by Emily Henry
I only realized I’d said it aloud when Arthur answered, “I’m looking, Fran, same as you.”
I found her in the corner, pressed up to Dad, sobbing into his chest. His hand was cupped around the back of her head, his mouth murmuring against her forehead.
My stomach felt like it was free-falling through my body.
All I’d wanted on the ride over from school was for Mom to look at me, to reach her hand out, so I’d feel safe, so I’d know that whatever had happened to Mark was fixable.
Watching her fists curl into Dad’s shirt, I understood, suddenly, irrevocably, that my mother could do nothing to protect me, or to fix this.
Arthur had wandered off to get answers from a chubby boy in all black with bulging blue eyes, and I was alone.
No one could help me, or even see me.
And then I spotted him: a boy with a mop of shiny dark hair and deep brown eyes, with skinny shoulders and scabby knees that poked out from Dickies shorts. He was arguing with the cops blocking the door.
“Please,” the boy said. “Please let me back there, please.”
One of the cops had him by the shoulders, holding him back. “I know you’re worried, buddy. I know you are, but your dad’s strong, and there’s nothing—”
The boy shook free. “Let me see him! I need to see my dad.”
“You need to stay calm. Be brave, okay?”
He started screaming, tearfully swearing, trying to physically move past the cops, but they kept buffeting him back, gently.
Pityingly.
At any other moment, I might’ve been embarrassed to watch it, wanted to crawl out of my skin at the sight of someone my age kicking at a hospital door, shouting half-formed, swear-laced insults at two adults who were looking at him like he was a toddler hurling a pacifier around.
But I felt it too, everything he was raging against, the way the whole world had become his enemy. I wanted to kick, spit, yank hair, but the thing I wanted to fight was too big and unhurtable.
I wanted to tussle with the dirt, rip the grass out of the earth, smash the hospital windows until someone looked right at me and saw my pain.
One of the officers tried to grab the boy’s shoulders, and he tripped backward from her, turned, searching for something, someone who could help him, but everyone was wrapped up in their own fear.
I wanted him to know that I saw him. That someone heard him.
When his eyes caught mine, I lifted one hand.
His mouth was ajar, the corners twisted downward, denting his cheek.
Slowly, he lifted his hand. His eyebrows peaked together. They seemed to ask, You too?
Two days later, he would walk up to me in that same waiting room and introduce himself as Remy Nakamura, my future best friend (he wouldn’t say that part, but I like to think it was implied), and three days after that, Arthur would go out to ride bikes with Nick Colasanti Jr., whose father was killed in the blast.
Dad would drag us along to Nick Sr.’s funeral (Mom would stay at the hospital with Mark), and there we’d see a lanky, dark-haired girl who carried a book in lieu of a purse, though she was polite enough not to read from it until the service was over and she was seated at the dismal potluck’s kids’ table with the rest of us: me, Arthur, his new friend Nick, my new friend Remy, and Remy’s cousin Levi, who was enormous compared to us and, for some reason, wearing a baby blue suit with shoulder pads in it.
When Nick cleared his throat pointedly, the lanky girl set her book down and introduced herself as Sofía Perez, the niece of the steel mill’s receptionist and granddaughter of a steel worker.
She had just moved here from New York City, which immediately made her glamorous despite her plain clothes, and she wondered whether we liked our school (we didn’t) and whether we played lacrosse (I hadn’t even heard of it).
“I tried out for a team once,” Nick said, “but then the coach got busted for printing fake money in his basement.”
Sofía arched an eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound very true.”
“I swear to Gah,” Nick said, and no one argued.
Sofía turned to me, her dark eyebrows pinching in the middle. “I heard about your brother. That must be so hard.”
Arthur bristled beside me, his mood turning the room icy. “What, are you looking for the scoop on the Great Splendor Tragedy like all those leeches taking pictures at the funeral? We don’t know what’s going to happen, so maybe don’t put him in the grave just yet!” Arthur didn’t wait for a response, just stood and stormed from the room, leaving behind the chill he’d summoned.
Sofía drew back, teary-eyed. She looked around the table, silently apologizing or maybe searching for an ally, but no one said anything.
She hadn’t done anything wrong, not really. Arthur just didn’t want to talk about Mark, or our parents, or the way home had started to feel like a sinkhole and the future had turned fuzzy and dark.
He didn’t want to talk about how afraid he was, or how much he hurt.
None of us did.
That was the start of our long-term policy regarding the accident—unspoken, but fully understood: Don’t say a word.
Five years later, we still didn’t talk about it.
Bits of the accident hid in every dark corner of our lives, but dragging them into the light for everyone to see would only hurt worse than leaving them be.
The six of us were destined to be alone, trapped in a grief we weren’t willing or able to share, but from then on, at least we were alone together.
FOUR
TURN ON CHANNEL 11 NOW, Levi texted the group. Arthur had been fully invested in googling things like “ice disc” and “magic lightning” and “weird meteorite, lost time” for the last few hours.
