The End of the World As We Know It

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1: The Invite

  2: Shirts Vs. Sins

  3: Special Delivery

  4: Getting A Life

  5: It’s My Party And I’ll Cry If I Want To

  6: Corkscrewed

  7: Aliens And Other Party Fouls

  8: Please, Be A Deer

  9: Nobody’s Home

  10: Going Green

  11: Catch My Drifter?

  12: Let’s Get High

  13: Strange Brew

  14: Greasing The Wheels

  15: Lenny Bruce Is Not Afraid

  16: A Thought

  17: A Thought

  18: Retail Therapy

  19: Everyone’s A Winner

  20: A Man Of Action

  21: Rhapsody In Purple

  22: Anger Management

  23: Winners

  24: Mall For One, And One For Mall

  25: I’ll Drink To That

  26: A Case Of Bed Head

  27: First Date

  28: Just Another Sad Love Song

  29: This Is Not A Drill

  30: The Most Interesting Man In The World

  31: In For The Kill

  32: Deep Freeze

  33: All Aboard

  34: Looks Like We Made It

  35: Uzi-Licious

  36: Like A Bat Out Of Hell

  37: When Life Hands You Aliens …

  38: Imagine All The People

  39: Hangover

  40: Give Me Some (Outer) Space

  41: What’s Next?

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  Copyright

  This book is for Clark and Steve, without whom my place in the world wouldn’t feel quite like mine.

  And for you, Mom. I want to say so many things but none more important or true than that I miss you every day.

  This book is for Clark and Steve, without whom my place in the world wouldn’t feel quite like mine.

  Have you ever had one of those life-changing days? “Oh, definitely,” you say.

  You’re thinking: the night you got to second base; your first sip of Natty Light in that musty corner of your next-door neighbor’s basement; that time at Taco Bell they gave you a chalupa instead of a gordita and you had a revelation about the menu that felt wise and universal—It’s. All. The. Same. Shit.

  Well, not to burst your burrito or anything, but you haven’t had a life-changing day. Not really. Not in the deep-voiced, movie-trailer-narrator sense: “It was a day just like any other, until one event changed life as he knew it—forever.”

  Today is that day.

  1

  THE INVITE

  Sarabeth Lewis, 6:49 P.M. Saturday, Her Bedroom

  Sarabeth Lewis was bored.

  Not just bored with her bedroom, a pink-infused Martha Stewart project of her mom’s that made her feel like she was about to be suffocated by cotton candy. Not just bored with the prospect of another Saturday night spent practicing her cello, which loomed in the corner like a massive ball and chain. Not just bored with looking up at the same old ceiling, wondering how a girl could be nearly done with high school without having made one real friend.

  She was existentially bored. Bored to the core. Possibly bored in a way no one had ever been bored before. At least I’m original, she thought, rolling onto her stomach and heaving a sigh.

  “Tonight’s topic: three things I’ll never be a part of,” she said as she wrote the header across the top of her journal. Every topic she dreamed up lately contained the word never. Three places she’d never go. The three Interiors—as she called the popular kids who occupied the center of the cafeteria—who would never learn the difference between “their,” “they’re,” and “there.” Three supposedly hot guys she’d never go out with, even if they asked.

  Pressing her pen to her lips she underlined Three Things I’ll Never Be a Part Of and wrote: a Girls Gone Wild video; my mother’s annual Makeover Madness event. The words poured onto the page in her loopy, A-plus penmanship. Sarabeth was the last teenager on Earth to give a crap about the Palmer Method. The guest list for Teena McAuley’s Casimir Pulaski Weekend party.

  Except she actually was on the guest list.

  She flipped a few pages back in her journal and pulled out the red envelope that Teena’s friend Dahlia Dovetail had handed her in the cafeteria yesterday. Across it was written the simple message: “You’re in. Bring this invite to gain one admittance to Teena McAuley’s Annual Casimir Pulaski Weekend Party.” Once upon a time, Sarabeth and Teena had been friends, before Teena became a queen bee in eighth grade and left Sarabeth in her glitter-eye-shadow dust. But there was no way Teena had invited her out of fond distant memories. Sarabeth knew her twin brother, Cameron, was responsible. “It wouldn’t kill you to get out once in a while,” he’d told her on Monday, as she hovered over the stove, trying to master a crepe recipe by Julia Child. “Teena’s big party is this weekend. Maybe I can get her to invite you.” Cameron was nice, but he wasn’t stupid. He had sway with Teena. Her crush on Cameron was as persistent and as obvious as Sarabeth’s lack of a social life.

  At the time, Sarabeth had thought it was just Cameron being nice and three-minutes-older big-brothery, expecting him to forget what he’d said. Cameron Oliver Orman Lewis—yes, his initials spelled COOL—was the rarest of Interiors. He played quarterback and skateboarded, was a drama-club leading man and edited the school paper, got good grades and went to all the best parties. Oh, and he was nice: Every freak, geek, and chic loved him. Sometimes it bugged Sarabeth that he was such a good guy; she couldn’t even hate him for getting the popularity gene that she’d missed. Their mother, Olivia Lewis, had, postdivorce, risen to become the Chicagoland metropolitan area’s most successful Gussy Me Up beauty franchisee. Now she often wondered aloud how Cameron had wound up so much more like her, while Sarabeth was like her absentee father. The ultimate insult.

