Vivian Apple at the End of the World (Vivian Apple, #1)

by Katie Coyle

Beaton Frick. Frick was pure of heart and mighty of resources; he lived in a kingdom called Florida.

my best friend, the indefatigable Harp, the one who loaned me the dress and secured the champagne.

late March,

But in this moment, my eyes wide open, my body taut with worry, I know I’m doing what I thought I never would. I’m believing.

because I’m trying not to feel the belief still shivering in my bones like a new, unshakable part of me.

I’ve lived next door to Harpreet Janda

While I made SAT flash cards and waited for the weirdness to blow over, my old friends were getting married and having babies, populating the earth with more soldiers for Christ’s army.

by last year, Harp’s wildness suddenly resembled sanity more than anything else, and we became an inseparable team, a fiercely non-believing unit of two.

Three months ago, when her parents finally converted, Harp packed a bag and walked the two miles to her brother Raj’s apartment in Lawrenceville, where...

“There’s no normal anymore,” said Harp. “There’s never going to be a normal again. So now’s probably as good a time as any to start acting like you’re the hero of your own story.”

He’s around our age—good-looking, but not in the golden-haired and square-jawed way those Church boys always are. This boy has long fingers and soft, messy brown hair. He wears black-framed glasses and uses the same tricks I do for blending in to a crowd—he keeps his red plastic cup close to his mouth so he can drink from it to keep from talking, and he’s found something in this abandoned house to read.

“I’m Peter,” he says as I sit.

Pastor Beaton Frick. The picture’s in black and white, so you can’t see the twinkling green of his eyes, or how tan his skin is from years of Florida living. But you can see the distinguished gray flecks at his temples, the movie star cleft in his chin, the thick white line of his smile.

The paper’s dated three years ago, and under the picture of Frick is a jokey headline (“Uh-Oh: The Rapture’s a Go!”), the kind that everyone used at first, before the Church got powerful and its congregants began boycotting the “lamestream” media, claiming religious persecution.

there was a kind of relief in it, a close and secret sense of safety, like I was falling, yes, but into some kind of a net. But will that sound stupid? Won’t these contradictions make me seem blurrier, less defined? I worry that if he can’t see me clearly, he’ll forget me easily. And, anyway, admitting it feels like tempting fate, like breaking a mirror on purpose.

Dear Universe, I say. Make me less meek, make me less afraid. Dear Universe, make me the hero of my own story.

their looming salvation has made them weirdly absentminded—but

and that’s when I feel something tear in me, something important.

unless their masks of piety shifted by accident, to reveal a glimmer of the person underneath.

know the exact date they officially joined the Church of America, because it was the Sunday after my sixteenth birthday. It was early in March,

Dylan, his angel-faced boyfriend, and a scared-looking little girl I take to be Dylan’s seven-year-old sister, Molly.

There were how many Believers? Hundreds of thousands, probably? And they don’t think even five thousand are gone. Frick’s nowhere to be found, and Adam Taggart, the official Church spokesman, is gone too. But the celebrity Believers are still present and accounted for.

The food is all Church of America brand; in addition to founding the Church itself, Frick was the CEO of its accompanying multimillion-dollar corporation. They publish the magazines and run the Church television networks, and they produce end-of-the-world provisions like these—bottles

I realize that if I let it, their absence will turn into something I’m constantly remembering and forgetting and remembering. A new flash of pain every time, like pressing down on a bruise.

Wambaugh—my old history teacher, and one of my favorite people on earth. If

She’s the adult I wish I had the moxie to become.

There is nobody on this earth whose life is not of value.

happen. I don’t want you to write off the rest of your lives, just because someone else’s God didn’t try to save you. Because you know what? The fact that he didn’t means he’s a bad God.”

My grandparents’ offer—which isn’t presented as an offer so much as the way we’ll be doing things now—turns me instantly back into a teenager. I didn’t realize how badly I wanted to be one until they showed up.

she forgive me for being me.

The room has had all its character carefully interior decorated out of it.

You really think God would have us shut our economy down? When our capitalist foundation is part of what God so loves about America?

and sometimes only a few more months. The second option begins to feel sweeter. Fewer hours to fill. Fewer expectations. Just a handful of weeks, and maybe some pain, but after that nothing but darkness.

“Jesus (Thank You for Making Me American)”

How are they not afraid? Do they have some force of character I lack? Or just a lot of money?

Even now I think I could only list for him the various things I don’t believe in. But still I wish I could. Because I’m starting to narrow it down. I don’t believe in hate. I don’t believe in money. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe it’s too late.

But weird things are happening. They’re real, and they’re happening, and you can’t pretend they’re not just because you haven’t seen them before.

the Church advocated very traditional gender roles, and my parents were starting to comply.

“If you were baptized,” said Mom, “you know you would have to leave school, right?”

“Nearly everything they teach you there is completely contradictory to the Church’s position,”

buildings and museums and libraries were bought up by the Church and converted into compounds. The secular radio stations and magazines began to fade into memory. Television shows without a Believer element became rarer—soon

herself. “It was her brother, the sodomite. The poor lamb got himself killed.”

‘The road to heaven is narrow, and overcrowded with the damned.’ You can guess how they interpreted that one. It means we’re expendable. We’re standing in the way. Like if we’re going to suffer the flames of eternal hellfire, why make us wait another four months? Especially if we’re making it harder for them to get to heaven.

“Basically anyone who’s mentioned in the Book of Frick as being unsavable. There’ve been a lot of attacks on other religious groups, gays and lesbians, any girls or women who are seen as or can be proven to be ‘promiscuous.’”

“My father was a Believer. From way, way back. So I’ve seen more of the Church than most.”

The Book of Frick claims that in the late 1970s Jesus personally appeared to Frick in a powder-blue Chrysler convertible that had the power to travel instantly through space and time. Jesus used the vehicle to usher Frick to seven different spots in the United States that were personally blessed by God for one reason or another and at which Believers and Non-Believers alike could expect to find redemption.

Frick’s first vision—the one he had in a dream, where he and God chat over Frappuccinos at Starbucks for a few minutes before God condemns secular morals and burns all the baristas’ eyeballs out.

away. “I was ten years old when he joined the Church—that was eight years ago.

“My mom died, last year. Ovarian cancer. He didn’t call.

And I don’t