We All Looked Up

by Tommy Wallach

  “Hey,” James said, waving to get her attention, “if you’re wondering whether or not to be afraid of Ardor, you shouldn’t be.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Sure you’re not,” he said, as if conceding a point he knew he’d already won. “But just in case you were considering being afraid at some point in the future, I wanted you to know that there’s little rational basis for it. The odds of collision are very slim. In reality, everything we ought to be concerned about is already right here on planet Earth.”

  “I thought you said not to be afraid.”

  “I said don’t be afraid of the asteroid. This is the twenty-first century. The oceans are rising. Mad dictators have access to nuclear weapons. Corporatism and the dumbing down of the media have destroyed the very foundations of democracy. Anyone who isn’t afraid is a moron.”

  There was something violent in the way James said that last word—“moron”—as if he were at that very moment surrounded by them, and they were his enemies.

  “Thanks again, James.”

  “Don’t mention it. Stay safe.”

  After school, a few dozen students assembled on the grass outside the refectory to sky watch. Someone had brought a telescope from the science building, though it was being used primarily to look down people’s throats and up into the offices on the top floor of Bliss Hall. Everyone was joking around and having a good time, but Eliza couldn’t shake a sense of foreboding. Even if James was right, it wasn’t easy to be relaxed about a giant rock flaming through the sky at a gajillion miles an hour.

  When she got back to the condo, her dad was sitting in front of the TV, watching the news. Even though she knew he was equally sick wherever he happened to be, Eliza always thought her dad looked about a million times healthier at home than he did in that beige, fluorescent hellhole they called a hospital—all beeping machinery and mechanical beds and death smells.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “Hey, Gaga. Looks like someone left a love letter for you on the kitchen table.”

  A piece of notebook paper with a childish scrawl on the front was propped up like a little tent: Thanks for stranding me in the suburbs, bitch.

  “You wanna talk about it?” her dad asked.

  “Not even a little.”

  She sat down in a puffy red chair next to the couch. On the TV, a couple of news anchors were talking about the asteroid, which appeared in a CGI rendering as a colorless rock pocked with craters, like a small misshapen moon.

  “. . . our conspicuous new friend will be with us for at least a few more weeks. Labeled ARDR-1388 by the scientists who first discovered it, the asteroid is now affectionately known as Ardor.”

  The CGI disappeared, replaced with a white-bearded man with wire-rim spectacles and altogether too much enthusiasm. The sub­title said he was Michael Prupick, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Washington.

  “If Ardor has broken its orbit, we’ll be able to watch it blaze across our sky on its way out of the Milky Way and into deep space. Near-Earth objects may get a bad rap in Hollywood blockbusters, but they’re incredibly useful to astronomers, not to mention the fact that mining companies are researching ways to exploit asteroids just like this one for rare elements in the very near future. In short, we could not be more excited about Ardor’s appearance.”

  The news anchors popped back up onto the screen.

  “Sales of telescopes at local camping and toy stores are already up twenty percent this week—”

  Eliza’s father muted the television.

  “So what poor slob did you strand in the suburbs?”

  “Did I not say we wouldn’t be discussing that?”

  “Did I agree?”

  They sat there in silence for a few seconds, while the talking heads on the TV continued their Muppet-y mouthing, but Eliza could feel her dad building up the energy for another push.

  “It’s just that I need to know you’re gonna be able to take care of yourself. With me heading toward, you know, the margins of the picture, and your mom and everything—”

  “Don’t start.”

  “I’m just saying that stuff like this is on my mind, all right? Fucking sue me.”

  Eliza thought the rules were understood, even if they’d never been stated explicitly. She and her father were never to bring up either (1) the fact that, within a year, he’d almost certainly be dead, or (2) the fact that Eliza’s mother had fallen in love with another man and moved to Hawaii with him. And now her dad was breaking both rules at once. She got up and sat down next to him on the couch.

  “Dad, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. I think it’s that fucking rock. It’s got me all worked up.”

  “I asked some kids at school about it. They said we shouldn’t worry.”

  Her dad shrugged. “Maybe. But just in case, could you humor me on one thing?”

  She already knew what he was going to say. “No.”

  “Come on!”

  “We’ve been through this. If Mom wants to talk, she can call.”

  “She tried that.”

  “Not since last year.”

  “Because every time she tried to talk to you, you’d just tell her what a shitty person she was and hang up!” Her dad was actually shouting at her; Eliza couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that.

  “She deserved it.”

  “No, she didn’t! I told her she could go, Eliza!” His voice got quiet again, and he put his hand on top of hers. “I told her she could go. Because she was in love. And arguing with that is pointless. It would be like”—he gestured toward the TV—“trying to stop that asteroid with a fucking BB gun. But I know it tore her apart to leave.”

  “She still did it.”

  Her dad nodded. “Yeah. She did.”

  “And I don’t forgive her.”

  “Well, that’s another thing. I’m just asking you to talk to her.”

  Eliza rolled her eyes. “Jesus. Fine. I’ll think about it.”

  “Good.” He patted her hand. “So what’s for dinner?”

