by Lydia Sharp
I tear my gaze from Lucy’s face and tilt my head back to look up into the black.
“Spica,” she says, starting our game. Name all the visible stars. I guess it’s not a game, though, because no one wins or loses. We just keep going until one of us declares game over.
“Jupiter,” I say.
“Not a star.”
“Yeah, but from here it looks like one.”
“JJ.”
“Fine. Ursa Major.”
“That’s a constellation.”
“It contains stars. It counts.”
“Game over.”
“That was fast,” I say through a laugh.
“You changed the rules.” Her tone is annoyed, but she smiles. “You’re chaos personified, you know that?”
“Thank you.” I keep us swinging gently, like a rocking chair, and her breaths get slow and even. Relaxed. The moon is bright and swollen tonight, but not full.
“Look at that fat gibbous.”
Lucy feigns offense. “What did you call me?”
“You know I was talking about the moon,” I say, giving her a playful bump of my leg, and her head bounces softly. “Besides, if I ever called you the moon, it would be a compliment.”
“Please, enlighten me.” She curls up her legs and releases a wide yawn. “How can a lifeless, dusty, crater-filled ball of cold rock be a compliment?”
“Challenge accepted.” But it’s not a challenge at all. “The moon is a light shining in a dark place.”
She snorts. “Cliché.”
“I wasn’t done yet. The moon is a loyal, steadfast, dependable companion to the earth. Always in flux but entirely predictable. And even when it’s not full and appears broken, it still has enough strength to pull the tides.”
I look down to see her reaction, see if I should keep going on about the wonders of the moon and how she compares to it. She isn’t looking back up at me, but her lips twibble.
I must have said something wrong. “Lucy—”
She flinches, pointing toward the midnight-blue horizon. “Did you see that?”
“No. What—” A streak of white flashes across the sky. Quicker than a blink, it’s gone.
“There’s another one!” she squeals.
“I saw it!” Excitement bubbles in my chest. I almost missed it, though. It wasn’t that bright, or that high. “I’ll get my telescope. We can see them better—”
“No.” She reaches up to put a hand on my arm. “Stay. Please? I’m comfy. We’ll see them with the telescope tomorrow night. Right now, let’s just …” She pulls her hand back inside the folds of the blanket. “Stay,” she repeats, as if she’s afraid I might actually deny her request.
Never. What the moon wants, the moon gets.
“All right,” I say. “Let’s play a new game. We’ll both make a wish on the next one, and then see whose comes true.”
She hums in amusement, the sound vibrating softly against my thigh. “Do wishes on falling stars come true? Wouldn’t the fact that they’re falling and disintegrating cancel it out?”
“Good question.” I pull my cell phone out of my pocket and ask Google. Just as the search results pop up, there’s another flash in my peripheral vision. Lucy squeezes her eyes closed tight, making her wish.
“I missed it.”
“I didn’t.” She opens her eyes again, smiling. “What does Google say?”
I tap the link to the top article, then skim through it. “Hm. It doesn’t cancel it out.”
“Good.”
“Not necessarily. According to this website, if you wish on a falling star, you’ll receive the opposite of whatever you wished for.”
“Oh … Oops.”
“What did you wish?”
“For Marty to work, eventually, so I can …”
We never talked about this. All those weeks building the device together, we never admitted our personal reasons for wanting it to work. It was just a school project, a way to get a good grade—until it was more than that, because we started to hope. Or at least I did. I didn’t realize Lucy had, too.
“So you can what?” I press.
“Go back to five years ago and see my mom. Convince her not to leave us. Then we could have a second chance at, maybe, having a relationship of some kind. Even if she wasn’t the greatest mom. That would be better than nothing.”
“Lucy … I want that for you more than anything. But—”
“There are no second chances,” she says with me.
“Yeah.”
“And I just nailed that coffin shut tight with a backwards wish on a falling star. Marty will never work now.”
