On some hot-ass Saturday afternoons we steal a bottle of Jenny’s mom’s rum, spike Mountain Dew Big Gulps, march to the 8th Street parking garage and leer down from the rooftop at the Youth Group kids we used to hang with. Down below on Main Street, Jake — Youth Group’s thirty-three-year-old leader/prophet — stands on a milk crate and preaches fiery good word mashed up with Y2K brimstone. My brother Eli, Jake’s truest apostle, wears this plastic sandwich board that says FREE ADVICE and walks up and down The Grove talking God and survival talk all cheerful to whoever will listen. It’s embarrassing until the rum fully hits, then it’s just funny and kind of sad.
Jenny sits on the ledge hanging her long legs over and talks more shit about Youth Group than I do. Mostly because she had/has a crush on Eli who told her, “No thanks I’m only in love with the Lord now,” when she asked him to junior prom in late spring. Plus, he told her she was too self-focused and needy. Eli can be a dick. She would never admit that’s the main reason she quit Youth Group — Eli’s petty rejection — and she never even told me about asking him out, but I know she did. We’re linked like that.
Jenny and I tell each other the reason we quit Youth Group is because we’re smarter and more enlightened. Way fucking cooler than those fear-mongers and lemmings. Maybe so. But there are these other reasons, too, I bet Jenny knows. I made out with Jake one night after Youth Group when he was giving me a ride home in the low-ride hearse. I never told her shit about it, but feel like she deep down also knows he tried to finger me and started unbuckling his jeans as he whispermoaned my name — “Belle-a, oh my Isabelle” — with spearmint breath and I told him don’t and he told me he could feel God tethering us together as one and I told him it was only the little Jesus in his pants telling him that. I slapped his hand away from all that unbuckling and he quick like nothing grabbed my neck and said, “My God can be a vengeful God, too, cunt,” squeezing hard at my jawline.
I had to use cover-up on the bruises for a week. We’d always been flirty before, and I thought we might hook up some time, but after that I don’t want to get any closer to Jake than up here leaning on the 6th floor railing, letting the rum smear my vision and speed my blood as we watch strangers on lunch break ignore Jake and my brother and the four other kids across Main Street trying to drum up interest in salvation. Sometimes we think we should martyr it up, but fuck that, too. We’re girls with things to do, and we’ll do them because like Jenny says, we’re not here to play motherfucking handball, bitches, we will ruin you, it is now our job.
◆
When Jake first moved here and started up Youth Group everyone was right off mesmerized by the way he made everything seem enlightened and cool. First time I met him, Jenny, Eli, and I were smoking outside 7-Eleven. This was the same week we sent Mom to rehab, the same week Dad yelled, “Jesus f’n Christ, Belle, are you retarded?” at me for not folding the laundry proper, and for not putting his mail in the right order, and for buying 1% milk instead of 2%. He was walking the knife blade all March because of Mom, but it still, it made me cry.
It was a Monday or Tuesday we met Jake, the first warm day of spring. In pulls this matte-black hearse, with fat white crosses on the front doors, a Dead Kennedys emblem stenciled on the hood, tires chirping, the stereo blasting Suicidal Tendencies. This made Eli perk up. He was still wearing the Mohawk and the tight black jeans and eighteen-hole Docs, boots like Jenny and I wore too. I perked up when Jake got out of the hearse, and he’s not some punk and not some mortician-looking goth, but a sharp-angled, smiling, confident charmer, a gentleman and a savior. He wore faded Levi’s and an untucked Smiths t-shirt and cross-shaped earrings, which we later learned he liked to sometimes wear upside down just to, you know, “keep God on his toes.”
He gassed up the hearse, nabbed a twenty-four pack and some beef jerky, came over to us sitting on the gum-spotted curb, handed across jerky. At first we thought he was being condescending, like we were some latchkey scragglers, but we took the jerky anyhow.
