The Year We Fell From Space Read online

  “No.”

  “Did you say anything to him?” the guidance counselor asks.

  “No. I was reading a book,” I say. “Crap. I think it’s still at the bus stop.”

  “So he just pushed you? Out of the blue?” Mom asks.

  “Yeah. Didn’t say anything to me and I didn’t say anything to him.”

  Something about this conversation tells me that Finn Nolan told a different story. And there is a different story. I just can’t tell it.

  1.   Finn Nolan was already at the bus stop when I got there. I asked him how he was doing and he told me none of my business and I said that he could talk to me if he wanted to because I kinda know what he’s going through and I did have my book in my hand, but I wasn’t reading it, and then he pushed me and I fell.

  2.   My wrist hurt so bad I had to go to the nurse, but my pride hurt worse because I thought I was doing a good thing by offering Finn to be there for him when he needed it. We used to be friends.

  3.   I didn’t tell the nurse what happened. I just started crying and the nurse asked me a bunch of questions about why I was crying and I told her that the ice wasn’t helping my wrist and that it hurt so much I might die.

  4.   The nurse called the guidance counselor and the guidance counselor asked if I wanted to talk and I said no.

  5.   All the guidance counselor wanted to know was how I hurt my wrist and I finally told her that it was really Finn.

  6.   Mom got here and I made it sound like we didn’t talk at all about anything and he just pushed me out of the blue, but he didn’t. What I said really made him mad, even though I didn’t say anything mean. I stuck up for Finn because he owns a quarter of a divorce just like I do and everyone pretends that because we’re twelve, we can’t own any part of a divorce. But we do. And I can tell he doesn’t know what to do with it.

  7.   Mom says I need to get my wrist x-rayed. So we go to the urgent care place in town and wait.

  “I don’t want Finn to get in trouble,” I tell Mom.

  “Why not? He could have broken your wrist.”

  “He didn’t mean to. He’s just mad about stuff,” I say.

  “What stuff?”

  “Um, you know.”

  “So he did talk to you?” she asks.

  “He didn’t say a word.”

  She looks at me. She has a lie detector. Some days it’s faulty, and other days it’s not. Today is a not-faulty day. She says, “But you said something to him, is that right?”

  I hate Mom’s lie detector.

  I’d never thought of it the way she said it before, either. Finn may have broken my wrist. That’s not good. It would get him in even more trouble. I should have just stuck with my story of tripping and falling.

  “Have you connected the stars on the map I gave you yet?” I ask.

  “It’s a tough one,” she says. “I can’t find anything in there.”

  I start to wonder if I drew defective maps that week. I can’t blame myself. It’s hard drawing the stars when you’re hurtling through space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour.

  My wrist isn’t broken, but it’s a bad sprain. I have to wear a brace and not use it for three weeks. It’s my right hand. I can’t figure out how I’m supposed to live without using my right hand.

  Jilly sees the brace on my wrist and the first thing she says is, “It’s gonna be weird having to wipe your butt with your left hand.”

  When Mom tells her we’re going to talk to the Nolans, she says, “Can’t I stay here? Patrick is a troll.”

  “He won’t be a troll while I’m there,” Mom says.

  She’s wrong.

  Patrick is a troll the entire time Mr. Nolan, Mom, and I talk about Finn. Finn won’t come out of his room. Mr. Nolan says, “I don’t know what to do with him anymore.”

  Mom and Mr. Nolan talk about what they can do and I go to Finn’s door and knock. He says, “Go away.” I knock again and say it’s me. When he opens the door and sees my hand in the brace, he starts to cry into his hands.

  “You don’t have to hide it,” I say. “I know you’re sad.”

  “I didn’t mean to push you that hard,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I didn’t want to tell anyone what happened, but the guidance counselor hypnotized me or something,” I say. “You didn’t get in trouble, did you?”

  “Just my dad.”

  “Oh,” I say. This was what I wanted to save him from.

