Amy Brashear - The Incredible True Story of the Making of the Eve of Destruction

“No, on being caller number nine,” she said, shaking her head. “You shouldn’t have pulled the string to the safety shower.”

“Shouldn’t have, but —”

Mrs. Martin knew of my tendency to be a smart-ass. “You know better than that.”

I grabbed another Snickers.

“Laura, where should we start?” she asked.

She started the discussion. I went back to eating another Snickers. When I didn’t answer her question, she took away the Snickers bowl.

“You pulled the safety shower. Does it have anything to do with being caller number nine?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“I need you to talk to me,” she said.

I twisted my scrunchie around my wrist.

“Remember, The Day After [12] On November 20, 1983, 100 million people dropped everything to watch The Day After on ABC, a TV movie about the nuclear annihilation of Kansas City and the aftermath in Lawrence, Kansas. Prior to the TV movie airing, there was a special viewers guide sent in the mail. We were supposed to watch The Day After and then have a discussion, but if we needed to talk to someone, there was 1-800-NUCLEAR, a special counseling hotline. If we needed to talk to someone because it got too much too fast, they were there. Seriously, as a nation we had homework. And we were warned, DON’T WATCH IT ALONE! Local affiliates even went so far as to advise parents not to let kids watch it at all. Mom and Dennis didn’t listen. They let me watch it. I curled up on the couch and watched the end of the world happen with no commercial breaks! Terrence said he watched half of it at his mom’s house before he got bored and did homework instead. He missed the mushroom cloud, the firestorms, the wind, the skeletonized people, the buildings exploding, people vaporized, the slow deaths of hundreds of thousands, the radiation poisonings, the panic, the savaging, the pillaging, the government not knowing how much to dig in the irradiated farmland, the possibility of deformed infants, no medicine, no cures, no hope, only despair. We don’t even know who shot first. But as John Lithgow said in the movie, it doesn’t matter. After the movie they said it would be much worse than what we saw—there would be vomiting with acute diarrhea, and much, much more. Max’s parents confined him to his bedroom and checked on him to make sure he wasn’t watching it. He had little to add to the conversation the next day at school. The movie was scary. It left me feeling nothing. I was hollow inside. I was afraid. I still am. was only a movie,” she said, repeating the one line that she told me after I came in crying last November. The time when I broke out in a cold, shivering sweat, followed by weeks of depression and anxiety.

It’s only a movie. Just like it’s only a game.

“Do you believe everything they tell you?” I asked.

“Laura—”

I sighed, reaching for the bowl of Snickers, but then realized she took that away, just like the politicians were doing with my hopes and dreams.

“No, it has nothing to do with that—though that subject appears nightly in my nightmares,” I said.

“Laura, how does that make you feel?”

That dreaded question that people who get psychology degrees and decide to head-shrink for a living ask.

How does the fear that adults with the power to flip a switch are going to mess it up before I got my chance sound to you? Not good. We were living in a nuclear soap opera.

“How does it make me feel?” I said, repeating her question.

“I asked you,” she said.

“It makes me feel—”

There were two camps: the holy beep, we all could die and the maybe things won’t be so bad . I fell into the first camp. The camp that knew it had fifteen minutes to accomplish everything it wanted to before it died. That did weigh on your psyche.

Last November, after watching The Day After , I called 1-800-NUCLEAR with the rest of the poor saps. I was afraid that my parents would be killed and I would survive. I was afraid that I would die and my parents would survive. I once had to make Mrs. Martin a list of everything I was afraid of:

My parents will die

I’ll get sick

I’ll die

Bad grades

People won’t like me

I’m not pretty

I won’t ever have a boyfriend

Nuclear war

Whenever I tried to talk about my feelings on nuclear war, what actually happened was silence. I couldn’t. If I talked about it, then that meant it was on the horizon. A nuclear payload heading down on us, down on me.

Yeah, we did drills where we hid under our desks. You know, those were some badass desks. Immune to an ICBM, or what you probably would see in your underpants right after. And we had a fallout shelter in our basement at school, but it was locked after too many students found that to be the perfect make-out spot.

On a scale of one—does not bother me—to five—very disturbing—I was on a ten going on eleven.

Mrs. Martin looked at her watch. “We should continue this conversation,” she said. “I’ll schedule you in for a weekly session.”

I was defeated. But nodded anyway.

“Does this count as my punishment for pulling the safety shower in chemistry?” I asked.

She shook her head and smiled. “No, you’re suspended for one day. You got off easy.”

Worth it.

I leaned over the desk to grab a handful of Snickers from the bowl she purposely put out of reach. I took a glance at my folder, which was flipped open, and died a little inside.

Laura Ratliff is afraid of not having a future. She is afraid of dying in a nuclear blast. She comes from a broken family, which isn’t that uncommon, but it was done in such a way that it became town gossip.

Mrs. Martin , I thought, you’re going to miss me when I’m gone .

I was sent home—and by home I mean the Flat Inn. My mom was the general manager of the only decent (or so she claimed) hotel in the town. Helping was my after-school job. Folding towels, emptying the trash, stocking the sweets shop. That afternoon, I grabbed an orange soda from the cooler, found a comfy seat in the lobby and watched as my mom dealt with crisis after crisis.

“What’s leaking from the ceiling from the fourth floor?” a guest asked.

Um. Rain? I didn’t say it out loud. That would be rude to the guests. End of the world to some of these people. The customer wasn’t always right. Sometimes they were downright stupid.

“I’m sorry, sir. Let me see if we have any available rooms I can move you to,” Mom said.

The phone didn’t stop ringing, and Mom didn’t stop trying to explain why they were sold out. She hung up the phone. “Why don’t you take your little hammer and nails and build you one,” she said to no one as the phone rang again. “Flat Inn, this is Edna. How may I help you? No, I’m sorry. We are all sold out for that week. What’s going on? Well, ma’am, they’re shooting a movie—”

Some of the crew and a few of the actors were staying here, and Mom was going insane. Some of the older actors were renting houses. I guess they were too old for the hotel lifestyle. I didn’t blame them. After the “secret” came out about my mom and Terrence’s dad, Mom and I pretty much moved into room 104. Next to the kitchen. Noisy. And you could smell the free continental breakfast at five-thirty in the morning. Dad escaped to Little Rock Air Force Base’s barracks.

“Welcome to Flat Inn. Checking in?” she asked a man with a suitcase.

Paula walked over and sat down a stack of brown and green folders and a stack of paper. “Put a copy of this letter in each one.”