“So you don’t like boys?” David said.
“I just don’t like boyfriends and girlfriends.”
“So you don’t like anybody?” he asked.
“I just don’t want to be your girlfriend, okay? You seem nice. Nothing wrong with you. But I don’t want to do this dumb stuff like girlfriends and boyfriends. It’s stupid.”
“Are you going to Leah and Mike’s wedding at recess tomorrow?”
I shook my head. “That’s what I mean. We’re in sixth grade. Having weddings is stupid.”
“So you think weddings are stupid?”
It was the Tuesday after my dad moved out. Of course I thought weddings were stupid.
I didn’t answer him because the recess teachers blew their whistles and we all went inside.
Later that day, a note appeared on my desk.
David told me that you think my marriage to Mike is stupid and that you think I’m stupid and that Mike is stupid. If you’re so smart then why aren’t you married yet? I can tell you why. Nobody likes you. No one will sit with you at lunch anymore and no one will talk to you. You’re excommunicated from the sixth grade class. You can sit with Malik now and let him spit milk at you.
Leah—class president
We didn’t have a class president yet—we were in sixth grade.
I didn’t know what to think about the note. It didn’t change my mind. If anything, it made the whole marriage-at-recess/boyfriends-and-girlfriends thing seem stupider. I worried about Leah, just like I worried about Finn Nolan. But it was as if they were traveling in two different directions. Finn got quieter and meaner and Leah got louder and meaner.
As for sitting with Malik for lunch, that was fine with me. I’ve always liked him—maybe more so because he has a life-threatening nut allergy and has to sit at a lunch table by himself. His mom and dad are from Iran, so Malik not only looks different from most of the kids at West El, but people treat him different, too. Not always mean, either. (Though—sometimes mean.) The music teacher loves the kid. Malik plays piano and one time during the talent show, the whole school thought he might be famous one day. That was before the milk incident, last year. Now people don’t really talk to him. Their loss. Malik is hilarious.
Jilly goes outside now. She doesn’t bring the tiger to school anymore. She still whines and cries to get her way sometimes, but I think that’s just Jilly. Something is different, though, since last week when she went out in the rain. Something big.
“I want to call Dad,” she says. Neither of us has called Dad since he left and he hasn’t called us, either. She seems angry about this. I’m probably angry about it, too, but I also used to take silent walks with Dad in the forest. I like to imagine Dad’s silence for the last two and a half months as a long walk in the woods, I guess.
Mom is out testing two new pairs of all-weather boots, a fleece vest, and a fitness tracker. I’m looking at the star map I drew this week and the shapes are forming.
Jilly repeats herself. “I want to call Dad.”
“Go ahead,” I say.
“Do you want to talk to him, too?” Jilly asks.
“Nah. I’m good.”
She picks up the phone and I go to my room in the attic and I polish the meteorite.
That probably sounds all wrong and makes you worry about me. But I’m fine. The meteorite is just—I don’t know. It’s part of me or something. It’s a sign that things are going to be okay one day.
I’d like to know what day, but it can’t tell me.
All it can tell me is that everything is going the way it’s supposed to.
Even when I hear Jilly raising her voice to Dad on the phone, I know that everything is going the way it’s supposed to.
“You said we’d see you!”
“You didn’t have to lie!”
“I don’t care how it makes you feel!”
I’m glad Jilly can talk like that. I don’t know what I’d say to Dad today if I talked to him.
“It doesn’t make any sense that you tell us we’re going to come over and then say we can’t,” she said. “And it’s mean. We need you!”
The meteorite says, “I don’t need him.”
“Me neither,” I say. “I don’t need anybody.”
The rock says, “Friends are nice, though.”
“Friends? No.”
“I’m your friend,” the meteorite says.
“You can’t turn on me,” I say. “All my other friends turned on me.”
The rock says, “Just Finn and Leah.”
“Exactly.”
“Leah’s different, though,” the rock says.
I don’t say anything.
There’s the sound of stomping. “You can’t keep doing this!” Jilly says to Dad on the phone. She’s not crying or anything. She’s just mad. I kind of envy her.
I can see Mom walking down one of Lou’s trails. That gives Jilly a minute and thirty seconds to get off the phone. Unless she doesn’t care if Mom hears her. I don’t know what goes through her mind anymore. Since last week she’s older than me in the way she acts. I mean, look at her. She’s on the phone yelling at Dad and I’m in my room talking to a rock.
One of us is dealing with this the right way.
I don’t think it’s me.
I go downstairs and point toward where Mom is and mouth the word “Mom” to Jilly, who says, “We miss you and this isn’t fair,” and hangs up the phone. I go back to my star map. It looks like a man walking alone in the woods. While Mom takes off her boots on the bench outside, Jilly face-plants on the red couch and I draw the shapes of my week into the map. The trees are enormous above the man. There are so many of them. I sign it. April 2, 2019, Liberty Johansen.
I make a note to give this to Dad when we finally see him. I make a note to tell him that I understand that he just needed a long walk in the forest because I need those, too, sometimes.