  “Is it broken?”

  “Just sprained,” I say.

  “That’s good.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t figure out what to do to feel better,” he says.

  “I threw a toaster through the window.”

  He looks up like he doesn’t believe me. “I did. Ask my mom.”

  “She did,” Jilly says. She’s standing at the doorway now.

  “Stop spying,” I say.

  Somewhere in the house, Patrick is counting to ten. Jilly is supposed to be hiding. “Can I hide in here?” she asks.

  Finn and I answer at the same time. “No!”

  Jilly scampers away.

  “Did you get in trouble?” Finn asks.

  “A little. Not really. Everyone knew why I threw the toaster,” I say. “And we didn’t have to buy a new one. Robust toaster. So I had that going for me.”

  “Why’d you throw it?”

  “I … I was mad,” I say.

  “Did it make you feel better?”

  “Not really,” I say. “It gets better little by little. You just have to get used to it.”

  “How do they expect us to get used to it?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. But I know it’s as hard for them as it is for us.”

  “No. It’s not. Not the same thing. Not at all.” He’s crying again. “Like—I get that it’s hard to break up. Look at your parents. Never thought they’d break up. But then they did. It must be hard. But for us? It’s like one of our parents died.”

  “That’s the trick,” I say. “They didn’t die. They’re both still here and we’ll get to see them.”

  “It feels it.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “I want to run away,” he says.

  “Where would you go?”

  “I don’t know. I just want to get away from here. I hate everything.”

  “Me too. I hate everybody. For months. And I can’t seem to tell them why,” I say.

  “You don’t hate me,” Jilly says from the doorway.

  Finn and I yell back, “GO AWAY!”

  Finn sits on the floor of his room, still leaking tears from his eyes. I move over and sit next to him. “Look,” I say. “Maybe we can get through this together somehow. We have to go through school together anyway. We could talk or something.”

  “I don’t want a girlfriend,” Finn says.

  I laugh. Can’t stop myself. I just keep laughing. Finn starts laughing too. We laugh until we’re crying. Good tears. I say, “Girlfriend!” and we laugh more. As if the idea of girlfriends and boyfriends is the funniest thing in the world.

  And it is.

  Not just because our parents broke up. But because nobody sees how big the galaxy is when they’re thinking about girlfriends and boyfriends. Earth has eight billion people on it and Leah Jones talks about how her new middle school boyfriend is her soul mate. She’s in the seventh grade. I don’t know why people limit themselves so much.

  “Love is stupid,” Finn says.

  “It’s probably not stupid, but I’m twelve and I don’t care about it,” I say.

  “Is your dad different now?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much,” I say.

  “My mom is different. She talks a lot more and she’s like—a feminist or something.”

  “You really need to look up what that word means,” I say. “It’s not a bad thing.”

  “Let’s keep talking,” he says.

  “Okay.”

&nbs
p; “I don’t mean here. I mean at the bus stop and stuff.”

  “Oh good, because I can’t feel my right leg and I need to get up,” I say.

  “I’m really sorry for that,” he says, pointing to my wrist brace.

  “I know.”

  “Sometimes I’m just so angry, it’s like …”

  “It’s like a meteor hitting the atmosphere,” I say.

  “Something like that,” he says.

  “Maybe one day after school you could come over and see my meteorite,” I say. “Sometimes I talk to it when I’m mad because I think it’s the only thing on Earth that will understand me.”

  “You’re weird,” he says.

  “Maybe you can talk to it, too.”

  “You don’t have a meteorite,” he says.

  “She does!” Jilly says from the doorway. “It’s big and is probably worth ten thousand dollars!”

  We chase Jilly back to the kitchen where she grabs Mom and climbs onto her lap. I feel like giving Finn my pocket-meteorite but I decide I shouldn’t, and it’s mine.

