Let's Call It a Doomsday

by Katie Henry

  “Holy shit, Ellis Kimball. I never would’ve guessed you had it in you.”

  My head snaps up. Crouched by one of the street-level windows is Sam, and I have never been so glad to see anyone.

  “Sam!”

  I run over. I’m not quite tall enough. I drag a chair as quietly as possible and climb on it so that Sam and I are more or less eye to eye.

  “What are you doing here?” I whisper.

  “Cutting gym,” he says. “I’d ask what doing you’re doing here, but I’m pretty sure I know.”

  “Did you hear it? Did it work?”

  “Oh, it worked,” he says. “Radio broadcast? Doomsday? Mass hysteria? You’re a prettier Orson Welles.”

  “Um, thank you?”

  “This”—Sam holds up a flyer—“is hilarious.”

  Hilarious? I reel back and almost topple the chair.

  “Not that it wasn’t good,” Sam continues, “but I think the Senior Prank is supposed to be done by seniors.”

  The Senior Prank also happens in the spring. “Sam—”

  “Better than last year’s, though. A bunch of paper cups filled with water in the quad? Uninspired.”

  “This wasn’t—”

  “I mean, was it as good as that time in the nineties they got a cow onto the C-building roof? Nah. But that’s okay.”

  “So you’re saying it wasn’t as good as animal cruelty?”

  “Or my brother’s year, when they hired a mariachi band to follow Principal Grant around all day. It was expensive and all, but that’s a prank.”

  “Sam!” I hiss. “This wasn’t. A. Prank.”

  He sits back on his heels. “Huh?”

  “The end of world really is coming. And I thought people deserved to know.”

  “Are you messing with me?”

  “Hannah’s had visions.”

  Sam gapes at me. “Hannah had what?”

  “Dreams,” I clarify. “More than visions. Very specific dreams about the end of the world.”

  Sam stares up at the sky. He makes a noise somewhere between a sigh and a groan. “Ellis . . .”

  “I’m—!” I say, and press on even though he throws up his hands. “She did!”

  “She’s been stressed out of her mind for, like, six months! She’s basically disintegrating. This isn’t a game, it’s serious.” He jabs at his chest. “And that’s me saying that.”

  “I know it’s serious. It’s real, Sam.”

  He looks at me with a mix of sadness and disbelief.

  “The end of the world is almost here,” I say. And then, even though he won’t get the Book of Revelation reference, “Surely, it comes quickly.”

  “God,” he says through gritted teeth. “I really want to make a sex joke right now. But you’ve ruined it. You’ve ruined it with the apocalypse.”

  I laugh, even though this is possibly the least-funny situation I could find myself in, barring the actual apocalypse itself. I should probably be crying. It would make more sense. Sam reads through the flyer.

  “Freak snowstorm?” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “So, what, buy up all the blankets at the army supply store?”

  Not a bad start. “And nonperishable food. Bottled water. Alternative heat sources.”

  “Sounds like camping.”

  “Forced camping.”

  “All camping is forced camping to me,” he says.

  We sit in silence for a moment. “Hey, Sam?” I ask, and he looks up. “When you see Tal, will you give him a message from me? I might not be able to talk to him again.”

  “They’re going to send you to On-Campus Intervention, not ship you off to a Siberian gulag.”

  “Please.”

  He stuffs the pamphlet in his hoodie pocket. “Okay.”

  “When you see Tal, tell him none of this is his fault,” I say. “Tell him I wish I didn’t have to do this. Tell him sometimes I wish I didn’t believe, but . . .” I smile, thinking of one of the first conversations I had with Tal. “But you can’t force unbelief.”

  “Okay,” Sam says. “Not his fault. Wish you didn’t have to. Can’t force unbelief.”

  “One more thing.” I raise myself up on my toes, as if the closer I am to Sam, the more it will stick in his brain. “Tell him that this can’t be the tribulation period.”

  Sam cocks his head. “The what?”

