“I’m serious, you guys,” said Trevor. “This is the end of the world.”
“If that bus doesn’t show up in the next two minutes,” said Daryl, “I’m leaving.”
Daryl slouched against the chain-link fence that surrounded a neighboring vacant lot. Years earlier, the house that used to sit on that lot had slipped into the canyon along with a section of limestone cliff. You could still find remnants of the house below, splinters of wood tangled in the brush, shards of tile in the dirt. Not much was left of the property. A cracked driveway led nowhere. Weeds grew where the lawn once was. Yellow signs warned of the instability of the bluff.
“Here’s how it’s going to happen,” said Trevor. “First the crops are going to die. And then all the animals are going to die. And then the humans.”
But at that moment, my own anxieties were closer at hand: Without Hanna, I felt awkward standing alone on that curb. Even on a normal day, the bus stop was a bad place to be without a friend. Bullies reigned. No supervisor supervised here.
I decided to stand beside Michaela because we’d been elementary school friends, but those bonds had worn thin.
“Hey, Julia,” she said when she saw me. “You’re smart. Do you think this earth thing could screw up my hair somehow?” She was redoing her red ponytail. “Because my hair is going crazy today.”
She looked ready for the beach, in miniskirt and baby tee. Sequined flip-flops clung to her feet. My mother never would have let me wear flip-flops to school.
“I don’t know,” I said, regretting my practical outfit, white canvas tennis shoes double-knotted beneath plain jeans. “Maybe.”
These days, Michaela’s lips perpetually shimmered with gloss. Her hips perpetually swayed. Mascara streaked her cheeks at every soccer practice, and she spoke of boys in multitudes—it was hard to keep track of all her Jasons and Brians and Brads. How could I admit to her my own modest desire? How could I explain to her that for months I’d hoped to talk to just one boy who right then was waiting with us at the bus stop, slowly rolling his skateboard back and forth on the other side of the lot? Seth Moreno: like a blinking light in my head.
“Seriously,” said Michaela, holding up the ragged tip of her ponytail. “Look at all this frizz.”
A fruity shampoo scent wafted up from her hair whenever she moved.
“Ouch,” said Michaela, whipping around as if stung by a bee. There was Daryl, snapping the strap of her bra. “Quit it, Daryl,” she said.
That bra wasn’t supporting much. Michaela was as flat as I was. But she wore it anyway, a racy symbol of things to come. Visible through the white cotton of her tank top, those two empty cups held at least the possibility of breasts, if not the real things, and I guess just the expectation, just the idea, the mere dream of a female body was enough to lure the boys to her side.
“I mean it,” she said as Daryl snapped it again. I could hear the quick slap of the elastic landing on her skin. “You’re annoying me.”
In the distance, I watched Seth Moreno throw a rock over the chain-link fence and into the canyon. I had the feeling that he cared about important things. His sadness was always apparent. It was in the angry whip of his wrist as he let the rock go. It was in the tired motion of his head. It was in the way he squinted at the sky but would not look away.
Seth already knew about disaster: His mother was sick, and she’d been sick for a while. I’d seen him with her once or twice at the drugstore, a red bandana wrapped round her head where her hair once was, her skinny legs planted in a pair of chunky orthotic shoes. Breast cancer: She’d had it for years already, forever, it seemed, but I’d heard that now she was really dying.
Suddenly, I felt a hard pinch through the back of my T-shirt. I turned. Daryl was behind me. He was laughing at me.
“Gross!” he said, turning his head toward the rest of the kids. “Julia’s not even wearing a bra!”
My cheeks turned hot.
I realized that Hanna would have known what to do. She was the leader between the two of us, the talker, the boss. She could be mean when she needed to be. Maybe having sisters had trained her. She would have stepped in at that moment and said to Daryl the exact right thing.
But I was on my own that day and unaccustomed to getting teased.
A few months earlier, I’d passed through the lingerie section of a department store with my mother. A salesclerk had asked if we’d like to see the training bras. My mother looked at the clerk as if she’d said something about sex. I looked at the department store floor. “Oh,” said my mother. “I don’t think so.”
Daryl was staring at me. He had the palest white skin, the sharpest, freckliest nose. I could feel the eyes of the other kids on my face, attracted to cruelty like flies to meat.
I longed for the sounds of the school bus to rescue me but heard nothing—only the faint murmur of insects, busy among the flowers in the canyon, and the dull ring of Seth’s skateboard striking the curb again and again. The power lines were humming above us as usual, the flow of electric current uninterrupted by the slowing. I would later hear that all our machinery would keep working for a while even if all the humans were gone.
A lie formed in my mouth. It tumbled out like a broken tooth. “I am too wearing one,” I said.
A silver minivan came around the corner, kept moving, and was gone.
“Oh yeah?” said Daryl. “Then let’s see it.”
Everyone but Seth was watching us. The older boys, the eighth-graders, had stopped their shoving matches to see what would happen. Even Trevor had stopped talking. Diane watched, too, rubbing with two fingers the silver cross that always hung around her chubby neck. The Gilbert twins stared their silent stare. Seth was the only one who stayed apart. I hoped he hadn’t noticed what was happening. He was standing on his skateboard, facing the other way, the wheels crunching the dirt, as he rolled back and forth on the other side of the lot.
