Eliza answered one question about the blog (“I’m a big Francis Ford Coppola fan”), three questions about her personal life (“Straight but looking forward to my experimental phase,” “Does ‘bad for me’ count as a type?” and “Missionary, I guess, but they’re all pretty good”), three questions about her technical process, and two questions about her favorite photographers. Then Sandrine thanked her invisible audience and shut down the live feed.
“Great job, Eliza.”
“Was it?”
“Sure! You’ve really got a future in this. If, you know, you have a future at all. And hey, if you ever make it out to New York, I’d love to launch you on that experimental phase.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
Sandrine winked and closed out the session. Eliza shut the lid of her laptop. Across the table, Andy looked up from the book he was reading—by Immanuel Kant, of all people.
“Someone’s got a secret admirer,” he singsonged.
“Shut up.”
He’d gotten lucky, was all. When Eliza first got Andy’s drunken ramble of a voice mail, she didn’t even bother to listen to it all the way through. It wasn’t until a few days later, when she was talking to Madeline on Skype, that she thought about the message again. Eliza had been hoping that her best friend would come back to Seattle after the announcement, but apparently Madeline had fallen in love with some senior boy at Pratt, and because most of her family still lived on the East Coast anyway, her parents decided to move out that way.
Eliza wasn’t sure which was stranger, the fact that she might never see Madeline again, or the fact that Madeline was actually in a relationship.
“You have to have enough fun for the both of us, okay?” Madeline said. “Tell me stories. Any crazy end-of-the-world sex yet?”
“Not quite. I did, however, receive the mother of all drunk dials from a boy.”
“Do you still have it?”
“Yeah. But only because deleting it would involve looking at all the voice mails my mom’s left me. It’s getting ridiculous.”
“We can talk about that later. First I wanna hear the epic drunk dial.”
“Really? You wouldn’t rather talk about my deep emotional issues with my mother?”
“Nope.”
“Fine.” Eliza scrolled quickly—Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom—until she found the five-minute-and-forty-two-second message left by an anonymous 206 number.
“It’s actually sorta sweet,” Madeline said, once it was over.
“But he’s totally wasted.”
“So what? He sounds . . . romantically insane.”
“I agree with exactly half of that.”
But once she turned off Skype, Eliza listened to Andy’s message again. This time she noticed something she hadn’t before—a particular word that he used, odd but familiar. She Googled “cuirass,” and then “corass,” and finally the search engine got her drift and pulled up results relating to “karass.” The ever-helpful Urban Dictionary defined it as “a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident.” How could she have forgotten? It was from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, one of her favorite books back when she was a sophomore, with its promise of a world religion that owned up to its own ridiculousness, and an apocalyptic ending that was more than a little relevant to current circumstances.
Maybe it was just a lucky guess on Andy’s part, but it got her attention. A couple of days later, she decided to call him back.
“I’m not interested in anything romantic,” she told him. “If you can handle that, meet me at Bauhaus at six thirty. And don’t you dare bring any fucking flowers.”
He was already waiting for her when she got there, so she snuck around the table to order a drink and do a little reconnaissance. Her primary fear was that he might still misinterpret this as some kind of date. The end of the world was coming, after all, and a lot of people were doing a lot of crazy things. In the past few days, the scientists had nailed Ardor’s arrival time down to the wee hours on Tuesday the first of April—April Fool’s Day. It was T-minus forty days, which meant humanity as a whole was living in the existential equivalent of last call at a dive bar, when people’s standards started dropping like panties at a Justin Timberlake concert. Andy had obviously cleaned himself up for the meeting—his hair was freshly cut and combed, and he was wearing a pair of jeans that actually fit him and a sweater instead of a hoodie. It was way too dramatic a change for him to have pulled off all by himself. A woman’s hand, or at least a gay guy. Was this really the outfit of a boy who’d gotten the hint?
“Well, you got me here,” she said, gently setting her saucer down on the table.