He sat next to Eli, and Eli said what’s up. Jake said that he’d just moved from Portland but that Boise seemed pretty cool, full of possibility. This was the time of year when the thaw was finally on, trees and gardens blooming all over the place. He reached his long arm across Eli and shook my hand, then Jenny’s. His hands were smooth. He smelled like mint and cloves and oranges. His eyes were blue-green beyond blue-green. They made me want to do everything he ever asked. Jenny and Eli, too, I could tell, even though at first Eli was jealous because Jenny was supposed to be hot on him, not this older guy. Then Jake handed over a Camel and a PBR, and Eli remembered he’s not that interested in Jenny anyhow. Jake said come on let’s go somewhere and drink, stood up, and opened the back door to the hearse.
We drove up Warm Springs, then wound our way to Table Rock lookout to drink and watch the evening creep in all gold and yellow and blue. It was a comfort as we talked school and small-city ennui and a little bit of Y2K Jesus paranoia and the end of the world. It was something that Eli had for a long time obsessed about, just like Mom. We grew up going to church and picturing Armageddon — Left Behind, etcetera — but we hadn’t gone for months because Dad got in an argument with the pastor over a stupid potluck. Jake saw the fear in Eli and played into it like a master. Jake said he’d been reading up on it all, and I thought then that maybe it was because he was scared of it, too, and that self-confidence was his cover like the safety-pin jackets, eyebrow and nipple piercings, green and purple side-chopped hair, were maybe ours.
Jake went on with details — one-world order, Second Coming, famine, drought, looting, wandering the earth as lonely and hopeless nomads. Then we were back to watching the evening lights wink on, and talking about the hearse, parties in Portland, where to score good weed. Just as the sun was easing into the horizon, the last beers in our hands, Jake pulled out this fat, worn Bible, along with this little pen light and read from Leviticus, or Revelations — “And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth…” Jenny stood up and said “Wait,” looking me straight in the eye, then Jake, “Jake, seriously, who the fuck are you?”
Jake stood up, too, taller than the day, taller than anyone I’ve ever seen. He pointed to Jenny. He said, “You’ve been waiting for me.”
Eli looked at me, nodded like everything is going to be different now.
I just held my middle finger out, and Jenny did the same until Jake was laughing and we were laughing too. We were pretty buzzed. Jake pulled us in for a hug, the laughter building, Jake’s hands all up and down our backs, necks, hips, and when I looked at Eli he seemed the only one of us not about ready to piss their pants with hysterics and a weird buried terror. Eli, my little brother was glowing and buoyant like I’d never seen him.
◆
Now that it’s August it seems like the year 2000 really is almost here. Y2K fever all over the place. The computers are all going to go mad-cow crazy because of the analogue two-digit date thing. According to Jake and Youth Group and Jenny’s dad and everyone on TV, there will be no way to access your money, bombs’ll be flying since the launch computers are wacked — no subways, no jumbo jets, no gas from digital pumps, or fuck it maybe even the refineries won’t be able to refine, and rumor has it it’s all set up to lead to that one-world government that for some reason scares everyone.
The answer: Jesus, big-ass generators, hoarding ramen, bottled water, peanut butter, canned peaches and chili. Jenny’s dad even has a bunker in the hills beyond Table Rock, but he won’t tell her where — “Until the chosen time,” he says. That’s typical Jenny’s dad. But I will say, Jenny and me are intrigued, like what if… And Eli, he’s fully vested. He’s drinking the Kool-Aid like it’s the tropical blood of Christ. And what the hell, maybe it is.
◆
Early summer we were all into Jake’s idea to start this Christian-Youth-Group-plus-survival- bootcamp so we could be ready for Y2K and the day of reckoning that he’d convinced us was an imminent thing. Jake’s take on Youth Group seemed punk, and we wanted to be punk. After not much time at all Youth Group gained serious traction — mostly because of Jake’s good looks and relentless salvation enthusiasm, his innate abilities to, let’s say, foment. But then the fever of summer hit and Jake’s self-deprecation started slipping away and seriously the apocalypse became a definite thing and we were all in jeopardy if we didn’t follow his lead. I could change, and because I could, Jenny could, or vice versa. But not Eli, and definitely not the rest of the Youth Groupers.
