I wondered if I should have seen it coming. If I should have been more observant—smarter, more sensitive to subtle emotional shifts. If I had been, maybe I’d have realized that my mother and my father were missing something. That they would find whatever they were missing in God. But the truth is, I can’t remember anything from our pre-Frick lives that would have indicated how gratefully they’d turn to him. The truth, I’d have to admit once I started asking myself these questions in the weeks immediately following their conversion, was that I hadn’t known my parents that well. And once they Believed, I never would, unless their masks of piety shifted by accident, to reveal a glimmer of the person underneath.
I know the exact date they officially joined the Church of America, because it was the Sunday after my sixteenth birthday. It was early in March, a little over three months before the end of my sophomore year. I’d invited my few friends over that Saturday—Lara Cochran, who was my best friend for the pre-Harp years; Corinne Brocklehurst; and a quiet girl from my art class named Avery Caruso. We ate pizza and cake and shared the customary gossip, snippets of rumors we’d heard about parties we hadn’t been invited to. They all left promptly at nine, after handing me small gift baskets of lip gloss and body spray from the same place in the mall. We were friends because of the alphabetical closeness of our last names, because of our good grades and our disinclination to draw attention to ourselves. If I was bored at that party, I didn’t realize it.
When I woke the next morning, my parents were downstairs at the dining room table. It wasn’t late, but I could tell they’d been out of the house and back—they were dressed nicely, and in the center of the table was a platter of bagels, more bagels than the three of us could ever consume in one morning. They sat close together in a conversation they abruptly dropped when I walked in, and immediately I could sense their jumpiness, the uneasiness they sometimes got before imparting bad news. As I sat down and reached for a bagel, I had the sudden thought that maybe someone had died.
“Tell us about your party,” Mom said. They’d been home the night before but had stayed in their bedroom to give me and the girls “privacy.” It was the sort of privilege afforded by the parents of a good kid—they had not even the slightest concern that we’d get into anything resembling mischief. The party narrative took about twenty seconds. I was distracted the whole time by the sense that they had something they wanted to say. When I mentioned Avery’s name, they glanced at each other for a fraction of a second.
“We saw her mother this morning,” Dad said.
“At the Bagel Factory?”
“No,” Mom replied, very slowly. She looked at my father again. His eyes answered some question she had, and she turned back to me. “We saw her at church, actually. Your father and I, we’ve decided to join a church.”
As far as I knew, my parents had never stepped inside a church before that morning. We were not “churchgoers,” as my mother referred to the neighbors and friends who got slightly dressed up on Sunday mornings. I remembered the second grade, when Lara had made her first communion. I’d been invited, and sat in the pew behind some of Lara’s uncles, watching as she made her way down the aisle, dressed like a tiny bride. She’d looked ethereal, so much prettier than me, and I came home crying to my mother that I wanted to have a first holy communion too. She sat me down and explained very patiently that only Catholic girls and boys took communion, and that since we weren’t Catholic, since we weren’t anything, this was one milestone I would not have.
“Why aren’t we anything?” I’d asked.
My mother gave me a long look then, chewing the inside of her lip. “That’s just not the kind of people we are,” she told me. “Some people are that way, and we’re just . . . not.”
So, probably, I should have taken the news that they’d spent that Sunday morning in church a lot less in stride. But at the time, I felt embarrassed. Their going after years of not going struck me as a strange and personal thing, like the sex I’d only recently come to understand they’d at one point had. So I just sat there, aware of the closeness of their gazes, emotionlessly spreading cream cheese on my bagel.
“It would mean a lot to us,” my father said, “if you’d come with us next week. You don’t have to go as much as us, but you might get something from it. It couldn’t hurt, anyway.”
I shrugged. “Okay.” It didn’t occur to me to ask what church they’d joined. I barely understood the differences between them. If they’d said the church they’d chosen was the one founded by Pastor Frick, the white-toothed man whose name I had seen online, whose face I’d glimpsed once or twice in the teasers for the Channel 11 news, I might have reacted a little differently. I might have understood a little better how drastically my life was about to change.
It must be a while later, because the sun that beamed down through the holes in my parents’ ceiling has set, and their bedroom is dark and cold. I sit on the floor at the foot of the bed, my feet tucked under me, my palms flat on my lap. My back aches. I have been sitting like this for hours. I have no memory of time passing, only of the thought I had when I sat down: that if I was very still and very good, if I waited for them patiently, my mother and father would come back from wherever they’d gone.
