All the Ways the World Can End Read online

  So about a month ago, when Dad had to do a hospital overnight (to replace his colostomy bag—party!), I begged Julian to visit for a look-see. Dr. Ganesh was doing his rounds and I could smell his sandalwood aftershave three rooms away.

  “Ey-leah-nor!” he said when he saw me. “Can I get a what what?” (fist bump). Usually I hated going by Eleanor. My mom insisted on saddling me with this name because she thought Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the most underappreciated heroes of the world. I also had the clumsiest last name in the history of consonants, Rosenthal-Hermann, because Mom insisted on hyphenating. Everyone had called me Lenny since I was in kindergarten. Except Dr. Ganesh, of course. Somehow when he said my name, it sounded like it had five sultry syllables. Which was another reason his voice made me shiver.

  “Damn,” I heard Julian murmur. “One of us has to kiss that silly man.”

  Of course, I knew Dr. Ganesh could never really go for me. First of all, he was at least a dozen years older than me and had a regular habit of looking inside my dad’s rectum. Also, I’d be wildly surprised if he was into awkward teen brunettes with overbearing unibrows and panic attacks who wore thrift-store jeans and still didn’t really fit into a B-cup. But that didn’t stop me from dreaming. Like, it wouldn’t be totally impossible for Dr. Ganesh to be treating my dad on a night shift and then I’d be there looking out a hazily moonlit window and we’d share our deepest secrets and some Milk Duds from the vending machine as the sky melted into a sunrise.

  “Maybe I should call him to describe what happened this morning?” I asked Julian now. “It’s a saline solution. Not supposed to do anything besides … salinify?”

  “Nice,” Julian said.

  “Or I could just text him?”

  “Do it.”

  It took me approximately eleven minutes to compose these two lines of text:

  Hi Dr. Ganesh, it’s Eleanor Rosenthal-Hermann. Can I ask you a question?

  Julian had already etched a map of the United States into his fifth piece of blackened toast and bitten off three more fingernails by the time I finished.

  “Is that okay?” I showed him my phone.

  “Sure, just let me see that.” He snatched it and typed in Do you like pina coladas or getting caught in the rain? Then he pressed Send while I tried to pry the phone out of his hands, screaming, “Stopstopstopstopstop!”

  Dara wasn’t too pleased with our noise pollution and gave us a scowl. Julian and I each put down a three-dollar tip on our one-dollar cups of coffee and picked out the pink chalky mints from the host stand before heading out to say goodbye to Don Juan.

  I noticed there was a big plastic bucket on the floor under the tank and a hose pumping some bubbly fluid into it.

  “There-a goes the neighborhood,” said Julian.

  “Who invited all the plankton to this party?” I chirped.

  Julian tapped on the glass just as my pocket buzzed. I pulled out my phone and saw I had a text back from 917-555-0198.

  Hahahaha.

  How is my favorite Eleanor? You are very hilarious. Yes and yes!

  ~ Yours, Rad Ganesh.

  Mass Extinction

  A recent report from the World Wildlife Fund says that we’ve lost half of the world’s wildlife population in the past 40 years.

  Main causes:

  fishing nets

  poaching

  deforestation

  spilling crap into the water

  spraying crap into the air

  being crappy earthlings

  Warning signs:

  tusks on your lawn

  summers without bees

  Don Juan Crustaceo losing all his lovers

  It’s no longer about survival of the fittest.

  We’re all going down.

  Chapter 3

  VAGEORGIA

  The Mountainside High School parking lot was the drooliest hub of mass extinction. There was so much horny potential for procreation, which mostly fizzled out into a lot of urgent face-mashing in gas-guzzling minivans or SUVs. What made me most annoyed was some unspoken and ozone-destructive rule that if you were getting some action in a vehicle you had to keep your taillights on. I knew at least two people in my school who had gotten felt up and worn out their parents’ car battery in the same day.

  Julian and I walked through the lip-lockers and joined the hall rush to second period without anyone asking where we’d been.

