It's the End of the World as I Know It - Hardcover

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Matthew Landis slays boredom wherever it lurks in his eighth-grade social studies classroom. He lives in Doylestown, PA, with his wife and four kids, some chickens, and a boxer that acts much like the forgotten eldest child.

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19 Days Before The End

(Monday, September 3)

1

“So what did you say?” I ask Tommy.

He hands me another screw and I send it through the plywood with my cordless drill. “I said, ‘Mother: No, thank you.’”

“He said, ‘Not happening, Kelly,’” Brock calls behind us. He’s loafing in the shade of the giant maple tree in my backyard, murdering flies with his tree trunk arms. “And then she said, ‘Don’t call me by my first name, because I birthed you and therefore control your life.’”

“She’s making me try out.” Tommy sneezes three times in a row because of his massive allergies. “For soccer.”

I get my level out and make sure the plywood is lined up straight with the shed wall. “Hmm. Soccer is pretty much just running,” I say. “Probably ninety percent running.”

“I know,” Tommy says. His arm bumps into me when he says it. He’s always talking up in your personal space. “But she threatened to sell Pete.”

“She always does that. She won’t actually do it.”

“She posted him on Snake4Sale.com,” Brock says. “Tommy cried.”

“I didn’t cry.” Tommy heads to the shade and slumps on the ground next to Brock, which makes him look extra small. Me and Tommy both have brown hair and people used to say we could be brothers until I grew way bigger last summer. “It was, like, a moaning sound.”

“Sounded like crying,” Brock says.

I pull a screwdriver from my tool belt and start checking the tension on each screw. If they’re too tight, they could crack the plywood under the extra pressure from people banging on the outside to get in. “You should pretend to be sick for tryouts.”

“Kelly will know,” Tommy says. “She has, like, psychic mom powers.”

“Kelly knows all,” Brock says.

Tommy fishes out a Gatorade from the cooler. “But it’s fine, because I won’t, like, make the team. I’ll get cut on the first day of tryouts. And Pete will be saved.”

“Pete wants to eat you,” Brock says. “He tried once and he’s going to try again. Let her sell him.”

“That was a misunderstanding,” Tommy says. “Pete was confused. He thought my hand was a mouse.”

“I think to Pete, we’re all mice,” I say. “He’s a python.”

“No. You guys.” Tommy shakes his head. “Pete is cool.”

“There is a predator living in your house and he is coming for you,” Brock says.

The alarm on my watch goes off. It’s one of those big bulky ones with all the buttons you see Navy Seals wear on TV. The doomsday blog I follow, Apocalypse Soon!, gave it ten out of ten mushroom clouds.

“I will push the earth out of orbit,” I say, taking off my tool belt. “Witness me.”

I toss my watch to Brock and he counts down, “Three, two, one . . . destroy gravity.”

I drop to the grass and crank out thirty pushups before my arms start to burn. At forty, I slow down. Five more and my shoulders are screaming. I close my eyes and do smaller sets of two and three. My muscles are lead but I keep pushing. Blood pounds in my ears and the sun blazes on me like the fire that will spew out of the supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park on September 21.

“Time,” Brocks says.

I collapse onto the spikey grass. “How many?”

“Sixty-five,” Tommy says. “New record.”

I jump up and beat my chest with dead arms. Six months ago I couldn’t do twenty pushups in a day, and now I’m closing in on seventy in two minutes.

I’m getting stronger. I will be ready.

Brock throws my watch back. “My mom wants me to play football,” he says. “I heard her talking to my dad about it. They think if I don’t exercise, I will become part of the couch.” He slow tracks a fly in the air but lets it go. Brock is deadly, but he can also show mercy.

“Wanna go out for soccer with me?” Tommy asks him. “We could get cut together.”

“I have Hall Monitor training after school.”

“They have training for that?” I ask.

“One of the many changes I suggested as Hall Monitor in Chief.”

“Dee.” Tommy comes over and gets real close again. He waits a few seconds and then says, “You wanna do it? It would be like when we did tee-ball but just ate sunflower seeds on the bench.”

I look at the shed and think of all the stuff I have to do still: Hang the rest of the plywood. Order the gas masks. Mainly it’s the rolling steel door I’m worried about. That thing was supposed to come two weeks ago, but there was a shipping mess-up.

“Can’t. You know—the apocalypse.”

He sneezes five times. “Yeah.”

Clang.

We look two backyards over and see my neighbor Misty walking toward a tree with a paper target on it. She digs around in the grass and picks up a hatchet, then walks back to her spot. Throws again.

Clang.

It bounces off the tree way above the target.

“What,” Brock says, “in the crap.”

“At least she’s hitting the tree now,” I say. “She’s been out there for a week.”

“I thought she was sick,” Tommy says. “She missed most of school last year.”

I shrug. “I don’t know.”

We watch Misty take off her Phillies hat and fix her ponytail. She goes through a bunch of weird stretches, really taking her time lining up the shot.

“She doesn’t look sick,” Brock says. “She looks ready to hatchet murder that tree.”

“I think it was cancer,” Tommy says.

“No,” I say. “It was something else. My sister knows her sister and she told me, but I forget.”

Misty lets it fly, and the hatchet sails through the air perfectly, like in a movie.

Thunk.

It sticks dead center in the target.

Bull’s-eye.

“Whoa,” Tommy says.

Misty shrieks and runs to the tree. She’s jumping around and celebrating. Now she sees us and shouts, “Did you see that? Please tell me you saw that!”

Brock gives her a thumbs-up. “Nice.”

“Ohmygosh!” Misty shouts, and it’s all joy and she’s got this smile like the sun. She screams again.

Her mom whips open the sliding glass door and runs out onto their deck yelling, “Mercedes! What’s wrong?”

“Look at this!” Misty points to the tree. “Can you believe this? Bull’s. Eye!”

Her mom looks at us. Tommy waves.

“Look at it!”

Brock stands up and says, “Mrs. Knoll: We will all testify to that bull’s-eye.”

Her mom makes a face like I am sort of embarrassed and also confused and goes back inside.

“Yes!” Misty shrieks. She puts the hatchet and paper target in one of those red wagons little kids get hauled around in. She pulls it across her yard and points at us, shouting, “Amazing!”

“That girl is, like, off,” Tommy says.

She walks between her house and the Mitchells’, the people next to me. The wagon rolls pretty good on...