I didn’t fall asleep, exactly, but now I’m awake. I remember things from the hours I’ve sat here, sounds pouring through the open windows. Shouts, sobs, sirens. The doorbell furiously ringing. My phone vibrating on the floor a yard away. But I stay still. To move would be to break the spell. If I move, it will be like I want them gone, like I want them never to come back.
I hear the front door open.
I hear the creaking of floorboards, the squeaking of steps. A shadowy figure appears at the end of the hallway, and when I see her I let out a sigh and fall back against the bed, because somehow I know it’s over. Harp rushes down the hall toward me.
“Viv.” She crouches down and takes my wrist into her hand, like she’s checking my pulse. “Are you okay? I called, but . . .” Harp’s gaze moves up and beyond me, to the ceiling.
“They’re gone,” I say to her.
“I know,” she says quietly. “Mine too.”
Harp had been very flip about her parents’ conversion. She wasn’t close with them the way I was with mine—even before her parents Believed, Harp treated them like two aggravatingly clueless landlords, and the Jandas just seemed bewildered by their fast-talking, uncontrollable daughter. When they joined the Church, Harp’s parents didn’t try to convert her the way mine did me. They just stopped talking to her. They stopped setting a place for her at the dinner table. Harp started arriving home from school to find her belongings out at the curb with the recyclables. She laughed about it at the time; she shook herself loose from them so easily, I guess I let myself think it didn’t bother her that much. But she looks tiny right now, crouched before me in the gathering dusk, her face smooth and hard. I know she must be hurting. How cruel it was of me not to answer my phone. How pathetic to imagine I was the only one waiting. I lean forward and throw my arms around her neck, knocking her off balance. When it comes to physical affection, Harp usually runs full speed in the opposite direction. But tonight she hugs me back, tight. When we pull away, she has to help me to my feet, because my legs have fallen asleep.
Harp holds on to my elbow as we walk downstairs. We enter the living room, which looks blue in the twilight, and I gasp at the sight of three figures standing in an awkward clump by the door.
“Viv,” one of the figures says with a sigh, and Raj, Harp’s skinny, gangling older brother, moves toward me and takes me into his arms. Over his shoulder, I can see Dylan, his angel-faced boyfriend, and a scared-looking little girl I take to be Dylan’s seven-year-old sister, Molly. Raj lets go.
“Not gonna lie,” Dylan says. “I thought you had salvation in the bag, Apple. You’re more saintly than most Believers.”
“Are you kidding?” Harp says. She sits on the couch and pats the space next to her. Molly, with her long chestnut curls, goes running. “You think I was going to let God beam up my protégée? Not on my watch, God. Over my damned body.”
The two of them are giggling, partly out of hysterical nerves, I imagine, and partly to keep Molly calm. I walk over to the light switch beside the door, but my hand has hardly grazed it before my friends all hiss in warning. “What?”
“It’s a little . . . weird out there right now,” Raj tells me. “People have gone maybe a tiny bit nuts in the last twelve hours.”
I remember my parents’ warnings (“Now, this should last you for the six months between the Rapture and the apocalypse,” my mother said, stocking our cabinets with cans of soup and tuna, “but the real trouble will be keeping it out of the hands of the looters. And the hellhounds!”). “Violent?” I say, lowering myself to the floor by Harp’s feet.
Raj nods once, curtly. “It’s best if we don’t draw too much attention to ourselves. It would also be a good idea if you had . . . anything that we could protect ourselves with.”
“There might be stuff in the basement.” I shrug. “I know my dad has a baseball bat down there.” I start to stand, but Raj holds his hand up to stop me.
“Hey, Molls, you want to go on a treasure hunt?” His voice is softer and sweeter than I have ever heard it. I see Dylan turn to gaze at Raj, his eyes lit up with love. Molly nods shyly and leaps to her feet to follow him. Raj slips a flashlight out of his backpack, takes Molly’s hand, and leads her to the basement door.
We hear their voices echoing down the stairs, and Dylan sinks to the floor and sprawls his lanky body across it. Dylan is probably the handsomest boy I know, and every move he makes lets you know he knows it. He’s constantly trying to be the center of everyone’s attention; it might explain why he and Harp don’t always get along. “We walked here; did Harp tell you that? We walked from Lawrenceville to Highland Park to pick up Molly at my parents’ house. They’re gone, but there’s this big Believer compound next door—they knocked down a few houses last year to build it. Big ugly stone building with an electric fence around it. There are always Believers wandering around the yard, calling out offensive shit. Today, the place was—”
“Empty,” I supply.