“If you’re wearing a bra,” said Daryl, leaning toward me, “then prove it.”
I fiddled with my necklace. Suspended from a delicate chain around my neck was a tiny gold nugget, unearthed sixty years earlier by my grandfather’s hands when he worked in the mines of Alaska. It was the one artifact of his that I treasured.
“Leave her alone,” Michaela finally said, but her voice was too thin and too late.
What I understood so far about this life was that there were the bullies and the bullied, the hunters and the hunted, the strong and the stronger and the weak, and so far I’d never fallen into any group—I was one of the rest, a quiet girl with an average face, one in the harmless and unharmed crowd. But it seemed all at once that this balance had shifted. With so many kids missing from the bus stop, all the hierarchies were changing. A mean thought passed through my mind: I didn’t belong in this position; it should have been one of the uglier girls, Diane or Teresa or Jill. Or Rachel. Where was Rachel? She was the nerdiest one among us. But she’d been kept home by her mother to prepare and to pray—they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, convinced that this was the end of days.
Another car floated around the corner. This time it was my father in the green station wagon, on his way to work. He waved as he passed. I wished I could flag him down, that he could rescuse me. But he could not have read in that plain scene the signs of any trouble.
“Either you show it,” said Daryl, “or I’ll do it for you.”
As has been well documented, rates of murder and other violent crime spiked in the days and weeks following the start of the slowing. There was something in the atmosphere. It was as if the slowing had slowed our judgment too, letting loose our inhibitions. But I’ve always felt that it should have produced the opposite effect. This much is certainly true: After the slowing, every action required a little more force than it used to. The physics had changed. Take, for example, the slightly increased drag of a hand on a knife or a finger on a trigger. From then on, we all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess ca
n travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret? But the new gravity was not enough to overcome the pull of certain other forces, more powerful, less known—no law of physics can account for desire.
I heard the bus rumbling around the corner toward us, its brakes squeaking, its engine rattling. Daryl heard It too, and that’s when he grabbed hold of the front of my shirt and pulled up. I twisted away from him, but I was too late. As I turned, I saw Seth, his long limbs swinging as he walked, heading in our direction, just in time to see my bare chest.
Here’s what I remember next: the white of my T-shirt over my face, the whoosh of damp air on my bare breastbone and bare ribs, over the whole flat plane of my chest. The excited squeals of the other kids. Daryl held me that way for a few long seconds while I twisted and turned, the two of us locked in a perverse dance. I could feel the cold air on my skin and the chain of my necklace digging into the back of my neck.
Finally, Daryl let the edge of my shirt drop.
“Liar,” he said. “I knew you weren’t wearing a bra.”
The bus stopped at the curb and began to idle there. The light sweet smell of diesel filled the air. I felt faint. I was blinking back tears.
“Jesus, Daryl,” said Seth, coming up and shoving him in the shoulder. “What the hell?”
Months later, Michaela’s mother would spread a star chart before us and explain to me that the slowing had shifted everyone’s astrological signs. Fortunes had changed. Personalities had rearranged. The unlucky had turned lucky. The lucky had turned less so. Our fates, so long written in the stars, had been rewritten in a day.
“Don’t worry,” whispered Michaela as we climbed up the steps and into the bus. “No one saw anything.”
But I knew that this was just something you said when the exact opposite was true: Everyone saw everything.
Seth was the last one onto the bus. He smiled a weak smile as he passed me, heading as usual for the back rows. What I saw in his face was more alarming than what I’d seen in Daryl’s. In Seth’s dark eyes and his thick, pressed lips, I saw something different, something worse: I saw pity.
I considered running off the bus right then, but it was too late. The doors were closing.
“I bet they’re already sending the president and the smartest scientists to the space station, where they’ll be safe,” said Trevor from the front seat, as if his stream of theories had never been interrupted. For once, I was glad that he was talking.
The bus jerked away from the curb. The driver, a fat man in a thick black belt, looked rattled and distracted. He kept glancing up through the windshield at the sun.
I reached for my necklace, and that was when I noticed it was gone, my grandfather’s tiny gold nugget, flung somewhere in the dirt.
I turned to Michaela, panicked. “My necklace,” I said, tears blurring my eyes. “Where’s my necklace?”
But Michaela didn’t hear me. She was already involved in a conversation on her phone.
“I’m telling you,” said Trevor. “This is Armageddon.”
At school, we were told to disregard the bells, now rogue, the whole bell system having come unhooked from time.
Without the morning bell to prod us, we turned aimless and imprecise. Kids floated this way or that, a shifting flock of birds. The crowd was wilder than usual, harder to herd. We were loud and wound up. I hid out at the edge of the group while teachers tried in vain to corral us. Their thin voices were drowned out by the ocean of our own.
This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall. I knew I still looked like a child.
By now, the fog had burned away, leaving a bright, clear sky in its place. In the wind, flags snapped on the school’s flagpole.