  Mr. Nolan looks nicer than he has in a long time. I don’t know what Mom said to him. I say, “Finn wants to see my meteorite so tomorrow he’s coming home after school with me and we can do our homework together, too.”

  “Sounds good,” Mom says.

  Mr. Nolan smirks. “You two made up quick.”

  “We’re friends,” Finn says. “Stop being weird.”

  Mr. Nolan stops smirking.

  “I’m really sorry,” Finn says again. “If you need help with anything while it heals, let me know.”

  Jilly looks like she’s about to say something about how I have to wipe my butt with my left hand, but I shoot her a look like I’ll throw a toaster at her.

  We eat magic meatloaf for dinner.

  Mom seems happier. Jilly seems fine. I feel … better.

  When I go to bed, I ask the rock why I feel better.

  “Some things take time,” it says.

  I think about how it takes Earth 365 days to work its way around the sun. I think about Saturn who takes 29.5 Earth years to make the same trip. Then Neptune: 164.9 Earth years.

  I’m glad I live on Earth where things go faster.

  Jan doesn’t think I have depression. Not the kind Dad has. She says we have to keep our eye on it.

  “You’re at the age where this shows up. Sometimes it’s just ups and downs that are normal. Sometimes it’s longer than that. I think you’re probably depressed because you’ve had a sad year.”

  “I feel a lot better now,” I say.

  “What changed?”

  “I was at Dad’s last weekend. Then Finn sprained my wrist. This is gonna sound weird but it was like hurting my wrist helped me somehow.”

  “Really?”

  “I could help Finn,” I say. “That’s what probably made me feel better.”

  “You can’t keep focusing on other people,” she says. “Plus, it’s not healthy to think that helping someone who’s been mean to you is a solution. Or that it’s your job. That’s kinda dangerous behavior, you know?”

  “All boys are jerks at Finn’s age.”

  “It’s not about being a jerk. He put his hands on you. He hurt you.”

  “He used to be my friend. He trusted me enough to take it out on me,” I say. But I hear what I said on some sort of delay and I make a face like I just ate raw clams. There is sand in my throat. “Oh my gosh. That sounded like I was defending him for hurting me.”

  “You were defending him for hurting you,” Jan says.

  I think about this and stare at the fluffy stuffed elephant in Jan’s office. “Wow. I think I know where I learned how to do that,” I say.

  “I think you know, too.”

  “Maybe I’m more like my mom than like my dad,” I say. “Maybe I’m making excuses for people who aren’t nice because it’s a way to keep the peace or something.”

  “It’s a hard habit to break, but we’ll break it together,” Jan says.

  “I’m still so sad, though.”

  “That’s normal. You found out a lot of new stuff this weekend. That kind of information takes time to process,” she says.

  Jan tells me that divorce causes similar emotional reactions as death. It’s mourning. There are stages. She says there are a ton of different types of depression, too. There’s sadness about a situation, there’s “feeling depressed,” which can last longer, and then there’s the disease of depression, which can be all kinds of different things.

  I’m scared of getting what Dad has, but I also know that he can be happy, too. Depression can do a lot of awful things, but Jan says it can also help me be very aware of how I’m feeling and that’s super important.

  “A lot of people don’t know how they’re feeling,” I say.

  “That’s true.”

  “My feelings showed up in my star maps, mostly.”

  “Then keep drawing them,” she says.

  I decide that tonight would be a good night to go up to the hill.

  When we get home, Mom shows me her finished star map from January. She’s connected the dots into camping tools. A hatchet, a bowie knife, a tent, a campfire, and something that looks like a marshmallow. I guess the stars show you what’s on your mind, just like I always thought. And it’s October, Mom’s favorite camping season.

  I call Dad when I get home but his number goes to his voicemail, so I leave a message. “Hi, Dad. I read your letter again today. I want you to know you’re a great dad. That’s all. And tonight I’m going up to the hill to make a new map. Figured you’d want to know that. I love you.”

