Transcendent

VIKING

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

First published in the United States of America by Viking,

an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2016

Copyright © 2016 by Katelyn Detweiler

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eBook ISBN: 9780698155657

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-
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IS AVAILABLE
ISBN: 9780451469632

To Carebear and Denny,
again and always—you transcend every
day.

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

—W
ILLIAM
B
UTLER
Y
EATS
, “T
HE
S
ECOND
C
OMING
”

W
HERE WERE YOU
the day Disney World was bombed?

This is the question that will haunt my generation for the rest of our lives. The twenty-fourth of August. An awful ghoul now, still so fresh in our memories, fading into a hazier shadow that will walk beside us until the very end. Our skin will prickle as we drive by a summer carnival or see pictures of an old castle and its arching, majestic towers; when we tuck our own children into bed someday, and they ask us to read them a story filled with princes and princesses. Because our fairy tale ended that day. Our castles were covered in blood.

This type of question is not new, of course. Each generation has its own markers, its own moments that were so devastating, so beyond comprehension, that the world stopped spinning when they first heard the news. The fundamental truths of their existence, their everyday
certainties, stripped away and shredded into a million incongruous little pieces. Where were you when JFK was shot? When the planes crashed into the Twin Towers?

We come together in the wake of these epic tragedies, find a bittersweet new unity that bridges any former divides. We hope for change; we promise ourselves and each other that this won't happen again, can't possibly happen again. That this time, our world will be different.

Then it does happen, somehow worse than the last time, despite our intentions. Our world—it is not so different after all. Humanity is predictable in its restlessness and its frustration, its ability to cause destruction, and its ability to so soon forget.

But we cannot forget this.

If there is a next time—if there is a grander, more terrifying next time—the world will end. It must. Because how could there be worse? How could there possibly be anything worse, without our whole broken, beautiful world going up in flames?

•   •   •

My simple answer to this question is that I was lying on a bench in Brooklyn overlooking the East River, holding an iced-coffee cup to my forehead to cool my burning skin. It was a scorching August afternoon, the kind of hot that made New York feel like a city inside of a big, tightly sealed
box, no holes to let in any fresh air—or to let any of the stale, putrid air out. But I always felt better being near the river, a wide open space with no delis or apartments or stoplights—just peaceful, flowing water. Water that had been there long before me, and would hopefully be there long after me, too.

I had gone to the riverside specifically that day because I was stressing about dumb boy problems—or more like my lack of dumb boy problems, since I had been flying completely, absolutely, not-a-single-kiss solo for every single one of my seventeen years. This summer I had hoped it was my turn, working myself up to flirt with Gabe Goodman, the sweet, soft-spoken golden blond violinist who had the seat next to me in Summer Strings Camp. Gabe had been flirting, too, I'd thought. Until I'd found him by the concession stands on our camp night out to the Yankees game the weekend before, his lips, tongue, hands making music with the absurdly gorgeous redheaded cellist.

It was fine; I would be fine. Summer and camp were almost over anyway. I only had senior year to get through before I'd be off to Juilliard or Berklee or Oberlin. Only a year before high school would be in the past, and I could find my real place.

My eyes had just started to close, surrendering to the heat, when I heard a woman's scream. I jerked up, knocking the coffee cup from my head, ice spilling over the
ground. The woman was a few benches down, her face an ashy white, mouth gaping with disbelief as she stared down at her phone. Her other hand gripped the stroller at her side, pulling it in closer.

“Disney World! What kind of monster bombs
Disney World
?”

I grabbed for my phone, along with a handful of other people scattered along our path.

“What's happening?” asked one man who had stopped midrun, hunched over as he gasped for breath. We all looked back toward the woman, who was just now realizing that she had an audience. She stood up and plucked her little boy from the stroller before turning to face us.

“A series of bombs just exploded all around Disney World. Magic Kingdom. They don't know much yet, but they think thousands could be dead. Thousands of . . .” Her voice broke as she buried her face in her baby's checkered blue blanket. “Thousands of children.”

I stood there frozen with the others, trying to make sense of those words. No one would bomb Disney World. No one was that evil.

The baby started crying, his tiny face scrunched in agony. I leapt onto my bike and pedaled, as quickly as I could—toward Park Place and my brownstone, my parents, my ten-year-old brother, Caleb—those wails following me the whole way home. No matter how hard I pumped my
legs, how fast and frenzied, sweat pouring down my face, my back, the ride felt like it was happening in a vacuum of slow motion. The people walking, biking, driving in cars around me seemed warped and choppy, the noises distorted, nonsensical. All I could hear were the same words looping inside my head:
Magic Kingdom
 . . .
bombs
 . . .
thousands of children
.

I needed to see my family. I needed to know that my life—my bubble—was still the same as it had been that morning, the same as I had left it when I'd strolled out of the living room and hopped on my bike. I felt selfish, desperate, entirely alone.

I pulled into the entrance of our brownstone and threw my bike down on the stoop, flew up the front steps. My mom and Caleb were hunched on the floor in front of the TV when I pushed through the door, Caleb's head tucked against her shoulder as she stared straight ahead, unblinking. I collapsed on the sofa as my dad, home from work in the middle of the afternoon, walked in from the kitchen with two mugs of steaming coffee. He put the mugs down and wrapped his arms around me, but I couldn't look up. I couldn't look away.

The scene playing out on the television screen was utterly unreal. It looked like something from a gruesome apocalyptic action movie—fiction, with actors and fake explosives and carefully choreographed pretend
destruction. But this was the news. This was live. This was happening. Masses of people screaming and running in a chaotic crush, smudges of black and red across their faces and clothes. Smoking heaps of rubble, bits of metal and cement and paper and a thousand other things I couldn't identify and didn't want to identify, destroyed beyond any kind of recognition. Sirens, flashing lights, stretchers, and bags, big, black, human-sized bags. The reporter was turning to interview a woman in a torn, bloodstained Snow White costume, her stage makeup smeared in bright clumps all down her face, and strands of blonde hair falling out from beneath her matted black wig. And in the background, past the carnage littered along what had once been the famed Main Street, U.S.A., I could see the crumbling remains of Cinderella Castle.

The kingdom, the fairy tale, was destroyed. And in its place, there was hell on earth.