How do I know that?

I like kids. Huh. Just a feeling. But I like them. They’re cool. They’re fun to hang out with.

So I’m a single man in my thirties, who lives alone in a small apartment, I don’t have any kids, but I like kids a lot. I don’t like where this is going…

A teacher! I’m a schoolteacher! I remember it now!

Oh, thank God. I’m a teacher.

“All right,” I said, looking at the clock. “We have one minute until the bell. You know what that means!”

“Lightning round!” yelled my students.

Life had changed surprisingly little since the announcement about the Petrova line.

The situation was dire and deadly, but it was also the norm. Londoners during the Blitz in World War II went about their day as normal, with the understanding that occasionally buildings get blown up. However desperate things were, someone still had to deliver milk. And if Mrs. McCreedy’s house got bombed in the night, well, you crossed it off the delivery list.

So it was that with the apocalypse looming—possibly caused by an alien life-form—I stood in front of a bunch of kids and taught them basic science. Because what’s the point of even having a world if you’re not going to pass it on to the next generation?

The kids sat in neat rows of desks, facing the front. Pretty standard stuff. But the rest of the room was like a mad scientist’s lab. I’d spent years perfecting the look. I had a Jacob’s ladder in one corner (I kept it unplugged so the kids didn’t kill themselves). Along another wall was a bookshelf full of specimen jars of animal parts in formaldehyde. One of the jars was just spaghetti and a boiled egg. The kids speculated on that one a lot.

And gracing the center of the ceiling was my pride and joy—a huge mobile that was a model of the solar system. Jupiter was the size of a basketball, while wee Mercury was as small as a marble.

It had taken me years to cultivate a rep as the “cool” teacher. Kids are smarter than most people think. And they can tell when a teacher actually cares about them as opposed to when they’re just going through the motions. Anyway, it was time for the lightning round!

I grabbed a fistful of beanbags off my desk. “What is the actual name of the North Star?”

“Polaris!” said Jeff.

“Correct!” I threw a beanbag to him. Before he even caught it, I fired off the next question. “What are the three basic kinds of rocks?”

“Igneous, sedentary, and metamorphic!” yelled Larry. He was excitable, to say the least.

“So close!” I said.

“Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic,” said Abby with a sneer. Pain in the ass, that one. But smart as a whip.

“Yes!” I threw her a beanbag. “What wave do you feel first during an earthquake?”

“The P-wave,” Abby said.

“You again?” I threw her a beanbag. “What’s the speed of light?”