  Sarabeth ran her fingertips over the invitation, wishing she still felt as determined to go to the party as she had earlier today. She’d been so excited, she’d snuck a bottle of Chardonnay from her mom’s wine rack, since even an outcast like Sarabeth knew you didn’t go to Teena’s without alcohol. Tinley didn’t sell alcohol within its borders, and Sarabeth didn’t have Cameron’s college-friend connections to help her score liquor. Plus, she’d even ventured out to buy a new outfit. Sitting next to her on the bed was a shiny pink shopping bag from Charlie, one of the trendy stores in the mall she’d always been too scared to enter. Sarabeth dumped its contents onto her bedspread: the still-folded, wisp-thin green crepe sweater, the dark-rinse jeans, and Charlie’s signature hot-pink tissue paper. The outfit was far from wild, except for the fact that Sarabeth usually stuck to shapeless black and gray sweaters and pants that didn’t call attention to her five-foot-eleven frame.

  Feeling the soft fabric of her sweater, Sarabeth instantly fell under its spell. She wanted to wear it. And not just for a date with her cello. She stared at the words on the invite and back at her reflection in the mirror. Maybe this was an I-want-to-get-into-your-brother’s-pants invite—but so what? Why should the Interiors have all the fun? Those kids could probably die tomorrow and feel like they’ve lived a great life, Sarabeth thought, knowing she was being a little melodramatic. And here I am, wondering if my life has even started.

  She pulled off her black T-shirt and slid the sweater on over her head. Even Gussy Me Up’s number-one-selling lotion, Smooth Moves, couldn’t duplicate the soft sensation.

  And then she said the sentence no one should ever utter: “What’s the worst that could happen?
”

  2

  SHIRTS VS. SINS

  Evan Brighton, 6:52 P.M. Saturday, Orland Ridge Mall

  Evan Brighton couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry as he strolled through Orland Ridge Mall, tightly clutching an invitation to Teena McAuley’s annual Casimir Pulaski Weekend bash, the knuckles of his left hand turning white. Coach would kill him for putting any strain on his star pitching hand, but Evan didn’t care. This party was way more important than taking the Ermer Elephants to sectionals.

  This was Teena McAuley.

  Teena McAuley, astonishingly beautiful, impeccably dressed, and sexy as all hell—which was where Evan’s impure thoughts would certainly send him, if the lessons of parent-enforced Bible study were true. Teena was more than just another girl. She was a dream come true.

  Yesterday, Evan’d barely believed it when Teena sauntered up in last-period calculus and dropped the invitation onto his desk, winking one of her sparkly dark brown eyes at him as the envelope fell with a little whisper onto the gray desktop. The irony wasn’t lost on Evan. Calculus was the class where he figured he’d blown any smidgen of a shot with Teena McAuley. A month ago, during an exam, she’d been leaning forward in her chair, right behind Evan. She smelled so good he’d stopped even bothering with the differential equation and just breathed deeply so he could smell her. Which sounded creepier than it was. Teena was just one of those people who smelled good. Anyone would be enticed by her flowery perfume as it mingled with a tinge of her sweet-smelling sweat, fresh from her eighth-period gym class. He could feel her breath on his neck, not to mention the threat of an erection growing in his pants.

  Wholly unnerved by the idea that Teena might see him pop a boner, he’d croaked, “What are you doing?” His stupid exclamation had brought their teacher, Miss Holman, rushing over to seize Teena’s exam and bust her for cheating. The one person in class he’d do anything for, and he’d gotten her suspended. Teena had barely looked at him since. Until now.

  So here he was, scouring the mall, desperate for a miracle in the form of a wardrobe update to prove he was worth some kind of attention. It was one prong, the easiest prong, of his plan. He’d sized up the situation the same way he’d size up a batter, trying to take what he knew about a player and mingle it with what he felt in his gut.

  What he knew was this:

  1. Teena had liked him once. Okay, so it was back in kindergarten. She’d set a pan of plastic hot dogs on the play stove and grabbed Evan from the floor, where he’d been stacking alphabet blocks with future burnout Leo Starnick. “You’re my husband,” she said, kissing him quickly on the lips. Then she’d flitted away, leaving an awestruck Evan staring so long and so hard at the plastic wieners that the teacher had called his parents out of concern.

  2. He was a good-enough-looking guy who, for all practical purposes, should have been able to get tail. Evan was the star pitcher of the Ermer Elephants, and girls who didn’t know him did check him out. The problem came with girls who did know him: They also knew his stepdad was Godly Jim Gibson, head of the Soul Purpose Community Church, the mega-est of the megachurches, sitting at the outskirts of Tinley Hills. No girl wanted to be felt up by a guy whose stepdad’s local cable show promised you’d “Watch and learn—or burn!” Unless you counted the chicks who attended the Find Your Soul Purpose teen workshops at the church. They were easy, with a creepy, culty center. He’d made out with one moonfaced girl at a church hayride, and she’d wanted to do it in the church “so God could watch.” Even a practice round with someone like that seemed likely to put him on a path to obligatory marriage before age eighteen.