I shove my phone in my pocket, then push us into a gentle swinging motion again. “You know that stuff isn’t real. It’s superstition. It’s people trying to find explanations behind things that can’t be explained, because they’re just coincidence.”
“I know.” Her voice is too quiet, though. Disheartened. This isn’t the note I want to end the night on. We were laughing a few minutes ago. We had ice cream. We had magic. We can turn this around.
“Okay, let’s make a wish on the moon, just to be safe. It’s so big I bet it trumps all the stars, falling or not.”
“You’re full of it,” she says, “but okay. Just to be safe.” She looks up at the broken moon, then closes her eyes, and so do I. My other senses immediately heighten, focusing on the smell of rain lingering in the air, the sound of the swing hinges creaking, the sugary taste of ice cream still on my tongue, the feel of Lucy’s warm body wrapped in fleece pressed against me …
I know what I want, and even though it can’t possibly come true, I think it anyway.
I wish we could stay like this forever.
Lucy hasn’t said a word to me all day, but as expected, her text comes through at seven thirty on the nose.
Lucy: Where are you?
Me: Leaving soon
I slip my phone back into my pocket and look up, into the mirror hanging off my closet door. Back to the task at hand. Maybe the twentieth time’s the charm. But within seconds, my fingers get tangled and the thing around my neck looks like it needs to be put out of its misery.
Whoever invented bow ties can go straight to—
Something bright, blinding white, flashes outside my bedroom window, snapping my head in that direction. What the … ? The whole room vibrates. Shudders. Like an earthquake. In Ohio? It’s been known to happen but extremely rarely. The windows rattle, my reflection in the mirror blurs, and Marty vibrates across the top of my bookshelf where I left him after school yesterday. He lets loose a few blue sparks, and I rush to stamp them out on the carpet. Piece of trash, why didn’t I just dump him yesterday?
Then, as quickly as it all started, it stops. I run to the window and look outside. Nothing seems different. Same acres of lush spring grass and our long gravel driveway that leads to the country road. No power lines have come down. What made that light, then? It was too bright for a meteor, even a big one, and it’s not dark out, anyway, even though it will be soon. They’re not visible yet.
Everything’s quiet. Even the horses out back aren’t whinnying like they’re scared and confused. Weird. A large fly buzzing too close to them would set them off. Why wouldn’t an earthquake?
Never mind about the horses, I need to check on my parents and sister. I turn to rush out and do just that, when—
“Knock, knock,” Mom says from the other side of my bedroom door. “Are you decent?”
She sounds fine.
“Yes, come in.” I yank the strip of blue fabric out from around my neck, practically choking myself in the process. “Did you feel that earthquake?”
Mom’s reflection approaches mine in the mirror. “No, what? We don’t get earthquakes here.” She catches sight of the bow tie in my fist, and without a word, she takes it from me and starts fastening it around my neck like a pro. In three seconds flat, she’s done.
That’s my mom, top student at YouTube University. Just abou
t everything she knows, she learned from the internet. We watched the how-to videos for bow ties after picking up my tux, but apparently she’s the only one who retained the lessons.
“You feeling all right?” she says. “You look nervous.”
“I’m not nervous, I just … You sure you didn’t feel any vibrations?”
Her blue-gray eyes narrow and study me from beneath her brunette bangs, but then Shayla comes blazing into the room, effectively cutting off any lingering fears I had that anyone got hurt. If they’re both okay, and so are the horses, then Mama likely is, too. Maybe I am just nervous about tonight. Or overexcited. Too frustrated with the bow tie. Enough to see and feel things that aren’t there? I don’t know.
“Look at you all fancy!” Shayla squeals, and I can’t help but laugh. “Dance with me, JJ.”
It’s not a request; it’s an order, one I know better than to disobey. She grabs my hands and starts doing this jump-skip-fairy-sprite-forest-dance thing, her medium-brown cheeks bunched up with a huge grin, humming through her teeth like a ventriloquist, probably some song she just made up, while I stand in place, wondering what I’m supposed to do. I opt for twirling her around me a few times, then sweep her up into my arms, and she begs me to toss her onto my bed. She’s so tiny, she weighs nothing.