  “The tribulation. He’ll know what it means. Tell him this can’t be the tribulation because . . .” My eyes burn, and so does my heart. “Because the last three months were the happiest I’ve ever been.”

  Sam looks at me sadly. I’m not sad. I meant it.

  “Can you remember one more?” I ask. “It’s the last one. I promise.”

  Sam nods.

  “Tell him I wish we had more time.”

  Sam reaches his hand through the crack in the window. I raise mine up. Only our fingertips can touch, but it’s enough.

  “I’ll tell him,” Sam says.

  “Everything?”

  “You’ve got a way with words.” Sam snakes his hand out. He stands. “I don’t think I’ll forget them.”

  “Thanks, Sam.”

  “Anytime.”

  When he leaves, I twist my head as far as it will go, watching as he gets smaller in the distance. It feels like when my parents dropped me off at sleepaway camp for the first time. Like a tether’s been cut, or a muscle’s been severed, and I’m facing an entirely new existence. Alone.

  I step off the chair. Rather than dragging it back to its old spot, I place it facing the door. Whatever’s coming through, I’m facing it head-on.

  After what feels like an eternity of staring at the door, the knob turns. Mom emerges in the doorway. I knew she’d be the one to come get me, and I kept trying to picture her reaction. Trying to prepare. Like research, but for emotions, which almost never works. I’d prepared for Mom being quietly furious, rage under a layer of carefully applied foundation. But she just looks . . . defeated. Battered and tried, her whole body waving a white flag. Being defeated implies an enemy, though, doesn’t it?

  It only takes one horrible second to realize that the enemy is me.

  Mom jerks her head at the door. “Come on.”

  I stand. I reach for my backpack before remembering it’s not with me. “I need to get my stuff.”

  Wordlessly, she hands over my backpack.

  When I walk out the door, Mom puts her hand on my shoulder and guides me down the hallway, toward the glass front doors.

  “We’re going home?” I ask, because I thought there would be more. More talking, more discussion, more questions. No one’s asked me a single question. Don’t they have questions?

  “Yes,” she says. “We’re going home.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to me? Ms. Bayer?”

  “I explained the situation,” Mom says.

  “But you don’t even know what the situation is!” I protest.

  “I know plenty.”

  She’s already made her mind up about everything. Not just Hannah, not just faith or the right way to fold dish towels, but everything. Including me. We walk the rest of the way to the car in silence. We start the drive home in silence, too. But then something pricks in my heart and deflates the quiet.

  “So am I suspended, or what?”

  I don’t know why I ask. In a week, it won’t matter.

  “I handled it,” Mom says. “Nothing’s going on your record.”

  I don’t know why I’m relieved. In a week, my record won’t matter, either. I shouldn’t care, why do I care?

  “Then why can’t I go back to class?” I ask Mom.

  “We came to an alternate arrangement.”

  “What arrangement?”

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “I deserve to know what’s happening to me.”

  Mom veers off the road so suddenly I brace myself on the dashboard. She parks. She turns off the car. And then she bursts into tears.

&n
bsp; “I don’t know what’s happening to you, Ellis,” she sobs. “I don’t know why you’re doing this, I don’t understand a thing you’ve done.”

  I’ve never seen her cry like this. I’ve seen her cry quietly, artful and delicate tears at the right moments. I’ve never seen her collapse.

  “Mom,” I whisper. “Mom, please, stop.”

  “I want to,” she says, her voice raw. “I want to understand so badly, but I don’t. I don’t. I don’t know how to help you. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Please,” I say again, because she’s scaring me. Is this what it’s like, to watch someone break down? To see them sliced open by their own thoughts and know you can’t do a thing to stop it? Is this what Mom has seen me do, over and over and over?

  She’s sobbing through each word now. “All I want is to help you and I can’t. What kind of mother can’t help her own baby? What kind of mother am I?”