He tended to become obsessed with things, especially things he thought could scratch the itch of boredom that came from living in Splendor. One week he’d be hell-bent on becoming a skydiving instructor; the next he’d want to be a tattoo artist, or a pilot, or an actor or a firefighter or a private investigator.
Watching a piece of meteor fall out of the sky was likely to transform his last two weeks here into a quest to become either an astronaut or a geologist.
He sighed as he read Levi’s text, then shoved the old laptop we shared aside and turned on the TV.
Sheriff Nakamura appeared onscreen, standing in front of a field. It was almost nine PM, but the footage had been shot during daylight. It was one of those reports they kept running over and over again, a talking head in the corner adding information as the story developed.
“This is absolutely some kind of hoax,” Sheriff Nakamura was saying. “There is no natural way for the ground to have become scorched in this intricate pattern without doing damage to the surrounding crops. It’s simply not possible. Think of this as graffiti in the extreme.”
“What do you have to say about the behavior of the cows?” the news anchor asked. I recognized her as Cheryl Kelly. She’d been the face of the reports about the accident at the steel mill too, though back then she always wore navy blue, whereas now you never spotted her out of her signature red blazer.
The sheriff chuckled and thumbed the front of his hat. “Now, Cheryl, I’m afraid you’re going to have to ask a veterinarian, or maybe a bovine scientist, that question.”
The screen cut to a different image: a wash of green marred by brown.
Arthur squinted. “What is that?”
The camera panned over the dull brown-green. A series of gray rectangles appeared at the bottom edge of the screen, a thin streak of silver outlining the shapes. Boxy buildings and a fence wrapped around them.
“The substation. On Jenkins,” I said. And from the fence along the top edge, brown sprouted outward in a symmetrical pattern. Like a tree’s branches, like roots hanging from a plucked wild onion, like the scars up Arthur’s and my arms.
But there was something else in the grassy field behind the metal structures, something black and white arranged along the charred patterns, mottling the gaps between them into speckled bands.
Cows. They’d moved from their line along the fence that morning and fanned out to graze along the burns.
The screen cut back to Sheriff Nakamura and Cheryl Kelly. My phone rang, interrupting her next question.
“Seeing it?” Levi asked as soon as I accepted the call.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
The camera cut once more to the field, and my eyes dipped to the scars on my arm, trying to determine whether they were, as they seemed to be, identical to the massive pattern burned into the field onscreen.
“You and Arthur need to get over here,” Levi said.
“Remy’s grounded, remember?” I said. “We have no ride.”
“Then ride your bikes.”
Arthur shot me a look over his shoulder. “What’s he saying?”
“He wants us to ride our bikes over there.”
“Not want,” Levi said. “Need.”
“Tell him if he’s so desperate for company, he can ride his bike here,” Arthur said.
“What’s he saying?” Levi asked me.
“He says stop being a lazy asshole,” I replied.
“Frances.” Levi enunciated slowly: “Go out into your yard, get onto your bike, and pedal your little Schmidt hearts out. You need to see what my video camera caught.”
* * *
* * *
My handlebars shocked me so badly I flung the bike back against the shed where I’d left it leaning.
“What?” Arthur said, climbing astride his own. “Did you see a spider or something?”
I wasn’t afraid of spiders, but when I said so, my indignation was lost on him. He was already halfway across the yard.
Arthur never waited for me—he looked back to make sure I was there, and he constantly bugged me about bringing the Mace key chain he’d gotten me for Christmas—but he never waited.
He was morally opposed to slowing himself down, for anyone but especially for me. A few years ago he’d very matter-of-factly told me that the worst thing Mom ever did for me wasn’t leaving us, but babying me so much that I couldn’t handle it when she did.
It was the only time either of us had said it aloud—leaving us—but the fact that Arthur thought I couldn’t handle her leaving stung worse than the phrase itself.
I grabbed my bike again, this time careful to touch the rubber handle first, then took off after my brother. The back of my neck prickled, and I fought an impulse to look back. Dad wouldn’t be watching us from within the yellow glow of his bedroom window (he never was), and I’d feel stupid for even checking (I always did).
If we were being watched, it was probably by him, the creepy hermit whose property backed up to ours. He sometimes stood there, late at night, at the barbed wire fence that separated our field from his woods, looking like Frankenstein’s monster in his denim bib-alls.
I rode faster.
We turned up the access road to the train tracks, pedaling hard to keep pace as we thundered over the gravel, past the propane tank they used to heat the track switches in the winter and past the giant blue penis Nick had spray-painted on it, then cut through the woods to the back of Levi’s neighborhood on the literal far side of the tracks.
He, Sofía, and Remy all lived in the newer part of town—houses built on hills in the late 1950s, with fern-filled solariums and mahogany bookshelves like Sofía’s, or home gyms and stainless steel appliances like Remy’s. Houses with pools and gardens and forest views, and easy access to both Kroger and Walmart.
Levi lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in a sprawling, mint-colored house, a mid-century quad-level with wide windows, a nearly flat roof, and a lattice carport that jutted out over his parents’ twin Volvos. Foliage hemmed it in from all sides, blocking the pool and hot tub from the neighbors’ view.
