Meteorites

by Julie Paul

  Talk the terrorist into backing down, Joel. Tell it to be reasonable. It’s only his hand on her shoulder. A doctor might do that, or even a stranger, like the firefighter who clapped him on the back after he shoved a twenty into the big black boot for the fundraiser outside the grocery store.

  Mike hasn’t kissed her. He’s just staring into her eyes, seeming to hang on her every word like he’s done all day, and she seems to like the attention.

  Joel reaches over to rub Margo’s shoulders. This is love, buddy, he thinks. Watch and learn.

  “When you come west, you’ll have to stay with me too,” Mike says. “I’ve just bought the condo across the hall from my original one to use as a studio, so you can choose what view you want.”

  “Wow,” Margo says. “Joel, we really should make a plan.”

  “It’s gonna have to be the winter,” he says. “This is my busy season.”

  Mike is shaking his head. “I don’t know if we have that much time, bro. Maybe you can’t tell over the phone, but Bill really is sliding fast.”

  He can’t handle this conversation tonight.

  “I’m beat,” Joel says, and stands up. “The spare bedroom’s made up, and there are towels on the dresser.”

  “Thank you, Joel,” Mike says. “Truly.”

  “You coming?” he asks Margo.

  “In a bit,” she says. “I’m too full to lie down just yet.” She giggles. “And maybe a little tipsy too.”

  He’s desperate to be alone with her, to process this insanity of a day. He’s not mad at her, for any of it; he just needs to talk. And someone has to be the good hostess to this guy, who’s still got energy from three time zones back.

  Mike looks tanked, a look he also recognizes from the mirror. “Same here, babe.”

  No. He doesn’t get to say that.

  “Goodnight, then,” Joel says. He gives Margo a wide-eyed look, but she simply waves and throws him a kiss.

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  Michael should have stopped at the red wine. He knows better, but still, he always gets caught up in the moment, and if there ever was a moment to get caught up in, well—

  Margo’s taken some of the dishes, so he gathers the rest of the plates and glasses and follows her into the kitchen. He feels crunching underfoot. What the hell? Ah, right. Cheerios. There’s a toddler in the house.

  What a thing to be jealous of! But that’s what he’s feeling—for everything Joel has. He’d paint over that ceiling beaver, ASAP, get some new draperies, and make the kitchen a priority, but otherwise, this whole package has him filled to the brim with longing.

  Michael pushes open the swinging kitchen door to find Margo dancing to Fatboy Slim as she gathers her curls into a ponytail in front of the sink she’s filling with hot water.

  “I love this song,” he says, and starts singing along. “I have to praise you like I should.”

  “My God,” Margo says. “It’s just too crazy, your voice and Joel’s.”

  “This must be weird for you. It always was, back in the day.”

  Margo turns off the tap and faces him. “Like with Christina?”

  He nods. How much does she know?

  “Michael, what really happened?” she asks. “Joel hasn’t told me much at all, and it seems—well, I just want to know.”

  “Fair enough,” Michael says. He takes the dishcloth from over the tap, dips it into the soapy water so he can wipe the dreadful countertops. “I was dating her, but we were both friends with her for years. Then, one day after we were hanging out in a hayloft at her farm, she got caught in a barn fire.”

  “Those stains don’t come off,” she says. “Don’t worry about it. So, you got out of the fire? And she didn’t?”

  He puts the cloth back over the tap. “No, I was at work by the time it happened. I’d left her there, sleeping peacefully.”

  “How horrible!” Margo cries. The synth music coming from the ghetto blaster does not match up with this conversation, but he’s happy it’s on.

  “It was. One whole side of her face was burned and down her arm.” He takes a deep breath. “But she was healing, slowly, and then, a few months later, she shot herself.”

  Margo stands there, shaking her head. “What a terrible loss.”

  Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time” is coming from the radio now. “The worst.”

  “And Joel?” she says. “He was, what, in love with her too?”

