This story begins with Armageddon. It begins with the end because it was the end that would eventually bring him his beginning. In a tiny bathroom on the third floor of the Villa Boitano apartment complex in Humphrey, Ohio, 8-year-old Cameron Pepper knelt in the dark on the toothpaste-green linoleum before the tub clutching a flashlight in his left hand. He sighed heavily, about to end the world.

Cameron gently turned the flashlight on with his thumb, catching the sight of his breath steaming up on the plastic shower curtain two inches in front of his face. With a quick jerk of his right hand, the shower curtain slid left exposing a fleet of Transformers, robots in disguise, lined up on the side of the tub. They stared at Cameron in anticipation. Well, anticipation in disguise. They knew their day of judgment had come upon them. Cameron had placed Encyclopedia Britannica volumes K–M and N–P flat under their feet to create more surface area on the lip of the tub. On sunnier days, Cameron would also stack volumes G–J and Q–R on top in order to stage platform-diving competitions between the Autobots and the Decepticons, but this was not a sunny day. This was Armageddon.

Rising slowly and with great precision to his feet, Cameron swung the flashlight back and forth like a pendulum, sweeping over the Transformers and causing brief, alternating moments of illumination and darkness to fall over them. With his right hand he cautiously fished a folded slip of paper out of his back pocket, paying mind so that the motion of the swinging flashlight remained fluid. He flipped open the top of the paper to expose a list of words he had extracted from random parts of the King James Bible. He let the flashlight stop on Optimus Prime. The ultimate spelling bee was about to begin.

Cameron pursed his lips, poising to utter the first word with conscious syllabic articulation, when he heard the front door close in a way that shook through his entire body. His knee involuntarily shot up, knocking both encyclopedia volumes and all of his Transformers into the tub, the water spitting into his face on impact. Blinking the water out of his eyes, Cameron aimed the flashlight at the bottom of the tub. The gold trim running along the edges of the encyclopedia pages began to flake off and rise to the top of the water, the empty, sunken robot eyes of his Transformers gazing vacantly up through the shimmery surface at nothing in particular. The encyclopedia volume N–P was opened to a tiny black and white depiction of the earth in the margin of the “planets” subheading. Cameron’s eyes became fixated on it, so small and flat, so drab in black and white. He stared down for several minutes at the pathetic earth, half marveling at how its image sat on the bottom of the tub mirroring his disappointment.

The apocalypse was not supposed to happen on accident. What about the spelling bee? None of them even had a chance at the words! He had even concocted elaborate deaths for the bad spellers. Cameron shook his head. The end of the world was not supposed to be so random and ill-planned. Staring down at the tiny earth drowning at the bottom of his tub he realized that he had ruined the encyclopedias, and consequently, everything from K–P in existence. His parents would not be happy. The thought of this brought him back to the sound of the closing door. The recollection of it paralyzed him. The sound of the front door closing in that particular way would haunt him. It would haunt him because there is a certain sound a closing door makes when someone you love is not coming back.

“Earth to Cameron Pepper! Do you care to join us back here in 1991?”

Cameron’s head shot up from resting on his elbow, causing his chair to jolt and emit a sound like a fart. Everyone in his Earth Science class tittered.

“Err…” he grumbled.

“Will you pass the Earth Day worksheets back to the rest of your row?” Mrs. Kemeny stood with her arms crossed peering over her reading glasses.

Fat cow, Cameron thought as he picked up the pile of worksheets in front of him and passed them back to Robbie Curtis, who was cackling like a goddamn magpie in his ear. Fuck that guy. Who was he to laugh anyway? He talked to his TI-80 in algebra because he thought he could communicate with aliens.

Cameron was more or less used to being laughed at. He was a walking powder keg of general amusement to everyone at Herbert Hoover Jr. High. He was considered a weird kid from a freaky religious family. An odd kid who wouldn’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance or stand for the National Anthem because he was taught at home that it was blasphemous to pledge allegiance to anyone or anything but God. He was a boy who didn’t dress up for Halloween or receive gifts for Christmas. All he did was wait. Wait for the end, the Great Tribulation when God would come and wipe out the world, escorting the few chosen back with him up to the Kingdom of Heaven. It was supposed to have happened already. His father was always telling him, “Any day now.”

Cameron lived with the unbearable burden of the constant present, unable to let his mind escape to the future to find solace in better things to come. He often thought back to that day with his Transformers in the bathtub. He remembers looking at that picture of the earth at the bottom of the tub and suddenly not being able to tell how far he was away from it. At 13, Cameron Pepper could not escape that day when everything from K–P, everything in the middle, had sunk and drowned, the heart of him had gone somewhere, and he had been lost at sea among his insides, like an iceberg frozen and bobbing in dark waters. That was the night his mother left for a carton of milk and never came back.

Cameron swallowed hard and sought comfort in Sarah Nelson’s back seated in front of him. Sarah Nelson and the astronomy of her back, neck and shoulders killed him. She was wearing a tank top, which revealed a crescent moon birthmark on her left shoulder blade. Her shoulders were peppered with freckles and tiny jagged, red scratches connected to some of them, forming shooting stars across the universe of her back. She must have kittens at home, Cameron thought, kittens that nuzzle her neck and claw carelessly at her shoulders. Cameron often would stare endlessly at her back. Sometimes he fantasized that when the world would end he would get sucked into the back of her, becoming part of some galaxy or other. The Milky Way…Andromeda…Medula Oblongata.

“I can feel you breathing on my neck.”

“What?” Cameron was instantly looking at the profile of Sarah Nelson’s turned head.

“I can feel your breath. On my neck.”

“Sorr…”

“It’s ok.” By this time she had turned completely around and was facing him. “You spelled recycle wrong. There’s no ‘k.’”

“What?”

“For No. 1 on the worksheet.” Her index finger pointed to the erroneous “k.” She studied his face carefully.

“Do you really think the world is going to end in fire and brimstone?” It always sounded so stupid phrased like that. “Or maybe nuclear war?” she asked, barely audibly.

Cameron stared at her, half shocked at her earnestness. He wanted so much to be able to explain everything to her. But how could he tell Sarah Nelson who had kitties and was a good speller that he sometimes thought that his father was crazy? How he was tired of waiting. How, in a great way, the world already seemed like it had ended. How he could never let his imagination travel into the future because the apocalypse was slow and sudden at the same time, stealing parts of your life when you least expected it and leaving you to somehow trudge on. How sometimes the earth does revolve around you, in a continuous orbit, spinning but never quite touching you.

“I don’t know,” he answered.

Cameron looked down at his desk and noticed a small slip of paper with little black music notes doodled all over it that said:

“I’ll stop the world and melt-down with you.”

Cameron felt something chip away at the iceberg floating around in his gut. He imagined kissing Sarah Nelson on her porch. He pictured what it might be like to be with her someday, to swat her bottom with a newspaper. He saw her kittens full-grown, lapping up milk in the kitchen. Milk that she had left the house to buy but came back. He saw Sarah Nelson coming back home with the milk.

Cameron could feel the plate tectonics of his impossible present start to move and take shape as his body began to resist its own mortality for the first time in years. The Big Bang spawned by 1980s song lyrics, personalized and written in a girl-crush glitter pen. The ability for a boy to allow himself the thought of a future would become both a small step and a giant leap for a kind man.

Sometimes rebellions can be soft, quiet and inconspicuous in their glacial revolutions. His insides, tilted and churning at 23 1/3 degrees, Cameron forgot dying.