Part 1
The day I learned the world was ending, I was practicing French kissing on my bathroom mirror. Not the most dignified way to spend what could be humanity’s final moments, but there I was, age seventeen, leaving lip-shaped smudges on the glass while CNN droned on in the background about our impending doom. My mother would later mistake these marks for evidence of my cocaine habit, which I found oddly flattering. If only I were that interesting.
The asteroid, officially named 2024-KX3 but dubbed “The Big Goodbye” by whatever intern was running NASA’s social media, had been the headlines’ darling for weeks. Scientists initially gave it a 2% chance of impact, which grew to 15%, then 45%, and finally settled at a charming 98.7% certainty that we’d all be cosmic dust in roughly 72 hours. I found myself wondering if the remaining 1.3% was just their way of maintaining plausible deniability for their LinkedIn profiles, should we somehow survive.
My parents, Charlotte and Richard Westbrook III (the numeral was crucial, lest anyone mistake us for the decidedly less prestigious Westbrook II clan), received the news of Earth’s imminent destruction with the same level of concern they’d shown when our favorite caviar supplier announced they were switching to sustainable farming practices: mild irritation followed by immediate strategic planning.
“Well,” my mother declared over breakfast, barely looking up from her iPad where she was undoubtedly ordering end-of-world party supplies, “I suppose we should make the best of it.” She pronounced ‘suppose’ with three syllables, something she’d picked up during her semester at Oxford thirty years ago and never quite managed to shake. “We simply must host something. The Carruthers are doing a doomsday brunch, and I refuse to let Margaret outshine us in our final hours.”
My father, hidden behind his newspaper (yes, actual paper – he insisted digital news was for people who also enjoyed instant coffee), merely grunted. This was his way of expressing everything from mild approval to severe cardiac arrest, leaving us to interpret the subtle variations in grunt-pitch like some sort of wealthy-WASP Rosetta Stone.
“Peter, darling,” my mother continued, using my full name as she always did when plotting something that would inevitably traumatize me, “you’ll need a new suit. Something end-of-the-world appropriate. Perhaps charcoal? Navy feels a touch optimistic.”
I considered pointing out that clothing choice seemed rather irrelevant given that we’d all soon be vaporized, but instead found myself wondering if vaporization hurt. Would we feel it? Would I die mid-kiss with my bathroom mirror? These were the thoughts keeping me up at night, while my classmates posted their apocalypse bucket lists on Instagram – skydiving, confessing crushes, trying hard drugs. My bucket list had exactly one item: kiss someone who wasn’t made of glass or my own hand.
The party planning consumed our household like kudzu on a southern mansion. My mother hired three different event companies, explaining that competition would bring out their best work, even if their best work would only exist for approximately sixty-eight hours. The house filled with sample centerpieces, each more apocalyptic than the last. My favorite featured a miniature asteroid made of Swarovski crystals crashing into a bed of white orchids. Very subtle.
“The Santiagos confirmed,” my mother announced one evening, her voice carrying the same tone she used when announcing she’d secured the last truffle shipment before Christmas. “All of them. Even the girl – what’s her name? The one who’s always in those magazines?”
“Zoë,” I said, too quickly, my voice cracking like I was thirteen again. My mother didn’t notice. She never did.
“Yes, that’s it. Zoë. She’s flying in from Milan, apparently. Or maybe it was Madrid. Somewhere with an M.” She waved her hand dismissively, as if European fashion capitals were interchangeable trinkets one might pick up at an airport gift shop.
Zoë Santiago. The name hit me like a cosmic impact of its own. I’d spent years of my life watching her from afar, first in school where she’d barely noticed my existence, then later in magazines where she definitely didn’t notice my existence. Our parents had run in the same circles since before we were born, but while I had perfected the art of blending into expensive wallpaper, Zoë had mastered the art of making everyone else fade into the background.
The last time I’d spoken to her had been at her fifteenth birthday party. I’d managed to spill punch on her white dress, stammer an apology that sounded more like a dying seal’s last words, and then hide in the coat closet for two hours. A week later, she’d left school for her first major modeling contract. I’d convinced myself these events were related.
