At Monday morning assembly, after a few announcements of club meetings and a rambling plea to please return the lab’s frogs, I stood and pronounced: “This Friday the world will end.” I sat again. The student body murmured their agreement---there was a massive English paper due Friday, as probable a cause as any to cause an apocalypse, and exams were next week, so why shouldn’t the world end? It made perfect sense. Steven, who listens to too much rap and smokes too much pot, punched my arm. “Tell ‘em dude, right on.” The teachers panicked, not because of the implications of my announcement, but because they thought I was insane. The headmaster cleared his throat, smiled nervously and dismissed us. We walked to class.
Monday through Friday morning went ordinarily. We went to class, left class, hung out in our dorms, talked, ate, slept. There might’ve been a little less attention paid in class, and I was a little more popular, but nothing worth writing home about. (In fact, most people didn’t write home---about the coming end or anything else, figuring that their parent’s wouldn’t nag them about lack of contact when the earth was destroyed.)
Thursday night we stayed up until dawn. We decided to watch the sunrise, and went to the May Dell, which is modeled after a Greek amphitheater and is the location of our famously beautiful graduation ceremony. The May Dell echoed with the sound of the alarms we’d set off when we’d left the school. It was shiver-cold in the blue darkness, so we made a bonfire. We danced around and sang what we remembered of the disturbing Lord of the Flies songs. We went back inside and wrote our names on the dorm room walls with charred wood from the fire.
Philip, my roommate, was lying on his bed when I walked into the room. He wasn’t bothering with class. I grabbed my biology book, as if this final token gesture would get me into heaven. In Biology II I sat next to Maria, who is Latina, and totally “smoking”—to quote the bathroom wall. I asked her what she thought of the apocalypse. She flipped her hair and said she wasn’t fazed. As we turned to page 243 in the textbook the earth rumbled. Our teacher explained the tremors as “a common natural phenomenon”—but we knew better.
We headed to the basement of the school, which was used by the CIA during one of the world wars. It was designated an official bomb shelter. Besides, it had a ping-pong table, and the geeks had stashed their laptops and video games there. As the second floor melted into butter and vines grew from the doorknobs, we sat in a circle. I leaned over and kissed Maria, because there seemed nothing better to do during an apocalypse. When the teachers used the fire extinguishers they produced nothing but cotton balls.
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