It wasn’t long ago, just into summer, when Eli fully denied Jenny post-prom, and then right after the shit in Jake’s hearse happened we dropped out. Then a rumor started that Jenny got it on with some washed up grunge lead singer from Seattle, and Eli told Jenny she’s a Godless slut. Jake told people I blew him in the back of his hearse and he got this rash all over his junk. Then like that we’re both the outcasts like we thought we always wanted to be.
◆
Jenny and me find it all pretty funny now that we’ve left Youth Group and started really seeing Jake ramp up the zealotry. Summer’s bloomed, and we’ve had a lot of laughs up on the garage and all around the streets of Boise. We’ve seriously consumed a barrel full of stolen rum, seems like. I don’t know how Jenny’s mom doesn’t know, or maybe she does and doesn’t give a shit — both our parents are pretty checked out this year, but somehow it makes things better, makes us more real, Jenny and me.
Once fall sets in lots more kids start buying into Youth Group. Eli rounds them up, and Jake knocks them down. Jake starts demanding dues — not necessarily money, but stuff: food and furniture and a good stereo or two — for the bunkers at the Y2K cabins up north of Idaho City that who knows if he even owns like he purports. Eli’s the only one who claims to have ever been up there, and who can trust what he says anymore — not me, not Jenny, not the citizens of our half-ass little city who he keeps giving FREE ADVICE to. For dues, we hear Jake says it’s okay for kids to steal stuff, and we know for sure some have. One of Eli’s friends got the shit beat out of him for selling his dad’s vintage Fender, and this other kid got sent to juvie for swiping cases of champagne from the Co-Op loading dock.
“Not sure Jesus would be down with that,” I tell Jenny on a cooling fall day up on the rooftop. I’m pointing at two kids we recognize but don’t know roll up in a 4×4 and drop off two brand new TVs and an unopened crate of wine. Eli pats them on the shoulder to say God blesses you.
“Fucking Jesus thieves,” Jenny says, crossing herself with her middle finger as those dudes get back in their truck and Eli looks up our way but acts like he doesn’t see us.
“Eli won’t tell me where they keep it all,” I say, and lean into Jenny to stay warm. Pretty soon it’s going to be too frigid to hang up here.
“We should call the cops,” Jenny says.
But if we call the cops on him who knows what he’d do. I think back to the choke, the black look in Jake’s eyes that night, and say, “No chance.”
◆
At school Jenny and I are fully the outsiders of the outsiders, which now does in fact feel natural. Eli hangs with the Youth Group kids on this patch of yellowing grass off the track, and most days Jake comes over and talks with the whole growing group of these kids we used to know and be — hard burnout kids like Claire H and Peter W from over near Garden City, the one Mexican punk kid Bennie S, and even Barnaby Kerns, violently intellectual and trying to grow a chin beard for over a year. Kerns used to always deconstruct everything we read in school, or that anyone said — via queer theory, post-modern, feminine, post-punk, Armageddon theory. Now even he’s into Jake, and his Y2K charisma, and the all-inclusive brainwash of the end of the millennium.
The school doesn’t like it much more than we do, and now they don’t let Jake onto school property, which doesn’t matter for shit because it’s an open campus so the Youth Groupies meet him other places — Flying M, the skate park, Record Exchange. Plus the track runs right along Washington Street so Jake just leans against the cyclone fence, lets fly what will fly.
I try not to pay it much mind, but it’s hard, especially with Eli always hassling me about it at home, and then especially, especially with what Jenny let out this afternoon: “I’m worried I want in on Youth Group again. We were there first, which seems important. That’s what I keep thinking: Jake came to us first, for a reason.”
I think about telling her how it felt to check those bruises in the mirror five times a day and how my neck still pulses — but she probably guessed already, and she still said this shit, still wants back in, so it matters fuck-all and I’m pissed.
“All this is blowing up soon — Youth Group, not the world,” I say, “these fuckers don’t know anything.”
“You don’t believe any of it? Not even in Eli?” she says.
“My brother is a pussy. And you’re being a dumbass.”