But Dylan shakes his head. “Not empty. Quiet, but not empty. No one was out in the yard, but we could hear voices coming from inside. We heard a kid crying.” He pauses and finds my eyes in the dark. “As we were leaving, we stood by the fence for a while, trying to make out something distinct. And then we heard a gunshot.”
“What?”
“Yep.” Dylan taps his fingers on the coffee table. “Vivian, do you mind if I smoke?”
My parents have rules against smoking—on the few occasions that my maternal grandparents have visited, my mother has always made them smoke on the front stoop. I’m about to say yes, I do mind, apologetically, but then I remember the holes in the ceiling and my throat goes dry. I shake my head. Dylan snakes a package out of his pocket and taps it on the table. He pulls out a cigarette and lights it, and for a moment his face is the only lit object in the room—golden, unshaven, hollow eyed. The tension in it melts as soon as he takes a drag.
“Anyway,” Dylan continues, “it seems like not all the Believers were saved. At least not based on what Harp was telling us.”
I tip my head back to look at my best friend’s upside-down face. She holds out her hand to Dylan and doesn’t speak until he hands her a cigarette. “I didn’t wake up until two,” she says. “When I did, I had, like, fifteen hundred missed calls from Raj. I didn’t know what they were about, but I figured they would be nagging in some way. So I didn’t call him back. I cleaned up the mansion a little, and when I got tired of doing that, I turned on the TV. All the networks were taking the same line: ‘Mysterious Mass Disappearances.’ All of them were dancing around the word ‘Rapture.’ The thing is, it’s a lot fewer people than Frick said it would be. There were how many Believers? Hundreds of thousands, probably? And they don’t think even five thousand are gone. Frick’s nowhere to be found, and Adam Taggart, the official Church spokesman, is gone too. But the celebrity Believers are still present and accounted for. Including,” Harp says, as if anticipating my next question, “the president.”
“People are freaked out,” Dylan says. “We saw only five cars on our whole walk here, and the people in them had shotguns across their laps. We saw an abandoned bus on Liberty Avenue. Like, just sitting there in the middle of the street. And when we got into Shadyside, we came probably this close to getting mugged. A group of kids came toward us, and one of them had a knife out, but they saw Molly and backed off.” Dylan exhales a ragged line of smoke. “Never in my life did I anticipate using my baby sister as a human shield.”
The three of us sit in silence, until Raj and Molly come tromping back up the steps. Raj has made our self-defense a quest, a mission, and Molly dutifully carries a jumble of items in the basket she’s made of her skirt: duct tape, a ball of twine, a hammer, a tennis racket. Raj has the baseball bat. To me he hands a sledgehammer. It has the remains of a white sale sticker on the handle, the adhesive still tacky to the touch, and when I run my finger across the heavy black head of it, it leaves a small pile of white dust on my skin. Even in the dark living room, surrounded by my hushed and fearful friends, I can see it.
We set up camp in the living room that night and light candles. I can’t blame Raj or Dylan for their fears—they’ve actually stepped foot into the post-Rapture world—but from our vantage point on the living room floor, it’s hard to sense any particular dangers lurking on my suburban street. In the hours since my friends got here, I haven’t heard a dog bark; I haven’t heard a car door slam. For all I know, all my left-behind neighbors are doing exactly what we are: hiding. But I’m so relieved not to have to spend the night by myself. I treat it like a slumber party. I help make Molly a fort out of couch cushions and pillows; I throw open the kitchen cabinets and laugh when my friends’ mouths fall open at my hoard. The food is all Church of America brand; in addition to founding the Church itself, Frick was the CEO of its accompanying multimillion-dollar corporation. They publish the magazines and run the Church television networks, and they produce end-of-the-world provisions like these—bottles of Holy Spring Water, a bland SpaghettiOs knockoff called Christ Loops. For a long time I took a moral stand by not consuming them, but now the Rapture has come and I’m starving. We eat cold Christ Loops out of the can, even though the electricity still works, for now. When Molly falls asleep, Dylan and Raj speak in hushed voices about what comes next—Dylan has a plan to take Molly to an aunt’s house in New Jersey. Raj will go too, though the aunt hasn’t spoken to Dylan since he came out. It’s odd now to remember the old ways in which families used to fracture. Raj and Dylan study a map they took from Dylan’s parents’ car, trying to determine which roads will be used less.
“My fear,” says Raj, “is that we’re not going to be able to make this trip in six months.”
“What are you talking about?” Dylan says. “Of course we can. New Jersey’s not that far.”