Mom looks excited when she walks in the door. She says, “Wow, one of these pairs of boots is great and the other pair is awful! Not even waterproof. What good is that?” She takes off her jacket. “But I may have just found the best sports bra ever.”
Jilly giggles at this. I take note to ask Mom what kind of bra it is when it’s finally time for me to get a bra. Seems like a useful thing to know.
She asks us how our day was. We both say we’re fine. Jilly doesn’t mention that she just yelled at Dad and I don’t mention that I now talk to a rock.
Later, Jilly finally notices the meteorite. We’re playing cards on the floor in my room while Mom writes about the things she tested on her hike.
“What’s that?” Jilly asks.
I pretend it’s no big deal. “A rock.”
She crawls over to it and tries to move it. “Why’s it so heavy?”
“It’s a secret.”
“I love secrets,” she says.
“It’s the meteorite,” I say.
She sits and thinks awhile. “From the night the windows broke?”
“Yep.”
“You found it?” she asks.
“Yep.” She looks at me like I’m a famous explorer and I feel like the older sister again. “You can’t tell anybody. Not anybody.”
“You know I won’t,” she says. “Not even Mom.”
“Pinkie swears and stick a needle in your eye?”
“That’s gross.”
“But I mean that big of a promise, right?”
“You found it. Why would anyone want to take it from you? It’s just a rock.”
“I don’t know. People are weird, I guess,” I say.
Mom calls us downstairs and asks, “How about homemade pizza for dinner?”
Jilly gets excited because she loves Mom’s pizza. When Mom asks me what toppings I want on my half, I say, “Whatever you want.” Then I go back to my room. I don’t really care about dinner or pizza or anything.
“I’m supposed to be getting used to this,” I say to the rock.
“Some things are slow,�
�� the rock answers.
“I don’t understand Dad. He’s supposed to be around more. He said he would be. Why’d he lie?”
“I just fell from space. How am I supposed to know?”
“I just fell from space, too,” I say. “I guess we’re new here.”
The rock nods.
“He probably didn’t lie on purpose,” the rock says.
“How would you know?” I ask.
“I know a lot.”
“Are you sure you don’t want ham and pineapple?” Mom calls up the steps.
“I’m fine!” I say.
“I’ll make ham and pineapple anyway,” Mom says.
“As if ham and pineapple will change my life,” I say to the rock.
Mom’s closer to my door now—just down the attic steps. “You’re spending a lot of time in your room this week. Working on star maps?”
“Kinda,” I say. “Not really. I don’t know.” I look at the maps above my bed.
“You should take those down,” the rock says.
“I’ll never finish them,” I say.
“Throw them away,” the rock says.
I don’t feel like I can throw them away. I made them. Maybe one day I’ll figure out the shapes of winter. I’ve never had this much trouble before. Now it’s like every star I drew has the possibility of being part of something else. And at the same time, every star I drew has the possibility of not being part of anything at all.
Just like Dad.
Just like me.
You should probably know some more stuff.
About school. And Leah Jones.
Something happened back in January during the week she excommunicated me from the sixth grade.
On my way out of math class that Wednesday Leah said, “I heard your dad left. I can see why.”
It had only been five days since Dad moved out. I’d been bracing myself for Leah being mean. It was how she was now.
Everyone knew that.
What everyone didn’t know (including me) is that I can be mean right back.
I said, “Happy fake wedding day. I hope Mike knows he’s marrying the biggest bitch on the planet.”
I didn’t know I could do that. I’d never tried. But it felt good. The way eating ice cream feels good. The way a good dream feels good even after you wake up. It felt really, really good.
At lunch no one would let me sit down at our table—excommunicated. So it was my first day sitting with Malik.
Malik ate a ham-and-cheese sandwich with mustard on it. He had mustard on his cheek and didn’t know it. It didn’t bother me or anything. I’ve had mustard on my cheek before. “How’s school going?” he asked.
“It’s good.”
“But how’s it really going?” he asked. “I mean, you wouldn’t be sitting here if it was going really good, you know?” For a fifth grader, Malik is perceptive.
“I was excommunicated from the sixth grade because I said fake weddings at recess were stupid.”
Malik has the best laugh. He laughed so hard at that, it made me laugh, too. He even slapped the table and the lunch monitor came over to make sure he wasn’t dying from a random peanut. “No one has ever asked me to get pretend-married,” Malik said. “I wonder what I’m doing wrong.”
“Ugh,” I said. “You’re doing everything right. Believe me.”
“If you want, we can pretend we’re married as long as you never eat anything with nuts in it.” We laughed.
We ate our lunches for a minute. Malik wiped the mustard from his cheek.
“You still go fishing with your dad?” Malik asked. “Down at that pond you used to tell me about?”
I looked at him and wondered if I should lie. Malik had almost-died three times. I figured he could handle the truth.
“My dad moved out last weekend,” I said. “My parents are getting a divorce.”
“So no fishing then,” he said.
I laughed a little. “Nope. No fishing.”
Ms. S. walked over then but I didn’t see her. Malik did but he didn’t have time to say anything.