Jenny’s face folds into this hurt angry mask and she says, “You’re a bitch.”
I say, “These people are not real. They are not who we are. They’re idiots, remember? Don’t be a myopic cunt.”
Jenny holds her middle finger to my forehead and flicks it and it hurts and shocks me and for the first time in a long time we both go off to spend the day by ourselves.
◆
I wander the North End blowing off homework, getting more and more angry and confused at Jenny until that finally reverses and I simply feel like shit. Jenny and I don’t fight. Not even when back in seventh grade she told her mom I stole lipstick and blush and condoms from Rite Aid and my dad got word, told me he wished he never brought me into the world — “Abortion was a real option, never forget that,” is how I remember it, is how it was etched into the history of the world. But fuck it, it was Jenny who stole all that. She just told her mom she was holding it for me because she panicked. She apologized, and apologized again, and I forgave her because I love her in all the real ways people love. She had just been scared, just so scared.
◆
I don’t see Jenny for almost five days. The Big God 2000 rally gets officially announced by Jake and Eli down at The Grove the week before Thanksgiving. Jake’s got a bullhorn and Eli’s got a Grim Reaper robe and scythe. Big God 2000 is December 31st, and it’s meant to be a night of saving where kids finally commit to Christ — because it’s not too late to save themselves.
When I finally talk to Jenny again it’s when she comes over to our house to tell me her mom got into some kind of trouble down in California where she ran off to a couple of weeks ago.
Jenny gives me a hug and we say sorry, then she explains how her dad drove out there to California to help her mom, and maybe bring her back? She says, she’s troubled for her mom even if she is a snatch and cheated on her dad all last summer. She says, fuck why is he even going out there? She says, only good thing is we’ll have their house to ourselves for Thanksgiving break week which is amazing because things at my house are deadly boring status quo — my parents going back to church regular again after Eli started laying on the guilt trip — and I hate to even be there.
◆
About a month before Big God 2000 I’m way out at the Hastings on Fairview and some dude comes up from behind me in the new punk vinyl section and says my name real quiet and sets his hand on my back like we’re yesteryear lovers. I turn ready to see someone from high school, or one of Eli’s friends just fucking with me, but who do you think it is smiling at me like that cat from Wonderland? Jake. He says my name again, Belle it’s so awesome to see you, smiling wider, which makes my stomach drop, my palms go slippery and all I can say is, “You too,” when what I’m thinking is, “Asshole I’m not quite sure I said you could touch me.” At least I don’t smile back.
“Been wanting to talk,” he says. “After you and Jenny cut out.”
“Well, not me,” I say. “I have not been wanting to talk with you. Like, until the world ends for real.”
“You got me wrong,” Jake says, stuffing those reaching hands into his jean pockets. “You got me wrong. I’m here to help. What records you buying?”
“You don’t have any fucking idea what I got wrong.”
“Don’t be hostile,” he says. “I’m just a friendly friend trying to reconnect with a friend.”
“Sure.” The Hastings sound system thrums a Pavement song.
“Big God 2000 is going to be epic,” Jake says. “And for real. You should be there.”
He smells like worn leather, sugared sweat, wearing the glossed skin of reptiles, of insects.
“Sure,” I say again, feeling stupid. I touch at my neck for those bruises that will never, ever be gone.
“Pavement,” he says, putting his left hand on my waist. “You would have loved them live. I played them for your brother, and now he’s all about Pavement and Big God, Big God and Pavement. Some people just want truth in their lives, Belle.”
“I don’t give much of a fuck, Jake.”
“You will,” he says, taking a step back.
I bow my head, turn a slow half-circle, yet I know he’s keeping his yellow-green lizard eyes on me. I do not see him, yet I do, in the smudged tile floor, the bright-sleeved records, the smiles of the oblivious clerks ringing up oblivious customers, I see it.
I keep my head down and away, as I hoist my arm and middle finger high, and higher.
Jake laughs, “Oh you’ll give a fuck.” He claps once, twice, laughs again, retreating. “Jenny and you both will. It is already written. The Book of Days.”
