The Last Days of California
An eerily modern Pilgrim’s Progress in which a plain 15-year-old girl is dragged along on a family car trip, starting from their sourly-sweet Alabama home and heading for Oakland, California where, in five days, the Rapture will commence. Dad has lost his job, though the two girls aren’t supposed to know that. Mom has pretty much lost whatever affection she had for Dad, though the two girl’s aren’t supposed to know that, either. Elise, seventeen and beautiful, is pregnant, though Mom and Dad aren’t supposed to know that. And the narrator, Jess Metcalf, has pretty much concluded that it’s all a crock: beauty, true love, goodness, Jesus, fast food, all of it. She learns a lot on the road, but never loses a certain clarity of vision.
Why hadn’t he texted me? I hoped he didn’t think I was just some girl who had given him a handjob in the back of his van. I was, of course, but I couldn’t think of myself that way, and couldn’t think of him thinking of me that way, either.
Then again, fast food is pretty good.