“It’s farther than you think,” Raj replies. “On foot? With supplies we don’t even have yet? A tent? Food? I’m wondering if it’s worth it, if we shouldn’t just stay here with Molly and wait it out.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Dylan sighs, then folds up the map. “Probably we’ll want to be inland in six months anyway.”
I’m about to ask him what he means—what’s happening in six months?—when I remember. “You’re not serious,” I say. Raj and Dylan stare. Beside me, Harp laughs a strained, chirpy laugh. “You don’t really think the apocalypse is coming in six months, do you?”
“Look, not believing was all well and good when there was nothing to believe in,” Dylan says, a little snippily. “But now it’s happened. Our parents have shot through the ceiling and embraced the eternal kingdom, so I’m not going to operate like the world’s not about to end. I’ve got a kid to take care of; I can’t afford to be skeptical.”
Raj leans over and puts his hand on my forearm, and I’m reminded of the crush I had on him when we were younger, when he was the tall, sharp-cheekboned boy at the bus stop. Always he seemed so much nicer than the boys in my class, so much calmer. He squeezes gently. “It’s okay, Viv. It’s scary, but it’s okay. It’s just a case of admitting we were wrong.”
I say nothing. Harp stands up suddenly, her empty can of Christ Loops hitting the hardwood floor with a dull clatter. “It’s stuffy in here,” she says. “I’m going to get some air.”
“You can’t,” Dylan hisses.
“I’ll go on the back porch,” Harp snaps. “I’ll be quiet, I promise. And I’ll take this.” She picks up the sledgehammer lying across my lap. “Viv?”
I don’t particularly want to leave the safety of the house, but I follow Harp onto the back porch, presuming little to no harm can come to me so long as I’m with her. As soon as she pushes open the screen door leading to the deck, though, all other thoughts leave my mind as the heat hits me. It’s freakishly hot out, and it’s only the end of March. Walking home this morning, I’d had to pull on a cardigan, but right now, deep into the evening, it feels like July—the air is thick and humid, practically unbreathable.
Harp senses my surprise. “Oh,” she says. “I forgot that part—alarmingly unseasonable weather. We’d better get used to the heat. Hellfire and damnation and all that.”
She wanders off the edge of my parents’ deck, resting the sledgehammer on one shoulder. I stand beside her. Harp stares into the dark, at her parents’ house, which stands empty. I know I should say something. But it’s still hard to get serious with Harp. It’s hard to say, “How are you doing?” in that gentle way that indicates you’re expecting a sad answer. I know she’ll flip her hair and crack a joke—I know if she didn’t, I’d have no idea how to handle it.
“My parents didn’t go through the ceiling,” she says.
I don’t know what to say to this. “Oh.”
“There aren’t any holes in the ceiling.” Harp focuses her stare straight ahead; her voice is flinty, almost sarcastic. “There’s food in the fridge. They’re the only things gone.”
I’m so tired. I sit and pull my knees up to my chin.
“But there are holes in your ceiling,” she says. “That’s hard to ignore. It’s hard to pretend that’s something other than what it is.” She sits beside me. I feel her razor-sharp gaze. “What do you think happened? What do you think is going on?”
I can tell the questions aren’t just desperate ones she’s throwing out to the universe. Harp’s not trying to make sense of it. As always, she knows her own mind perfectly—she knows exactly what she believes. There’s a note of suspicion in her voice. She’s testing me now, the new post-Rapture me, to see if I’ve gone belatedly Believer on her.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t wrap my mind around the world legitimately ending, you know? But I don’t know where my parents are. And if they’re actually in”—I cringe just thinking the word; it sounds so ridiculous—“heaven, then why aren’t all the Believers there? I wish there were somebody who could explain this to us.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“I won’t.” We sit together in silence for a moment, listening to the crickets chirping. “Mostly I wish I knew what we’re supposed to do now.”
When Harp begins to speak, I can hear the quiver in her voice—I don’t know if she’s trying to keep herself from crying or laughing or screaming, but she’s quieter than I’ve ever heard her. “Raj and Dylan, they made that plan without even telling me. They’ve been planning for the end of the world for months, probably. And I just play no part in it.”
I know exactly how she feels. It’s how I’ve felt for a year now, watching my parents pray and preach and stock the cabinets with canned goods. But Harp—I can only ever imagine her in the middle of a crowd. It must feel so new and so bad to be so alone. I reach out in the dark and take her hand in mine. She doesn’t squirm away. My best friend holds on to my hand tightly, and together we drink in the new world.