Not to come across as too serious or anything, but my bedroom had always been my sanctuary.

My corner of the world, where I had learned that the meteor was going to hit us for the first time in the dark on my little phone screen. 

The bed met the wall—two of them, including the window and the rusted radiator that had stopped working long before I got there. If I looked outside at night, sometimes I could see people getting robbed in the shitty little alley next to my apartment building, but the police never bothered to show up unless someone was dying, so I'd taken to playing Never Gonna Give You Up as loud as I could through my window, and that usually scared them off.

My aesthetic was artist inhales a mold spore and dies slash artist slams his toe into the radiator and gets lockjaw and dies slash moldy green paint with mold included. Bonus: there was a toaster oven on the shelf across from my bed when it got negative zero, and I couldn't leave the room at risk of freezing to death.

"How old is this spinach and feta pizza in your fridge?" Felix shouts from the kitchen, and a second later, he announces, "Never mind! Those are pepperonis!"

I roll my eyes and take a seat on the edge of my bed before grabbing the old-fashioned dial phone on my nightstand since this place still had a traditional landline. 

The first person I decided to call was my grandma, who was probably in the middle of watching one of her telenovelas and sipping coffee in her recliner. There was no one else's voice I wanted to hear more than hers, especially since I hadn't seen or talked to her in a week. One of my biggest regrets was not having the courage to call her and say goodbye before the meteor hit. Instead, I'd gone and met a stranger in a parking lot. 

"Hola, Nani," I tell her after she picks up after the third ring, "it's Hector."

"Tito?" She replies in her croaky voice, and I hear the sound of the TV in the background. "Mi pequeño pancito! It's been such a long time! Are you eating properly? Did you finally move out of that apartment into something nicer? I keep telling you that one day we're going to find your body frozen to death in that place or worse!" 

I really didn't want to cry over the phone, but after thinking that I'd never see her again for almost a week straight, it made me kind of emotional. 

"Grandma?" I ask her through my tears, "I think I made a huge mistake. I got involved in something that I don't want to be a part of."

"Aye, Tito," My grandma replies, "Paying off your student debt isn't that important! Did they take your kidney?" She asks me, "Didn't I tell you not to get involved in drugs after your grandfather ended up spending three months in the hospital, high as a kite with a block of cocaine in his ass when he was twenty-one?" 

"Grandma, I met a gay man who wants to end the world," I tell her in my wobbly voice.

"You want to do what with a gay man?" Grandma replies, her voice going all faint and crackly. 

"Nani?" I stand up and ask, "Can you hear me? I can barely hear you!" 

Fucking phone connection. 

I jiggle the cord a little while grandma rambles on the other side, but as I'm struggling to make sense of what she's saying, a shadow crosses the window right next to my bed, and I drop my phone when the room goes two shades darker. I figured that it was probably nothing; cats crossed all the time outside on the fire escape, but when I turned around to look, this thing shot past the window.

I crash backward and rip the phone off my desk when the cord tangles around my shoe, and I end up sprawled on the floor. The window darkens once more, the object outside reappears, and smoke fills the area outside. Just as a dark hood and fragments of ripped black cloth start to emerge from the darkness, the contours of a slowly decomposing face start to take shape.

I open my mouth to silently scream when the creature slowly pushes his hand through the wall, as if dipping its gnarled fingers into a pool of water. For some reason, I knew I was going to die, and  that this demon from hell was here for me.

A hand slaps over my mouth before I can yell in terror, and suddenly I'm being dragged backward when Felix grabs me in a tight hold. 

"Whatever you do, don't scream and think happy thoughts," he whispers into my ear. "That's a wraith. They're attracted to pain and despair and feed in the shadow realm. Every time Ender stops the apocalypse, the veil between worlds becomes thinner and thinner, allowing them to cross through."

My eyes pop open wide when the Wraith slides halfway through the window, and the scent of rot follows it—a sickeningly sweet, pungent smell that makes my stomach lurch in seconds. A quiet shriek rolls out of its mouth, and a black tongue slides out, inches away from my face now.

Felix keeps a tight hold on me when a hot, putrid tongue touches my cheek.

I couldn't even fucking breathe at this point.

I try conjuring images of making tamales with my grandma when I was a kid and watching TV with her while I waited for my parents to show up, even knowing that they never would. I think about all the moments we had walked to the corner store together to buy nothing but junk food for dinner on Fridays, and how she had loved me when I was sick.

Those were my happy thoughts.

Tears slide slowly down my cheeks as the Wraith slides back through the window, completely losing interest in me and Felix before it vanishes completely in a cloud of grey smoke.

"Wow, that was a close call!" Felix announces cheerfully, "I haven't seen one of those in weeks!"

"Dude. Can you let go of me?" I ask him, because he was pretty much holding me Leonardo Dicaprio and Kate Winsett-style on the Titanic with his arms around me, and I wasn't prepared for this level of gayness just yet, especially not with him—okay, definitely not with him.

There's a creak out in the hallway, and both of us look over when a figure in a hoodie appears.

"Damn," Bones says when he peers inside at us and sees Felix holding me in a bear hug, "you motherfuckers are gay as hell."