  “Essays are in the basket. Once again, I wonder why I bother,” said our English teacher, Mr. Dunleavy. I got a B, which was mildly insulting considering I’d drawn some poignant parallels between The Grapes of Wrath and the current water shortage in California, but all Dunleavy wrote on the bottom of my paper was, “Let’s try to stay on topic next time.”

  Julian reminded me as we sat down that Dunleavy had been at our high school for over a decade, teaching the same Steinbeck curriculum to snotty teens and pulling at the same four hairs on his head in frustration. Dunleavy had yet to get any of his own work published even in the school newsletter. He had a file folder full of unappreciated sonnets and a musical he’d written on his Casio about the life of Harper Lee—both of which he’d shared with Julian.

  I tried not to get too jealous when other people fell in awe of Julian. He reeked of confidence and daring, and somehow made everyone feel like he was being extraordinary just for them. Even the crossing guard by our public pool once told me that Julian made her feel “heard” for the first time. Also, it was common knowledge that Julian was smarter than everyone in our school—including many of the teachers. A few months before, when we’d had to take statewide exams, we were supposed to write an essay based on a historical quote. Julian’s essay began, “Give me liberty or give me meth.” Then he launched into the biography of Terrence, the guy who used to sell Julian drugs outside Pocketful of Posies flower shop. It was a phenomenal treatise about how our judicial system was failing anyone nonwhite and how methadone clinics were like sweaty gyms full of gangs and false panaceas. Though ultimately Julian had to take the test over, I heard Dunleavy reading the essay out loud in the staff lounge, followed by applause.

  After second period, I was pretty much alone until lunch. It wasn’t that I had no other friends. I hung out with a handful of girls I’d known since third grade. But most of them were tripping after Becca Dinger, empress of off-the-shoulder sweaters. I’d been close with Becca back in grade school, but once she started wearing body glitter on a regular basis she lost interest in me. Also, she told me that my house smelled like mothballs and that I was insecure. Both of which I couldn’t deny. Then she was the first girl in our grade to lose her virginity (to Kevin Kripps) and she reached instant celebrity status. Kevin and Becca already had a joint website where they posted pictures of their romantic getaways and musings on finding your soul mate.

  Physics was a lesson in vectors that turned into chaos theory. Ms. Hubble (no relation to the telescope, but I’m sure it gave her a nerdy thrill) had us doing a lab that came to a crashing halt when the results for junior prom court were announced over the intercom.

  The good news was that Becca was officially queen. The horrific news was that Derek Hooper was king. Becca started shrieking and lost her golf ball off an inclined plane, shattering a pipette in the process. While Becca’s peons tried to clean up her mess, she announced to the class that she could never accept her position as queen without her boyfriend, Kevin, by her side. “The system is rigged!” she cried. “It must be stopped.”

  “Totally,” chimed in a few girls.

  “Rigged!” echoed some others.

  There was actually nothing wrong or rigged about junior prom court elections, except for the fact that junior prom court was a ridiculous idea to begin with. The “elections” were held in the cafeteria and no one even campaigned. Plus, the prom itself was being held at a country club that had once been accused of spreading salmonella, and I wasn’t exactly batting away offers from eligible young gentlemen.

  The only danci
ng I was committed to doing was for Julian. He’d choreographed a solo for me in the Mountainside Spring Performing Arts Showcase, which was going up in less than two weeks. The piece made me giddy and petrified at the same time. I’d protested mightily when Julian said he wanted me to be alone onstage for three whole minutes. But the truth was those three minutes felt like the pinnacle of my small life so far.

  The movements were simple but strong. All I had to do was stand in the middle of the stage with my head tilted to the side. There was a Pretty Petunia Princess doll that we’d found in my attic with one eye permanently shut and a head tilt exactly like mine. She’d been the inspiration for this piece. Then, when Julian cued me with some twinkly ballerina music, I had to waltz around the stage, my arms embracing emptiness. Julian told me I was evocative to watch as I did it. As soon as the music stopped, I collapsed on the floor wherever I was. That was the hardest part, since I had no practice in stunt work and never knew how to brace myself. Hence the trail of bruises up and down my left hip, thigh, and elbow. Each run-through turned my skin a deeper purple. I loved the marks of my persistence.

