The Year We Fell From Space Page 5

  “You’re just mad because nobody at school likes you,” Jilly says.

  “That’s rude,” Mom says. “Be nice to your sister.”

  “I’ll be nice to her if she’s nice to me,” Jilly says.

  “I was nice to you. Every single day of your life,” I say.

  “You weren’t nice just now,” Jilly says.

  “You picked a stupid animal. Your choice. And that’s not nice, either,” I say.

  “It’s a game!” she says.

  “Star-nosed mole? It’s not a very fun game if we don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I say.

  “You’re a mean sister,” Jilly yells.

  “I walked you to homeroom for the last two months,” I say.

  She’s crying. I’m not. This shows that I’m mature and she isn’t. I can own my mistakes and she can’t. Ask any star-nosed mole. I bet they even know that they’re weird and no one has heard of them.

  “Liberty, stop making your sister cry,” Mom says.

  I look at my plate of food.

  My face gets so hot I can’t hold my fork, so I drop it. It lands on the floor.

  The sound of the fork hitting the floor makes me jump. I look left.

  “I’M SICK OF ALL THIS YELLING!” I say. I yell. I say-yell in a voice I’ve never heard before.

  I close my eyes, tilt back my head, and make this sound: “OOOOOOEEEEEAAAHHHYYYY.”

  Mom and Jilly don’t say anything at first. I can’t see them because my eyes are closed. Then they say a bunch of stuff but I don’t listen to it. Jilly’s still crying. Everything is unfair.

  “I AM ASKING YOU ALL TO BE QUIET SO I CAN JUST THINK FOR A MINUTE!” I say. “GGGGGRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAEEEEEEOOOO!”

  I go on a sort of journey in my head. I run away and live in the woods. I run away and become Amish. I run away and find my spaceship and finally go home. I stop at Finn Nolan’s house and take him with me because I worry about him even though I shouldn’t. It’s not like he’s worried about me. Nothing is fair.

  I open my eyes, but it’s like I’ve been away for three months. I expect to see everyone here, eating dinner like normal.

  Mom and Jilly look startled. Dad still isn’t here.

  “AHHHOOOOOAAAHHOOOO!” I yell.

  I get up from the table and pace around the kitchen. I step on my fork and I curse because it hurts.

  Mom says some stuff but I can’t understand it.

  I close my eyes and inside my eyelids, I can see the night sky. At least two thousand stars.

  “I HATE EVERYONE ON EARTH AND WISH I COULD GO BACK TO MY PLANET!” I say.

  I do a jumping jack and shake my head. I feel dizzy.

  “BBBBBBRRRRROOOOOOOOYYYYYYEEEEEE!”

  My ears ring and I think I may be louder than the loudest thing on Earth.

  “WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT?” I say.

  Jilly is now sitting on Mom’s lap. I don’t know how she got there. They look so happy without me. Just the two of them. I should probably move in with Dad. Nothing is fair.

  “STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!” I say.

  They keep looking at me. There’s sweat on my face, I’m so hot.

  “AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHH!”

  I pick up the toaster.

  I’m not sure why, exactly, I pick up the toaster.

  It’s just there.

  Mom and Jilly are still sitting together, Jilly’s arms wrapped around Mom’s neck. Mom is saying something to me—I can see her mouth moving but I can’t hear any words.

  I throw the toaster at the window.

  The toaster goes through the window.

  I thought it would bounce off. I know it’s a window and it’s made of glass, but I really thought the toaster would bounce off and land on the kitchen floor. Instead it goes through.

  Another broken window.

  Another reason for Lou to come into our house and show us that we need a man.

  Another time I make Mom feel bad because she didn’t mean for this to happen. She was just doing what anyone else would do in her situation but I don’t know what her situation is because she can’t tell me.

  “I NEED TO HAVE A BATH!” I yell.

  I run up the stairs to the bathroom and turn on the water.

  I look at myself in the mirror and I look like myself except I wish I looked like someone else. I wish I was someone else. I wish I knew what a star-nosed mole was. I wish I knew why I threw the toaster. I wish I didn’t have any family. I wish I was the rock.