  “Yeah. He wouldn’t forgive me for dating her—or for not being able to save her, I guess.” Shut up now, he tells himself. That’s all you need to say.

  “What a mess,” Margo says. “But, I mean, all of this was so long ago. Will you . . . I mean, I hope you guys can move on. That he’ll finally be able to let it go.”

  “We’re making progress,” Michael says. “He’s talking to me again, at least.”

  “Yes. And Bill’s going to be happy,” she says. “That’s the main thing right now.”

  She turns to face the sink again and begins to wash the dishes, her lovely neck exposed beneath her ponytail, hips swaying to the beat.

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  Joel can’t sleep. He needed a break, but now he’s wide awake, thinking about his father. He can actually hear music coming from downstairs. Fuck. His head is spinning, his stomach uneasy, but maybe some water will help.

  Where’s the water glass? It’s always in the ensuite, except it isn’t now.

  Fine. He’ll go down there, give Margo the stink eye, hydrate, and return upstairs, where he’ll take a pre-emptive Tylenol and fall into a numbing slumber. Mike will have to entertain himself tonight. Surely he’s got a book, or some hand lotion to lube the palm.

  They were best friends once, he and Mike, no disputing it. But it hasn’t felt like there’s a hole in his life, with him gone. Or if it once did, it’s been mended, with a mishmash of threads, and he’s carried on. Today has been more of a tear; something sharp poking into him, a rent in the fabric, but he’ll get over it. It’s his father’s dying wish. And all paranormal sensations have ceased in the past couple of hours too, unless that’s just the booze.

  Joel holds onto the bannister as he makes his way, quietly, downstairs. He isn’t sneaking. He’s simply being careful because he’s a little wasted, and he knows how the hardwood can be slippery in socks. June, and he’s still wearing socks.

  It sounds like a club down here, music and laughter coming from behind the swinging kitchen door. When he pushes it open a crack, it even looks like fun, because his wife is dancing at the sink, shaking that round, firm ass of hers, singing along to Michael Jackson.

  Fun, until he sees Mike’s eyes on Margo’s backside. Fun, until Mike dances over with a dirty plate and puts his arms around her waist, with her still in front of him, and starts to wash it.

  Before he knows it, Joel’s pushed the door open, the sugar canister’s in his hand, and he’s taking aim.

  //// Trajectory

  Sara and I were a gang of two. Each other’s moon. People rolled their eyes at us, called us snobby, stuck-up know-it-alls, and we didn’t care a bit. We were geek girls, but with better wardrobes. We devoured the same books and movies, and people asked if we were sisters because we answered in tandem half the time. After a while, we started pretending it was true.

  It was the fall of 1989. Eight months from then, high school—and the eighties—would be over. We thought we’d outlast it all.

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  That October, we decided to endure the inane serfs that were our Grade 12 history classmates and go on the big field trip to the Boston area. Not because we wanted to look at bullet holes in old houses or walk through cemeteries, but because we could check out Harvard, take the tours, and get the T-shirts. We jumped at any reason to leave our small Ontar
io town, even if it meant bringing the locals with us.

  On a Thursday afternoon, eight and a half hours after leaving home, our bus pulled into the parking lot of a Motel 6 in Boston and expelled us and twenty teenagers who’d been farting, belching, and burning through their Walkman batteries listening to “Like a Prayer” and “Funky Cold Medina” and eating Cheetos and peanut butter sandwiches. We were all ready to move: the jocks started wrestling, and the gym girls turned cartwheels on the asphalt while we waited for Mrs. Dobbs to check us in. Mr. Conway set into the jumping jacks and yelled at us to take part. Sara and I gave him the look—our withering best that we called just that, the Wither—and turned our backs and tried to think warmth into the pale, late afternoon sun.

  When Sara was in the bathroom, someone came up behind me and covered my eyes with his hands. The hands were cold and slightly wet and smelled like Doritos.

  “Guess who?” the person asked.

  “Stop it, Scotty,” I said. “I’m mad at you.”

