After I painted her nails, Mom and Grandma came in and began fanning the air with old cardboard sheets. We even opened the windows, for a brief few minutes before Mom closed them and mopped the inside frame of the window coated with the thinnest layer of tiny ash particles.

And then came dinner.

The scented lotions and aromatic candles, burning to the very bottom of the wax, mixed surprisingly nicely with the food bubbling in the pot next to the fireplace. Even though it was her birthday, we still couldn't avoid eating a bit of soup, though today, Mom and Grandma used up two cans of our nearly gone chicken to create a thick broth. We even chopped up a stalk of green onion that we are growing in the greenbox to add a bit of freshness to the noodles.

Dinner was really nice for everyone except for Dad, since being a vegetarian, he got left with a can of half-warm, limp zucchini and carrot with some noodles, which probably tastes as bad as it sounds. But, you know what, a solid six out of seven people were enjoying dinner, and that's all that matters.

After we had finished drinking all of our soup, Mom brought out the centerpiece, a loaf of brownie, only a couple of inches high and maybe half a foot long, but the chocolatey smell wafted through the air and even though we've eaten more today than we have in the past few days, everyone's mouths were wafting. Mom let it sit somewhat close to the fireplace, so that the chocolate chips would melt and ooze out with every bite.

"How—" May said, uncharacteristically stuttering. "Where'd you get the brownie mix from? I thought we ran out."

"We had a little bit left," Mom said. "And your father and I decided to stash it away for a special day, like today."

"Well, Mom. Do you also have the keys to a Ferrari stashed away?"

"Very funny," Mom said and grabbed the slightly smoky but warm brownie cake with gloves. May tried to grab a chunk of the cake, but Mom blocked her and picked up a candle, lighting it and placing it on top of the cupcake.

"Can we hurry up and get to the cake eating part?" May asked.

"Not before we sing."

"I don't need a song."

"Well, I need one," Dad said and started clapping his hands in a rhythm. "One. Two. Three."

And then our terrible, off-pitch singing began. One miracle about Mom and Dad is that they haven't figured out how to sing with their own beat, their hand clapping completely asynchronous to their singing. And then, after we finished "Happy Birthday," Mom decided to do a rendition in Chinese to bring Grandma and Grandpa in, with Dad filming and mumbling along while I struggled to remember exactly how to sing it.

"It's time to make a wish," Mom said.

I could almost hear the sounds of "Ferrari" being chanted in May's mind as she blew on the long candle on the cake. It was a weak blow and the candle flickered back to life.

"It seems like the man in the sky doesn't want you to get a Ferrari," I said.

"I wasn't wishing for one anyways," she said, but you could see everyone thinking, "Totally."

This second try, she managed to do it, and Mom removed the candle before cutting a small slice of brownie and serving it to May. "So what was your sweet fifteen wish?"

"It's sweet sixteen," May said. "Only Spanish people do sweet fifteens."

"I know," Mom said. "I just thought it'd be a good idea to celebrate it a bit early."

"You think I'm going to be dead before sixteen," May said. "And that this birthday is like one of those cancer charity things for kids that are about to die."

"That's not what I mean—"

"Then we've always got next year," May said. "So let's just keep today what it is supposed to be. A boring, nothing special fifteenth birthday. It's not my sweet sixteen. It's just fifteen, so don't call it that."

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"Okay," Mom said, though she was a bit confused and flustered. I was kinda confused too because sixteen didn't seem very exciting. I mean mine was just like any other birthday, just renting a cheap movie to watch, eating some pizza and cake, before working on homework since that's what I get for being born in January in the school year.

But I kinda get May too. I know she's trying to change for the apocalypse, raiding homes and basically stealing from people that aren't there, and maybe she's changing a little too fast, but I wonder if that's all just an act. Well, maybe not an act, but just a way of dealing with the change around her by changing faster, and that trivial stuff, like sweet sixteens or fancy cars, is her hanging onto normalcy that's still here around us.

We didn't talk much beyond some very light conversation, as we nibbled our brownies, savoring the last bit of chocolate that we may ever eat, unless Mom has some more stashed away. The sun was setting, and we all knew it was time for Mira to leave, but as soon as she got up, she stopped and looked at her hands.