  Rocks don’t know the difference between unfair and fair.

  Rocks don’t need parents. Or sisters.

  Rocks can’t be excommunicated from the sixth grade.

  Nobody wants to marry a rock at recess.

  Mom checks in on me in the bath which is awkward but I get it. She’s making sure I’m okay. Not throwing toasters. Not cursing. Not yelling weird sounds that don’t make any sense. I wave at her and she smiles and then closes the door again. I go back to looking at the stars inside my eyelids. My ears are underwater and I’m communicating with my people.

  I have the tiny meteorite. I’m tapping on the bathtub with it. I’m making a rhythm. It’s the rhythm of space. It’s like Morse code but better because no one can decode it but me and the stars.

  H—E—L—P—M—E.

  The stars send me a message inside my brain: There was no meteorite. I am the meteorite. I fell from space, endured impossible atmosphere. Crabby professor would say I’m not a meteorite. I bet crabby professor doesn’t like to be wrong about things. But he is. I’m a meteorite.

  Except I’m a girl, too.

  The meteorite is still in my bedroom, proof that it’s the meteorite, not me. But I’m in my bedroom too so maybe we can both be the meteorite. We both fell from space. We both got really hot and made a loud noise and broke the windows in Lou’s log cabin.

  “Sometimes I wish I was an alien,” I say when I come down from my bath.

  Mom nods. She pauses a video that she’s showing Jilly on the computer.

  Jilly says, “I think you probably are one.”

  “What would be cool about being an alien?” Mom asks.

  “Everything,” I say. “I’d know about space travel and other species and I’d see humans as an inferior race and not want to, like, fit in with them or anything.” Mom and Jilly look at me with sad eyes. “And I could just take off whenever I want. In my spaceship. Back to wherever I came from.”

  “I’d miss you,” Jilly says.

  “You could come with me!”

  “It would be so cool to see Earth from space,” Mom says. “Can you imagine?”

  I’ve seen pictures like anyone else has. But no, I can’t imagine what it would be like to see Earth from space because if I got off this planet, I wouldn’t look back. Even if I landed somewhere that smelled like farts all the time. Even if I landed on a planet that’s dark all the time. Or light. Or cold. Or hot. Or even if I landed on a planet that had yodeling music playing twenty-four hours a day, I wouldn’t look back.

  Sunday morning. Mom comes downstairs, gets a cup of coffee, and says, “Dad’s going to take you guys for a while today.” She says this as if it’s something we’ve done before.

  “Like last weekend?” Jilly asks. “And the one before that?”

  Jilly’s sarcasm is really coming along.

  “For real. He’s coming at around eleven,” Mom says.

  I bet she talked him into it because of the toaster thing.

  I haven’t been myself.

  Dad picks us up at our house and it’s weird. Like, the-light-during-an-eclipse weird. It feels like a dream.

  First, he’s skinny. Too skinny. Like I-could-see-in-Jilly’s-eyes-that-she’s-afraid-he’s-sick skinny.

  Second, he parks in the driveway and waits until we come outside. As if Mom isn’t here at all. It’s as if he thinks Jilly and I have been living in the cabin on our own for the last eighty-six days.

  Third, he’s weari
ng a baseball cap. Dad never owned a baseball cap when I knew him. He looks like someone else’s dad.

  We get in the car and drive down the lane.

  “We’re gonna see some stars tonight,” he says.

  “I have school tomorrow,” I say.

  “Since when does that matter?” he asks.

  Jilly says, “I’m right here, you know. I don’t like stars.”

  We’re both in the back seat and Jilly scowls at me and I roll my eyes at her like Dad is being weird because he is being weird and I have nothing to do with it. Jilly makes a funny face and it makes me smile. I reach over and hold her hand. She leans into my ear and says, “He smells weird.”

  Add to my list: Fourth, Dad is wearing cologne and that’s weirder than all the other stuff I’ve listed already.

  “How about a baseball game?” Dad says.

