The Year We Fell From Space Read online

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Prologue—The Day We Fell

  Part One: Things Fall From Space

  Chapter 1—Pretend Pie

  Chapter 2—Exciting Exceptions

  Chapter 3—Postal Code Polaris

  Chapter 4—Postal Code Polaris with a Faint Red Glow

  Chapter 5—Liberty Johansen Is Not Going Irrational

  Chapter 6—Aliens

  Chapter 7—We Need to Talk about Dad

  Chapter 8—Things Change

  Chapter 9—The Magic Box

  Chapter 10—The Crabby Professor

  Part Two: Other Phenomena in My Galaxy

  Chapter 11—The Nolan Brothers

  Chapter 12—Jilly and the Wet Tiger

  Chapter 13—Space in My Bedroom

  Chapter 14—We Need to Talk about School, I Guess

  Chapter 15—Conversations with a Rock

  Chapter 16—The Thing about Leah Jones

  Chapter 17—Nothing Is Fair Nothing Is Fair Nothing Is Fair

  Chapter 18—Hot Dogs Are Okay Now

  Chapter 19—Me and Jan’s Whiteboard

  Part Three: So Now you Think I’m a Thief

  Chapter 20—Countdown

  Chapter 21—Gravity-Bound Broom

  Chapter 22—The Library Holds My Secret

  Chapter 23—Snooping Can Really Ruin Breakfast

  Chapter 24—Dad’s House Has Cable TV

  Chapter 25—Untitled Jilly

  Chapter 26—Mom and Her Hatchet

  Chapter 27—Cassiopeia Rising

  Chapter 28—Mr. Nolan

  Chapter 29—Jilly’s Tenth Birthday

  Part Four: Bargaining with Stars

  Chapter 30—School Shopping in a Nebula

  Chapter 31—Smeelings

  Chapter 32—The Scarecrow with Boobs

  Chapter 33—Standardized Tests Are Stupid

  Chapter 34—Meteorites Don’t Eat Hamburgers

  Chapter 35—Angry Constellation

  Chapter 36—Suddenly Grilled Cheese Sandwiches Are Fine

  Chapter 37—My Liberty

  Chapter 38—Bedtime Story on Planet Perfection

  Chapter 39—Tubas Are Cool

  Chapter 40—Worst Sister Ever

  Part Five: How to be Polaris

  Chapter 41—Waiting and Waiting

  Chapter 42—The Day My Brain Ate My Brain

  Chapter 43—Liberty Johansen Is Totally Irrational

  Chapter 44—Pajamas Are Everything

  Chapter 45—All for Nothing

  Chapter 46—The Day I Crushed My Dad

  Chapter 47—Meteorites Don’t Eat Hamburgers II

  Chapter 48—Lost Luggage

  Chapter 49—Everything Is Something

  Chapter 50—Lying for Good

  Chapter 51—What Is Finn Nolan’s Toaster?

  Chapter 52—Some Things Take Time

  Author’s Note

  Me and Marvin Gardens teaser

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Mom and Dad sat Jilly and me down when we got home from school on a Friday. It was January cold outside—snow piled up on the edges of the quarter-mile-long lane to our house—and Dad made us hot chocolate when we got inside after our walk from the bus stop. Then, we sat on the red couch. They sat on the green one.

  Mom said, “Dad and I are going to separate. He’s going to move out this weekend. I’m sure you’ve noticed things aren’t going well between us. We’re sorry you’ve had to hear us fighting so much. But the main thing for you to know is that you’ll still see both of us and that we both love you very much.”

  “You’ll still see me all the time,” Dad said. “I’m going to get some bunk beds so you can stay with me whenever you want.” He didn’t look us in the eyes. He was staring at the carpet, mostly.

  “We want you to talk to us about anything that’s on your mind and don’t be afraid of the feelings you have about this because whatever you feel, it’s totally normal,” Mom said.

  I wasn’t afraid of the feelings I was having. In order, they were: relief, confusion, and fear. Probably some other ones, too, but those were the big ones. Jilly was pure sadness. Her body shook. I moved closer to her on the couch and put my arm around her.