“Liberty, would you come with me, please?” I looked down at my half-eaten lunch and she said, “You can bring that and finish it in my office.”
I had to admit that I called Leah the B-word. Ms. S. said she was going to call my mom and that I would have to apologize to Leah’s face at the end of the day.
I missed recess, which I was happy about. No having to see Leah get fake-married. She’d even worn a white dress, which was stupid because it was January and no one would see the dress under her winter coat anyway.
At the end of the day, ten minutes before the buses lined up outside the school, I looked Leah Jones square in the eye and apologized. I didn’t mean a word of it.
The next day it was like the whole school was under a weird spell. At the bus stop, Patrick and Finn Nolan didn’t even look at Jilly and me. In homeroom, I asked the girl who sat across from me what was wrong, but she gave me a look like asking was inappropriate. Everyone seemed tired. Our math teacher gave us an extra day to get ready for a quiz and let us study in groups. Which meant I studied alone.
At lunch, Malik had a pile of cheese and crackers and a container of grapes. As he started making little cracker sandwiches, I said, “What is wrong with this school today? Everyone is acting weird.”
“Don’t know,” Malik said.
“It’s creepy.
Malik said, “Did you hear about Leah’s ring?”
“Excommunicated,” I said.
“She lost it.”
“Who cares about a stupid ring?”
“It was her mom’s ring. Real diamonds,” Malik said. “They searched all night. Even the teachers stayed late looking for it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“She’s in big trouble at home,” Malik said. “Someone told me the ring was worth a million dollars.”
I shrugged off the million-dollars thing. Who even knows how much a ring is worth, anyway. But something was wrong with Leah, I knew that. “She keeps staring at me all day,” I said. “Maybe she thinks I stole it.”
Malik said, “I promise when we finally get married, I won’t steal my mom’s ring.”
Inside of an hour, I was sitting in the chair in front of Ms. S.’s desk again.
“I didn’t even see the ring,” I said.
“I did tell her mother that you spent recess with me yesterday,” she said. “But I wanted to ask just in case.”
“I wasn’t looking. Sorry,” I said. “I think fake weddings are stupid.”
Dad still hasn’t kept his promise. It’s been eighty-four days since we saw him. I don’t care now if he needs a long walk in a metaphorical forest. I can’t hear his laugh anymore. I can’t imagine his eyes anymore. I can’t remember anything the way it used to be. And I don’t know how to be in this new family. A family of three. A galaxy missing a vital planet. It’s like I dreamed all this.
I’m hard. Cold. I’m covered in metallic spots. I’m heavier than myself. I’m the rock. And I want to go back home—to space.
Jilly annoyed me all day—right up to when we walked into the house after school. She keeps telling me that I should be nice to Leah Jones so I can get my friends back. Jilly is too young to understand.
“I have to do my homework,” I say, and set up at the desk in the living room.
She says, “I’m going out to swing.” She says it like I should be proud of her or something. For doing what normal kids do. Whatever. She can be normal all she wants.
Mom is making spaghetti and meatballs for dinner. I’m not hungry. I decide to skip my homework and I go upstairs and lie on my bed. The unfinished star maps on my ceiling mock me.
Your idea to change the world is stupid.
You’ll never be anyone important.
I stand up and rip them off the slanted ceiling. I throw them on the floor and sit back down on my bed. I curse a few times under my breath. I’m probably a monster.
�
�You’re not a monster,” the rock says.
“You can’t even talk,” I say.
“Okay. You’re probably not a monster,” it says.
“Why’s everything so unfair?”
“Nothing is fair,” the rock says.
“Nothing is fair,” I say.
“Are you sure you don’t know anything about Leah’s ring?” the rock asks.
“Of course not,” I say.
The rock doesn’t say anything.
“Why’d you even ask that?” I say.
The rock doesn’t say anything.
“None of this is fair,” I say.
I go back downstairs. The spaghetti is on the stove and Jilly is back inside and she and Mom are playing twenty questions. Jilly always picks really weird animals. Mom and I can never guess them. Unfair. This is my life.
I set the table and don’t play along.
By the time we sit down, Jilly tells Mom her animal was a star-nosed mole. Mom acts like it’s cool that Jilly tricked us. I roll my eyes.
“What?” Jilly asks.
“Nothing.”
“Why’d you roll your eyes and breathe like that?” she asks.
“I didn’t,” I say. But I did.
“Yes you did,” she says.
“Whatever.”
Mom sits down after dishing out spaghetti and meatballs onto plates.
“It hurts my feelings,” Jilly says.
“I didn’t do anything,” I say.
“You rolled your eyes!”
“Star-nosed mole? Like we’d ever even know that,” I say.
“So you did roll your eyes!” Jilly says.
I’m less hungry than I was when I first sat down. I look at my plate and I can’t figure out how I’m going to eat this much food.
“It’s unfair,” I say.
“Because I know more than you?” Jilly says.
My face gets hot. Like I’m sick or something. I can’t get a deep breath.
“Eat your dinner,” Mom says to both of us.
I try to eat. Small mouthfuls. But I’m too hot to chew.
The Year We Fell From Space Page 4