I am silent, smiling, flipping Jake off with both hands now, staring at the oversized London Calling poster across the store, the bassist bent in supplication, in the moment before he smashes his Fender to shit, and is immortalized.
“See you at Big God,” Jake says, and then he is gone, and I buy that Clash record, and I go home and play it loud. Over and over, I play it loud.
◆
Then it’s almost Christmas and Jenny and I go around downtown defacing the snowy, smiley elves and reindeer and Santa Claus window paintings that’re everywhere, painting upside-down crosses and pentagrams and X-ing out Santa’s eyes. Eli says we shouldn’t be giving gifts this year, or any year, not that they’ll be many/any more years after this one. He says we’re given the greatest gift of all each day, every day, and that should be enough. I say, even Jesus and the apostles needed new shoes and underwear sometimes, and maybe even some new makeup, right? He just shakes his head and goes over to whisper some shit about materialism and how he’s praying for me into our parents’ ears.
Turns out they partly listen to him and get us way fewer gifts, which is fine, I suppose, because whatever. I, however, get them and Jenny all more gifts than normal, spending most of the $200 I had in savings. I give Jenny a copy of The Bell Jar and wrap it in my favorite Cramps t-shirt with one of my dad’s ties. I get Dad a big fat Swiss Army knife, and Mom two sweaters from Dillard’s, and the whole family a gift certificate for ice cream cones and sundaes at Goody’s.
But, my favorite gift I give is to Eli. It’s a blank leather-bound journal that looks a lot like his Bible. I get his full name embossed in gold on the inside cover — Elijah Reginald Harrison — and on the first page I write him a message telling him that I love him, that I will always, that he is my brother, forever. I tell him to write his own story, with his own beginning, middle, end. Don’t let anyone write it for you, I say. Ever. Please. At the end I draw a heart and smiley face and a little furry mouse because I used to call him that when he’d just come back from the hospital after Mom gave birth — Mouse, my Mouse.
◆
December 31st is finally here. We’re walking through frozen downtown on our way to crash Big God 2000, passing the rum back and forth trying to stay warm. Our breath billows out ahead of us, and when we stop to light up in the icy, black alley off 8th I can’t tell my breath from the smoke. I kind of like it because all that’s been together inside me anyhow. Other kids are crunching down the alley at the far end, maybe drinking rum and smoking, too, wondering about this last day and what the hell is really going to happen tonight — Y2K, the millennium — and what then, like Jenny and I keep wondering, like seriously what the fuck then? Pretty sure I hear Jake’s name and “Yo Big God Badass Jake 2000’s happening shortly, bitches,” come drifting from those alley kids’ direction.
“Whole fucking city’s gonna be there, huh?” Jenny says, taking a drag and pitching the butt.
“Yeah,” I say, flicking my smoke hard against the graffitied bricks, watching the cherry explode and rain orange down into the filthy snow. Now that Jenny’s been around again we’ve been doing the old, cool stuff, and her dad’s still been gone a lot — allegedly helping her mom out, but we think working serious on his Y2K bunker — so we still get to watch Skinemax and drink and laugh over there at the house, and we still get to talk shit about Jake and Eli and Big God and all the other lemmings.
“There’s going to be some shit going down tonight, Belle.” Jenny leans back against the wall and takes a fat pull of rum. “Be ready.” Then she takes a step my way and hugs me.
“All these assholes can shut up and head for the hills after tonight,” I hiss into her neck, smelling smoke and peach shampoo.
“My dad said he’d be back for us after tonight.” She huffs a quiet, sad laugh and lets me go. “It’s Doomsday, Belle.” She smiles, and I smile, and I think: we know each other again.
“Fuck Doomsday.”
I reach for the rum and chug and she chugs and then the bottle is empty and I throw it loud and unbreaking and profound — a giant off-key gong — against the Dumpster and we’re back on 8th Street feeling no pain or cold and all the fracture is mended and we’re going to go have a good laugh as we witness Big God 2000.