  After my dramatic drop, Julian walked slowly onto the stage wearing an apron and carrying a turkey baster. He stood in front of me and the Pretty Petunia Princess doll and nudged us both with his toe. Then he took a long pause, surveying us both, picked up Petunia, and cradled her lovingly as he walked off stage.

  Lights out.

  Thunderous applause. Or maybe disturbed silence. Either reaction would thrill Julian for sure.

  We ran through the movements a few times at lunch, but it was pretty treacherous since the stage was covered in dusty Fresnel lights, a roll of blank canvas, and a pile of twigs. The spring showcase was officially called I Have But One Desire, which was taken from a quote by the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. Julian and I called the show VaGeorgia, because it was an all-female cast (besides Julian) and the production had become intensely hormonal.

  At the VaGeorgia helm was a tiny woman named Marty, who was at our school on some arts-in-education grant. She leapt around the room and talked with her whole body. It was clear she did not own a single bra. I loved Marty when I first met her at the beginning of the year. She’d traveled all over the world with a dance troupe and taken some ascetic vows where she shaved her hair to a salt-and-pepper fuzz. Her eyes were light gray and she smelled like potting soil. There was always a little piece of salad stuck in one of her front teeth, which I thought was accidental until she told our cast she placed it there to say “F you to all the societal expectations of female beauty.”

  VaGeorgia was supposed to be about claiming ownership over our femininity. I wasn’t sure what that meant since I didn’t think anyone wanted to own or even borrow mine. But when Marty said it, I felt like her words were the bongos and we were in some giant drumming circle. (She brought in a lot of drums to rehearsal—also a lute, a didgeridoo, and a Moroccan tambouriney thing.) Marty was focusing on Georgia O’Keeffe because she said O’Keeffe had been a crusader for women’s anatomical power. She wanted the show to be “free from structural norms” and yet incorporate monologues, an a cappella medley of girl-power songs, and dancing.

  Originally, Marty had told Julian he could do all of the choreography and she would do the producing and “lyrical composition.” That didn’t pan out, though. We never found out what exactly lyrical composition meant, and Marty insisted on starting every dance rehearsal with free-form movement that she called “exploring the female trajectory,” followed by an invocation to our foremothers where we did a lot of primal yodeling. When and if Marty did hand the proverbial baton over to Julian, everyone was usually hoarse and tired. I could tell Julian wanted to choke her and all her foremothers, only he needed this last credit for his early graduation.

  When afternoon classes were over, I tried to check in with my dad before heading to rehearsal, but he didn’t pick up his phone. A good daughter would’ve gone home to make sure he wasn’t lying in a pool of blood. A selfish, scared, graceless daughter would’ve shrugged, scarfed down a granola bar, and slouched her way into the auditorium. Marty was particularly on fire from the moment I said hello.

  “We’re on the stage. Let’s go.” She made the cast lie down with all the lights off as she led us through a guided meditation about traveling through our fallopian tubes to meet our heroines. “This is not just about one woman’s desire, this is about all of our desires,” she rumbled. “This is about every woman who has fought for our freedoms—Sojourner Truth, Betty Friedan, Malala, the Nineteenth Amendment. Open up your womb. Let the world see your sensuous light.”

  I wanted to be inspired, but lying there just made me think of the millions of microorganisms and adolescent bacteria burrowing into my skin. Not to mention the blanket of sawdust that had gathered on the stage since lunch. The one skill set I had mastered was being a germophobe.

  “Now mindfully, carefully, make your way to your spots for the opening of the show,” said Marty. A current of whispers whipped around the room. Spots? Opening? Nobody knew where to go or what to do.

  “Yeah, that’s what I was trying to tell you.” Julian’s voice boomed from the back of the theater. “We never set anything as the opening. Or the middle or closing for that matter. And we have no place to move even if we did know where to go.”