Andy had a cup of black coffee in front of him, already nearly empty. “I guess so. Everyone’s a sucker for a good drunk dial.”
“One thing first, just to ensure we are definitely, one hundred percent on the same page—we will not be having sex now, or at any point in the future. Understood?”
“Understood. Any hand holding?”
“None.”
“No cards on Valentine’s Day?”
“I’d kill you. Plus Valentine’s Day probably won’t come again.”
“Okay, last question. Does no sex also mean no kinky role-playing, wherein you play the mature professor and I play the naughty student in need of a good spanking?”
“It does.”
“Got it. I forgot to bring my Catholic schoolgirl outfit anyway.”
Eliza laughed, and Andy looked pleased with himself for making her laugh, and the awkwardness between them let up a little bit.
“So you think we’re in a karass together, do you?” she asked.
“Sure. It makes sense, right? We’re basically living in a Vonnegut novel now anyway.”
“Those don’t tend to end well.”
“That is true.”
Eliza sipped her coffee—about forty cups left, assuming her usual one-a-day regimen. She hadn’t told anyone about her morbid new habit, but she figured Andy would probably get a kick out of it. “So I’ve started doing this weird thing in my head,” she said. “Like, when I put on socks, I think to myself, well, I’ll only put on socks forty more times. And when I look at the moon, I think about how many more times I might look at the moon. Even when I ordered this coffee, I couldn’t help counting how many more coffees I’d probably get.”
Andy held up his mug. “I think I can fit in a good two hundred, if I stay focused. Which the coffee should help with. Now if only I had something to focus on other than my own imminent demise.”
“Actually, that reminds me, I could use your advice about something.”
“Really?” He seemed genuinely surprised.
“Why not? We’re karass-mates, aren’t we?”
“Damn straight.”
“So I started this blog a few days ago, and it’s already turned into a bit of a thing. But I think I might be totally full of shit, in which case I should probably shut it down.”
“Are you talking about Apocalypse Already?”
“You know it?”
“My friend Jess found it on Reddit. It’s kickass.”
“Really?”
“Totally. You gotta keep doing it. Bobo says it’s important that everyone knows about the messed-up shit that’s going on at Hamilton.”
“Yeah, well, Bobo seems pretty messed up himself, as far as I can tell.”
Andy stiffened, as if someone had just insulted his mom. Eliza remembered how she used to feel when her dad gave her grief for hanging out with Madeline, whose sense of style he once described as “a stripper dressed up as a prostitute for Halloween.”
“Bobo’s smarter than people think.”
“I’m sure he is,” Eliza said, backtracking. “But he does seem a little, I don’t know, loose-cannon-y.”
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“I guess.” Silence as Andy downed the rest of his coffee. He slammed the mug down on the table. “Hey! I just realized, you could probably help us out too!”
“With what?”
“This party that me and Anita are planning.”
“Anita Graves? Wait, are you guys a thing?”
“What?” Andy looked almost offended. “Dude, no! We’re just collaborating on this party. And also I think we’re a band now.”
“She sings?”
Eliza didn’t know much about Anita, other than a collection of adjectives: rich, ambitious, smart, aloof. “Musical” was not to be found on that list.
“Like Janelle Monáe and Billie Holiday had a baby. It’s crazy.”
“You listen to Billie Holiday?” Eliza asked.
“What? Because I dress like a punk I’m only allowed to listen to the Cramps or something? Don’t be a bigot, yo. Anyway, that wasn’t my point. My point was that we’re planning this party for the night before Ardor comes. I’m talking massive. Not just Hamilton. All of Seattle. All of anywhere, maybe. But we weren’t sure how to get the word out. And suddenly you’ve got this big audience, right? It’s, like, fate or something.” Andy looked down into his coffee mug. “Hold up. I need a refill here if I’m gonna get my two hundred cups in.”