  3. Teena always wanted what someone else had. Last year, she’d robbed her best friend, Nathalie Oliverio, of her football-stud boyfriend, Jason Keller, only to dump him when he sprained his wrist and was benched for the season.

  Knowing all this, Evan decided he couldn’t use a direct approach with Teena. He was going to throw her a curve. He absolutely had to publicly make out with someone tonight. He’d make sure to take advantage of the large quantities of available alcohol to find a willing girl who didn’t make him too nervous. The girl had to be part of Teena’s circle, cute enough to make Teena feel threatened, and not so drunk that she’d forget who Evan was by Monday at school. It was a long shot, but so was pitching more than one perfect game in a lifetime, and Evan had already pitched two.

  Besides, you didn’t just get invited to Teena McAuley’s biggest party of the year. He had to be gaining some kind of social status just to merit an invite. He guessed it had something to do with the recent story in the student paper, the Ermer Herald. No one read the paper, true, but an extremely flattering photo of him pitching had recently appeared next to the headline THINGS LOOK “BRIGHTON” FOR ERMER ELEPHANTS. His hair was curling up in just the right way under the rim of his blue hat, his outstretched pitching arm looked ripped, and his normally wide eyes had taken on a semi-cool squint against the harsh glare of February’s cold but blinding sun. Coach made Evan start practicing early, since Evan didn’t play a winter sport. Playing varsity ball was about the only thing that made him feel normal and the only thing he could think of that might inspire Teena to think of him as an actual guy and not just a huge joke.

  He’d been wandering the mall since blowing off Saturday practice at three thirty. He’d seen some of his classmates, mostly cute girls and all probably Teena invitees, at the mall, too. They’d all seemed surprised and confused to see Evan Brighton out doing anything remotely normal. When he wasn’t at baseball practice, he maintained a steady and strictly enforced schedule of Bible study, churchgoing, and “supporting” his stepfather’s mission by sitting in the front pew for televised fund-raising specials. He didn’t usually hang out at the mall and had even heard one girl ask her friend, “Isn’t he the one with the church dad?” The only person with less mall cred than him was Sarabeth Lewis, who he’d almost crashed into. She’d been clutching a distinctly pink shopping bag from Charlie, one of the nicer girls’ stores in the mall, against her chest nervously. The smartest, most accomplished girl in their class was pretty much a loner, and if anything, she had seemed like she might be more uncomfortable at the mall than Evan was. His stomach growled, reminding him he’d been here for more than three hours and hadn’t bought anything. Food first. Then he’d make a decision. He ambled past a mom pushing a double-wide stroller and brushed by the line of old men sitting alongside the gurgling water feature, all holding their wives’ purses in their wrinkled laps.

  The aromatic cocktail of the four most popular fast-food eateries collided together before he even made it past the Hat Hut. Cinnabon’s hypnotically sweet odor rose up over the orange duck sauce from China Wok, dancing together with the spicy grease of Happy Gyro and the melted cheese and pungent garlic of Phat Phil’s Pizza.

  Evan spun left to get in line at Phil’s, watching as Leo Starnick tossed a circle of dough in the air. An older girl in a tight CAMEO BEAUTY INSTITUTE tee studied Leo intently. Her talonlike nails gripped the top of the glass case filled with pasta salads and hot pizza slices as Leo worked in the open kitchen that faced the food court. Her eyes focused on Leo’s sinewy arms, probably wishing Leo’s gaze were directed at her instead of the dough.

  If they were still friends, Evan might have asked Leo for help with his Teena predicament. Leo had a rep as a lady magnet, even if he did pull some trashy women. But they didn’t exactly run in the same circles. Actually, if Evan thought about it, neither of them really belonged to any circle. Leo wasn’t a full-on burnout, since he somehow played in the string ensemble and was rumored to be a near-genius, despite his GPA. And Evan might have played sports, but he was no jock. Every time he walked into the locker room, his teammates’ conversation about tits, ass, and who was getting what abruptly stopped, as if Evan would be reporting back to his stepdad on their sins. It was hard to find a circle when everyone rated you about as much fun as a geriatric Walmart greeter.

  Evan ordered two slices of pepperoni, a
nd Leo walked over to ring him up. “It’s one-fifty-two, man,” Leo said with a grin.

  Evan stared at Leo, bewildered. That was only enough to cover the Pepsi when his total should have been about seven or eight bucks. He pointed down at his slices. Leo shook his head. It hit Evan that Leo had given him the slices for free. He pushed a few bills across the counter.

  “Thanks, man.” Evan dumped all his change in the tip jar, and Leo gave him a quick thumbs-up that would have looked dorky if someone else had done it, but somehow managed to look cool on Leo.

  The simple fact that he hadn’t paid for two slices gave Evan a boost. He devoured his pizza in a series of piggish gulps and washed everything down with his Pepsi. Now he could add Gluttony to his list of sins. Take that, Godly Jim Gibson.