By then, all the beautiful, cool people had emigrated with cyanide in champagne at glamorous “Bon Voyage Parties.” They'd held hands and jumped from skyscraper penthouse parties. People already a little world-weary, all the movie stars and super-athletes and rock bands. The supermodels and software billionaires, they were gone after that first week.

Every day, Eve's dad would come home saying who was gone from his office. Who in the neighborhood had emigrated. It was easy to tell. Their front lawn would get too tall. Their mail and newspapers would pile up on the doorstep. Their curtains were never open, their lights never came on, and you'd walk past and catch a whiff of something sweet, some kind of fruit or meat rotting inside the house. The air buzzed with black flies.

The house next door, the Frinks' house, was like that. So was the house across the street.

For the first few weeks, it was fun: Larry going downtown to pound his electric guitar alone on the stage of the Civic Theater auditorium. Eve getting to use the entire shopping mall as her own private closet. School was out, and it would never, ever start back up.

But their dad, you could tell he was already over Tracee. Their dad was never good at the part after the romantic start. Normal times, this was when he'd start to cheat. He'd find some new squeeze at his office. Instead, he was watching the Venus footage on television, paying close attention, his nose almost touching the parts where you could make out people, groups of those beautiful supermodel people, piled together naked or linked in a long daisy chain. Licking red wine off each other. Humping without reproduction or disease or God's damnation.

Tracee, she was making a list of celebrities she wanted to be best friends with once the family arrived. At the top of her list was Mother Teresa.

By now even harried moms were rounding up their kids, shrieking for everybody to hurry up and drink their poisoned milk and get their asses the hell to the next step of spiritual evolution. Now even life and death would be phases to rush through, the way teachers hurried kids from grade to grade to graduation—no matter how much they did or didn't learn. A big rat race to enlightenment.

In the car now, her voice getting deep and rough from breathing the smoke, Tracee reads, “As the cells of your heart valves begin to die, the two halves, called ventricles, get sloppy, pumping less and less blood through your body . . .”

She coughs and reads, “Without blood, your brain stops functioning. Within minutes you'll emigrate.” And Tracee shuts the pamphlet. The End.

Eve's dad says, “Good-bye, planet Earth.”

And the Boston terrier, Risky, barfs up cheese popcorn all over the back seat.

The smell of dog barf, and the sound of Risky gobbling it up, are even worse than the carbon monoxide.

Larry looks at his sister, the black makeup smeared around his eyes, his eyes blinking in slow motion, he says, “Eve, take your dog outside to puke.”

In case the family's gone when she gets back, her dad says there's a Going Away Kit on the counter in the kitchen. He tells Eve not to hang around too long. They'll be waiting for her at the big party.

Eve's future ex-stepmom says, “Don't hold the door open and let out any smoke.” Tracee says, “I want to emigrate, not just be brain-damaged.”

“Too late,” Eve says, and tugs the dog outside to the backyard. There, the sun is still shining. Birds build nests, too dumb to know this planet is out of fashion. Bees crawl around inside the open roses, not knowing their whole reality is obsolete.

In the kitchen, on the counter next to the sink, is a Going Away Kit, the plastic blister card of cyanide pills. It was a new flavor, lemon. A family pack. Printed on the cardboard backing is a little cartoon. It shows an empty stomach. A clock face counts off three minutes. And then your cartoon soul would wake up in a world of pleasure and comfort. The next planet. Evolved.

Eve punches one out, a bright-yellow pill printed with a smiling happy-face in red. It didn't matter if they'd used that toxic kind of red dye. Eve punches out all the pills. All eight, she takes into the bathroom and flushes down the toilet.

The car's still running inside the garage. Through a window, standing on a lawn chair, Eve can see the heads slumped inside. Her dad. Her future ex-stepmom. Her brother.

In the backyard, Risky is nosing at the crack under the garage door, sniffing the fumes from inside. Eve tells him, No. She calls him back away from the house, back into the sunshine. There, with the neighborhood quiet except for the birds, the buzz of the bees, the backyard already looks messy and needs mowing. With no roar of lawn mowers and airplanes and motorcycles, the birds singing sound as loud as traffic used to.

After she lays down in the grass, Eve pulls up the bottom of her shirt and lets the sun warm her stomach. She closes her eyes and rubs the fingertips of one hand in slow circles around her bellybutton.

Risky barks, once, twice.

And a voice says, “Hey.”

A face sticks over the fence from the backyard next door. Blond hair and pink pimples, a kid named Adam from school. From before all the schools shut down. Adam's fingers grip the top edge of the wood fence, and he pulls himself up until both elbows rest along the top. His chin hooked on his two hands, Adam says, “Did you hear about your brother's girlfriend?”

Eve shuts her eyes and says, “This sounds weird, but I really miss death . . .”

Adam kicks a leg sideways to hook his foot over the fence. He says, “Your folks emigrate yet?”

In the garage, the car's engine coughs and misses a beat on one cylinder. A ventricle getting sloppy. Inside the window glass, the garage air is shifting gray clouds of smoke. The engine misses again and goes quiet. Nothing inside moves. Eve's family, now they're just their own left-behind luggage.

And, spread out in the sunshine, feeling her skin turn tight and red, Eve says, “Poor Larry.” Still rubbing circles around her bellybutton.

Risky goes to stand next to the fence, looking up, as Adam hauls one leg, then the other over the top, then jumps down into the yard. Adam stoops to pet the dog. Scratching under the dog's chin, Adam says, “Did you tell them we're pregnant?”

And Eve, she doesn't say anything. She doesn't open her eyes.

Adam says, “If we get the whole human race started again, our folks will be so pissed . . .”

The sun is almost straight overhead. What sounds like cars is just wind blowing through the empty neighborhood.

Material possessions are obsolete. Money is useless. Status is pointless.

It would be summer for another three months, and there was a whole world of canned food to eat. That's if the Emigration Assistance Squad didn't machine-gun her for noncompliance. Top-A priority target that she is. The End.

Eve opens her eyes and looks at the white dot near the blue horizon. The Morning Star. Venus. “If I have this baby,” Eve says, “I hope it's going to be . . . Tracee.”

24

Mr. Whittier leads Miss Sneezy to the door. To the world, outside. The two of them, hand in hand. Here is our world without a devil, our Villa Diodati without any monster to blame. He's hauled the alley door open a little, open enough so a ray of real sunlight angles in from the alley. That bright slot, the opposite of the black slot we found when we arrived.

Miss Sneezy the same as Cassandra Clark, the bride of Mr. Whittier. The one he wants to save.

The projector bulb has burned out. Or burned so hot so long—with something dramatic always happening, something horrible always happening, something exciting always happening—it's tripped a circuit breaker.

The Baroness Frostbite is asleep in her pile of rags and lace, her greasy pink pucker, muttering. So is the Earl of Slander, sleep-talking, dream-rewinding the scenes in his head.