  Jilly and I don’t answer because we don’t really watch baseball because we don’t have a TV that’s connected to cable channels. Also, Finn Nolan and Ethan McGarret are on the baseball team and I’m pretty sure I don’t care about baseball at all.

  “Or we could go over to my place first?” he asks.

  “Whatever you want to do,” I say.

  “I wanna see your apartment!” Jilly says.

  So we go to his apartment on Porter Drive. Which is more like a town house than an apartment. It’s modern, two stories, and has wall-to-wall carpet. Big new TV. Our old fish tank, but with new fish. Not much furniture. Nothing on the walls. It looks like he still thinks it’s temporary.

  “Where’s our room?” Jilly asks.

  “That one,” he points.

  “But … where are the bunk beds?” Jilly asks.

  “Oh. I. Uh. They’re coming soon,” Dad says.

  “You’ve been gone for three months and you didn’t get the bunk beds yet?” I ask.

  “I’ve been doing other stuff,” Dad says.

  “Like not eating from the looks of things,” Jilly says.

  Dad wants to say something. Instead he takes a deep breath through his nose and lets it out through his mouth and smiles kinda pained.

  “Okay,” Jilly says. “I’m good with leaving any time you want.”

  I look in the kitchen. There are dishes piled in the sink and three glasses next to it. One glass has a lipstick mark on it. I run it under the tap and wash off the lipstick so Jilly won’t see. “Me too,” I say.

  We go to a baseball game. Dad had tickets all along and I guess he didn’t want to force us to go, but he seems happy once we’re in the stands and watching the game. He buys us hot dogs and I try not to think of all the things he used to say about how hot dogs are bad for us. I’m just glad to see him eat something.

  By the sixth inning, Jilly is bored and I’m thinking about lipstick. Mom doesn’t wear lipstick. That’s what I’m thinking.

  “I want to go home,” Jilly says in my ear.

  “I know.”

  “Like right now. I have to go home.” She looks terrified, like she’s having some sort of anxiety attack.

  I pull her into my side and hug her. “Dad,” I say. “Can we go now?”

  “We’re not even to the seventh-inning stretch!”

  I give him a look like we really have to go now, so we get up and make our way down the bleachers and to the parking lot.

  In the car, he says, “I feel like we’re strangers.”

  I say, “Don’t worry. It’ll get easier.”

  “Maybe if you wouldn’t have ignored us since January,” Jilly says. Or half says. I can hear her because I’m in the back seat with her, but I don’t know if Dad can hear her.

  He doesn’t say anything else.

  I think he heard her.

  We end up at the diner in our little town’s Main Street. Everyone looks at the three of us as they come in and pick up their take-out food or wait to get seated. I feel pity from every single person. It’s like we have a cloud above our booth that says DIVORCE in cuddly, puffy black letters.

  “It was great to finally see you guys,” Dad says.

  Jilly doesn’t say anything.

  I say, “It’s good to see you, too.”

  “I miss you so much,” he says.

  Jilly doesn’t say anything.

  I say, “We miss you, too.”

  Fact is, I still miss him now, right here, in the diner. He’s not doing any Dad things. He looks distracted.

  When he drops us off at the cabin, he doesn’t get out of the car. He offers us hugs over the back of his seat like he’s dropping us off to school in the morning. I lean in and give him a squeeze and say, “I love you.” Jilly just gets out of her side of the car, closes the door, and goes inside.

  “Do you think she’ll be okay?” he asks me.

  “She’s doing better than you think.”

  “Seems really angry to me,” he says.

  “So?”

  “So I hope she’s not like that next time,” he says.

  “If next time is three more months, then she probably will be,” I say.

  “I—”

  “Eat more food. You look too skinny,” I say. We meet eyes. His eyes look hurt. I blink twice, force a smile, close the car door, and go inside.

  Jilly is crying in her room and Mom is downstairs in the kitchen scrubbing the sink. She just scrubbed it a few days ago, so if I was to guess, she’s trying to scrub all the way through to Australia to not be here in the cabin. To not be here in a divorce. To not be here in a Sunday when her daughters went to a baseball game with a stranger.

  I knew I would eventually end up in here. Leah Jones. Toaster. Talking to a rock.