  “About your wittle bunny?” He took his hands away from my face. Scott had stolen my grey Gund stuffed animal on the bus, and he and Greg—the two guys we were able to tolerate—had played football with it on the bus.

  “That was a gift from my niece, okay? The one who died last year.”

  It was a lie, but I turned around and gave him the Wither. When the bunny came back to me, it smelled like Polo, Scotty and Greg’s cologne. How very New England; Sara and I had taken turns snuggling with it, pretending it wasn’t the fragrance we liked, just the coziness.

  Scotty dropped his gaze to the ground. “Oops. Sorry, Lori.”

  “What’s up with Conway?” I said.

  Scotty laughed. “He’s a gym teacher, remember?”

  “What a knob.”

  Sara came out of the lobby holding a pamphlet about Salem. “This is where we’re going tomorrow,” she said. “Where all those witches were killed.”

  Scotty grabbed the brochure and stared at the back page. “Oooh,” he said. “A haunted house.”

  Sara grabbed it back. “You’re not scared of witches, are you?”

  “Just of Dobbsy.”

  Everyone laughed. Scotty was nearly failing her Canadian history class.

  “Looks more exciting than the battle sites,” I said.

  “Now, children,” Scotty said, putting on Mrs. Dobbs’s reedy voice and scrunching up his shoulders. “It’s always exciting to see history where it was made.”

  “Kiss it,” Greg said, and started walking on his hands.

  He was always showing off like this. Still, both Sara and I couldn’t help staring at his upside-down, perfectly balanced body. His shirt had fallen down over half his face, and we could see the dark vee of his chest hair, his nipples like mini peppermint patties.

  “How special,” Scotty said.

  He left our little group, walked over to Mr. Conway, and started telling him a joke. Sara and I kept our eyes on Greg and his forearms. Greg kept his eyes on me.

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  A friendship is a strange and wonderful vehicle, able to transport the people within it to all kinds of new and exotic lands. It can also run out of gas, break down, trap you inside, burn oil, leave clouds of exhaust, tire tracks. Sara and me, we’d built that beast from the ground up, held it together with all the certainty and cynicism and ennui within us. The thing was a tank, meant to prevent anyone but us from boarding.

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  We were assigned a room with four other girls, a group of brunettes we called the Fraud Squad because of their tendency to shoplift. We unloaded our gear, claimed our beds—Sara and me on the double, closest to the bathroom—and then obeyed the next order to gather in the parking lot for a quick shopping trip before dinner. While we waited for the whole group to assemble, and Sara had run back to the room for her forgotten purse, Greg decided to teach me how to spit.

  “You have to move your whole body forward when you let it go,” Greg instructed.

  “Propulsion, right? Increase the force behind the ammunition.”

  “Yeah, I guess. And keep your head up. Don’t look down. You want to get a nice big arc.”

  I gathered a ball of spit in my cheek and tried his technique. It ended up on my chin and half a foot in front of me.

  “Is that it?” he asked. “Is that all you can muster up?”

  “I can’t produce that much mucous on demand,” I said, wiping my face on my shoulder. “I need something to spit out.”

  He blushed first.

  “Here,” he said. He leaned down to pick a piece of grass from beside the sidewalk. “Chew this.”

  I took it, inspected it for dirt, and stuck it in my mouth.

  “Aaah!” he yelled. “Disgusting.” Then he was laughing, holding his stomach. “I can’t believe you just did that.”

  “Grass is healthy. Chlorophyll, cellulose, fibre . . . . A billion cows can’t be wrong.”

  “What if I’d given you a worm? A billion robins might not be wrong, either.”

  Sara returned, waving her purse in victory. I still had the grass in my mouth. After I massed it into a ball, I let it fly.

  “You’re a fast learner,” Greg said.

  I waved at Sara. “Wanna try?”

  She gave me a look that was nearly the Wither. Was I really that far out of line?