As the hours ticked by, our house transformed into what my mother called “an elegant acknowledgment of our celestial fate” but what looked more like a deranged planetarium had mated with a Nordstrom’s holiday display. Galaxy-print tablecloths competed with star-shaped ice sculptures for attention. The catering menu featured “Meteor Meatballs” and “Cosmic Crostini,” because apparently even the end of the world needed themed hors d’oeuvres.
My father’s contribution to the preparations was to raid his wine cellar, emerging with bottles he’d been saving for “a special occasion.” I wanted to point out that being obliterated by an asteroid wasn’t so much a special occasion as it was a terminal one, but he seemed so pleased with himself that I held my tongue. He arranged them all in our dining room, labels facing forward like soldiers at attention, waiting for their final mission.
The night before the party, I couldn’t sleep. The asteroid was visible now, a bright dot in the sky that news anchors kept insisting was “nothing to panic about” while very clearly panicking about it. I stood at my window, looking up at the dot that would soon expand to fill the entire sky, and thought about Zoë Santiago.
In my more philosophical moments, which usually occurred between 2 and 4 AM while scrolling through her Instagram, I’d decided that Zoë was less a person and more a concept – like gravity or tax evasion. Something that existed in theory and affected my life greatly, but remained fundamentally beyond my comprehension.
And now she was coming to my house. To die. Well, we were all coming to my house to die, but her impending death felt somehow more significant. I wondered if she’d changed in the years since she’d left. If fame had made her more or less approachable. If she remembered me as the punch-spilling closet dweller. If she remembered me at all.
The morning of the party arrived with an appropriately apocalyptic orange sunrise. The news reported riots in major cities, mass prayers in streets, and a sharp uptick in both wedding ceremonies and divorce filings. In our neighborhood, the only sign of impending doom was a slightly larger number of delivery trucks than usual, as apparently everyone had decided to prime their way to the apocalypse.
My mother floated through the house like a general inspecting her troops, adjusting flowers and straightening already-straight place cards. She’d chosen to wear Chanel, because if you’re going to be hit by an asteroid, you should at least be hit while wearing Chanel. This was the sort of wisdom I’d grown up with, along with “never wear brown shoes with a black belt” and “always keep emergency champagne in the second freezer.”
“Peter,” she called out, catching me trying to sneak past the kitchen. “Do remember to shower before the party. And wear the new suit – the charcoal one, not the navy. We’re accepting our fate, not going to a regatta.”
I nodded, retreating to my room where the suit hung like a fashion-forward funeral shroud. As I stood there, staring at it, I could hear cars beginning to arrive, tires crunching on our circular driveway. The end of the world was starting, and all I could think about was whether I should try to tame my cowlick one last time.
Somewhere between my third attempt at a Windsor knot and my fifth check for stress-induced stress hives, I heard her voice. It floated up from the foyer, through my closed door, past all my carefully constructed defenses. Zoë Santiago was here, and I was hiding in my room, trying to make peace with both my imminent death and my imminent humiliation.
I looked in the mirror one last time, at my reflection in the charcoal suit that was supposed to make me look end-of-world appropriate. “This is it,” I told myself, trying to sound confident but achieving something closer to constipated. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
The asteroid visible through my window seemed to twinkle in response, as if to say, “Well, actually…”
Part 2
A common misconception about wealth is that it makes people more sophisticated. In reality, it just gives them better lighting and more expensive alcohol to showcase their lack of sophistication. As I descended our curved staircase (modeled after one my mother had seen in a French château, though she could never remember which one), I witnessed what could only be described as the world’s most elegantly dressed mental breakdown.
Mrs. Carrington, who’d once lectured me for twenty minutes about the proper pronunciation of “croissant,” was openly weeping into a crystal punch bowl. Mr. Davidson, my father’s golf partner and fellow rare wine enthusiast, had abandoned his usual stoicism in favor of performing what appeared to be interpretive dance to Beethoven’s Fifth. Even my father’s secretary, Ms. Powell, had shown up uninvited and was methodically eating all the caviar with her hands. No one stopped her. The apocalypse, it seemed, had finally given her the promotion she’d been wanting.