  “How are things with Liberty?” Jan asks.

  “It’s going okay,” I say.

  We smile at each other.

  “I heard you got pretty mad last week,” she says.

  “I’m probably mad all the time. I don’t know.”

  “You’ve had a hard year,” she says. “How’s school?”

  I shrug. I don’t really want to tell her about Leah Jones. If I do, it looks like I think the same way Leah Jones thinks and I don’t. “Jilly seems to be doing better,” I say.

  She’s quiet for a minute. Then she asks, “Want to tell me what you have against toasters?”

  I laugh. I’m not sure why. “It was the first thing I saw.”

  She nods.

  “It was like I didn’t have control of my arms. Or my mouth. Or anything,” I say.

  “What were you thinking when you threw it?” she asks.

  “I wasn’t thinking anything. It was just—I was just—really mad. Like, sometimes I want to go back to wherever I’m from. Mars or wherever. You know? I mean, life would be easier and maybe I’d make friends there.”

  “Wouldn’t your friends on Earth miss you?”

  “I don’t have any friends on Earth,” I say.

  “I’m sure you have somebody,” she says.

  “Trust me. I don’t have one friend.” I feel bad because I have Malik, but I only have him at lunch, so it’s not like I’m lying. “I used to have Finn, because he lives down the road, and for a while I was best friends with Leah. But now I’m a freak because Dad moved out.”

  “Wow,” she says.

  “I don’t miss them. They’re all immature and think about boyfriends and girlfriends all the time.”

  “Oh. I can understand why that’s annoying,” Jan says. “But why no friends?”

  “I’m just afraid if I talk to anyone, people will tell Leah.”

  “Who’s Leah?”

  “She’s the girl who excommunicated me from the sixth grade class.”

  “Excommunicated?” she asks.

  I nod.

  “Does she have the power to do that?” Jan asks. She asks me to explain why Leah has so much power and I do. It all sounds stupid. Other girls want to be Leah. Boys want to marry Leah. Teachers think she’s great because she gets good grades and does exactly what they want her to do. Also, she has all the right cloth
es.

  “She sounds kinda boring,” Jan says.

  “She is boring,” I say.

  “So why’d she excommunicate you from the sixth grade?” Jan asks. “And what about the boy down the road?”

  “Finn Nolan. I really don’t want to talk about it,” I say. “I want to talk about Dad.”

  She nods.

  “He was so weird on Sunday,” I say.

  She nods.

  “Like maybe that’s why he wasn’t happy when he lived with us—maybe he just wanted to take a long quiet walk in the forest without me. Or Jilly.” I almost cry a little. “Like—maybe we’re the problem.”

  Jan shakes her head. “Having a parent struggling with depression is hard,” she says. “Trust me. Feeling like this is normal. But you’re not the problem.”

  I say, “I guess.”

  “Your mom says you and your dad were into the stars, too. That you used to draw maps of stars together or something like that.”

  I don’t say anything.

  Jan looks at the whiteboard on her wall. She says, “Draw me something.”

  I get up from the chair and uncap a blue marker. I draw the North Star in the middle of the board, mark N, S, E, & W, and start filling in from there. Bigger dots for bigger stars. Smaller dots for smaller stars.

  “Wow,” Jan says. “That’s pretty cool. I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “How would you know?” I ask as I keep drawing.

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe your mom or your sister would have explained.”

  “Jilly and Mom are having a really hard time,” I say.

  “What about you?” she asks.

  “I’m okay,” I say.

  “But you’re throwing the toaster around. Does that seem okay?”

  “I have to help them adjust,” I say. I’m filling in smaller stars now. I don’t want to turn around and look at Jan. I feel like I’m going to cry.

  “Help who adjust?” she asks.

  “Jilly and Mom. And Dad, when I see him. He’s skinny. Too skinny. And Mom never gets to do anything because he keeps canceling and she’s probably dying to go hiking with her friends,” I say.

  “And how are you helping Jilly?”

  “I play games with her every day and walk her to homeroom and protect her on the bus from the Nolan brothers and hug her when she cries.”