The End is Now by Rob Stennett

He’d never had a locker, and he’d never had to keep his own schedule
     going from one class to the next. You don’t have to do that until junior high. It’s intimidating the first time you have to
     do that, when you’re suddenly responsible for getting yourself to class on time with the right books. But it teaches you responsibility.
     It prepares you for the real world. Will hadn’t had any of that preparation.
    Yet tonight he was instantly thrust into the real world as all these newscasters and people in town were talking about him.
     They were making judgments about him without even having met him. Most of them weren’t even there when he said those things
     at his school.
    Will continued to stare at the TV.
    “You know those people on the news just make stuff up so everyone will watch,” Emily said.
    “I know. For sure. I don’t even care. I mean, I’ve just about forgotten what they said anyway,” Will said. Emily was pretty
     sure his eyes were watering up.
    Emily didn’t say anything about that. And she didn’t know what else she could say to make things better. So she just sat silently
     in the living room with her baby brother, watching him flick through the channels, searching for something amidst all the
     choices cable television had to offer.

EMILY HENDERSON
    In one sense, Emily felt bad for her little brother. She could see the toll the rapture predictions and the town’s whispers
     and gossiping were taking on him. She should be doing everything she could to validate him and help him get his message out
     there.
    The problem was that in another much more urgent, real, and everyday sense, Emily understood that her brother’s soothsaying
     was creating a serious problem in her social life. There were enough real problems out in the world already. Why did Will
     have to be making them up? And why did he have to be doing all of this
now
? This was the most important week of Emily’s life. She planned on becoming homecoming queen. It was the highest honor that
     any girl could achieve in high school. It would be something she could always look back on proudly, something she could tell
     her grandchildren about.
    Now, it’s entirely possible this was a selfish goal. Perhaps Emily was shallow for thinking about how Will’s meltdown was
     messing with her chances of getting to wear a plastic crown from the dollar store while holding a bouquet of pink roses. If
     that’s the case, you just had to forgive Emily. She’d had this goal locked in her sights every day for the last six years.
     Emily decided that she was going to become homecoming queen after her first day in junior high. Actually, she made this goal
     exactly eight minutes into her first lunch as a junior high school student.
    At Jefferson Elementary, Emily always ate lunch with Marsha, Tonya, and Becka. She didn’t really even remember how they became
     friends. They’d always been friends. But at her first junior high lunch she realized she didn’t know anyone.
    Not a soul.
    Well, okay, she “knew” other kids. But not enough to sit by them at lunch. You had to really know someone to do that. You
     had to know them well enough to share the same piece of chewed gum. It was that intimate.
    So she clutched her lunch tray and walked slowly through the room. She was looking for someone —
anyone
— to sit by. Marsha’s family had moved to Wichita that summer so that wasn’t helping. And Tonya had “B” lunch so she was
     out. Emily continued to search the lunchroom for a friendly face. Only now it was getting obvious. She didn’t have a friend
     in the room. She was looking foolish and scared standing there clutching the tray as her knuckles turned white. She had to
     do something.
    And then she saw Becka sitting at the popular table. The table where all the kids had clothes that looked ratty and torn even
     though they really paid lots of money for them. These clothes were so expensive because trendy New York designers knew