, and boys—even men—started noticing me, even staring at me, wherever I go. And I like it.

  “Hey!” Pauly calls out when he sees me.

  He is standing next to Nicole, who turns and frowns in my direction. She doesn’t even have the sense to be happy we have visitors.

  I smile and wave and try not to bounce over to them too fast. “What’s up?” I say when I’ve crossed the yard.

  “We came to see if you girls want to drive to the lake with us. We’re going to swim and have a picnic.”

  I can already imagine Nicole’s list of reasons we can’t go, so I’m surprised when she doesn’t immediately jump in and say no.

  Instead, she just looks at me.

  “That sounds cool,” I say, then look back at her.

  She shrugs. “Sure, we’ll go.”

  I can hardly believe it.

  First she hitches with me to town for pizza, and now this? It’s the least irritating twenty-four hours I’ve ever experienced with her.

  But then I see her look over at Wolf, the weirdest of all these kids, with his stillness and his silence—always like some kind of creature trying to blend into his surroundings—and I see something change in her face. I see, if I’m not going completely crazy from the heat, that she’s got a thing for him.

  I tuck this knowledge away for safekeeping, because I know it’s going to come in handy. When I look over at Laurel, I see that she’s watching Nicole too. Maybe she saw the same thing I saw. She’s looking at Nicole in a weird way, like a hungry animal.

  “Better get your swimsuits on,” says Pauly.

  “I’ll be right back.” I smile and go back inside to change.

  I hear Nic following after me, but I’m in too good a mood to talk to her right now. I’m thinking instead about which swimsuit to wear. There’s the one Dad approves of, a navy blue one-piece I wore to swim team last summer and that is all worn out in the butt from sitting on the edge of the pool, and then my black one, and then there’s the new one he doesn’t know about, which I bought with my own birthday money, the little yellow string bikini with the white beads at the ends of the strings. Of course I will wear it. I’m just a little worried about Nicole later telling Dad I wore it in front of guys.

  But seriously? If there was ever a time and place for that bikini, this is it.

  Unlike Nicole, I actually have a chest. Like a real, C-cup chest that guys notice. I put on the bikini with a pair of cutoff shorts and am walking past Nic’s bedroom when she comes out wearing her own stupid swim team suit from last year. It makes her look like a ten-year-old girl, flat as a pancake.

  “What?” she says when I grimace.

  “Don’t you have anything else?”

  “No, what’s wrong with this?”

  I shrug. “Nothing.”

  She goes back in and puts on a tank top and shorts over it. Then I watch her worrying over her hair in the mirror, and I realize that I never see Nicole fixing her hair. Half the time she either braids it or puts it in a ponytail while walking to her next task, not even looking to see if she’s done the job right. I seriously don’t understand how she can care so little about her appearance.

  Except now she does.

  A few minutes later we all cram ourselves into the nasty old van. I am sitting in the backseat with Kiva, who, if I’m being completely honest, I will admit I have a little thing for. We kissed a tiny bit at the Sadhana party, and it was pretty awesome, but that was all. I haven’t seen him much since then, and never alone.

  The seats are stained and scratchy, and there’s a smell like an old skunk. I search for a normal seatbelt, but there is just one of those lap-style ones, so I put it on and try to act like I’m cool with all of this. We are rolling through the woods to the main road when Kiva lights up a joint and takes a long hit on it, then offers it to me.

  Okay, so I’ve never smoked anything before. Not even a cigarette. Someone offered me a hit at the party, but I waved it away like I saw another girl do, and no one seemed to care. This time feels different, more important. The smell is weird, but I don’t want to start off looking like a dork before the fun has even gotten started. There’s no denying that Kiva is cute, with wavy, dark-blond hair that hangs to his shoulders, and a dark tan, and pale blue eyes. He told me before that he’s sixteen, so only two years older than me, definitely within reach.

  So I take the joint and put it to my lips, trying to imitate what he did. Then I am coughing uncontrollably, my throat burning, my eyes watering.

  Nicole looks over her shoulder at me with the same blank expression she wears when deciding whether she’s going to shoot an animal.

  WOLF

  I reach back and take the joint from Nicole’s little sister while she’s struggling to catch her breath. I put it out and stick it in the side door, because the last thing we need is to get pulled over with a van full of pot smoke, and also I’m sure our guests aren’t big stoners.

  “Hey, give it back,” Kiva says.

  “Not while we’re driving, idiot.”

  “Okay, Grandma,” he shoots back at me.

  Kiva and I have never been all that close, but I’ve known him for as long as I can remember, and in that way he feels like a brother. He can be impulsive and dumb, but he’s mostly harmless, and I don’t want to see him in trouble.

  I’m painfully aware of Nicole beside me, her brown legs smooth in the summer light, her thin arm close enough for me to brush against. Her hands, resting in her lap, are long and capable, with thin, squared-off fingers. Working hands, but attractive ones. I wonder if her palms are rough or soft, and I don’t know which I’d hope for. Either would be perfect I think.

  Up front Laurel and Pauly are arguing over the music on the radio, something about who the singer is, and I stare out the window at the passing landscape to wonder how I got here. I hadn’t intended to spend the day with this group, but when Laurel said they were going to stop and invite Nicole and her sister along, I changed my mind. She could see straight through me, as if she knew I’d come along when she mentioned Nicole.

  It’s going to be over a hundred degrees today, so there isn’t much else we can do besides swim. Even working on the cabin in the forest shade would be miserable, and I feel a lightness in my chest that I haven’t felt in a long time. I’m glad to be here with my friends, on this
sweltering day, hurtling toward possibilities. I feel young, or maybe youthful, instead of impossibly ancient.

  We reach the lake and park along the side of the road to avoid paying the parking fee. It’s a Thursday afternoon, but still there are quite a few people at the best-known beaches, so we grab our stuff and hike through the woods for a quarter mile to reach a hidden cove few people know about. It’s partly shaded, a little beach barely emerging from the woods before plunging into cold, deep water, perfect for a day like this.

  I carry the food basket, since I was responsible for packing it. Up ahead, Pauly has the cooler and everyone else has towels and blankets and backpacks. Nicole sticks close to me, and her silence is comfortable. I like that she doesn’t try to make small talk while the rest of the group chatters away on the trail ahead of us.

  There are lots of questions I want to ask her, but right now we’re all hot and breathing hard from the uneven up- and downhill trail.

  When we reach the beach, I’m happy we’re the only ones there. We haven’t even finished putting all the stuff down before Kiva has pulled off his shirt and jumped howling into the water. Nicole’s little sister, looking precocious in a yellow bikini, follows him.

  I get the glass bottle of kombucha out of Pauly’s cooler and bring it to Nicole, who is spreading her towel out on the sand. She peers at it for a moment before taking it and drinking, then makes a face when she’s done.

  “That’s not tea,” she says.

  “It’s kombucha. Sorry, I should have mentioned. I’ve been making it all summer. Everyone at the village thinks it has healing powers.”

  “It’s what?”

  “It’s a fermented drink made with this thing that’s like a mushroom?”

  She blinks, frowns.

  “Don’t worry, it’s nothing dangerous. Just sort of a fizzy tea drink. There’s water, too, if you want some.”