And then there was Zoë Santiago.
She stood in the center of our foyer, somehow making our chandelier (imported from Italy at a cost that could have funded a small nation’s space program) look like mood lighting specifically designed to illuminate her existence. She wore a simple black dress that probably cost more than my college fund, her hair shorter than I remembered it, less modelesque and more… real. The effect was disorienting, like seeing a Renaissance painting in jeans and a t-shirt.
“Pete?” she said, turning toward me with a smile that had launched a thousand marketing campaigns. “Pete Westbrook?”
I considered pretending to be someone else – perhaps a very well-dressed caterer or a surprisingly young tax attorney. Instead, I managed a sound that existed somewhere between “yes” and “help,” which she graciously interpreted as confirmation of my identity.
“I thought that was you lurking up there,” she continued, moving toward the stairs. “Still practicing your stealth techniques, I see.”
She remembered my lurking. More specifically, she remembered me. This revelation was so startling that I temporarily forgot how to operate my legs, nearly tumbling down the remaining steps. I caught myself on the bannister, trying to pass it off as a casual lean, like I often draped myself over banisters while contemplating imminent planetary destruction.
“You look… different,” I said, immediately wishing I could shove the words back into my mouth and swallow them whole.
“So do you,” she replied, mercifully ignoring my awkwardness. “No more braces. No more unfortunate haircut.”
“You remember my haircut?”
“Hard to forget. It looked like someone had put a bowl on your head and then let the bowl make all the creative decisions.”
She was right. My mother had insisted on taking me to her stylist, a man named Giovanni who claimed to have trained in Paris but had a suspiciously strong Boston accent. The result had been less haute couture and more haute catastrophe.
“I saw you in Vogue last month,” I said, desperately trying to steer the conversation away from my past fashion crimes. “The spread about sustainable fashion?”
“God, that shoot was bizarre. They had me posing with recycled plastic bottles like they were diamond necklaces. I quit right after that, actually.”
“You quit?” The concept seemed impossible. Zoë Santiago quitting modeling was like the sun deciding to quit rising, or my mother deciding to quit judging people’s choice of table linens.
“Turns out being professionally pretty isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” she shrugged, accepting a glass of champagne from a passing waiter. “Besides, seemed silly to keep at it with…” She gestured vaguely toward the window, where the asteroid was now visible even in daylight, a malevolent eye winking at us through the atmosphere.
Before I could respond, my mother materialized beside us with the preternatural timing she usually reserved for interrupting my rare moments of social success. “Zoë, darling!” she exclaimed, air-kissing somewhere in the general vicinity of Zoë’s cheeks. “You look divine. I’ve been following your career religiously. That shoot you did in Morocco – or was it Monaco? The one with the camels. Or were they llamas?”
“It was Minneapolis,” Zoë corrected politely. “With snow machines.”
“Yes, of course, absolutely stunning.” My mother nodded as if she’d known this all along. “Peter, darling, help Claude with the cosmic cocktails. They’re not going to serve themselves.”
Claude, our regular caterer who’d been serving cosmic cocktails for the past hour without any assistance, shot me a sympathetic look. He’d been catering our parties since I was old enough to hide behind his legs, and had probably witnessed more of my social failures than my therapist.
“Actually,” Zoë interrupted, hooking her arm through mine with casual confidence, “Pete was just about to show me the garden. I heard you’ve added some new sculptures?”
My mother’s face performed an Olympic-level routine of expressions, finally landing on a forced smile. “Of course, the garden. Though I’m not sure the lighting is ideal right now…”
“Perfect for stargazing though,” Zoë said, already steering me toward the French doors. “Especially with our new friend up there providing extra illumination.”
