Every Universe

‣ Everything Is Ending

title ‣ Everything Is Ending

original work ‣ A Note A Day by Sophie Clarkin (Siriusly_fandoms)

notes ‣ does anyone remember that one shot about the biannual community service field trip I wrote? hopefully not, but I decided I really liked Florida and Ryder from it, so I decided to rewrite it and have them be the narrators. (one day I will write actual ANAD fanfic with actual characters as narrators... one day...) however, there are still A Note A Day characters in this, and after reading the Swoon Reads version, I decided to include major undertones of one of the ships from that while making this take place one year before my A Note A Day AU (this may seem like irrelevant information rn, but it's not). enjoy!

* * *

Florida and Ryder, who have been best friends since fourth grade, cannot imagine a life without each other. But now it's senior year, and everything is ending.

* * *

"It felt like a nightmare."

"Are you still talking about that?" Florida asks, shaking her mechanical pencil for lead. None comes out, so she reaches for her pencil case in her pastel blue backpack on her bed. "It's already senior year."

"I still remember it like it was yesterday. The recycled air, the dull hum of the air conditioning, the sounds of a hundred or so students' pencils scratching on paper." Ryder leans back in the swivel chair, staring at the white ceiling as he recalls the memory. "I hate AP Physics. I don't know how you got an A."

Florida scrolls down on the PDF loaded on her laptop for the next practice prompt. She's taking AP English Literature and Composition, for no other reason than she needed the stimulation, but now she has preparing for the in-class English essay on Friday by reviewing past prompts, which is mindless, tedious work. She would pay not to ever take another English class. "It's easy when you like physics."

"You're just a freak of nature! I can't believe you took AP Calc BC last year."

"Math is easy. I can't believe you don't like math."

"Math is hard! I don't understand sine or cosine or whatever we're doing right now."

"Shock." Sarcasm drips out of her voice like molasses, and Ryder, sitting at her desk, watches as his textbook practically mocks him for being so dumb. "You realize that this is the last math class you'll probably ever take."

"Bless."

A small smile plays on her lips. "You know, I want to go back to California."

Over the summer, Florida had invited him to go on an impromptu road trip with her to California. It was less of inviting him and more of knocking on his door at five in the morning and asking him to go with her, but he had packed a duffel bag of clothes and whatever else he could think of and then got into Florida's dad's car. They were in Maryland when their parents called them, asking where they were. They took the news surprising well, just reminding them to not get in trouble with the police.

"Yeah," Ryder says. "Cali had nice beaches."

"That's all you care about? We visited Berkeley!"

"I can't believe you want to go to Berkeley for physics."