I don’t think anyone expected to hear that we’d all be dead in a year because a giant space-rock decided to collide with the earth.
I mean, not all of us.
I know my Chemistry teacher did.
He came in a few weeks ago, in the same outfit as always: dress shirt, slacks, nice shoes, one of his two pairs of glasses (one pair was brown and the other was a slightly darker brown; he swore up and down that they were completely different and that we, as damned kids, could not tell the difference).
He put his folder down on his desk, stood in front of the class, and said two words:
“We’re fucked.”
It was funny at first, because none of us expected to hear that kind of language from him; he was always a stickler for using “appropriate words.”
It got less funny when he started tearing up.
He pointed at me.
“You. You will be dead.”
“What?”
“You will dead in a year.”
He pointed at another student, then another, then another, muttering the words “And you will be dead, and you will be dead, and you will be dead, and you will be dead,” going down the rows of desks and pointing at every single person.
Some thought he was going insane, others thought that he meant he would shoot us all and started running for the door, and some continued sleeping.
He came back to the front of the class and pointed at himself.
“And I will be dead. I will be dead most of all.”
He did not stop the students who ran out the door; he said that “there [was] no point anyway.”
When asked what the hell he was talking about, he simply took a piece of paper from his folder and placed it on the projector.
He focused in on the headline:
“METEOR TO HIT EARTH IN 2029.”
That was, indeed, a year from now.
I raised my hand.
“Don’t meteors hit the earth like... Constantly?”
He laughed.
“Sure, I suppose you could say that. But this one is much, much, much larger than the ones that hit Earth ‘all the time.’ This one could destroy the planet.”
He chuckled to himself.
“It will, of course. I know it will.”
“So why teach?”
He laughed again.
“I’m not planning on it. As far as I’m concerned, you can smoke pot and shoot guns at each other period; we’re fucked anyway.”
Some kids in the back laughed. I didn’t.
“Is there a way to stop it?”
He shrugged.
“Probably. They won’t do it, though.”
“Why not?”
“Fuck if I know.”
I couldn’t tell if he was a deeply pessimistic man, or just a bit too willing to accept his, and everyone else’s, inevitable death.
“So what do we do now?”
He laughed again, and sat down in his chair.
“Now? What do you we do now? That’s a good question.”
He sat in his chair for a minute, pondering.
“I suppose... I suppose we wait, don’t we?”
“I suppose we do.”