We All Looked Up (5 page)

Before she could say anything else, there was the sound of a car door slamming, and a cop was making his way toward them with a long, aggressive stride.

“There a problem here?” he asked.

“No problem,” the stranger said.

The cop looked at Anita.

“No, sir.”

He didn't seem to believe it. “Why don't you come along with me, miss? As for you”—he pointed at the stranger—“you stay there. My partner wants to talk to you for a minute.”

“Whatever, man.”

Anita and the cop walked across the street, past the festive flicker of the cruiser.

“What are you doing on your own down here, young lady?”

“Nothing.”

“You need a ride?”

“My car's just up the street.”

He put a hand on her shoulder. “You go straight there, okay? Pretty girl like you should be more careful.”

“Thanks.”

She climbed back up to First Avenue; the incline was so steep that it bent her backward, pointed her at the sky like a telescope. A lone blue star floated out among all the white ones, like a mutation. Anita felt pinned in place, caught between the dead eye of that star and the cold care of the police officer behind her. She didn't want to go back to the car, but she didn't want to stay where she was, either. She would have been happy just to disappear.

Whatever it is, it's not worth it.

She said the words aloud, but they were hollow now, no more meaning in them than in that distant will-o'-the-wisp adrift in the sky. Suzie O was wrong. Anita wasn't miserable because of the way things were. She was miserable because she kept hoping things would change. If she could eradicate the hope, she could eradicate the sadness.

It was time to go home.

E
liza

WAS THERE ANYTHING IN THE
whole entire world worse than waking up next to someone you didn't want to wake up next to?

His name was Parker—at least she could remember that much. He was asleep on his stomach, blond hair curling around his ears like cotton candy, another little patch at the base of his spine. Eliza was careful not to wake him as she rose from the bed and got dressed. It took her fifteen minutes in front of the bathroom mirror to scrape away the telltale signs of an alcohol-fueled one-night stand. She brushed her unwashed hair into a wild bun and stuck it with a pair of black chopsticks. The result was presentable enough, though all the primping in the world would do nothing for the pounding headache. For that, there was only her traditional mixture of coconut water and Red Bull—what her friend Madeline used to call a Bull Nuts. Breakfast accomplished.

Which only left the question of what to do about Parker. With all the discharge forms and final check-ups, Eliza's dad wouldn't be home before two or three in the afternoon, but this skeeze had to be gone by then. And he'd have to go on foot, because Eliza had driven him here. She left a note on the bedside table:
If you're reading this, you should be out of my house
. Too mean? Maybe. But she was way too hungover to care.

It wasn't until she saw the digital clock in the car that she realized how early it was. Still, spending an extra hour at school was way better than spending it alone in the house with a passed-out mistake. She turned the radio to the news—a monotonous recitation of international catastrophes—then flipped the station. Eighties music was undoubtedly better for the soul.

The parking lot at Hamilton was mostly empty. Eliza turned up the radio, got a blanket out of the trunk, and laid it across the warm humming heat of the hood. She leaned back against the wind­shield . . .

Someone was shaking her by the foot. Eliza opened her eyes to a gray-white sky, uniform but for that wicked blue speck of light. What was it still doing up there?

“Good morning, Mr. Magpie.”

She sat up and practically collided with the implacable grin of Andy Rowen. He was wearing baggy jeans and an unzipped gray hoodie over a T-shirt featuring the pale, spaced-out faces of the Cure.

“Rough night?” he asked.

“A little.”

“Didn't Blondie deliver the goods?”

She ignored the question. “What time is it?”

“By my watch”—he pulled up his sleeve and stared hard at the empty white expanse of his wrist—“about halfway through first period.”

“Seriously? Fuck!” Eliza jumped down from the hood.

“What's the big deal? I always get to school around this time, and lo, the world continueth to spin.”

Her book bag wasn't in the backseat, or in the trunk. In her rush to get away from Parker, she must have left it at home.

“Shit!” She slammed her fist into the side of the car.

“Whoa,” Andy said. “Chill out, man. It's just class.”

Eliza took a deep breath, then spoke with quiet scorn. “This may come as a shock to you, but some of us actually care about stuff. I'm sure you think that's lame or gay or whatever, but we can have another talk about it ten years from now, when you're still living in your mom's basement and working at Chipotle and the rest of us have lives.”

She stormed off toward campus, already feeling guilty for lashing out; it wasn't Andy she was pissed at.

“Jeez,” he said, “that must have been some shitty sex.”

“It was,” Eliza said, without stopping.

But she was glad to hear him laughing behind her.

She couldn't focus during chemistry class. The blue star kept popping back into her head, like the memory of a bad dream. And every time it did, her heart began to race.

She didn't think to ask about it until lunch, and only then because she happened to pass by the table in the corner of the lunchroom, farthest from the windows. Maybe it was judgmental, to think of it as the “nerd table,” and yet there was no getting around the fact that a school had its factions, and one of those factions happened to consist primarily of intelligent, not very attractive, not particularly socially capable boys, along with a few girls who hadn't yet learned how to dress or put on makeup or pretend to be dumber than they were. It was the girls who eyed Eliza with suspicion when she sat down at the table, as if she were an emissary from a tribe of Amazon women sweeping in to steal the menfolk away. The boys tried to look blasé, but they couldn't hide a bubbling undercurrent of fandom.

“Hey,” she said. “I'm Eliza.”

A boy with thick brown hair styled in an unfortunate mullet reached out a hand. He had an air of authority about him, confident in his element.

“Hello, Eliza. I'm James.”

“Hi, James.”

He introduced the rest of the table, but Eliza didn't absorb any of their names.

