Excerpt from Let's Call It a Doomsday by Katie Henry, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I'm overwhelmed by the number of things that don't make sense here. I'll start with the most basic.

"We haven't had class together, I didn't even know your name, but you want me to eat lunch with your friends?"

"We should be friends," she says. "We're supposed to be friends."

"Supposed to—I don't—why?"

She considers this. "I have a couple working theories."

I should leave. I should get up and walk away from this weird girl with her cryptic riddles who invaded my secret spot. But I don't get up. It's my secret spot, after all. Why should I leave?

"That's really nice of you," I say, and focus back at my book, "but I like eating lunch here."

She stirs beside me. "It doesn't have to be lunch. You could come after school."

I stare so hard at the words on the page they blur. "I have chemistry lab."

"We could get coffee."

"I can't drink coffee—look." I close the book. I've never had someone work this hard to hang out with me. "You don't want to be friends with me."

She wrinkles her nose. "Yeah, I do."

"No, you don't. I'm not fun, okay? To hang out with. I'm ... the opposite of fun."

"Boring?"

"Boring is the opposite of interesting, not fun, the word 'fun' implies—" I shut my eyes. "Do you see what I mean? Please save yourself. Save us both."

I keep my eyes closed for a long moment. When I open them, I expect to see that Hannah's left, like any normal person would. But Hannah hasn't moved from her spot on the carpet.

"Why do you see Martha?" she asks.

My mouth drops. "You're not supposed to ask that."

"Why not?"

"It's ... private."

"What if I guessed?" she suggests.

"Um," I say, which she somehow interprets as "Sure, go ahead."

She rests her chin on one hand. "Are you secretly convinced your entire body is made of glass?"

"No, I'm not—how is that your first guess?"

"Do you suffer from dancing mania?"

"I don't know that means."

"Clinical lycanthropy?"

"Oh my gosh, no, I have anxiety. I see Martha for anxiety."

"Oh." She looks disappointed. "That's not so bad. Everyone has anxiety, right?"

I think that's supposed to make me feel better, but it only makes my temper flare. "No," I snap. "Everyone feels anxious. Sometimes. About normal things, about tests, or getting into college, or—" I swallow. "I'm anxious about everything."

"Not everything," she says. "I'm sure not every single thing."

"I worry that people are talking about me, I worry that people hate me, I worry that the guy sitting next to me on the bus is a kidnapper or a murderer or a Scientologist. I worry that I talk to my lab partner in chemistry too much, I worry I talk to him too little. I'm worried that I'll fail chemistry and every other class because I'm bad at school, and of course I am, I'm bad at everything, so yeah, I do worry about everything—every single little thing."

I suck in a deep breath. Hannah folds her hands in her lap. "That," she says, "must really suck."

A laugh bursts out from somewhere near my rapidly beating heart. "It's not great." I sigh. "I don't mean to make it seem ... it's not just silly stuff like that. I worry about big stuff, too. Terrorist attacks, the apocalypse, MRSA—"

"What?"

"Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, it's this bacterium that doesn't respond to most antibiotics."

"No, I know what—" She shakes her head. "The apocalypse? You're scared of the apocalypse?"

"Yeah." She closes her mouth, looking at me intently, purposefully. She looks like someone trying to do multivariable calculus in their head. Or me trying to do math at all.

"Not the Four Horsemen, specifically." She only looks more confused. "I mean, not necessarily a biblical apocalypse, though it could be, but it could also be a flood, or an asteroid, or a human-created black hole. I worry about all the ways it could happen."

Excerpted from Let's Call It a Doomsday by Katie Henry. Copyright © 2019 by Katie Henry. Excerpted by permission of Katherine Tegan Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.