One thing you could say for Ardor, it was definitely bringing out the weird in everyone. The school’s foremost slacker teaming up with a girl who probably couldn’t slack in a hammock on a Cancún beach while sipping a margarita laced with Valium. And now it came out she was some kind of secret soul singer, and the slacker was probably the next Paul McCartney. Weird and weirder.
Up at the counter, Andy joked with the barista—a pincushion Goth girl who seemed to know him.
I like him, Eliza thought. Not the way he wanted her to, maybe, but at least as a friend. Since Madeline left for college, Eliza hadn’t really let herself get close to anyone. When she needed to be around people, she’d hit up a party or go out on her own. Pretty girls never struggled to find someone to talk to, as long as they didn’t need to say anything important. But she did need to say important things. She’d needed that for a while, actually.
When Andy got back to the table with his coffee, he pulled a small silver flask from his backpack and unscrewed the top.
“Wanna make it Irish?”
“Why not?”
He spiked their drinks—once, twice—and at some point in the next hour she just started opening up: about the nightmare her life became after what happened with Peter, about her dad’s illness, even about her mom, whose messages continued to build up on her voice mail like plaque on some hard-to-reach molar.
“You should call her,” Andy said.
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Because at least she gives a shit.”
“She didn’t give a shit for the last two years.”
“Maybe. But she does now. Trust me, that’s worth something. Besides, it’s the apocalypse, right? It’s your last chance. Get on the tearful reunion train already.”
Eliza, buzzed on the Baileys and having a surprisingly good time, thought how crazy it was that just a month ago, she wouldn’t even have spoken to Andy unless some teacher had forced her to. And now she was actually thinking of listening to him.
That Friday, Eliza got the tap on her shoulder she’d been expecting ever since Apocalypse Already took off. Ms. Cahill, the office receptionist, stood above Eliza’s desk, casting a dour administrative pall over the whole AP Chem classroom.
“Ms. Olivi,” she whispered, though the room had already gone quiet. “The principal would like to see you.”
Walking upstairs with Ms. Cahill, Eliza couldn’t help but imagine herself a convict, traipsing the long corridor toward the electric chair. Each classroom she passed was a prison cell; from inside came the desperate screams of chalk on chalkboard and the sighs of tortured teenagers spending what might be their last hours on Earth learning about the causes of the Peloponnesian War and the best way to ask for directions in German.
“Am I in trouble or something?”
“You’ll have to ask Mr. Jester.”
When they reached the main office, Ms. Cahill pointed out the principal’s door and then disappeared into her cubicle, as if she were just an appliance, like a vacuum cleaner, that would sit patiently in a corner until it was needed again.
Mr. Jester didn’t even notice her come in. He was staring out the window, past the dusty stripes of the blinds, toward the Hamilton parking lot. His outfit was decidedly non-principal-esque: wrinkled cargo pants and a ratty T-shirt with a picture of Jim Morrison on the front.
“Hey,” she said.
He jumped. “Jesus, you scared me.” His eyes were sunken and sleepless, and even the ring of hair atop the naked atoll of his head was wild and greasy. She watched him attempt the Herculean task of hauling up the heavy corners of his mouth. “How are you, Eliza?”
“Okay, I guess, considering.”
“Where are you hoping to head in the fall? New York, right?”
“If there’s a New York to go to. How’d you know?”
“I read the blog, of course! New York’s pretty crazy, though. I couldn’t take all that noise and traffic, but a young thing like you, you’ll do fine.”
A long silence. “You want me to take down the site, don’t you?” she asked.
The whole Botoxed cheer of Mr. Jester’s face went slack. “It’s not about what I want, Eliza. I believe in the arts. Free speech and all that.” He pointed to Jim Morrison on his T-shirt, and Eliza wondered if he’d put it on just for her sake. “But those pictures you’re taking have already caused a lot of trouble for this school. And I promise you that if you keep going like you’re going, it’ll turn out badly.”
“Is that a threat?”
