Apophis Read Online Free PDF Page B

before.
    Weeks of sunbathing had deepened her already tan Native American skin.  She’d pulled back her thick, lustrous hair into a haphazard bun so messy and so carefree that a stylist would never have been able to mimic its perfection.  My eyes had dipped lower to her bikini top, a white swatch of material that cut across tan skin and a defined clavicle, that accentuated the narrow hollow between her small, twin breasts.  She was breathing heavier than usual because of our sprint from the lake to my car, and her mouth was slightly open.
    Without thinking I’d leaned across the seats and had kissed her soundly on that parted mouth.  I thought I’d felt her press back against me, but I wasn’t sure.  For months afterwards I sat alone on my bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember if I’d felt her kiss me back.
    Her dark eyes had stared at me with such intensity when she’d pulled back.  All the while her tongue kept dancing out of her mouth to run the length of her lower lip as if she was still feeling and tasting me there.  In my daydreams, this was the part where she reciprocated my bravery and kissed me back.  But instead of that mouth moving against mine, it formed the words I dreaded to hear.
    “I won’t tell anyone,” she’d told me somberly.
    Much of my junior year I’d spent petrified that she’d go back on her promise and everyone in my high school, and then eventually the entire town, would know my secret.  But true to her word, Andrea had kept quiet.  I didn’t know if it was a tribute to our friendship or if she was afraid of implicating herself in some same-sex schoolgirl scandal.
    From that moment on we weren’t anywhere as close as we’d been before The Kiss.  The sleepovers stopped, but she was still brightly friendly to me whenever I saw her in the hallways at school.  I didn’t see much of her though as we didn’t share any classes that year or the next, hers all college-prep and Advanced Placement while I skated by, content to slip under the radar lest anyone notice my presence.
     
     
    The evening before Apophis was scheduled to strike, the moments just before we thought it was going to all end, I’d been sitting in this very same place on my bedroom floor, reading and listening to music.  My parents were spending the night together and I didn’t want to selfishly spoil what could be their final moments, but I also hadn’t wanted to overhear it.
    Sometime around 8 o’clock that night there’d been a knock on my bedroom door.  It was Andrea.  The moment I had opened the door, her lips were pressed against mine and her fingers were searching for the bottom hem of my t-shirt.  I didn’t bother stopping her to ask why.  I knew why – the world was ending.
    The next morning when we’d woken up to discover that the world hadn’t ended, she’d left as abruptly as she’d arrived.  I didn’t try to stop her and I didn’t try talking to her afterwards, and in a few weeks time she and her family had left for Florida.  I still loved her though.  She couldn’t help who she was anymore than I could.
     
     
    I took out two photographs from their protective liner and slipped them into a zippered pocket of my backpack.  One was a picture of my mother, standing and smiling in front of her prized flower garden.  The other was of Andrea.  I felt foolish to pack both pictures, especially the one of my former best friend, but I didn’t want to forget what they looked like or how loved they’d both made me feel in their own ways. 
    I thought about my father’s survival philosophy – you can carry everything you need on your back.  Be frugal.  Be prudent.  Be practical.  I wondered if I’d find any mementos in his backpack, but I knew that I needed these in my pack to survive.  Because even now with my memories not far removed from life before Apophis, it was hard to believe that the world I now saw around me had ever resembled the bright, warm, vibrant