◆
Inside the banquet hall it’s a teeming mess of kids, enough so we can hide in the far back corner and check out Jake in his signature black T and Levi’s up on the stage beneath the GET RIGHT — GO BIG WITH BIG GOD!! 2000 banner and beside Eli in his stupid-ass Grim Reaper get-up and this steaming wooden tub where we think they’ll be baptizing people all night. A couple of other kids stand tub-side and hold Bibles above their heads, faces dull, mouths tight-lipped, compliant. It smells like patchouli and feet and new carpet and there’s shitty Christian metal playing, then some Christian quasi-punk, then some half-ass Christian folk. Jenny’s quietly craning her neck, all serious and knit-browed. I’m just hoping we can remain halfway anonymous here.
“What time is it?” Jenny says, looking back toward the front door.
“After 10:00,” I say, and some stupid girl with head full of dyed-blonde curls, no one we have ever seen, says, “It’s time to get right, ladies. Clock is ticking…”
“What’d you say, bitch?” Jenny says, standing up straight and stiff and tall.
“I know who you are,” the girl says, looking up at Jenny, then over at me.
“Who am I?” Jenny says, reaching her long index finger out to draw a question mark in front of the blonde’s face as a clutch of other kids turn to see what’s up. “Who… the fuck… am … I?”
I feel the warm rumble of anger rise up in me, too, but I swallow it for now and hold it close and let Jenny tell our story.
The blonde doesn’t step back, or look away from Jenny’s eyes and says calmly, “Jake told us how you came after him,” she says, putting her hands on her chest and running them down her hips. “Asked him to sin with you. Asked him to compromise all this we have coming, to lose it. It’s not worth it, people like her, things like that, that’s what he said, I know about you.”
I’m thinking what the fuck and I ball my fist, raise it high and ready to swing on the girl for serious, but Jenny holds her hand up absolute and denying. She just shuts her pretty brown eyes and shakes her head as the music slows, fades. I lower my arm and think of that night in Jake’s hearse and I flatly say, “That’s not how this story goes, cunt.” Then Jenny just lets this chick just smile false and smug and walk away into the crowd.
“Jenny,” I say. “What happened here?”
But, now the music is nearly down, and Eli is up at the mic, and he starts in on the story of the first day we met Jake. This makes me sad and pissed because so much was different then, and that was hardly any time ago, and what the fuck is time anyhow, and how did someone like Jake take my brother away from me, away from the unit we once were. I think maybe for all of us humans there’s a thing like Jake waiting out there to take what we need to give away.
I can barely listen to Eli. He’s embellishing, exaggerating, laying out notions of a harsh brand of grace and destruction, earthquakes and floods and the pure light of heaven cascading down to then wash all that hurt away. I lean into Jenny’s shoulder, and say, “Fucking Eli. He always got shit wrong. Even back in like second grade, kindergarten, in diapers. Didn’t learn how to tie his shoes until seventh grade.”
Jenny just nods, and mini-headbutts me to show she loves me, and I mini-head-butt her to tell her I love her. This is when Jake takes the stage to this crazy-loud applause and whistling and whooping. Then he holds his hands up and almost all the kids hold their hands up, and everyone goes quiet.
“This is BIG GOD being BIG GOD,” he says in his smooth, firm, confident way. “You’ve all given something to be here – time, food, money, love, possessions, your spirits. I’m proud of you for this, just like He is. And in one hour and… thirty-four minutes, as the turn of the millennium happens and this worldly existence begins to melt away forevermore, you all will have a place with BIG GOD, and a place with me. I believe you are ready. I believe I am ready. We have buses at the ready. We will be convoying at dawn.”
Jenny leans into me, eyes glazed and indifferent. She kisses my forehead, whispering, “I’m ready,” and I reach down to squeeze her leg like what exactly are you ready for? Then she whispers quieter, almost beyond sound, “I’m pregnant, Belle,” and then like two seconds later as I turn and start to say what the fuck, Jenny, the banquet hall goes apeshit as the front doors swing open and a hotel management dude with a bullhorn is saying, “Nobody run… All of you stay where you are!”
