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

by Matthew Landis

  “I’m busy.”

  Misty eye-rolls. “You’re probably playing video games.”

  “I don’t play video games. They’re dumb.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “None of your business.”

  She folds her arms. “You used to be way nicer to me.”

  “What?”

  “When I’d come over to borrow stuff. You weren’t like this. You’d say something funny and then we’d go find what I needed. Sometimes we ate Cheez-Its.”

  My eyes are going back and forth real fast and my stomach cramps. When I’d come over. “Stop saying stuff like that.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t—listen.” I think I’m sweating. Misty squints real hard at me like What is happening with you and I grab the door frame. “I’m just busy,” I say. “Sorry.”

  “I’ll pay you.” She does some math in her head. “I’ve got some chore money I was saving for something, but this is kind of an emergency.”

  Now I feel like a jerk. “You don’t have to pay me.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  I blow out a long sigh. “Yeah.”

  “Awesome. Bring it over when you’re done, but come to the front door—not the back. Okay? But don’t ring the doorbell.”

  “Why not?”

  But she’s already sprinting across the Mitchells’ yard to her house.

  I go to the garage and pull down a couple of old bins. Most are packed with kid toys, but one of them has a bunch of old fishing stuff. I pull out a net that stinks like rotten ocean and bring it over to the workbench. I find a painting rod and duct-tape the net handle to it like an extension.

  “Just in time,” Misty says after I knock on her front door. She grabs the net stick thing and swings it around. “Sweet.”

  “Ahhhh!” somebody screams from inside. There’s a blur in the air, and then her sister sprints across the living room and screams again.

  “What was that?” I ask.

  “Brynn really hates birds.”

  “Why is there a bird flying around in your house?”

  “She’s a homing pigeon,” Misty says, marching toward the living room. I follow. “Her name is Pigeon.”

  “Her name is dead,” Brynn shrieks. She’s crouching in the kitchen with a binder over her head.

  “She’s just a little confused,” Misty says. “It’s her first mission.”

  I see a gray-and-white bird dive-bomb Brynn. She yells and drops to the floor just as the thing pulls up and perches on an open cabinet door. Misty creeps toward Pigeon with the net and slowly raises it up. Pigeon cocks her head and then takes off back to the ceiling fan way up in the living room.

  “Mom and Dad are going to kill you,” Brynn yells. “She’s already pooped on the couch.”

  I back against the wall so I don’t get pooped on. “Why did you let her out?”

  “It’s part of her training,” Misty says. She’s digging in the fridge now for something, and comes out with a piece of bread. “You establish their home base—that’s her cage in my room. Then you take them away and they fly back to their home. You can do it up to a hundred miles.”

  “Maybe her radar is off or something,” I say.

  “You think?” Brynn says. She starts crawling toward the stairs. Pigeon dives like a daredevil pilot, buzzing the wall and sending Brynn scrambling back to the kitchen. “Misty! Seriously!”

  “Just stop moving!” Misty yells. She’s smirking. She thinks this is hilarious. “It’s probably all that hair stuff you use.”

  “Just do something.”

  “Okay, okay!”

  “Put the bread in the net,” I say. “Maybe she’ll fly into it.”

  Misty drops a couple crumbs in and then holds the net up real high.

  Pigeon fluffs her tail. Some white stuff drops on the carpet.

  “Hmm,” I say.

  Misty lowers the net and takes the bread out. She looks at Brynn, then Pigeon, then the net. Back at Brynn, who’s got her binder on her head like a helmet.

  “No,” I say.

  “What?” Brynn asks.

  “Uh,” I say, but Misty gives me a face like Shut up, shut up and then she’s putting some bread on top of the binder.

  “What are you doing?” Brynn whispers, but she’s like fear frozen and can’t move.

  Pigeon flutters off the fan, does a couple swoops past the fireplace before landing on the binder. She pecks for one second before Brynn shrieks and then whamp—Misty slams the net over it.

  “Grab it, Derrick!” she shouts, and I race over to hold the binder. Brynn scrambles out from under it as Misty and I rotate the net, cinching it so there’s no way out.

  “Bad Pigeon.” Misty holds her up so their eyes are level. “Bad girl.”

  “I cannot believe you just trapped a pigeon on my head,” Brynn yells from the stairs. “You are so cleaning up all the poop.” Some doors slam and then I hear water running through the pipes.

  “What now?” I ask.

  “Back to home base.”

  I follow her upstairs. She stops outside her room and says, “You can’t come in.”

  “Okay.”

  Misty opens the door a tiny bit and tries to squeeze through, but the net and pole thing get stuck. She has to open it a little wider, and for a second I see inside. It’s not that messy, so I don’t know what she’s being weird about—some clothes and paper on the floor. Actually, not paper, index cards, all sort of lined up. She slams the door shut before I can see any more.

  In a minute she comes back with the net. “Thanks.”

  “Yeah.”

  We have a stare-off and then she says, “This is what it was like.”

  “What?”

  “Before.”

  I can feel my brain trying to click.

  “I gotta go,” I say, and head back down the steps. “See ya.”