  There was a sticky silence as we watched Marty twist and lunge her way through the auditorium—working out some sort of answer with her wiry body.

  “Okay, got it,” she said. “Oscar, lights!”

  Oscar was Marty’s seventeen-year-old weirdo son who got dragged around to a lot of her rehearsals and rarely said anything. I honestly felt sad for Oscar because there were so many rumors about him in our cast. One was that he had a cleft palate and mostly used sign language. Another was that he came from a sperm donor with a criminal past and Marty still breastfed him. He was maybe dyslexic, or autistic, or fluent in nine languages. The only thing I knew for sure was that Marty homeschooled him while they traveled the world with her dance troupe. Also that he was about two feet taller than her and had a huge nest of dark curls that dangled over his eyes. Sometimes while we danced Marty had him improvise music on the upright piano that sat off stage left and was barely upright anymore. Everything Oscar played sounded like a variation on Star Wars.

  The house lights went on and he loped toward the stage.

  “Oscar, how close are we to hanging those canvases?” asked Marty. “I don’t want to pin down any choreography until we know what this set is shaping up to be.”

  “I told you I can’t hang anything up until you give me some time to make the frames,” Oscar said.

  “Right,” said Marty. “And in order to make the frames…” She waited for Oscar to finish her sentence.

  “In order to make the frames, we need to get more lumber. And in order to get more lumber, we need the truck to go more than two blocks without breaking down. And in order for the truck to go more than two blocks—”

  “Okeydoke.” Marty cut him off sharply and jumped onto the stage in the same breath. I saw Oscar chew on his bottom lip as he backed away and slammed the lighting booth door shut. I would never survive if my mom tried to homeschool me.

  “Yes, this is right,” Marty announced. “Let’s all come back into a circle and check in, please.” She had us all sit around the twig pile and pulled one out. The bark was thin and the color of snow. Marty looked at it like it was a precious gem, then gave that same look of misty-eyed appreciation to everyone on stage.

  “I know this is a little disappointing, but I do think we need to close rehearsal for the day so we can respect our environment. It’s a little like life, right? How often do we pause to thank a leaf or water a thirsty sprout?” No one answered her, even though she gave us an eon of thoughtful silence to come up with a response. “All right,” she continued. “As we say goodbye for today, I’m going to pass around this exquisite piece of nature and when you receive it, I’d like each of you to say what thi
s process means to you.”

  She passed the twig to her right. Lindsay McAden took it and tried to shrug off the assignment, but Marty just kept on smiling at her until Lindsay squeaked, “I think the process is … fun?”

  There were lots of variations on the word fun—exciting, cool, interesting. Becca said she felt like it was intense. So the next five people said that too. I said it was challenging but helpful.

  “Ooooh, what a fascinating choice of words,” said Marty. “Can you elaborate for us?” I didn’t actually know why I’d said “helpful,” but what I meant was it got me out of the house and it gave my brain somewhere to focus, and sometimes when I was onstage moving or even following one of her meditations I didn’t have to think about anything—not climate change or chemo or the alerts on my phone that told me how many critically endangered Javan rhinos were left in the world. But that was not something I wanted to share with this crowd.

  Julian must’ve smelled my brain overheating from that question. He took the stick from me and said, “I am really enjoying this process and also feel like it’s vital for us to move forward now and get that lumber. So I can take one or two people in my car. It’s a beat-up Jetta, license plate starting EBW.”

  Then he stood up and got his backpack from the front row of seats. I followed his lead. So did most of the circle. Marty thanked us all again and said she would like to facilitate the lumber run, and probably Oscar too.

  “Fine. Let’s go,” Julian said. His voice was chopped and impatient. “And I’m guessing you want me to drop you off at home?” he said to me.

  I nodded, even though he was wrong. Still no message from my dad. My mom wouldn’t be home for at least another three hours. So I didn’t want to go home and act like everything was fine or manageable. I wanted to hide in the changing room or get caught up in the tornado of junior prom chatter or even lie pinned under a pile of lumber. Anything to not go home and just wait for something to get better. Or worse.