  Dad said, “Look, this is all my fault. I’m so sorry. We’re going to do the best we can to make things right and try to be a family again.”

  And that changed everything. For example, my feelings rearranged themselves into: confusion, fear, and more confusion. Jilly shook less and her eyes widened as if she could somehow see our family not breaking apart. But she knew it was. I knew it was. Mom knew it was. Dad seemed to be the only one there who was unaware.

  He was just saying stuff to make it seem better and to make Jilly not cry. Welcome to my life.

  Example 1: Jilly and me in the back seat every summer while Dad drives us home from day camp. I ask if we can stop for ice cream. Dad says no. I go back to watching the trees pass by as we drive. Jilly starts to cry. She says something like “I really want ice cream!” and Dad stops for ice cream.

  Example 2: It’s summer vacation last year and Mom is hiking with her friend Patty. I ask Dad if Jilly and I can stay up late to watch an episode of Star Trek. He says no. I start heading up the stairs to brush my teeth and go to bed. Jilly cranks up the waterworks and says something like “But I really wanted to see it! And it’s summer vacation!” and Dad turns on Star Trek and calls for me to come down.

  It was always the same. I tried crying but he’d tell me that “this is just the way things are.” For me. But not for Jilly. Jilly didn’t have a way things are. She just got what she wanted as if her tears and my tears were two different elements.

  He’s not a bad dad. He’s just mixed up, is all. When he’s outside, he’s usually fine. When he’s inside, it’s like he can’t think right due to a lack of fresh air or something. It was winter. We were spending a lot of time inside.

  Mom said, “Dad’s going to get some help. You know he’s been having some problems. He needs some time to figure things out.”

  I noted the somes in her sentences. Some help. Some problems. Some time.

  Jilly said, “Figure out if he loves us.”

  Dad said, “Don’t worry, baby. I’ll be back.”

  Mom said, “Jack, don’t say that. We talked about this already.”

  Dad said, “Sorry. But it’s what I want.” He turned to us and said, “Your mother is making me do this.”

  With that, Mom threw her hands into the air and plopped down on her favorite chair and crossed her arms.

  This was the dance of my parents. Dad always led. Mom had to follow or else. It sounds bad and it was bad. I had just turned twelve the month before and I couldn’t remember a time when they weren’t fighting every other weekend. But it wasn’t fighting, exactly. Dad would just start yelling and Mom would try to keep it from us. Parents are weird to think they can hide yelling from people in their own house. Yelling is like a smoke alarm. And the point of a smoke alarm is to wake people up.

  I knew this conversation was coming. Or I’d hoped. But I’d miss Dad, too. It was complicated.

  Dad moved out that night. Mom’s friend came to take me and Jilly out for dinner and ice cream. When we came home, Mom was there alone and Jilly cried for a while, but I didn’t.

  So now you know how it started, our fall from space. It’s a long journey from up there to down here, and there are other things you need to know:

  1.   The stars aren’t just stars, like you were taught. They tell me how I’m feeling when I look at them. No one can change my mind about this because no one knows anything about ho
w big and powerful the universe is.

  2.   My dad is a good guy with a bad disease. He is not his disease. But sometimes he can seem it.

  3.   My dad was my guiding star for my whole life. It wasn’t that I didn’t like my mom. I love her. She’s my mom. But Dad and I had something special. He and Mom always said we were cut from the same cloth.

  4.   This is a problem.

  5.   Picture this: I was nine years old and my dad and I were walking through the forest and we saw a doe and her two fawns only a few feet from us and then a buck walked up and that never happens. Dad was holding my hand and we froze and watched and it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. A family of four. Just like the family pictures we had all over our house. The doe and her fawns moved away from the buck and Dad and the buck were staring at each other and Dad smiled and breathed deep, and the buck looked like he was going to walk over to us and then he bolted and ran deep into the woods.