The principal put his hands down flat on the desk. His voice was desperate, almost manic. “No! It’s a plea! Look . . .” He scrabbled through the mess on his desk, coming up with a week-old copy of the Seattle Times, whose presses had stopped rolling a few days back due to employee attrition. The headline read VIOLENCE INCREASINGLY TARGETS KIDS AND TEENS. “It’s not safe out there, Eliza.”
“But it’s safe in here? At Hamilton?”
Mr. Jester waved the question away. “Listen, my superintendent says he got a call yesterday from the DOE. That’s the Department of Education, Eliza. That’s federal-level stuff! They think there’s some kind of corporal punishment going on here because they saw the picture you took, with that slacker kid all covered in blood.”
“His name’s Andy,” Eliza said.
“I know his fucking name!” The obscenity reverberated around the room like a gunshot. When Mr. Jester spoke again, it was with controlled fury. “I could get in real trouble, Eliza. Please. This is my life we’re talking about.”
For years now, Eliza had felt a captive to the whims of adults, whether they were acting voluntarily (her mom, leaving), or involuntarily (her dad, dying), or just ordering you around (pretty much all of them, all the time). She thought she’d always feel that powerless. Then she met Madeline, who taught her one way to exercise some modicum of control over the world: by making a weapon of her body. It took Eliza a year to realize that, while that kind of power was real enough, the exercise of it sapped some internal resource, one that took a long time to recover, if it ever did. Today, for the first time, she felt like her power was based on something other than sex. The fear in Mr. Jester’s eyes was the fear of a small man come face-to-face with something bigger than himself. And maybe it was cruel, but Eliza told him the truth—that she wouldn’t take the website down just because of what might happen if she didn’t, because she felt that what she was doing was good, and so only good could come of it, even if it wasn’t immediately clear how. And when the principal began to sputter and threaten and shout, she calmly reached i
nto her bag and pulled out the Exakta. It was the only thing about that whole meeting that truly surprised her: As she fit the viewfinder to her eye, Mr. Jester froze. She pressed the shutter button, replaced the camera in her bag, and left the office. All the while, the principal stayed perfectly still—resigned to his final pose.
He was fired the following week.
Anita
FOR THE FEW HUNDRED STUDENTS who still came to school every day, the morning now began with a mandatory twenty-minute assembly, presided over by Officer Foede, their government-appointed interim principal. He’d pass along the newest information about Ardor (as if they weren’t all compulsively checking it online a hundred times a day), then hand the proceedings over to student council, who’d been tasked with organizing a five-to-ten-minute daily “pep rally.” The remaining members of the Hamilton improv team, Sudden Infant Monkey Death Syndrome, claimed Wednesdays, while a group of boys who sang a cappella versions of female pop songs—Miley Cyborg—performed every Friday. The other three days featured a rotating cast of the talented and talentless, proving that ten minutes could feel like two or two hundred. Today, however, Anita had claimed the slot for herself; she and Andy were going to officially unveil the Party at the End of the World.
“Good morning, Hamilton,” Officer Foede said, stepping up to the podium. He was the quintessential cop—stalwart and ruddy-skinned and self-important.
“Good morning, Mr. Foede.”
“Today I have something very important to talk to you about. It’s come to my attention that a political gathering is planned for this upcoming Saturday at Cal Anderson Park. I am here to tell you that it is expressly forbidden that any student attend this event.”
Anita heard a clicking sound from somewhere nearby. Two seats over, Eliza Olivi was taking photos of the proceedings. Her dark-brown hair hung loose and a little curly, reaching just to the top of a silver ankh that drew the eye down into the vortex of her prodigious chest. So this was what Andy had himself all worked up about. It wasn’t as if Anita didn’t get it; the pretty airheads like Stacy Prince you could always write off as so much plastic, but Eliza was different. You could tell she’d actually be a beautiful woman, not just a beautiful girl. Still, Anita wondered if Andy recognized the insecurity balanced perfectly between the push-pull of Eliza’s two protective shells: the bitchy attitude and the skimpy clothes. Or maybe only other girls could see it, like those frequencies only dogs could hear.