He leads eight or twelve or twenty cops in. Half of them guard the exits and half take the stage moving straight for Jake who takes the mic in his hands like he’s praying to it, and says, “You all do what you want! You have free will! BIG GOD will triumph! Free will is holy! You are all holy! Holy!”
“Holy fuck,” I say. “It really is blowing up.” I hold my middle finger high and laugh as a cop takes the mic and begins to cut him off.
I turn toward Jenny, still holding my finger high and expecting her to maybe be doing the same, “This is righteous!” I say, as I see that Jenny is not beside or behind me and my heart drops and my hand comes down and a new fear rises. Then I feel someone hug my leg and I look down to see it’s Jenny and she’s crying and just squeezing like I am the only thing keeping her from falling through this floor and dropping deep into the earth. I set my hand on her head, and just as I crouch beside her to tell her okay, it’s okay, the stereo up on stage goes top volume with that screeching Christian metal.
I clutch Jenny’s shoulder and stand her up as the kids all around start running and slamming and crashing for the doors and the stage — a couple of them swinging on cops and on the manager dude, then the cops swinging back and Tazing a handful of the Big God disciples. The sound is huge — muddled guitar and bass and shouts and cymbals and up on stage Eli has the mic now and is shouting, “Big God, Big God, Big God!!” as the cops frog-march Jake through the crowd and toward the front door.
◆
Like four minutes later Jenny and I are out front of The Grove holding hands and running past a huddle of new cops and some paramedics making their way onto the scene. It’s super cold, but we don’t notice it until, “Stop, Belle!” Jenny says, and we lean against the marble wall of the hotel and catch our breath. “There he is,” Jenny points at a lit-up cop car across Capital Boulevard. “Jake.”
She points, and I point, and he turns his head smooth and dark and smiles in this awful way like he knows he still has a piece of us and always will. Jenny stays flat-faced, but I mouth fuck you real slow and he just kisses the air two times. Jenny and me shake our heads and walk back into the cold crush of downtown.
◆
We end up back at Jenny’s house before it even turns midnight. Her dad’s not there though I half expect him to be doing the final load-in for his escape to the bunker in the hills. But whatever, we’re not here to be saved from anything. I let go of Jenny’s hand finally as we ease up to the front door, which makes me feel lost and paranoid for long beats as she fumbles with her key in the lock. I want to ask her to repeat what she whispered right before the cops blew through the doors, but I know. I know what she said. I know what Jake did to her, and how she called the cops and told them what they needed, but I just can’t say it aloud, can’t even really think it out loud either.
The house is shrouded and cold, but Jenny cranks the heat up, finds us a bottle, and comes back to my side. I’ve found the remote and have the countdown show up and going strong, old man Dick Clark with his thin microphone and fake black hair and timeless smile is saying things about it being a uniquely momentous type of day, and I’m thinking yes, that’s right, you got it right you decent old man.
Jenny and I didn’t say much on the walk home. The silent conversation in our heads felt like the right thing, enough, but now I want to hear it out loud so I say, “You fucked Jake?”
She stays all quiet, holding the bottle gently in her lap, just staring at the TV New Year’s scenes in London and Tokyo and Melbourne then back to Times Square — people everywhere celebrating that maybe it’s the end of the world, but that’s okay because nothing bad is happening — yet.
I reach for the bottle. “And you called the cops in? And you didn’t tell me shit? And it happened that one week, right? And Jenny, seriously, you’re pregnant?”
“Maybe,” she says. “I’m late.”
“And you went there?” The rum is waxy and sweet and I need it. “You let Jake go there?”
“I didn’t. I wasn’t going to.”
“But you did.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “Right? Plus, you weren’t there to stop it.”
“I was here, you know I was. We could have talked it out on the garage roof, or just walking around. We could have… oh fuck it now though, right? The world — it’s all blowing up, like in seconds,” I say, swig, smile, smile some more. “The end.”
Jenny takes the rum from me, just staring that glassy wondering stare again. She takes a mouthful. Then another. A tiny curl of a smile comes. She holds my eyes. “The end.”