  Something hot and searing sticks in my chest. Because deep in the darkest part of me, I’ve wondered the same thing. All my life, I’ve wanted to grab on to her skirt and beg her, “Why don’t you love me, please love me.” I’ve wanted to grab her by the shoulders and demand, “Why don’t you love me, you should already love me.”

  She does love me. She loves me so much it’s ripping her in two. She just doesn’t understand me. Love and understand are not synonyms.

  I grab her arm. “Mama.”

  She looks up at me, red-eyed and blotchy-faced, that veneer of perfect washed away.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry.” She wraps her arms around my neck, awkwardly. I hug her back, though I don’t understand exactly what she’s apologizing for. That can come later. You can love without understanding.

  We hold each other, uneasily but tightly, for a long moment. Mom breaks away first. She digs in her purse for a napkin and gingerly wipes away the parallel lines of mascara running down her cheeks.

  “Let’s go home,” she says.

  Twenty-Four

  I WONDER HOW much of my life I’ve spent on couches while someone tries to figure me out.

  Days, for sure, between Martha and the therapist I had when I was eight and my teacher said I wasn’t “emotionally connecting with other students.” I still maintain the other students weren’t connecting with me, though I now acknowledge it’s hard to connect with the girl who can’t stop talking about the destruction of Pompeii.

  If you include my parents in that list, it’s got to add up to weeks, at least.

  I don’t understand why we couldn’t have talked about this in my room, where at least I could have curled up under blankets while my parents stared at me like a zoo animal. When my dad got home, my parents claimed the entire second floor so they could whisper about me for a half hour while my body attempted to melt into the couch.

  I don’t know exactly what they talked about, but they must have decided something, because now they’re seated in two chairs in front of me.

  “First of all,” Dad says, looking at Mom out of the corner of his eye, “we know you’ve been having a tough time.”

  “Psychologically,” Mom adds.

  “With your junior year being stressful. We know that heightens your feelings of anxiety.”

  “This isn’t about school,” I protest.

  “Then what is it about?” Mom asks.

  “It’s about the end of the world,” I say.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Dad says.

  “I feel like my flyers were pretty clear.”

  “They were terrifying,” Mom says, “if that’s what you mean.”

  “The apocalypse is a scary concept, Mom, so sure.”

  “There is no apocalypse coming,” Dad says. “I thought we’d gotten past this.”

  “I believe there is.”

  Dad puts his head in his hands. Mom purses her lips.

  “I know you don’t believe me,” I say. “That’s fine. It’s your right not to believe me.”

  “That’s very kind, thank you,” Mom deadpans.

  “But other people had a right to know, you know?” They both look at me blankly. “The kids at school had a right to decide for themselves, too. So I had to tell them.”

  “How do you think you’d react,” Dad asks, “if you were in class, and all of a sudden, someone came on the loudspeaker and told you exactly how you were going to die?”

  “I didn’t say they’d die!”

  “You said the world as they knew it would be over by the end of the year.”

  “That’s not the same as dying.”

  Dad shakes his head. “If someone did that to you, you would be a wreck.”

  Is he right? Probably. But this was necessary.

  “Well,” I say, and it comes out a whine, “I didn’t know how else to tell them.”

  Mom sighs. “And I suppose there’s no convincing you that you shouldn’t have told them at all?”

  I stare at my shoes. “Were people—were people really scared?”

  “Ms. Bayer said it was—” Mom looks at Dad. “Light pandemonium.”

  “That’s a made-up word,” I mutter. “‘Pandemonium.’”

  “No, it isn’t,” Mom says.

  “Yes, it is,” I shoot back. “John Milton made it up as his name for Satan’s hell-palace in Paradise Lost.”

  “Ellis,” Dad says.

  “He didn’t just make it up, he stuffed Greek and Latin words together to make it up. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Yes, that’s what’s ridiculous, here,” Mom says.

  “Lisa,” Dad says.

  “Do you have any idea what we just went through?” Mom says. “Do you have any idea what I had to say to that woman to keep your record clean?”

  “What did you tell her?”