As we escaped into the cool evening air, I realized two things simultaneously: I was alone with Zoë Santiago, and I had absolutely no idea what to do about it. The garden, my mother’s pride and joy after the chandelier and her collection of passive-aggressive sighs, stretched out before us like a magazine spread come to life. Even the topiaries looked stressed about the end of the world.
“Your mom hasn’t changed,” Zoë observed, settling onto a stone bench near the fountain. “Still planning parties like they’re military operations?”
“The end of the world just gave her a bigger budget to work with.” I remained standing, afraid that sitting might somehow break whatever spell had led to this impossible moment. “Though I think the cosmic cocktails might be overkill.”
“Everything about this is overkill. That’s why it’s perfect.” She patted the space beside her on the bench. “Sit down, Pete. You’re making me nervous, hovering like that.”
I was making her nervous. Zoë Santiago, who had posed for photographers in Paris and Milan, who had walked runways and graced magazine covers, was nervous because I was standing awkwardly in my parents’ garden. The absurdity of this made me laugh, which made her laugh, and suddenly we were both sitting there, giggling like we were kids again, while the asteroid watched us with what I imagined was increasing confusion.
“Remember my fifteenth birthday?” she asked, once our laughter had subsided. “When you spilled punch all over my dress?”
I groaned. “I was hoping you’d forgotten about that.”
“Are you kidding? That was the highlight of the party. Everyone else was so busy trying to impress me, and there you were, creating abstract art on my dress and then hiding in a closet for two hours.”
“It was a very comfortable closet,” I defended. “Some of your dad’s cashmere coats were in there. Very cozy.”
She turned to face me, her expression suddenly serious. “Can I tell you something? Something I’ve never told anyone?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
“I went looking for you that night. After the punch incident. I checked every room in the house, but I never thought to look in the closet. I wanted to tell you it was okay, that it was actually kind of nice to have someone treat me like a normal person for once.”
The asteroid chose that moment to flare particularly bright, as if providing dramatic lighting for this confession. In the distance, someone inside the house shrieked, probably noticing its increased visibility. Neither of us moved.
“I wasn’t treating you like a normal person,” I admitted. “I was treating you like someone who terrified me in the best possible way.”
“And now?”
“Now you terrify me slightly less. But only slightly.”
Part 3
There’s something uniquely sobering about watching the instrument of your destruction approach while sitting next to the girl of your dreams. The asteroid now dominated the sky, a celestial spotlight illuminating every awkward silence and missed opportunity of my life. Inside the house, the party had devolved into what my mother would later describe as “enthusiastic fellowship” but what sounded more like the end credits of civilization being played at maximum volume.
“We should probably head inside,” I said, not moving. “My mother will send out a search party. She’s very committed to having witnesses for her final moments.”
“Let her,” Zoë replied, also staying put. “I’ve spent enough of my life doing what other people want.”
The way she said it—casual but weighted with truth—made me look at her differently. The Zoë I’d built up in my mind all these years was a construct, I realized, as artificial as the beauty lighting they’d used in her photoshoots. The real Zoë was infinitely more interesting.
“Can I ask you something?” I said, my voice cracking slightly. In the background, someone had started playing “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It” for what felt like the hundredth time that night. “Why did you really quit modeling?”
She was quiet for so long I thought she might not answer. The asteroid’s light played across her face, making her look otherworldly, but somehow more real than ever.
“You know those dreams where you’re at school and suddenly realize you’re naked?” she finally said, picking at an invisible thread on her dress. “That’s what modeling felt like. Except everyone was staring because they were supposed to be staring, and that somehow made it worse.” She laughed, but it wasn’t her magazine-cover laugh. “The day I quit, I was supposed to be shooting a perfume campaign. The concept was ‘ethereal beauty confronts mortality’ or something equally pretentious. I looked in the mirror and couldn’t recognize myself anymore.”
“So you came home to die instead?” The words came out before I could stop them.
“I came home to live,” she corrected, turning to face me. “Even if it’s just for a few more minutes.”
My heart was doing something complicated in my chest, like it was trying to accomplish all the beats it would miss out on in one go. Up in the sky, the asteroid seemed to pulse in sync with it. A cosmic wingman, if you will.