  Sara had never dated. Her parents were religious, so that was part of it, but frankly, she just didn’t give off a welcoming vibe. Hair pulled severely into a ponytail, skin always a little red from swim club, not to mention the goggle marks, a rare smile that revealed a crooked front tooth; it didn’t add up to your typical come-hither look. But she didn’t seem to worry about it, and we never brought it up. Like I said, we were not living in the present. All of our attention was supposed to be on the horizon, from within our friendship, blind spots and all.

  |||||||||||||||||||||

  We shopped at hyper-speed when we finally got downtown. For the last twenty minutes of our little trip, Sara and I went to the Gap, a store we didn’t have in Canada yet.

  As we navigated the racks, I said, “I think Sir Scotty likes you.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “No, really.”

  She was quiet for a minute. “Do you think he’s cute?”

  “Sure,” I said. “In a fetal kind of way. Hey, what do you think of this?” I was holding up a blue sweatshirt with a red logo. “Does Gap really mean ‘gay and proud’?”

  “Fetal?”

  “You know. Unformed. Raw. I think it’s his braces.” They made his lower lip stick out so that you could see the inside of it, wet and pink.

  “Better than the simian.” She was talking about Greg, of course. She rifled through a rack of cargo pants, looking for ones with sale tags. “A guy his age shouldn’t have that much hair.”

  “He can’t help it,” I said. “His father is Greek-Italian.”

  “Lori,” she said, “do you actually like him?”

  “I’m going to try this on.” I lifted up a red sweater with wooden buttons.

  “That looks like something my mother would wear.”

  “Really?” I held it up at both shoulders, squinting to see if I could see it. “It looks too old for me?”

  “Maybe I’ll buy one for her,” Sara said. “Do they have it in green?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m just playing around with Greg. He’s not even going to university. How could I ever think of him in that way?”

  His father owned a landscaping business with a fleet of new trucks around town. He was being groomed for takeover.

  In literature, what Sara and I came from was called humble beginnings. We wanted bigger. Better. To prove our focus on the future, I bought a blue Oxford dress shirt instead,
a practical choice for a future career as lawyer, or doctor, or—we didn’t know. The space beside “occupation” in our heads remained blank, but we knew it would be followed by some combination of initials, branding us with power.

  |||||||||||||||||||||

  The next day, after Paul Revere’s house, an ancient graveyard, and a bunch of golden pineapples—the city’s symbol of hospitality because whalers used to bring them back and set them by their doors to invite people in to eat exotic fruit—we set out for Salem.

  We started our tour at Gallows Hill, where the people they called witches were massacred, all of them hanged except for one man who was pressed to death. The lesson I remember from that day, on how to do it: insert one man in between two slabs of rock, tie him down, add more rocks on top, and presto, two days later, one pressed human. The hangings seemed humane by comparison.

  On our walk back down the hill to the Salem Witch Museum, the guide told us it had all happened in less than a year—hysterical youths claiming bewitchment, trials, verdicts, and executions. It felt weird to be there, three hundred years later, traipsing down the path the condemned took on their way to the hanging site, making jokes, walking the other way as if it didn’t matter in the least. Hysterical youths doing Scooby-Doo impressions.

  Still, Sara and I paid attention to the crazy stuff we heard. Moles and birthmarks were called “witches’ tits,” a place for the Devil to suckle from a body. One scene in the museum murals depicted women being stuck with pins to see if their moles bled. If they didn’t bleed, the women were obviously witches. Other murals showed clusters of pale-faced men in courtrooms and judges handing down the verdicts, sentencing people to be hanged.

  “You have to understand the times they lived in,” the guide said. “The small population had to stick together through hardship and disease. They just couldn’t tolerate devil worship among them because that might mean a rift. United we stand, divided we fall, you know?”

  One tableau depicted a woman named Tituba, the black slave of a minister, talking to Salem children and “warping” their pliant minds with talk of the Devil. Strangely, she was not one of the twenty-four people who died. She had confessed to practicing witchcraft and was allowed to leave town, unharmed. None of the dead had confessed.