The Probability of Everything

by Sarah Everett

BREAKING NEWS: MASSIVE ASTEROID ALTERS PATH, NOW ON COURSE TO MEET EARTH!!!

There was now a split-screen on the television, with a journalist interviewing a scientist on the left side and the purple ball—the asteroid—on the other. They were calling it AMPLUS-68.

“Amplus,” he said, “has a 84.7 percent chance of hitting us.” “Eighty-four point seven,”

I’m pretty good at math, you see. 84.7 percent meant that the asteroid had much more chance of hitting us than it did of missing us.

“Thousands of asteroids whiz past us every year and nothing ever happens,” said the president of NASA from the left side of the screen. On the right, the planet held steady. “But two hours ago, AMPLUS-68 collided with another asteroid, and then its path changed. We don’t have all the facts—where it may hit, how hard it might hit—and until we do, I urge everyone to stay calm.”

Jeremiah Woods was Dad’s best friend and also the world’s leading expert on everything.

An asteroid is a minor planet Most asteroids are in a belt Some asteroids have their own moons This asteroid is called AMPLUS-68 because of its massive size It has 84.7 percent chance of hitting Earth Which means only 15.3 percent chance it won’t hit Earth

FACT 1: The larger an asteroid and the closer it gets to Earth, the brighter the asteroid will look. THIS MEANS: When the world ends, you see a blinding white light, possibly brighter than the sun. FACT 2: Near-Earth objects entering the atmosphere can make a whizzing sound, a stormy sound, or no sound at all. THIS MEANS: The end of the world might sound like a whoosh, like a thunderclap, or like a peaceful silence. FACT 3: Past asteroids have made the Earth get hotter. THIS MEANS: When the world ends, you might get a warm feeling, like being wrapped in a burrito hug. FACT 4: The law of the conservation of energy says matter can change from one form to another, but it can never be created or destroyed. THIS MEANS: The end of anything (even the world, even us) is just a change. Kind of like water turning to ice or rearranging furniture. We just become something different. THIS MEANS: We don’t have to be afraid.

MY PENGUIN NOTEBOOK WAS MY FAVORITE PLACE TO hide. I knew it was a book and technically not a place, but whenever the world felt too big, I flipped through its pages and tucked myself into the words that I’d scribbled in there.

Maybe, I thought, what was scary about knowing when you were going to die was knowing the exact moment you would stop mattering.

The world hadn’t ended yet but already the not-being-ourselves was beginning.