  At home, I scrub my hands with bleach and then shower in case Pigeon has bird flu. That would not be a good thing to catch this close to The End.

  3

  “Popcorn is ready,” Claudia says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  She hangs outside my room. “Brock and Tommy are here.”

  I scroll to the Apocalypse Soon! weather alerts. Some weird stuff is hitting Australia and there’s all this chatter about a tsunami. “I’m just gonna stay up here.”

  “Dee: Movie roulette is sacred.”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  “It’s the one tradition we still do.”

  That desert movie flicks on in my brain. It’s on fast-forward or something and gets farther this time. I see the giant dust cloud way at the end of the road. A couple Humvees burst out of it and come speeding at me and the ground rumbles and I have to work really hard to shut it off.

  “Maybe I don’t want to anymore.”

  Claudia comes in my room. She puts her hand on my forehead and says, “You’re sweating.”

  I swat her hand away. “I’m fine.”

  She looks at the giant calendar hanging above the desk for a while and then grabs a marker and draws a little heart on Thursday, September 13. Five days from now. Eight days before The End.

  I stare back at my computer.

  “Do it for me,” she says. “Eat Dad’s awesome popcorn and watch something probably stupid for two hours because I want you to.”

  I look at the heart, then back down. Ugh. “Fine.”

  I wait till she’s gone before scribbling out the stupid heart.

  Downstairs I dig through a big collection of DVDs in the family room and pick a zombie one because there’s always useful survival stuff in those. In the kitchen Brock is pouring giant cups of Mountain Dew Code Red and I get one.

  “Kelly says butter is bad,” Tomm
y is telling my dad. “She says you might as well, like, shove a stick of dynamite into your heart.”

  “What does she think about salt?” my dad asks him.

  Tommy gives a thumbs-down. He chews on the weird trail mix he brought.

  “That smells like mulch,” Brock says, taking a whiff of the bag.

  “Okay, people,” Claudia says. “Put your cards on the table.”

  We all lay our DVD choices on the island counter. Claudia won last time, so she gets to put down two. Seven options total.

  “Again with the LEGO movie,” Brock says to Tommy.

  Claudia swipes it off the counter. “Sorry, dude.”

  Brock pulls my zombie movie next. Tommy gets rid of Claudia’s live-action musical and my dad takes out her other one, some lame romance movie. I’m last to go. Easy: the stupid Western from like fifty years ago my dad loves.

  Brock’s action movie is the only one left.

  “Boom,” he says. “You can thank my dad. He just bought it today.”

  “I heard it was good,” my dad says.

  Claudia puts the movie in and my dad hits the lights. I lie on the floor with a big pillow and eat the world’s saltiest popcorn. The plot gets going and Brock and Tommy make bets on which character is going to die first. I’m actually sort of glad Claudia forced me down here. It’s kind of a break from thinking about The End.

  “Watch this,” my dad says, and then everybody laughs as the secret agent guy punches right through a steel door. I’m laughing too and it feels really good. I think my ribs might actually split when Tommy makes Claudia rewind it and we watch it again in slow motion.

  My popcorn’s gone, so I get up to wash my hands. I’m rinsing them in the sink when I see my dad check his phone. He types something real quick and I wonder what he would be texting his construction guys this late on a Saturday.

  And then what he said echoes in my head—watch this. That’s a weird thing to say. How would you know something totally hilarious was about to happen in a movie that just came out? Isn’t that what Brock said? That his dad just bought it? Today?

  Watch this.

  So he’s already seen it.

  I heard this was good.

  And he’s lying about it.

  “Earth to Dee,” Brock says, behind me at the sink.

  I know why he lied. It’s the same reason he gets all dressed up and goes out after dinner.

  He took one of his Internet women to see this movie.

  In the theater.

  On a date.

  Now they’re texting about it, really laughing it up about what a great time they had and I’m watching him here and now the room is sort of tilting.

  I go upstairs and slam my door. Lock it. I’m shaking and my fists are clenching and unclenching and I’m walking back and forth and then Tommy is outside saying Dee, are you okay? But I don’t answer. I just keep walking back and forth and back and forth and I want to scream or cry or throw something and it’s like a hundred degrees in here and I’m sweating pretty bad now.

  I push the earth. The desert movie plays again, but after around sixty pushups I’m too tired and it shuts off. My muscles burn, but I actually feel less hot. I lie on the carpet and see Tommy’s shadow outside my room, sitting on the floor.

  I don’t know how long he stays, but he’s there when I fall asleep.

  1

  I wake up angry.

  My watch says 10:30 a.m., which turns the rage dial up even more.

  I overslept. Not a good survival habit.

  I hurry to the bathroom and brush my teeth. Popcorn stuck everywhere. I guzzle a ton of water and then go back to my room and look at the calendar.

  Twelve days.

  Pretty bad time to get lazy.

  I check for updates on Apocalypse Soon! and go downstairs. The kitchen is empty, so I eat cereal and watch Romanian guys carry sandbags from one side of a gym to the other on TV. Claudia comes back in from a jog and glares at me. Then she pretends I’m not there.

  “I didn’t feel good,” I say.