“You know what’s funny?” I said, surprising myself with my steadiness. “I’ve spent years practicing what I’d say if I ever got a real chance to talk to you. Had whole conversations in my head. Wrote speeches. Really quality material, too. Shakespeare would’ve been jealous.”
“And?” Her eyes caught the light, and I swore I could see the reflection of the approaching asteroid in them. “What was the verdict?”
“I’ve forgotten every single word.”
She smiled then, not her catalog smile or her runway smile, but something new and real and just for me. “So what are you going to do instead?”
Inside the house, the music had shifted to what sounded like a violin cover of “Highway to Hell.” My mother’s voice carried across the garden, calling our names with increasing desperation. The asteroid’s light was so bright now that the garden looked like it was underwater, everything rippling and strange and beautiful.
“I never kissed anyone,” I blurted out. “That’s what I was thinking about when they first announced the asteroid. Not my family, not my future, not my regrets about never learning to juggle. Just that I’d never kissed anyone.”
“Never?”
“Never. Unless you count my bathroom mirror, which I don’t, because I have standards. Low standards, obviously, but standards.”
She laughed again, and this time I joined her, because what else can you do when you’re sitting in a garden at the end of the world, confessing your lack of kissing experience to the girl you’ve been in love with since before you knew what love was?
“Pete Westbrook,” she said, and my name in her voice sounded like something worth saving, “you are nothing like I expected.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“The best thing.”
The asteroid filled nearly the entire sky now. People were streaming out of the house onto the back terrace, phones raised to capture humanity’s final moments in portrait mode. My mother’s voice had reached a pitch previously accessible only to dogs, organizing people into what she probably thought would make an aesthetically pleasing apocalypse tableau.
“We have about thirty seconds left,” Zoë said, her voice steady. “Any last requests?”
I looked at her – really looked at her – and for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel afraid. “Just one.”
She met my eyes, and I saw something there that made the approaching asteroid seem insignificant. “Well?” she whispered. “What are you waiting for?”
“Better lighting?”
And then she was kissing me, or I was kissing her, and honestly, the distinction didn’t matter because the world was about to end and Zoë Santiago’s lips were on mine and everything else was just details.
That’s when the sky exploded.
Not in the “we’re all dead now” way we’d expected, but in a spectacular display that looked like every Fourth of July finale rolled into one. The asteroid burst into a thousand pieces, each one igniting in the atmosphere to create an unprecedented light show. The sound hit a moment later—a boom that rattled windows and set off car alarms and caused my mother to spill her final glass of champagne all over her Chanel.
Zoë and I broke apart, staring up at the disintegrating rock that had nearly killed us all. Behind us, chaos erupted as people realized what had happened – or more accurately, what hadn’t happened. News alerts started pinging on everyone’s phones simultaneously, creating a symphony of survival: apparently, a last-minute coordinated missile strike from several countries had succeeded in breaking up the asteroid into harmless pieces.
“Well,” Zoë said, still slightly breathless, “that’s inconvenient.”
I looked at her, confused. “Us not dying is inconvenient?”
“No,” she smiled, reaching up to straighten my tie. “But now I actually have to follow through on that date I was planning to ask you on.”
“You were going to ask me out?”
“Still am. Unless you’d rather go back to practicing on mirrors?”
Above us, the fragments of our near-doom continued to paint the sky in streaks of light. From the terrace came the sounds of my mother already planning a “Thank God We’re Not Dead” brunch, while my father ordered someone to save the unopened bottles of wine. The world was surviving, continuing, persisting in all its beautiful, awkward glory.
“You know,” I said, taking Zoë’s hand, “I think I’m done with mirrors.”
“Good,” she replied, pulling me close again. “Because I have a lot to teach you about proper kissing technique, and mirrors are terrible students.”
As it turns out, the end of the world is a lot like the beginning of one – all you need is the right person to share it with, and maybe an asteroid to give you the push you’ve been waiting for.