  “I was thinking I’d make something.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. Like, make a call to Pagliacci’s for delivery.”

  Her dad smiled, one of those wistful smiles, like he was already missing something that wasn’t gone yet. The kind that made her want to cry.

  “Works for me,” he said.

  Anita

  ANITA HAD PREPARED HERSELF FOR the interrogation. She had prepared herself for the lecture. She had prepared herself for the threats, the grounding, the silent treatment, the wagging finger, the shaking head, and all the general parental bullshit that was bound to result from her unprecedented escape from Casa Graves the previous week. What she had not prepared herself for, however, was the loss of her car key. With it went the very soul of adulthood—the freedom to be alone. She was under constant surveillance now. Every morning her father drove her to Hamilton on his way to work, and every afternoon her mother would arrive promptly at three forty-five to take her home. Even inside the house, Anita wasn’t left to herself. Every twenty minutes or so, someone would knock on her bedroom door to ensure she hadn’t pulled some kind of Rapunzel or Juliet and shimmied out the window.

  An only slightly lesser evil was the talk radio her father listened to in the car.

  “A trickle of news about our friend Ardor from the eggheads over at NASA today,” said some loudmouth host that you could practically hear getting fatter and dumber as he spoke. “You’d think they’d have something better than this, given that all they do these days is spend our tax dollars and complain about how they don’t get enough of our tax dollars, but hey, what do I know? Anyhoo, initial estimates placed the asteroid about two million miles away from Earth as it passed through our solar system. But now t
hey’re saying it’ll be more like half a million miles, which in terms of deep space is a pretty close shave. And it’s funny, you know, those NASA guys have been drowning us, literally drowning us in all this talk about man-made climate change and holes in the ozone layer and all these problems that we know aren’t really an issue, and now we’ve got this asteroid that we’re gonna be dodging like one of those bullets in The Matrix, and the eggheads just say, ‘Oh well, we didn’t quite see it, sorry about that.’ So maybe these guys need to adjust their priorities a little bit, is what I’m saying. Back in five after this.”

  “Are your science teachers talking to you about global warming?” Anita’s father asked, turning the radio down.

  “A little.”

  He shook his head. “Of course they are. I’ll give you some books to read when you get home. And you’ll read them.”

  “Okay.”

  The only good news was that today was a Wednesday, which meant there was a student council meeting after school. These meetings could last anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours, and Anita’s mother could hardly be expected to just sit around the parking lot waiting. That meant Luisa would be coming, and Luisa could always be counted on to help Anita out. The goal was to get the meeting over with as quickly as possible. If Anita were lucky, she might end up with enough time to get a burger at Dick’s on Capitol Hill. Though it had only been a week, she yearned for a taste of the outside world like a prisoner ten years into a life sentence.

  Hamilton bylaws required that student council be made up of one boy and one girl from each class. Anita represented the seniors along with Peter Roeslin, the basketball player. The juniors were Damien Durkee and Krista Asahara. Krista was one of those hyper-earnest overachievers who couldn’t understand why anyone would ever disagree with her about anything ever. Also, she was pretty obviously in love with Peter. The sophomore class was represented by Charlie Howard and Julia Whyel, and the freshmen by Ajay Vasher and Nickie Hill. All the underclassmen pretty much deferred to Krista on everything.

  Anita called the meeting to order, ran over the minutes from the previous session (on the plausibility of once-a-month vegan lunches and fielding a Hamilton foosball team), and laid out the agenda. The only pressing issue was Olot, the schoolwide formal dance where the girls invited the boys, which was in need of a theme. As usual, Krista was the first one with a Statue-of-Liberty raised hand and the idea to go with it.

  “So the newspapers are saying that Ardor—you know, the asteroid?—is going to pass by us around the same week as the dance. So what if we went with some kind of space thing? Not science fiction-y, but more, like, astronomy, all planets and stars and stuff.”

  “Sounds great to me,” Anita said, already seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

  “We can cover all the pillars and the walls in black felt,” Nickie said, picking up on Krista’s theme. “And we can use Christmas lights to make stars. It’ll be super pretty but also cheap.”

  Ajay always chimed in when budgeting was at issue. “We could ask people to bring lights in from home. Everyone has a box in their basement, and usually even if they’re dead, it’s just a bad bulb.”

  Krista was bright as a new bulb herself at these promising signs that her concept was a hit.

  “Shall we vote on it?” Anita asked, glancing around the room. “All in favor of the theme of Olot being something space-related, say aye.” There was a chorus of ayes. “Perfect. Let’s brainstorm ideas on our own, and then we can decide on the best ones at our next meeting.”

  Krista gave a couple of weak, thudding high fives to Nickie and Ajay.

  “Well, that’s everything on the agenda. Is there anything else anyone wants to discuss?”

  Anita was afraid Charlie would bring up his favorite subject: the impossible, irreverent, and yet strangely divisive issue of allowing marijuana use on school grounds, now that it was legal in the state at large. But he seemed just as eager to get out of there as she was.

  “Then it looks like we’re done,” Anita said. “Thanks, everyone, for coming—”

  “What we’re doing here is a joke.”

