“Don’t be sorry. He seems sweet.”


“He’s not.” I shook the water off the apple and wondered if I should tell Bailey what my father had been saying about her. “I mean, he can be. But the Bible talk gets old after the first hundred conversations.”


“He does it all the time?” Without me having to ask, she tore off a paper towel and handed it over. “How long’s he been like this?” I waited a moment, until I heard Dad go upstairs again, leaving Mara and my classmates with another Peace be with you! “About a month,” I told her. “We’ve tried everything to stop him: giving him weird looks, asking questions that should be impossible to answer with Scripture—”


“Like what?”


“‘What’s for dinner?’ or ‘Think it’ll rain today?’ or ‘Hey, how about that Phillies bullpen?’”


“He has quotes about dinner and rain and baseball?” “There’s a lot of food and weather in the Bible.” I dried the apple and set it on the cutting board. “If he can’t answer, he just gestures or stays quiet.”


“Have you asked him to talk to a counselor?”


“Yeah, we’ve asked. Begged, even.”


“What does he say?”


“Not much.” I yanked a knife from the wood block. “Mostly he breaks things. So we stopped suggesting that,” I continued. “We’ve adapted, learned to speak his language—or hear it, at least. Or better yet, avoid him.” I started slicing the apple, trying not to wield the knife with hostility. “It sounds sick, but you do what you have to, to keep going.”


“It’s normal.” Bailey leaned her elbows on the counter, her hair tumbling forward over her shoulders. “My granddad’s an alcoholic. He lived with us for a year, after Grandmom died and before he went into the nursing home. He could be really fun and loving one minute, and then the next minute he’d be volcanically pissed off over nothing.” “Dad used to drink a lot, back before he found Jesus. I don’t know if he was an alcoholic—is, was, whatever.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Sometimes I think he’s just given up one drug for another.” Her face softened. “Maybe you’re right.”


“Being right doesn’t make it easier.” With the back of the knife, I pushed half the apple slices toward her.


“I love my grandfather, and I feel sorry for him, but I was glad when he left. Some people are just hard to live with.” Bailey came to stand next to me, close, before taking an apple slice. “But we find a way, right? It’s like when software has an unfixable bug. We come up with work-arounds.”


That was exactly it. I wanted to thank Bailey for understanding, but couldn’t get the words out. I hated the thought of anyone yelling at her the way Dad yelled at us. I wanted to go back in time, stand in front of her drunk grandfather, and shield Bailey from all the angry words flung her way.


“You’ve got red on your head.” Bailey reached up and brushed her thumb above my eyebrow. “Whiteboard marker.”


I froze under her brief caress. “Is it gone?”


“No. It’ll come off when you shower. I mean, when you wash your face. I mean, that might be in the shower or it might, um, not.” Bailey Brynn, Queen of Self-Confidence, was blushing. She scooped up a handful of apple slices. “I’m gonna go do math now.” She spun away, face hidden by her waves.


“Wait.”


As she stopped and turned, I realized I didn’t know what I was going to say, just that I didn’t want this conversation to end. My gaze dropped below her skin-tight capris to her matching flip-flops, which each had a cute little black-winged skull on the big toe.


“Your tattoo. What kind of bird is that?”


“They’re Galapagos finches.” She twisted her left leg to show me the back of her lower calf, where a pair of delicate gray-andblack birds perched on a twig. “In honor of Darwin, not to mention Atticus. Two of my heroes.”


“Atticus?”


“Finch. From To Kill a Mockingbird.”


“Oh. Right.” Mara had a copy of that book. I vowed to read it that night, despite the trig final. “It’s very cool.”


Her smile did me in.


When she was out of sight, I rubbed my forehead where she’d touched me, wishing I could stamp the imprint of her finger into my skin.

CHAPTER 7

NOW

“What’s that supposed to mean?”


Mara is peering over my shoulder at Mom’s computer, where Sophia’s website shows nothing but the phrase “like a thief in the night.” The preacher who brought the Rush into our lives used to be featured front and center on her home page, looking radiant, spirit filled, and some may say, kind of hot.

