Instructions for the End of the World (14 page)

She stares at the dark woods across the river, seeming to give this some thought. “What's the best thing you've ever seen out here?”

You
is what I almost say. Instead, I tell her about the next best thing. “I was out hiking once and got a little lost, so I ended up heading home in the dark. I was walking along a fire road when a young mountain lion ran across the road ahead, chasing a hare. The moon was out, and I could see them clearly, and I nearly pissed my pants.”

Her expression goes from shocked to amused. “That's amazing. I'd have been terrified.”

“He was only about fifty pounds or so, but yeah. I didn't go wandering around in the dark for a while after that.”

I watch her move toward the water, then bend to touch it when she reaches the river's edge. I wonder if she's ever been kissed or touched.

I wonder if she would let me.

Or if I should even dare to hope.

It's not why I brought her here, or it's not consciously why, but as I watch her take off her shirt and shorts, revealing a one-piece blue swimsuit, I know that someday soon I want there to be more than a friendship between us.

I want to know her in ways I cannot fathom, and it's an urge so powerful, I feel as if the energy of all humanity past and present is pushing me toward it.

NICOLE

What most people don't understand is that just because I know how to use a gun doesn't mean I like to do it.

But since the age of six, my dad has been trying to convert me. Mostly I have gone along with it. First it was just with an air rifle. He used to take me out in the backyard and have me aim at cans on the fence or homemade paper targets.

Once, though, when I was eight and had gotten so good at shooting targets and cans and tennis balls my dad threw into the air, he convinced me to aim at a squirrel, and when I actually hit it—when I watched its small brown body flinch and fall from the tree branch, landing with a quiet
thud
on the ground—I felt as if I'd just committed murder.

I
had
committed murder, as far as I was concerned then.

In that instant of realizing what an awful thing I'd done, I dropped the gun onto the ground and started to cry. My father tried to shush me, to tell me I'd done great, that the squirrel wasn't going to go to waste—heck, we could eat it for dinner, he'd said—but I was not comforted. I only cried harder, until my mother came out to see what was the matter, and I darted past her into the house and locked myself in my room for the rest of the night.

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.