  “I get it, Dee. Anything that reminds you of Mom is totally off-limits. Message received. No more movie nights.” Claudia rips her earbuds out and tosses them on the counter. “Maybe we should just move. Maybe we should change our last name.”

  “No, that’s not why—”

  “Everybody wants you to get better,” she says. “Don’t you get it? We’re all rooting for you. But it’s like you don’t even want to. You’re okay being this way.”

  This way. I shake my head. “You don’t get it.”

  “Whatever.”

  I go out to the shed and push the earth until I’m drenched. Get better. Like I’m the crazy person here who thinks our dad shouldn’t be going on Internet dates and seeing spy movies and then texting about it in our house. During movie night—a tradition She started.

  “Knock knock.”

  Misty’s standing there in her normal getup: shorts, T-shirt, Phillies hat. Sunscreen so thick, she’s a ghost.

  “I was thinking,” she says. “You might want to have this tree trimmed before the apocalypse. Because there’s a couple dead limbs and they might fall, and you’re not going to want to do that kind of work when the world is ending.”

  “What’s your problem?” I ask. It echoes off the walls pretty good, so I must’ve yelled. “What are you even doing here?”

  Misty walks away.

  Then she comes back, with some water she just took from my cooler. “You’re probably really dehydrated. It can make people angry.”

  I walk outside and sit in the shade. It feels twenty degrees cooler. I chug the water. Maybe I am dehydrated.

  Misty pulls the cooler over to me and sits on it. “Don’t you think people are too polite?”

  “What?”

  “They never say what they should. They just say what’s polite. Which is stupid because if you were sitting on a train track, and a train was coming, I wouldn’t ask you in this nice way to get off. I’d scream.”

  I shrug.

  She picks a dandelion from the grass and flings it. “I used to hate talking in front of people. In fourth grade, I peed myself during a class presentation on George Washington.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Misty takes off her Phillies hat and puts her face in some sunlight breaking through the leaves. Maybe she’s like a reverse vampire: She comes alive under UV rays.

  “In the movies, when somebody young finds out they’re dying, they’re sad about missing out on true love and stuff.” Misty shakes her head. “I mean—true love is probably cool, but there’s a million more things. A billion more. A billion billion.”

  “Mmhm.”

  “They all pile up, and it just gets higher.” She’s doing that really serious face again—the Misty Stare. Her eyes are hard, like what you’d find if you drilled down to the center of a piece of steel. “But I got better. So now I get to do them. And one of those things is saying what I want and not caring what people think.”

  I swat a mosquito on my neck and miss. Brock would be ashamed of me. “Okay.”

  “Do you get it?”

  The mosquito goes after my arm and I get it this time. I think about keeping it in case I get sick, to maybe analyze it for West Nile. “You’re trying to cram it all in or something. Because life is short.”

  “More like: Life is a buffet. And it’s gonna close at some point. So eat up.” The Stare fades a little. “Like the Brazilian one by the old air base with all the meat platters. I really want to go there for my birthday.”

  “Brock went there for his cousin’s graduation. He ate so much he barfed most of the next day.”

  Misty does her choking donkey laugh. Her smile is that giant one again—like this is the funniest moment of her life. “Classic.”

 
I drink some more water and think about what she just said. “The food won’t taste good,” I say. “The closer you get to the buffet shutting down, you’ll start to hate it. You’ll just be thinking about how it’s going to close and then it will all taste like gruel pouches.”

  “What’re gruel pouches?”

  “This thing Tommy’s mom makes,” I say. “Fruits and vegetables all ground together and shoved into these pouches.”

  “He eats those?”

  “He used to,” I say. “He says he doesn’t anymore but I’ve seen ’em in his fridge.”

  Misty shrugs. “Maybe you’re right. But I just got to the buffet and it all looks amazing. I don’t see any gruel pouches.”

  “Okay.” I shrug. “So what’s next?”

  “It was the bass cello, but I decided to quit. Too boring. Really hard to carry around.”

  “Hmm.”

  “That’s actually why I’m here.”

  “What?”

  “Mercedes,” her mom shouts. “We’re leaving.”

  Misty puts her Phillies hat back on. “Swim meet. Gotta support the sister.” She jogs out of the shed and calls over her shoulder, “To be continued.”

  2

  “Maybe he’s not hungry,” Tommy says.

  A white mouse walks right by Pete’s tail. This mouse has guts or is totally stupid.

  “When did you feed him last?” I ask.

  “A week ago. Maybe he’s, like, sick.”

  “Maybe he’s saving up,” Brock says. He gets real close to Tommy and breathes on his face. “For the main course.”

  Tommy shoves him and then there’s this blur as the mouse runs right by Pete’s nose. He stops an inch away and just sits there, nibbling something.

  “Oh man,” I say. “He’s almost dead and doesn’t even—”

  Snap!

  We all scream as Pete bites the mouse and then strangles it in his giant body.

  Then he swallows the entire thing.

  “I guess he’s okay,” Tommy says.

  Kelly comes in and says, “Thomas: I just got off the phone with Uncle Leo. He and Aunt Deloris are coming to your game this week.”

  “It’s just a scrimmage,” he says, but he’s smiling real wide. “I might not even play that much.”