  Picture this: Dad had tears running down his cheeks and we just stood there holding hands and saying things like “Wow” and “Holy cow” and the tears kept coming from his eyes and after a minute, I didn’t know if Dad was happy or sad but I knew he was my dad and I’d be there for him forever and he’d be there for me forever, too.

  Picture this: Everything changed and I don’t know why.

  Mom’s scribbling numbers again. The kitchen table is full of papers. Bills, booklets, yellow legal tablets. She’s got the look of concentration, which can look like she’s angry, but she’s not.

  Mom’s always been a great communicator. She talks to the bill people on the phone as if she’s known them for years—remembers their names, laughs, and cracks jokes. Jilly has picked up her signature closing—that part where the bill person asks if they can do anything else for you.

  “Can you buy yourself a pie on the way home from work and pretend I made it for you?”

  I’ve heard her say this a hundred times since I was little.

  Jilly says it, too, but she doesn’t have to pay bills or talk on the phone. She just says it to people working behind fast food counters and that guy at the car wash once. They always laugh because Jilly is funny.

  Was. Jilly was funny.

  I’m doing my usual thing for a Friday after school. No homework, I’m looking forward to a weekend of making new constellations. Since Mom’s been taking up the kitchen table for two months with her divorce action station, I lay my newest star map out on the coffee table in the living room.

  I have most of the stars drawn in, but no lines yet. I only connect the dots once the map is done. Making the new constellations is the most important part. The stars are always the same, but the lines and shapes change depending on how I’m feeling and what the sky is trying to tell me, which is why it’s important for me to draw the maps. Sometimes I don’t know how I’m feeling. The stars help me figure it out.

  “I want to play a game or something,” Jilly says. She’s standing at the bottom of the stairs holding the stuffed tiger she hasn’t let out of her sight for sixty-three days.

  I look at my map and she stands there staring at me.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Are you going to play or what?”

  I look at the clock on the wall. It’s two hours until sundown. “Want to go outside?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Come on. It’s finally spring. You can’t stay cooped up in here forever,” I say.

  I look back at my map. Stars everywhere—big dots and little dots. I’m starting to see new shapes and I need time to figure out what they are.

  Mom says, “Girls, I’m on the phone, okay?” Mom looks at me and crinkles her forehead. It’s a signal. She moves her head toward the back door. Another signal.

  As if it’s my responsibility to get Jilly out of the house.

  I roll up my map and put it on the top bookshelf.

  “I’ll race you to the stream,” I whisper. “Put your shoes on.”

  “No,” Jilly says. She’s clutching her tiger so hard now, I’m afraid his stuffing will bust out.

  I know not to fight her on this. I know what happens.

  I grab a deck of cards from the shelf and take her up to my room.

  I live in the attic now. Biggest room in the house. A little cold in the winter and a little hot in the summer, but who cares because it’s the closest room to the stars.

  Three hands of cards later, Jilly and I are at the kitchen table and Mom is dishing out Chinese food. Her paperwork is all stacked up on the windowsill where it will stay for the weekend.

  The three of us share the lo mein and Mom and I share her spicy chicken because Jilly hates spicy things. She loves those thick noodles, though, and she slurps them up and makes us laugh. Or she used to. Now she just rolls them around her fork and eats them like this is some sort of business meeting.

  Mom slurps her noodle and makes us laugh, but Jilly still won’t slurp.

  “How’s your new map coming?” Mom asks.

  “Good,” I say.

  “Connecting anything yet?”

  “I see a few things. A rocking horse. A basketball court. A tiger.” These aren’t the things I see, but I say it anyway because weekends and take-out food are kinda sacred around here now.

  “A tiger? Like mine?” Jilly points to her tiger, who is sitting on the windowsill guarding Mom’s paperwork.

  “Nah. I just said that so you’d look happy,” I say.

  Jilly stops looking happy.

  Mom makes that face with her lips tight in a half smile, like she’s saying shucks or a more grown-up version of it.

  “Jilly and I are going to watch The Wizard of Oz tonight,” Mom says.

