Sylvo and Jordan’s parents would explain that they didn’t so much believe in the Rapture as they believed in rapture. Believed in believing in it. This was why, after the apocalypse failed to present as promised, their parents were much less sheepish than their neighbor—Mrs. Jayl, who drove the boys to Lincoln Elementary—had expected, had perhaps been hoping for.
“They in there?” Mrs. Jayl craned to peer through the sliding mini-van door. As if Sylvo’s parents might have skipped town. Left their boys to fend amongst the heathen damned—this the situation they’d been anticipating anyway should some members of the family (the adults who believed) be sundered from the rest (their children who did not).
But Sylvo’s mother was home. She’d prepared oatmeal for the boys that morning. Dawn after the apocalypse. Date after which not one event—not dentist appointment, not birthday—had ever been entered on the family calendar.
“It’s a new time for our family, Mrs. J.” Sylvo surprised himself, echoing what his father had said to the reporters. It was the first thing the family had agreed upon for more than a year.
Sylvo’s desk was as he’d left it when the bell had rung Thursday: Math book stacked above speller. Four pencils like a family in descending order of height and ascending order of sharpness—a joke Jordan would have got.
Mrs. Haverstein stared as Mrs. Jayl had. “Welcome back,” she said in a regular, everyday way, as if she didn’t mean it. Then she blushed as if she did.
Sylvo waited before getting out his book and waited before turning to page eighty-two and waited again before beginning to read. He allowed his eyes to float over the letters, not reading, an ability he’d lose once he stopped practicing.
At lunch he saw Jordan again, his twin in one of Mia’s hand-me-downs. But who would know, Jordan said, that the sweatshirt had been a girl’s?
He pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. They sat in the gym-turned-into-cafeteria beneath a raised basketball hoop, its net insided out. Jordan’s list read: Yellowstone, the Bermuda Triangle, Israel.
“You think they’ll be ready for a trip?”
“Hey, they were ready to go further.” Jordan cackled.
As startling as it was that Jordan now spent his days in Mrs. Rodriguez’s third grade across the hall—their lives now severed, split to divergent directions—worse was his new ability to convince Sylvo to change his mind. Now a family trip did sound like the right thing.
Or it did until Sylvo was alone in Haverstein’s again, four missed words on his spelling test as thorough a break in his streak of 100’s as if he’d gotten everything wrong on every quiz from the beginning. As if he’d stood from his chair, walked to Fred the Frog’s terrarium and punched both fists through the glass.
But maybe their mother had been listening. That afternoon their parents were waiting in the kitchen where Sylvo and Jordan had left them, but with the family suitcases packed.
“You’ve both been so good through all of this,” she said. Their father said they were going to Disney World.
In their own backyard in early summer it could get bad—dried out grass like razor blades, even the mosquitoes suffocating, kamikazeing to the concrete—but in Orlando it was worse. Air like glue stick applied to every surface of your body. They’d flown, at least, the car having been sold last fall, about the same time as their father had let go of his eighteen-wheeler.
“You okay, kiddo?” Sylvo’s mother sidled up to him in the line outside the park, displacing Jordan. So all things were not on the up and up in Parentland. And how could they be? Their parents had cradled the prediction between them like a fledgling flame.
Here was a year that would have to be skipped in the family photo album. That was impossible to summarize in a holiday letter. Remember the year we thought—but not the kids! Ha!—that God was going to end the world? We’d go to heaven and the kids would be left with the unbelievers to rape and wail and gnash and murder.
“I haven’t ridden the teacups in years,” his mother said, in the park. Then, as if it was not too soon to joke, “And if I’m not in heaven just yet, then second best has got to be teacups, right?”
Sylvo had never been to Disney World, but had believed he’d known what to expect: buxom princesses. Laughter and merriment. But what could have prepared him for that landscaping? The sheer commitment bespoken by so many engineered hedges, patterned blooms.
“Neither of you needs a cart, now do you.” Their father had to look around for them first, swiveling his hips and swinging his head for a moment like one of those tutu’ed Hippos. Music surrounded them—frolicking, sprightly—the speakers in the bushes, wires down from trees.
“When we were here with Mia, we got her this big cart. It was big enough that your mother could ride in it, and Mia sit on her lap.”
Sylvo looked to Jordan.
This time, their father sighed.
Everyone should go to Disney World at least once in their life. Sylvo thought about the slogan from Make a Wish. They were wandering to the left, the crowd sweeping them—this against all of last night’s advice from Jordan, who’d sat in the motel room chair with the guidebook while the others lay in the beds with their eyes resting.
If everyone should go to Disney World at least once in their life, why had Sylvo and Jordan not been taken before? They may as well have gotten their Pirates of the Caribbean on before all the gnashing and wailing.
“Wait, wait.” Jordan came to a stop in the middle of the road. “We were supposed to go right.” He banked, turning the family within the crowd. “We’re supposed to go to Space Mountain first.”
“I hate that one.” Their father shuddered.
Jordan turned, walking backward against the coming mass of morning visitors. “You do? We don’t have to go.”
“No—it’s just, I’m too tall.” Their father laughed. “The whole time I couldn’t help but think, maybe they’d never tested it for anyone my size.”
Their father was tall. He could not be, though, the tallest ever to ride Space Mountain. Space Mountain had been built in 1977. Surely since then some NBA team had visited the park.
“Of course they’ve tested it,” their mother said. “In fact, you’ve even ridden it before and survived.”
“And it’s likely you’re shorter now,” said Sylvo.
“Height can vary over a lifetime,” agreed Jordan, grudgingly. “But…”
“It can. Body weight can fluctuate by five pounds in one day.” Sylvo saw his mother pause to consider the two of them. Which son was right?
The line was neither shorter nor longer than what Jordan had read to them last night, calling out fewer and fewer facts as their breathing deepened.
It would be impossible indoors in the dark to get a glimpse of the whole of the ride. They’d hurtle out into that darkness without any idea of the shape of the system, without anticipation of the next turn or dip before a low-hanging bar. Sylvo dropped to tie his shoe, waving ahead a teenaged couple.
With the same chivalrous spirit he gestured his father into the front car he’d secured. “You first.”
His shoulders, neck, and head did stick out further than anyone else’s.
Sylvo and their mother took the second row.
“Nervous?” Jordan leaned over to their father.
“Are you really worried, Jim?” Their mother’s forehead bunched into lines.
Sylvo sat directly behind him.
Their father must have said Nah. He said something Sylvo didn’t hear, his own heart pounding.
During their slow chug to the ride’s real start, this commencement of his family’s short shot through the dark, Sylvo would believe.
He’d believe, he’d believe, he’d believe.
And when his father’s head caught, when the chin snapped from the neck, the ball of it sailed like a new moon launched into space. But it was Sylvo’s throat that opened, his breath that released.
