The Girl at the End of the World by Richard Levesque

pulled the whole drawer out and let everything fall onto the kitchen floor. Seconds later, I saw the Swiss Army knife my mom had teased my dad about using, saying it was the tool he’d grab for any occasion—that and a roll of duct tape. I grabbed the knife and tossed it into the backpack and then, for good measure, opened the bottom drawer and found the half used roll of duct tape that had been there forever. Into the backpack it went, too.
    From the fridge, I grabbed two bottles of water.
    From the pantry, three protein bars and a jar of peanut butter.
    And then I ran into the living room, looking around frantically for anything else that might be useful, expecting to hear our smoke alarms going off any second.
    On the mantle was a framed photo of our family, the family that had been ours before the divorce and all the ugliness and the split visits and the new wife and half-brothers. Me with big dimples and blonde braids and Anna in braces, standing in front of Mom and Dad, big smiles on all our faces. We’d gone to the Griffith Observatory in the hills above Los Angeles for a Sunday outing, and in the photo the city spread out behind us as we stood on one of the observation decks. I remember my dad asking a tourist to take the picture, and I’d been embarrassed about posing in front of some stranger, but the smiles had been real. At least they’d seemed real. I didn’t know about the fighting and accusations yet, but a month after the picture had been taken, my dad had moved out. I kind of hated that picture, and kind of loved it, too. It had always surprised me that my mom had kept it out for everyone to see, a reminder of what had been lost.
    Of course, I didn’t think any of those things now. I just grabbed the photo and stuffed it into my backpack without wondering why or what good it would do me.
    I knew there was a good chance I’d never make it back to this house, this neighborhood. And that if I did come back, it would be a miracle to find the place standing or for there to be any record of the family that had once lived here and then fallen apart.
    Back in the kitchen, I pulled the spare key ring off its little hook and then yanked open the back door. Out of habit, I twisted the lock and pulled the door closed behind me. And then I ran to the driveway without looking back.
    The street was in chaos. Flames shot from every window in the house across the street, and the houses on either side were burning as well. No one had done a thing about the body on the lawn. I could hear dogs barking, people shouting, and the roar of the flames. On this side of the street, several trees were already on fire, and when I looked up at our house, I could see smoke beginning to rise from the roof, maybe only from embers that had landed there, but maybe not.
    The heat was terrific, and I slipped my jacket on, pulled the hood up, and ran toward Anna’s second-hand Nissan parked at the curb. She’d let me drive it up and down the driveway a few times, but I’d never actually driven a car on the street. That wasn’t going to stop me, though. I’d known when I was still inside the house that taking my bicycle would be a terrible choice. Driver’s Ed was going to start right now.
    I almost started crying when I got into the car, my backpack on the passenger seat and my jacket all bunched up between me and driver’s seat. The tassel from Anna’s high school graduation dangled from the rearview mirror. Such a simple thing, but it said everything about my sister, everything she’d been and done and wanted up until yesterday. Such an innocent, stupid little thing, just hanging there. And now all her dreams and everything she’d worked for…everything. It was all up in smoke like the houses around me.
    I resisted the urge to yank the tassel off the mirror. Instead, I carefully removed it and let it drop into the cup holder on the console.
    “Okay, then,” I said, wiping tears away with the back of my left hand while I slid