“You're here because of Ardor, aren't you?” James's eyes had the bright, almost manic intensity of extreme intelligence. Eliza knew she was reasonably smart, but brilliant people still freaked her out. She didn't like the idea that somebody might be seeing more of her than she wanted them to see.

“What's Ardor?”

One of the girls answered without looking up from some Japanese comic. “It's JPL's name for the asteroid. ARDR-1388.”

“Ardor,” James said, “is a near-Earth object, or NEO, a category including asteroids, meteoroids, and comets that orbit close to our planet. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory keeps tabs on all of them. It's part of their job.”

“Is it big?”

“Big enough to wipe us all out.”

“So why haven't I heard about it before?”

James raised his eyebrows. “You regularly visit the JPL website for updates on NEOs? You keep up with contemporary astronomy journals?”

“I do not.”

“So there you go.”

Eliza did her best to smile through this meteor shower of condescension. “Thank you, James. That was very helpful.” She stood up. Across the lunchroom, Peter Roeslin and his still-girlfriend Stacy looked over at Eliza at exactly the same time. She pretended not to see them.

“Hey,” James said, waving to get her attention, “if you're wondering whether or not to be afraid of Ardor, you shouldn't be.”

“I'm not afraid.”

“Sure you're not,” he said, as if conceding a point he knew he'd already won. “But just in case you were
considering
being afraid at some point in the future, I wanted you to know that there's little rational basis for it. The odds of collision are very slim. In reality, everything we ought to be concerned about is already right here on planet Earth.”

“I thought you said not to be afraid.”

“I said don't be afraid of the asteroid. This is the twenty-first century. The oceans are rising. Mad dictators have access to nuclear weapons. Corporatism and the dumbing down of the media have destroyed the very foundations of democracy. Anyone who isn't afraid is a moron.”

There was something violent in the way James said that last word—“moron”—as if he were at that very moment surrounded by them, and they were his enemies.

“Thanks again, James.”

“Don't mention it. Stay safe.”

After school, a few dozen students assembled on the grass outside the refectory to sky watch. Someone had brought a telescope from the science building, though it was being used primarily to look down people's throats and up into the offices on the top floor of Bliss Hall. Everyone was joking around and having a good time, but Eliza couldn't shake a sense of foreboding. Even if James was right, it wasn't easy to be relaxed about a giant rock flaming through the sky at a gajillion miles an hour.

When she got back to the condo, her dad was sitting in front of the TV, watching the news. Even though she knew he was equally sick wherever he happened to be, Eliza always thought her dad looked about a million times healthier at home than he did in that beige, fluorescent hellhole they called a hospital—all beeping machinery and mechanical beds and death smells.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hey, Gaga. Looks like someone left a love letter for you on the kitchen table.”

A piece of notebook paper with a childish scrawl on the front was propped up like a little tent:
Thanks for stranding me in the suburbs, bitch
.

“You wanna talk about it?” her dad asked.

“Not even a little.”

She sat down in a puffy red chair next to the couch. On the TV, a couple of news anchors were talking about the asteroid, which appeared in a CGI rendering as a colorless rock pocked with craters, like a small misshapen moon.

“. . . our conspicuous new friend will be with us for at least a few more weeks. Labeled ARDR-1388 by the scientists who first discovered it, the asteroid is now affectionately known as Ardor.”

The CGI disappeared, replaced with a white-bearded man with wire-rim spectacles and altogether too much enthusiasm. The sub­title said he was Michael Prupick, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Washington.

“If Ardor has broken its orbit, we'll be able to watch it blaze across our sky on its way out of the Milky Way and into deep space. Near-Earth objects may get a bad rap in Hollywood blockbusters, but they're incredibly useful to astronomers, not to mention the fact that mining companies are researching ways to exploit asteroids just like this one for rare elements in the very near future. In short, we could not be more excited about Ardor's appearance.”

The news anchors popped back up onto the screen.

“Sales of telescopes at local camping and toy stores are already up twenty percent this week—”

Eliza's father muted the television.

“So what poor slob did you strand in the suburbs?”

“Did I not say we wouldn't be discussing that?”

“Did I agree?”

They sat there in silence for a few seconds, while the talking heads on the TV continued their Muppet-y mouthing, but Eliza could feel her dad building up the energy for another push.

“It's just that I need to know you're gonna be able to take care of yourself. With me heading toward, you know, the margins of the picture, and your mom and everything—”

“Don't start.”

“I'm just saying that stuff like this is on my mind, all right? Fucking sue me.”

Eliza thought the rules were understood, even if they'd never been stated explicitly. She and her father were never to bring up either (1) the fact that, within a year, he'd almost certainly be dead, or (2) the fact that Eliza's mother had fallen in love with another man and moved to Hawaii with him. And now her dad was breaking both rules at once. She got up and sat down next to him on the couch.

“Dad, what's going on?”

“Nothing. I don't know. I think it's that fucking rock. It's got me all worked up.”

“I asked some kids at school about it. They said we shouldn't worry.”

Her dad shrugged. “Maybe. But just in case, could you humor me on one thing?”

She already knew what he was going to say. “No.”

“Come on!”

“We've been through this. If Mom wants to talk, she can call.”

“She tried that.”

“Not since last year.”

“Because every time she tried to talk to you, you'd just tell her what a shitty person she was and hang up!” Her dad was actually shouting at her; Eliza couldn't remember the last time he'd done that.

“She deserved it.”

“No, she didn't! I told her she could go, Eliza!” His voice got quiet again, and he put his hand on top of hers. “I told her she could go. Because she was in love. And arguing with that is pointless. It would be like”—he gestured toward the TV—“trying to stop that asteroid with a fucking BB gun. But I know it tore her apart to leave.”

“She still did it.”

Her dad nodded. “Yeah. She did.”