As we glided up the driveway, Levi’s head thrust out of the window over the carport. “Finally!”
“Faster than if we’d had to wait for you to learn how to ride without training wheels.” Arthur dropped his bike in the yard. “Where are the others?”
I kicked my stand loose and followed Arthur to the front steps.
“Nick: work. Sofía: lacrosse,” Levi answered before disappearing deeper into the room. “They’ll be here later,” he shouted. “I called Handsome Remy, but the sheriff answered: He’s grounded until further notice. Toss those boxes up, would you? Shouldn’t be anything breakable.”
He was referring to the three Amazon packages leaned against the front door. “How many of those do you think are porkpie hats?” I whispered to Arthur, who considered seriously before saying, “One.”
Whenever Levi’s parents were out of town, they left him with a credit card “for emergencies,” but they never seemed to question what sort of catastrophe would require their son to order signed movie posters or bulk boxes of sour gummy worms or hats from L.A. specialty stores.
Arthur tossed the packages onto the carport roof, then scrambled up after them instead of just going through the ever-unlocked front door like a normal person.
I would’ve preferred the latter, but we all treated the flimsy carport roof like a ritual. So I climbed onto the metal awning, flattened myself to the siding, and shuffled over to swing through the window.
Arthur was already standing over Levi’s shoulder at his desk, last night’s footage pulled up on his computer.
“Where are your parents?” I asked.
“Palm Desert,” Levi answered. He was wearing an entirely green outfit, including a hunter-green fedora, which made him look like a burly Robin Hood. “For Sable’s second birthday.”
Mr. and Mrs. Lindquist were much older than my parents, and both retired, and ever since Levi’s (much) older sister started having kids, they’d gone into full grandparent mode, with Levi and his nieces and nephew alike. They were all affection and no rules, and it seemed like they were visiting their grandbabies in California more often than not.
“A two-year-old is having a birthday party in Palm Desert?” I said.
“I didn’t know there was one of those,” Arthur said. “A palm desert, I mean.”
“Yeah, like the Springs weren’t enough for them,” I said. “They had to take the desert too.”
“Assholes,” Levi agreed. “Come here, Fran. You need to see this video up close.” He turned in his chair to face me, the monitor light catching the angry blue bruise on his forehead.
“Levi! What happened to your head?” I asked.
He reached toward the mark. “I was napping and I sleepwalked into a cabinet.”
“Huh,” Arthur said, peering at the mark like he’d just now noticed it.
He reached out to touch it, and Levi knocked his hand away. “Forget that! You have to see this!” He spun back to face the monitor, and I glanced uneasily at the paused video.
Now that we were so close to it, the idea of seeing what had happened to us—a moment none of us could remember—sent panic through me. I reached for my necklace, and my stomach lurched with the renewed realization that it was gone.
Levi started the footage. “Without further ado, I present to you . . . Some Very Freaky Yet Incredible Crap!”
The camera jaunted up and down, the sounds of Levi’s breaths hissing off the speakers. It was dark, except when the beam of light atop the camera managed to catch something. A flash of my shoulders and paint-stained tank top crossed the screen, my hair turning almost white in the light. And there was the side of Remy’s face, his neck, his hair. Nick looked over his shoulder, his skin going transparent un
der the glare so the veins under his eyes looked purple. And then more darkness, Levi breathing fast as he ran between the metal towers.
The camera dropped low, snatching at bits of our legs and shoes, the illuminated gravel blurring past. Levi must’ve lowered it while he was running. All I could see were his yellow Doc Martens whipping past.
The back of my neck prickled, as if that same electrical charge were in the room now, its static pulling at us like invisible fingers. I edged closer to Arthur and Levi.
I’d been there, seen this in real life, and yet there was a part of me that expected something horrible to leap out. Something we’d missed before.
Something that explained it all.
The movement onscreen stopped. The camera rose, light panning up Arthur’s back. Levi’s breath came in shuddering gasps.
The hair on my arms stood upright, and I smoothed the back of my head, expecting to find strands dancing in the buzzing air.
But there was no electrical charge in the room. My hair sat in heavy tangles at my shoulders.
Onscreen, the crumpled heap of metal came into view, and then—
My heart skipped as the camera floated closer, homing in on the glassy disc and the streaks of light moving in and out in repetitive patterns, like blood through veins.
“Like our scars,” Arthur said, fascinated.
He was right. The light looked just like the marks on our skin, like the burns in the field.
Sofía’s whisper came through the speakers now: “It must be heavy to have done this kind of damage.”
My own voice answered, the sound of my fear disorienting to me now. “Do you think it’s like . . . part of the comet?”
Onscreen, Arthur’s red T-shirt, visible in flashes, moved toward the disc.
My voice, the recording of it, sounded foreign in its shock. “Arthur?”
And then, in a flare of blond hair and sun-browned skin, I was lunging toward him. “ART! Don’t—”
A stark snap rang through the speakers, followed by a high-pitched warbling, easily twice as loud as the rest of the audio. The screen went white. “What is that?” I shouted over the warbling screech.