Through the crowd of kids out front, a potent rumor was wafting. These same channels had previously carried news of the illicit explorations of Drew Costello’s fingers and of the acrobatics of Amanda Cohen’s tongue, of the ziplock bag of marijuana found stashed in Steven Galleta’s backpack and, later, of the details of Steven Galleta’s life at the Mount Cuyamaca Camp for Troubled Boys. Amid this usual bilge now floated a different kind of gossip, its sources equally dubious: In 1562 a scientist named Nostradamus had predicted that the world would end on this exact day.
“Isn’t that creepy?” said Michaela, nudging me with her shoulder.
I was eager to escape. I wanted to burrow into the crowd, but I was afraid to leave Michaela’s side.
“I guess he was some kind of psychic or something,” she said.
You could still see the stretch marks on my T-shirt from the bus stop.
“Hey,” she said, looking around. “Where’s Hanna?”
“Utah,” I said. I could barely say the words. “Her whole family left right away.”
I pictured dozens of cousins sleeping in cars in the Utah desert, encircling a giant grain silo.
“Holy crap,” said Michaela. “Like forever?”
“I think so.”
“Weird,” she said.
Then Michaela asked to copy my history homework.
“I didn’t think we’d have school today,” she said. “So I didn’t do it.”
But I knew Michaela had stopped doing her homework earlier that year. She was developing a different set of skills. There was a lot to learn about the care of hair and skin. There was a proper way to hold a cigarette. A girl wasn’t born knowing how to give a hand job. I let her see my work whenever she asked.
In science, we made new sundials to replace the ones we’d made the first week of school. I was glad to be sitting in a classroom full of kids who had none of them been at the bus stop.
“Adaptation is a necessary part of nature,” said Mr. Jensen after he handed out the new calibrations. He was folding and unfolding his hands as he talked. “This is all perfectly natural.”
We were struggling to jam toothpicks into mounds of wet clay. The trick was to insert the toothpick at exactly the right angle. It was already clear that most of our sundials would tell a useless, sloppy sort of time.
“Think of the dinosaurs,” he continued. “They died out because they couldn’t adapt to a changed environment.”
Mr. Jensen had a ponytail and a beard. He wore a lot of tie-dye. He rode a bike to school, and it was rumored that he cooked his meals on the Bunsen burners in the back of the classroom and slept in a sleeping bag under his desk. He wore hiking boots to school every day. He looked like he could live for many months in the desert with only a compass and a pocketknife and a canteen.
“But of course,” he added, clasping his hands together, “we’re very different from the dinosaurs.” I could tell he was hoping not to scare us, but that was the thing: We kids were not as afraid as we should have been. We were too young to be scared, too immersed in our own small worlds, too convinced of our own permanence.
Competing rumors held that Mr. Jensen was actually a millionaire or that he’d invented something important for NASA and taught science only for the love of teaching. He was my favorite teacher that year. I knew he liked me, too.
He set up a question-and-answer box that day so that we could ask anonymous questions about what was happening.
“There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” he said as he collected our scraps of paper in a converted Kleenex box.
This was the same box we had used on the day they separated the girls from the boys, and the nurse came to tell the girls about our futures. “Something very special is going to happen to you,” she had said slowly, like a fortune teller reading palms. “It comes from the Greek word for month, because it’s going to happen once a month, just like the lunar cycle.” Only
Tammy Smith and Michelle O’Connor had sat apart, shifting knowingly in their seats, their bodies already in tune with the moon.
Now Mr. Jensen reached into the box and pulled out a question. He unfolded the piece of paper with great care: “ ‘Is it true,’ he read, ‘that a scientist predicted that the world would end today?’ ”
“Nostradamus wasn’t exactly a scientist,” said Mr. Jensen. He had evidently heard the rumor circulating the halls. “You all know that no one can predict the future. No one can say what will happen tomorrow, much less five hundred years from now.”
The school bell buzzed. But we all stayed put on our lab stools. The lunch bell was out of sync with us now.
Outside, the sky remained bright. Sunlight was pouring in through the windows, catching on the rows of clean beakers and clean test tubes, glittering like wineglasses on the shelves.
Mr. Jensen pulled another question from the box. Someone asked if the slowing might be caused by pollution.
This question seemed to depress him. “We don’t know yet why this is happening,” he said.
He took off his glasses and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. He paused near the fish tank, empty since September, when the filtration system abruptly stopped working. It happened on a weekend. We had returned Monday morning to find five fish floating like leaves on the surface. You could see the blood beneath the scales on their little bodies. The water looked clear to our eyes, but it had turned toxic for fish.
“Human activity has done a lot of damage to this planet,” said Mr. Jensen as we continued to work on our sundials. “Humans are responsible for global warming and the thinning of the ozone layer, and for the extinction of thousands of plant and animal species. But it’s too early to say yet if we’ve caused this change, too.”
Before the end of the period, Mr. Jensen updated our solar system wall, where outer space was neatly represented by six yards of black butcher paper and nine butcher-paper planets. There was also a sun on our map and a tinfoil moon. Scattered in the corners were rainbow-colored pushpins that stood in for all the planets we had not yet discovered. There were supposed to be thousands of them out there. Millions, maybe. It still astounds me, how little we knew about the universe.