  Heads turned. Peter sat slouched in his chair, looking uncharacteristically morose. He didn’t tend to say much in student council meetings, unless the conversation turned to something involving athletics or nutrition.

  “What are you talking about, Peter?”

  “I mean, aren’t we supposed to care about stuff other than just dances and foosball? Could we maybe try to do one thing that actually matters in the real world?”

  “Like what?” Anita said, unable to keep the frustration out of her voice. The truth was, she actually agreed with him. Sometimes it seemed like all they did in here was pad out their résumés while enjoying some pizza on Hamilton’s dime. But did he have to choose today of all days to develop a conscience about it?

  “I don’t know,” Peter said. “It’s just that the world’s so messed up. Even here at school, we’ve got all these kids who are probably gonna drop out at some point, or at least not go to college. Can’t we do something about that?”

  A long silence. Then, from the deep well of her crush, Krista hoisted up a fresh bucket of enthusiasm: “Totally, Peter.”

  Anita took a deep breath. The meeting wasn’t over anymore. Not by a long shot.

  “Ideas?” she asked.

  Peter was exactly the kind of guy that Anita’s parents wished she would date. Or maybe “wished” was a little strong—her parents probably would have been pleased as punch if their daughter never even spoke to a boy until after she’d graduated from college. But if she were to get involved in the dating scene, Peter would have been their first-draft pick. He was an athlete, which wasn’t great, but an athlete who was going to Stanford, which meant he’d have a career no matter what. He looked the part too—tall, attractive, and as white as the day was long (not that her parents were self-hating or anything, just that they associated white values with material success, while they seemed to suspect most black kids of being, at worst, drug dealers and, at best, freeloading bohemians). Anita could almost see herself with a guy like that. She would have bet good money that Peter was stellar at the whole “impressing the folks” thing, and probably looked damn good with his shirt off. The only problem, and it wasn’t a small one, was that he was just a little bit stupid. Not direly stupid. Not pushing-on-the-pull-door or 2 + 2 = 5 stupid. Just not quick to get the joke. Not sharp. And without that spark, for all his Abercrombie & Fitch looks, he did less than nothing for her.

  The student council meeting lasted for two hours and fifteen minutes, in which time they discussed everything from a soup kitchen in the refectory, to weekly after-school lectures on subjects like world hunger and climate change, to an old-fashioned bake sale. Peter was uniformly psyched about each new idea, along with Krista and the underclassmen, which left Anita to be the voice of reason.

  “We won’t get an okay from the administration on bringing homeless people on campus.”

  “You can schedule all the lectures you want, but you can’t make people go.”

  “Bake sales don’t make money.”

  By the end of the session, the only thing they’d managed to agree on was drafting a group of volunteer tutors to help struggling kids with their homework. It wasn’t exactly saving the planet or inspiring world peace, but it was something. Krista was so excited by their collective progress that she hugged everyone good-bye after the meeting.

  Anita practically sprinted out of the building. There wasn’t time for burgers anymore, but she could at least get a snack and a few minutes to herself.

  Luisa, waiting patiently in the roundabout, rolled down the window of the Audi.

  “Hey, Luisa, you mind if I run to Jamba Juice?”

  “You don’t want me to drive?”

  “I’d rather get the excercise, if that’s okay.”

&nb
sp; “Of course. And your friend will go too?”

  Anita turned around to find Peter standing right behind her.

  “That’s a great idea,” he said. “I could totally go for a Berry Razz­matazz.”

  “Oh. Uh, sure. See you in a bit.”

  Luisa smiled so broadly at Peter that Anita was actually embarrassed.

  They began to walk. It was raining, but the kind of rain where the droplets are so light that they float around like snowflakes in a blizzard, without any discernible slant. Anita knew there couldn’t be anything romantic behind Peter’s desire to hang out with her. He had a girlfriend, a paragon of the kind of bland and curveless beauty advertised on the cover of just about every magazine in the country. And though there’d been a rumor going around that he’d cheated on her somewhere along the line, Anita didn’t put much stock in gossip. People were always trying to bring down the folks on top. Still, it was weird to be alone with him, given that they’d hardly ever spoken outside of student council.

  “That was so energizing, wasn’t it?” he said.

  “What was?”

  “You know, trying to make a difference.”

  Anita couldn’t help but laugh. “Peter, what is going on with you today? You’ve basically slept through student council all year, and now you’re giving speeches about social responsibility? What’s your deal?”

  Peter smiled sheepishly. “Yeah, I guess I must seem sorta nuts, huh? I’m just . . . working out some stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “It’s hard to explain.” He paused, then: “Anita, do you ever worry that you’re wasting your life?”

  Out of the mouth of babes, it was said, though that was probably meant to refer to babies, rather than attractive teenage boys. But of course Anita worried about whether she was wasting her life. She worried about it all the time. Maybe it was blasphemy, but she felt like God had intended for her to be a singer. Otherwise, why had she been born with both the talent and the passion for music? And if she allowed her dream to die on the vine, wouldn’t it be the same as disobeying a direct order from God? Was that really so much better than disobeying her father?