Sait, who still has his six-pack. Sait, who kissed Tilda’s neck. Sait, who thankfully isn’t here. But neither is Tilda. Maybe they’re together right now.
We’re at Hampus’s house watching Armageddon, one of the movies they tried removing from the internet.
We see New York now. Sixty-five million years later. The first rocks fall from the sky like bombs, destroying skyscrapers. Hampus says it’s the pre-cum. No one laughs. I do what I did when I was little and my sister Emma made me watch horror movies while she babysat me: I stare at the screen until I no longer see images, only shifting colors and shapes. The sounds are the worst. More difficult to shut out without people noticing.
But then the movie gets going, and we laugh as the main character shoots at his daughter’s boyfriend, who’s dodging around the explosives on the oil platform where they work.
“Nice incest vibe I’m getting from that guy,” Johannes says.
“Yeah, he seems obsessed with her sex life,” Amanda adds. “She’s a grown fucking woman.”
I breathe a little more easily. Sink deeper into the armchair. No one could possibly take this seriously.
It turns out the oil workers are going to be trained as astronauts in record time. Then they’re being sent into space to drill a hole into the asteroid and blow it up. They only get one shot at it.
“Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to just train real astronauts to drill holes?” I say.
The others laugh. Do they feel as relieved as I do? I think so.
I can’t believe people talked about this movie as some blueprint to follow at the beginning of the summer. They said we should send up nukes. But Foxworth is too large and already too close. All the nuclear warheads in the world wouldn’t have been enough.
“Did he just put crackers in her underwear?” Amanda says.
“I think so,” Johannes says, and laughs.
He pulls her closer on the sofa. I feel a pang of envy. Johannes still has a girlfriend. He belongs here unquestionably. It was through Tilda and Amanda that everyone in this room got to know one another. Every time we hang out sober, I find myself wondering if they really want me there, now that Tilda and I are finished. I don’t even hang out alone with Johannes anymore, even though he’s my best friend. Sometimes, I get the feeling he’s avoiding me.
Maybe I’m so unbearable nobody wants me around anymore.
“Has everyone forgotten about New York being utterly obliterated?” Ali asks, and I’m grateful for the distraction.
“Good thing they’re getting drunk in a strip club before heading out to save the world,” Elin says. “Great priorities. Kudos, heroes.”
“Why did they bring machine guns into space?” asks Johannes.
“Does this girl do anything other than cry about her dad and her boyfriend?” says Amanda.
And then we start commenting on everything, laugh as the disgusting dad delivers a blubbering speech to his daughter before sacrificing himself. But we fall silent when the asteroid is destroyed. The people of Earth celebrate.
It’s the happy ending we’re never going to get.
“Good thing she got married so someone can take care of her,” Amanda says as the credits roll across a montage of wedding pictures.
“Cool how every person who wasn’t white was such a stereotype.”
Elin looks at me when she says it. I don’t respond. At the moment, I don’t have it in me to affirm her wokeness or to care about racist shit in a movie older than me. I have other things to worry about.
“Has anyone talked to Tilda today?” Elin continues.
I glance at the others.
“She was going to have dinner with her dad and her uncle,” Amanda says. “She wanted a quiet night in.”
“That’d be a first,” says Hampus, licking grease off his fingers.
Amanda starts braiding her hair. She goes slightly cross-eyed looking at it.
“I don’t know what the hell Tilda’s doing.”
“Where does she even get that shit?” Ali says.
“I don’t know.”
“Wonder how she pays for it,” Hampus says with a grin I would love to kick off his face.
The room goes quiet. Ali stares intently at his phone. Hampus starts eating chips with great concentration. Only Johannes meets my eyes. He shakes his head slightly.
It hits me that they probably talk about Tilda in a different way when I’m not around. “The question is how quiet it will be with Klas and his brother,” Elin says.
She throws Amanda a meaningful look. Something I can’t quite interpret passes between them. Johannes notices it, too.
“What?” he says, and I’m glad I don’t have to ask them.
“Tilda didn’t want us to say anything,” Amanda says.
She and Elin exchange another look. It’s obvious that they want to spill.
“Come on!” Hampus says.
Elin sighs. Crosses her legs and fingers the gold four-leaf clover in her earlobe.
“Klas has joined the Truthers,” she says.
“That’s why Caroline threw him out,” Amanda says quickly, as though she’s afraid someone else will get to share the nugget of gossip first.
“But . . . how did he end up there?” is all I can manage.
I try to imagine Klas in the True Church of Sweden. It’s impossible. The closest I’ve seen him get to religion was his obsession with Game of Thrones.
“His brother recruited him,” Elin says.
It still doesn’t make sense. Tilda’s uncle and his family moved here from Örebro this summer. I’ve only met them a handful of times. Klas’s brother may be an idiot, but not the kind of idiot who’d join the Truthers.
On the other hand, who is the type?
Given how quickly the splinter group broke away from the Church of Sweden, Stina says it must have been a long time coming. A popular priest down in the south started preaching about the Christianity of old, based on a God who puts humanity through inhuman trials. A God who doesn’t care for the Church of Sweden’s “liberal, politically correct nonsense.” The priest was fired, became a local martyr, and what started as a small group on social media has become a network of congregations all over the country. Some of the True Church’s congregants made the mistake of knocking on our door to recruit members, but they’re probably not coming back. They hadn’t counted on being invited in for a cup of coffee by a lesbian priest from the Church of Sweden who never tires of spirited discussion. Has Klas been knocking on doors this summer, too?
Suddenly, it becomes clear how much the distance between Tilda and me has grown if I didn’t even know about this.
“I find the True Church so creepy,” Amanda says. “They seem so . . .” She waves her hands around as if that’ll help catch the word she’s looking for.
“Evangelical?” Johannes suggests.
“Exactly!”
“What if they turn into one of those American sects that kill people for blood sacrifices?” Hampus says.
“Those weren’t sects. They were just random psychos,” Amanda replies.
“People always say that about Christians,” Elin says, looking at Ali. “If they’d been Muslim . . .”
Ali shoots me a weary look.