  Dad takes over. “Mom told her it was an isolated incident brought on by extreme stress and that with some time and distance, you would be able to overcome it.”

  They’re so sure time is limitless. I’d like to be that sure. I’d like to believe I have all the days in the world to spend with Tal and to watch Em dance. Instead, I have this sense of doom, dark and shadowed, wrapping its arms around my chest.

  “I convinced her,” Mom says, “you should be given that. Time and distance.” She pauses. “Physical distance.”

  “Physical . . . ?”

  Mom and Dad look at one another.

  “We’re going to Utah for Christmas,” Dad says.

  “I know that.” They made those plans a month ago. Never mind that their plane won’t be able to take off after the storm. “On the twenty-third. After Em’s recital.”

  “Yes,” Mom says, “but you’re going ahead of us.”

  I recoil. “When?”

  They look at each other again.

  “When?” I repeat.

  “Tomorrow,” Dad says.

  The sun explodes. The earth’s core collapses.

  “Tomorrow?” I whisper.

  “You’ll stay with Aunt Tonya until we get there,” Mom says. “We’ll all be together on Christmas.”

  “You’re sending me away,” I say, half accusation, half question.

  “We’re removing you from the stressor,” Mom says. “We’re taking this doomsday plot out of the equation.”

  I won’t be here on December 21. I won’t be at the top of the hill with Hannah. I won’t be there to make sure things go the way they’re supposed to. Panic rises. Panic reigns.

  “You can’t do this,” I say, fast and urgent. “You don’t understand what could happen if I’m not here, I have to be here, she told me—”

  “She’s disturbed,” Mom says.

  “Overly imaginative,” Dad says, spreading his hands. “And charismatic, I’m sure, honey, but that’s why we’re doing this.”

  “Because you want the world to end?”

  “Because we want to make sure you’re safe,” Dad says. “For the rest of December, you’ll be with family. Somewhere safe, and protected. And when January comes and
the world doesn’t end, you’ll see we were right. And things will go back to normal.”

  “I have school,” I protest. “You said they didn’t kick me out.”

  “They didn’t,” Mom says. “Your teachers said you can email in anything that was due this week. You’ll be back at school in time for midterms in January.”

  “They were really very accommodating,” Dad says.

  “And obviously, you are never seeing Hannah again,” Mom says.

  “It wouldn’t be good for either of you,” Dad agrees.

  “We’ll work out logistics in January,” Mom says. “You’re not taking your phone to Utah. We’ll start with that.”

  “But she doesn’t even have a cell phone!” I shout. “She gave it to Frank Zappa’s owner!”

  “What?” Dad says.

  I close my eyes to stop the buzzing in my brain. “Please,” I beg. “Please don’t send me away. Bad things will happen if I’m not here. Really bad things. I know you don’t believe the world is ending, I know you don’t believe Hannah, but don’t you believe me? I’m your daughter. Don’t you believe me?”

  “We believe that you believe,” Dad says.

  “But we also know you’re hurting yourself,” Mom says, grabbing on to my hand. “We also know you’re wrong.”

  I wrench my hand out of hers and stomp through the living room, into the kitchen, and down the stairs to the basement, picking up my backpack on the way and slamming the door behind me. I curl up on the lumpy, discarded chair by the washing machine and dig through my backpack. My Altoids box of everyday carry is still there, though someone’s clearly looked through it. My phone is not. From this spot, I can hear everything upstairs. The clack of my mom’s heels, the clomp of my dad’s size 12 feet. The running water as my mom starts to get dinner ready. And then I realize—they’ll let me stay down here for hours. Until dinner, probably. They know I need my space.

  And that means I have time. Not much. But some.

  They can’t hear anything in this concrete cave, not from where they are, but I still creep as quietly as I can to the basement’s back door. The inside lock opens, and then I’m outside, alone, undetected. I close the door slowly, silently. I have no phone, which means this’ll be a surprise. I have no real plan, either.