Free Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle by Katie Coyle Page B

noble, a romantic hero. She ends the post with an exhilarating plea:
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I swear by everything in this world I hold dear—my dead brother Raj and parties and gratuitous swearing and my best friend in this or any universe, Vivian Harriet Apple (note: I do not actually know Viv’s middle name)—that this is true. Consider this: In your heart, do you honestly find it any crazier than the idea that your loved ones just beamed on up into heaven this past March, that if you kill enough sweet innocent gay boys you’ll get cleared to beam on up yourself? You’ve let me down a lot these last few years, America, but even I don’t believe you’re that goddamn stupid. So ponder this tale, sweet reader. If you find yourself believing it, I ask you to do three things only:
    1. GET ANGRY. We should all be so pissed at the Church of America that we’re willing to break our hands in the metaphorical punching of its metaphorical face. Take that fear you’ve been living with for three years—that distrust of your friends and neighbors, that nervous anticipation of September 24th, the supposed last day of this beautiful messed-up world—and turn it into unseemly stone-cold anger. Say to yourself, “The Church of America has fucked with the wrong citizenry!”
    2. Tell someone else the story. Even if they don’t want to hear it—especially if they don’t want to hear it. The Church can kill me and Viv, but they can’t kill the story.
    3. Help us find the missing Believers. Before your Raptured loved one disappeared, did he or she say anything weird(er than usual)? Any references to random locations, upcoming trips? “I hear Minnesota is lovely this time of year”? Anything inexplicable left behind? Pamphlets titled
Things to Do in Denver Before You’re Raptured
tucked inside their Book of Frick? Strange charges on credit card statements, confusing numbers on phone bills? We know firsthand from one Believer who escaped Point Reyes that she’d been summoned to California weeks before the Rapture, told to move in secret. By any chance did the Believer in your life let the secret slip?
    OK, that’s it, you beautiful idiots. If you’ve got questions, leave them below. I’ve got nothing to hide except my current location.
    xoxo Harpreet Janda, Fugitive
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    For more than three weeks, we wait.
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    Harp expected an instantaneous, explosive response, so we spend that whole first afternoon sitting by the laptop, refreshing the page, waiting for a comment. She shares it on her Twitter and her Facebook; she finds secular forums and subforums devoted to Rapture theories and posts the link in the comments. “The farther it reaches, the more people will buy it,” Harp says. “And once they buy it, they’ll pass it on.” But there’s no immediate response. Suzy shows us the stat counter she installed and we watch it faithfully, noting that there are in fact visitors—fifty-eight page views the first day, seventy-three the next. But on the third day, it drops to a dispiriting seventeen. Plus, there are no comments, no link-backs from other pages. Harp seems to be the only person spreading the story.
    â€œIt takes time,” she says hopefully, more than once, “for things to go viral. You have to make them get seen by the right people.”
    Meanwhile, everyone at Cliff House relocates in shifts to the Los Angeles base Amanda has secured. We’re to fully abandon Cliff House by the end of July. One night about a week after Harp posts our story, I wake to the sound of typing, to the now-familiar blue glow of the laptop screen. Harp sits in bed with her knees to her chest. The sky outside is black, freckled with stars, and the beds around us are empty—today Kimberly and Birdie left for LA with twenty others.
    Harp sees me stir and quickly dims the screen. “Sorry, Viv! Didn’t mean to wake you.”
    â€œAny