And it feels like the end for certain. It’s all too small to matter. Here, now, this is what growing up means: understanding this dividing moment and learning to not care enough to think you can change it.
We turn to the TV and watch the wide bubble of screen as the countdown poises at twenty-five seconds.
“The century. It’s all over now,” she says. “All the way the fuck over. This is tape-delayed two hours — right?”
The rum is hot in my mouth and throat and belly. “You take a pee test?”
“Yes,” she says, “but I already knew, Belle.”
The screen is bright with the smear of orange balloons and white ticker-tape and Dick Clark smiling like we are his children. Guliani kisses his wife, gives the thumbs up. The camera sweeps above the masses, fixes its eye on the lit-up green ball as it slides slowly down the Times Square pole. The crowd counts down ten… nine… eight. Jenny takes the bottle, then my hand, and we whisper the numbers down to one, then just sit here a minute or two watching people dance. The streets teem with blonde girls and black girls and tall men in suits, in scarves and mittens, all shouting, all joyous, not one hint of doom on their faces. Just people. Just another year.
◆
After, Dick Clark comes back on screen and drums up a few citizens to interview. I snap off the television, and our world gets so small and quiet again it scares me because I remember that I want more, but now… but now who the fuck knows. The dead space of Jenny’s parents’ house hums and whispers and reminds me we’re in Boise, ID and Big God and Youth Group just happened but are over, are over, and Jake is going to jail, and Jake was inside Jenny, and Jake is still inside Eli, my brother, and who the fuck knows where Eli is, or where he’ll turn now, or what will happen to all those kids, what will happen to Jenny and me.
I whisper, “It can’t matter, it can’t matter, it cannot.” But still, I know it does.
I stand and walk across the darkened living room to the front window and open the curtains, ease close enough to the cold bay window to cloud my breath across the glass. It’s deserted up and down 12th Street, which makes me think words like Armageddon, Apocalypse, Left Behind as it starts to snow, tiny bright flakes dropping through the cone of streetlamp light across the street.
“You want to tell me about it?” I say, as I feel Jenny come up beside me. “How it happened?”
“I could,” she says, “but you already know.”
Jenny puts her head on my shoulder, and our sugared breath blooms against the window. “What’s gonna happen?”
I want to tell her that I do not know, not really, but simply draw a heart in the glow of the window’s condensation.
“Bullshit,” she says, and huffs a sad quick laugh, and draws BIG GOD across the heart, and then a circle-slash around and through the words, the heart.
And I laugh with her as we knock our heads lightly against the cold, rumbling window.
“Maybe it’ll work out,” she says, “all this.”
◆
But what happens next is nobody loses much of their shit over Y2K except stashes of Top Ramen and canned meat and needless diesel generators and people like Jenny and me. What happens next is Jenny’s mom flies up from So Cal and the two of them drive a rental back south to her mom’s house in Escondido on January 17th after it’s for sure Jenny is pregnant with Jake’s spawn. What happens next is her mom convinces Jenny she needs to finish off senior year down there then give her kid up to whoever thinks it’s worth paying for out there in the never-never of the world.
What happens next is Jenny keeps the kid and for a while sometimes writes me postcards, sometimes sends me CDs she’s burned, and once, only once, sends a singular Polaroid of the girl — a girl she names Isabelle, fucking after me. And how does that make me feel? Kind of sad, kind of angry, kind of like I mean a little more in this life some days.
But, then they fade into the backdrop, and I don’t see my friend, or hear from my friend, for many many years. Eli goes to seminary. Jake goes down for statutory and grand theft but only does a couple of years, then retreats into wherever people like him retreat. I stay here and register for college a few months later and wait for my life to begin after the end of the world, which never does prove to be an easy thing. What happens next is that I keep wanting and waiting, keep waiting and wanting… to start at the beginning of this story again — that warm spring day in 1999 in that 7-Eleven parking lot with Jenny, with Eli, when we had no understanding of the gravity of time, of how things are lost, of how to regret what never got to be. I want all that back.
And you know what? It takes a long fucking time for that to never happen.