"I just realized," Mira said, looking down at her nails. "The others, they might know or find out that—"

"I'll go get the nail polish remover," I said and disappeared into the bathroom to grab a lavender bottle that smelled faintly like artificial fragrance along with some tissue paper. Swishing the polish remover on the tissue, I walked into the bedroom, where Mira sat, staring at her hands.

"Do you think May's right?" she asked. "Not about the sweet fifteen or sixteen thing, but about people."

"I mean, I don't know," I said as I handed her the soaked tissue paper as she scrubbed the polish from her fingers.

"When we argued about it last time, I thought she was wrong about this, about me," Mira said. "But I'm starting to think she's right. I'm becoming more like Mom and Dad, more scared about people and about interaction and community. She was right that I was reaching for my gun that other day when we saw that lady. I didn't even think about it, and just made a judgement call based on nothing."

"I mean, people are changing, you know."

"Yeah," Mira said. "But I want to be less scared about people. How else are we going to go back to normal if we're all pointing guns at each other?"

"You think things are going back to before?"

"Not before, but something like before," she said. "Just a normal future where we fight about stupid things like movie nights or magazines."

My heart leapt because I knew what she was trying to do and trying to shift the conversation to the magazine, which is exactly what happened.

"I know that the magazine was more than just nothing," Mira said. "Sometimes, you're bad at lying."

I didn't know what she was saying or what she was insinuating. It's situations like this that I wish I could just disappear off the face of the world, drifting under the waves for a couple of hours or days until the whole situation is over, so that I can pop back into existence when everything is better. I knew that I couldn't lie my way around the truth because Mira knows that something is off, and she'll know that I'm lying, so I went with the half-truth.

"I just have a hard time with letting go of old things," I said. "I'm, like, a compulsive hoarder."

Sometimes, that does feel like the full truth, with the magazine and the guys and all the kissing in make-believe meadows in my mind. There are moments where I wish that I could just let go of this feeling, and there are moments where I believe, sometimes for just a flicker of a moment and other times for a couple of hours, that what I'm feeling is something else, like hoarding. Maybe I can box it away, like old mason jars and dust-stained toys, until I find the courage to throw it away.

But other times, this feeling flips, where I wish that I had the courage to speak up and the courage to say that what I'm feeling is right and real and it's not just a figment of my imagination gone wild because of my need to feel different. Some moments, I can even imagine being in a relationship. Well, not really a relationship, but more like an idea of a relationship, like the idea of having someone that you can actually confess to beyond just scribbling words to myself.

I'll actually take the half-truth back. This is actually a full truth, just in two different ways that feel like half-truths when combined together.

Mira stood up and was just about to leave the room when she said, "I've got to go now, but you know, there's a whole world of non-magazine people out there."

I almost scoffed and gave a May-like response, "What world?" But instead, I just nodded, and Mira said goodbye and left.

I guess the reason that I said that was partially because the world around us is crumbling away, one ash storm at a time until we're all buried under a thick layer of volcanic dust, like the people that were trapped in Pompeii. With Mom and Dad's paranoid and everyone killing each other for just little cans of food, beyond my mandated trips to the rivers and the glances of the streets and outside when Charles visits, it's like my world has shrunken more from before. And once winter comes with snow and bitter cold, these four walls around me will be my whole universe. Like all of my hopes and dreams will live and die between brown-painted walls and ash-stained windows.

But I think another reason is that I don't feel like there's a world for me out there, even if everything returns back to normal. Charles had got me thinking about what my ideal partner would be like, but that mostly has me thinking about what that guy's ideal partner would be like, if he was even interested in guys. He'd probably choose someone just as attractive as he is, someone cool, confident, funny, charming, and just perfect. I know I shouldn't be thinking so hard because this is all just a fantasy, and that no self-respecting twenty-some year old would ever get into a relationship with someone whose 17th birthday is a solid 4 months away since that'd violate a ton of laws. But still, even when I'm a twenty-something year old, I just can't see myself with anyone like him.

That's probably the one thing that I'm sure of.