“The quote’s from First Thessalonians,” I tell her, “from the chapter that supposedly warns about the Rapture. ‘The day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night.’” I scroll up and down the page but find no further hints. “But ‘thief in the night’ means a surprise. It means Jesus could come back any time, any day.”“In other words, not specifically May eleventh at three a.m. so everyone could put it in their day planners.”


“Exactly. It’s strange that Sophia would show the one piece of Scripture that contradicts her entire message.”

“Speaking of Sophia.” Mara grabs the remote control from Mom’s nightstand, switches on the wall-mounted TV, and tunes to one of the cable news channels. “When that last Rapture preacher predicted the wrong date a few years ago, they had reporters at his house. Maybe they did the same for Sophia. She’s gotten pretty famous.” The news broadcast is giving an update on the latest forest fire in New Mexico. I turn back to Mom’s laptop, clicking link after link on Sophia’s website. They all show the same message, “. . . like a thief in the night . . .” Creepy.


Mara gives a little gasp. “Yes! Flyers beat the Rangers four games to three. Conference finals, baby!”


I watch last night’s playoff scores and stats on the scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen. The hockey news feels oddly significant.


For weeks, I joked to myself that I might not be around to see the Stanley Cup Final in June, that there might not even be a Stanley Cup Final, due to the Tribulation, the prophesied post-Rapture chaos. In the last forty days, Mom and Dad made me read books and watch movies about the Rapture until I could recite the coming plagues and disasters and battles in my sleep. My imagination was jam-packed with predictions of horror and despair, predictions I was told to welcome because I’d be saved. Did I pretend there was no tomorrow to the point that I convinced myself?

I have a tomorrow, I remind myself, one that’s fresh and blank, like a shaken Etch A Sketch. No matter where my parents are, I’m here, with a life to put back together.


On TV, the forest fire story wraps up, and the anchor lady puts on a wry smile. “If you’ve been following the story of the latest Rapture craze, aka the Rush, you know that it was calculated to occur just over an hour ago. We’ve got a correspondent outside the home of the Rush prophet herself, Sophia Visser. We’re hoping she’ll make a statement.”


The broadcast switches to the correspondent, a young African American guy in a shirt and tie. Mara hits record on the DVR remote. Smart.


“It’s a dark and silent night here at Sophia Visser’s residence,” the correspondent says, eyes crinkling at his Christmas-carol joke.


“We’ve had no sign of her—or anyone, for that matter. There’s a car in the garage, a white Camry that’s on record as belonging to Visser,but phone calls and e-mails are going unanswered.”


The camera pans across the front of the house, where no lights shine inside. The only signs of life are the handful of bored-looking reporters milling near the front door.


“You may recall that in May 2011, the last Rapture preacher, Harold Camping, made a statement claiming that he had miscalculated the event’s date. We’re expecting Visser to have a similar excuse.” The correspondent glanced at the house. “Assuming she ever shows.”


I guess the media expected Sophia to publicly admit she was wrong. Or maybe they hoped the Rush would go full-on Hollywood, with Jesus zooming down on a turbo-powered cloud, whisking the cheering chosen ones into the sky.


The reporters weren’t expecting this nothing in between. Neither was I.


Mara sinks onto the edge of the bed beside me, avoiding the space where our mother’s legs would be. “You think Mom and Dad and the rest of Sophia’s people are gone?”


“Gone as in . . .”


“Like they just all took off.”


“Took off as in . . .”


“Ran away,” she says with irritation. “I don’t mean literally took off like flew into the sky.”


“The Rushers might be hiding in Sophia’s house.”


“They’d have to come out eventually.”


“Maybe there’s a tunnel.”


“To where?” she snaps, then rubs her temple. “Ugh, is it possible to have a hangover without ever going to sleep?”


“You’re asking the wrong guy.”


“Yes, because for once you are the B-E-T-T-E-R child.


Congratulations.”


“I may not have gotten drunk, but I did sneak out. If I hadn’t—”


I cut myself off.


“If you’d been here, what do you think would’ve happened? You