  “I’m going up to the hill,” I say.

  It’s been cloudy or raining for three days. Atmospheric interference. It’s when clouds get between me and the most important project of the twenty-first century.

  I’m not bragging. And I’m not being dramatic. I’m serious.

  I’m Liberty Johansen and I’m going to change the way people look at the night sky. I’m going to free them of old-constellation rules and teach them how to draw their own maps because the sky is trying to tell them something … only they don’t know it yet because I’m a sixth grader and nobody ever listens to sixth graders who say they’re going to do big things. But I’m an exception.

  We’re a family of exceptions.

  I’m going to change the way the world looks at the stars even though I’m a girl and I live in a time where people laugh at science and girls and anything else that makes sense.

  Jilly is a girl who has stopped going outside and who, at age nine, carries a stuffed tiger with her everywhere even though she’s too old to do that.

  And Mom is happier since Dad moved out even though everyone thinks she should be sad and lonely.

  Exceptions are a lot more exciting than rules.

  When I look up at the stars, I don’t try to find constellations or boring old stuff like that. I see patterns. I see pictures. I see possibilities.

  For example, if you take the dots on my map and compare them to a map of our town, we live on Polaris. We always point north and we help sailors and adventurers and lost hikers find their way. That’s our job as Polaris. The North Star. Always right. Always consistent. Always asking you to buy a pie and pretend we made it for you.

  Dad lives on Porter Drive now, which is about two miles from here. There isn’t a star marking his new house. It’s just all black sky. No pretend pie. No helping anyone find their way.

  Polaris isn’t hard to find if you know how to find it.

  Start with the Big Dipper, inside the old constellation Ursa Major. See a soup ladle, see the cup at the end of the handle. Follow that line up, out of the ladle, soup splashing twice its height, and you’ll find us: bright, dependable Polaris. Guiding you to where you’re going.

  It’s our job here on Polaris to nudge gently until you get there.

  Unless you’re M
om.

  Mom is not a gentle nudge.

  She has freak-outs sometimes but I can see why she has them. Jilly and I shouldn’t really put tape on the walls. We shouldn’t leave our paper scraps on the carpet she just vacuumed. And I probably shouldn’t get in trouble so much in school.

  Usually, it’s the Nolan brothers, who live down the road from us. Patrick bullies Jilly now, since Dad moved out, and she never tells on him, so I bring her into the office to tell on him. Patrick’s brother, Finn, is a jerk to me sometimes but I can handle him. A few times he told on me for pushing him around. But he’s the bully. Only he uses his mouth and not his hands. I can’t stop myself. I don’t know. Some days I can’t control my hands.

  Anyway, last week Mom had to leave work early to come pick me up at the principal’s office again. It didn’t have anything to do with the Nolan brothers, but I guess it did have to do with me not being able to control my hands.

  She’s always calm in there. She says things that impress Ms. S., the principal.

  “Lib, you can’t keep blaming your behavior on other people,” she said last week. “You have to own what you do. If you don’t learn this soon you’re going to have a heck of a time in middle school.”

  The principal nodded but I knew she’d given up on me in fourth grade when I kicked Ethan McGarret in the privates. It was self-defense, mind you, but I still probably shouldn’t have done it.

  Plus, last time I was in there was January, during the week we fell from space. Since then, even I’ve given up on me.

  Mom kept talking. “Listen to me. It’s no secret that this kind of family stuff causes some kids to act out. But seriously, what were you thinking?”

  What was I thinking? I was thinking that the science wing hallway walls were too boring. I was thinking they needed a little panache. I only drew the best constellations. They were pretty.

  Mom added, “I know you love the stars, kid, but save the drawings for your maps, okay?”

  The drive home was quiet and I missed Dad. Dad would have understood why I drew stars on the science wing wall. He used to tell me things were going to be okay at times like that. He approved of what he called “sticking it to the man,” which was what I was feeling when I drew the constellations on the science wing wall. Dad would have been proud of me. And he wouldn’t have cared how good he sounded in front of Ms. S.