  I take my wrist brace off so I can hold my pencil. Mom says it’s okay to take it off sometimes. It gets stiff if I don’t.

  Up here on the hill, there’s a breeze, while the rest of Lou’s woods feel like they moved to Florida. It’s October. It shouldn’t be this warm.

  I lay my blanket out and wait for the show. It’s dusk now and the sky is turning dark purple.

  I put my headlamp on my head and test to see if the batteries are still good. They are. For a minute, I feel like nothing has changed. But of course, everything has changed.

  My parents are planets who are no longer aligned.

  Dad lives with Tiffany now—a new planet we never knew about before. It’s exciting if you look at it that way.

  Jilly is still Venus and I’m still Mars except I’m not glowing a faint red anymore because I threw a toaster out a window. Or because of something. I’m not sure why. Some things take time.

  But the batteries in my headlamp didn’t know any of this was going on and they still work just fine. Same as billions of other people who didn’t fall from space this year. They work just fine.

  Jupiter is the first thing I see. I smile. It’s following the moon in the southern sky.

  Sometimes I can’t believe I can look up at the sky and see these things. Planets. Meteors. Stars. It’s all magic, really.

  More stars appear as the sky gets darker.

  I wish on the first one.

  Vega.

  There’s something special about Vega but I don’t know what. If a star can be friendly to a human, then Vega feels friendly toward me. If a star can suddenly become my best friend, then Vega has just become my best friend. I know that makes me sound weird, but I’m weird, so I don’t mind.

  Even if you call me weird to my face, I can still show you which way is north.

  If you want, we can hang out with my meteorite.

  If you think you’ve fallen from space, then you will feel at home with us.

  I draw my star map—the first real one since I threw the toaster—and I don’t stop. I just keep drawing star after star. No shapes yet, but they’ll come.

  When I draw, I don’t think of the stars like a map of our town anymore. I gave up on being Polaris because it’s too much work pointing strangers in the right direction. I have to find the right direction myself.

  I don’t know what time
it is and Mom hasn’t called me in yet, so I don’t care what time it is. The stars are everywhere. The sky is packed with them. It feels like there are more than I’ve ever seen.

  I stop drawing and lie back and marvel at it all.

  The screech owl screeches. The frogs are still going because it’s warm out here, October or not. The sky is peaceful. I feel peaceful, too, somehow. I’m still scared and pretty sad, but something about today made me feel like I’m really on Earth again and not falling through space.

  Since I threw the toaster, the stars didn’t feel as dependable as they used to, but tonight, they feel the way they did when I was little and Dad explained, “The sky goes around and around Polaris, like a top that spins forever.”

  That’s the thing about the stars.

  They’re always here. They’re the most trustworthy friends. They will always be exactly where they’re supposed to be at the time they’re supposed to be there. They can lead you home. They just keep going around and around.

  There are 108 days until the anniversary of Dad moving out.

  The stars will be in the exact same place as they were last year, but the planets will have moved. Just like Dad did. Just like I did. Just like Jilly did. Just like Mom did.

  Planets have their own course.

  But no matter what happens, the world keeps turning and the stars will be there in the same place you left them only a year ago.

  Nothing else on Earth is like this.

  Nothing else is as trustworthy.

  Nothing else can make you as small as the stars. As big as the stars.

  Jan told me today that I didn’t have to talk with Leah Jones yet. She said I could wait a week or two. She said she wanted to talk to me about it more before then. I’ll tell her that I didn’t feel bad for hiding Leah’s ring and how that scared me. I’ll tell her about how I wasn’t ever fine when I said I was fine. I’ll tell her how I became a meteor. How I made a deal with the stars. How the stars didn’t keep their promise and how I knew that they were never going to. I’ll tell her that I am learning how to forgive Dad for his mistakes. I’ll tell her that I am learning to forgive myself, too. I’ll tell her how the sky puts everything in perspective.

  How it makes me happy.