Shayla may not share my genetics, but she is 100 percent my baby sister. Mama was newly divorced and newly pregnant when she became my riding instructor, and that’s how she met Mom. Not long after Shayla was born, they got married. At the time, we had to travel to a different state for their marriage to be legal. I was only six, so it was like going on a vacation. I got to be the ring bearer. And that was the last time I wore a tux before tonight.
Shayla’s curtain of long black braids swishes, then splays out on the bed as she lands with a little bounce. “I can’t wait until my prom.” Her big brown eyes go bigger, widening toward Mom, and she pops up onto her knees, making her way across the mattress. Dragging the blankets along behind her. “Can I wear a tux to my prom, too? But a pink one? With roses embroidered on the sleeves? And sequined high heels? And a giant rose corsage on my wrist?”
“Of course you can,” Mama says, entering the room. “You can do whatever you want, baby girl.” Shayla jumps off the bed, shouts in victory, then runs off down the hall and thunders down the stairs. She’s a human tornado, always has been, appearing just long enough to let everyone know she’s a force, then disappearing again.
So Mama is okay, and no one seemed to notice anything weird going on. It’s like the earthquake, bomb, or whatever it was never happened.
Did it?
Mama whips out her phone. “Can I get a few pictures before you leave?”
Pictures, fantastic. I was hoping we could avoid this part. That’s blackmail material for every stage of my life after this. “Okay,” I concede, “but just a few. I’m already running late, thanks to a bow tie malfunction. I was supposed to pick up Lucy”—I pull out my phone to check the time—“four minutes ago. You know how she is.”
“Look here and smile,” Mama says. “Yes, we know how Lucy is, and that’s why we love her. She’s good for you. You’re good for each other.” Mama laughs, snapping again and again, changing the angle of the phone in between, telling me to “vogue” and “strike a pose” like it’s still the 1990s and she’s the teenager here. She’s enjoying this way too much. “I wish we could get the both of you together. Can you ask her dad to take some pictures of you together for us?”
Sigh. “Sure.”
“Look at him, Danni, our little boy is all grown up.” Mom’s voice cracks like she’s about to cry. God help me, that’s worse than the pictures. If she cries, then I’ll start crying.
“Please stop making a big deal of this. It’s just prom,” I say, as if I haven’t been looking forward to this for years. Seeing Shayla talk about prom with stars in her eyes … that was me when I was a freshman. Prom seemed so far away then. How is it here already? How is high school almost over?
Suddenly it all feels surreal. This tux I’m wearing. Mama snapping pictures and Mom getting emotional. Imagining Lucy in her own room right now, making last-minute finishing touches while she’s waiting for me to pick her up. Wondering what her dress looks like. Finally getting to see it.
My heartbeat kicks up a few notches. This is really happening, right now and never again. Live it up, JJ, you only get one senior prom. Carpe noctem—seize the night. You can worry about what happens after … after.
“And soon you’ll be graduating,” Mom is saying, forcing me to think about the very thing I don’t want to—graduation. Moving on. Living half a world apart from my best friend, who’s been right here with me through all of high school. I try to shake it off as Mom continues, “Then college and a career and, knowing you, you’ll probably start a colony on Mars and we’ll never see you again except through a telescope. It’s bad enough you’re moving to Texas, but at least we can take a plane there once in a while. We can’t do that if you’re in outer space.”
“Fine. I promise I won’t start a colony on Mars unless you can live there, too.”
“Thank you,” she says, like this was an actual serious conversation.
Mama finally wraps up her photo shoot, and I check myself in the mirror again. Hair is good … enough. Floppy is in style now, right? Bow tie effectively tied. Contacts instead of glasses. Converse instead of dress shoes. Tickets—no, Lucy has the tickets so I wouldn’t lose them. She’s got me covered. All I need to do is grab my car keys and I’m good to go. Unless I’m forgetting something …
I’m probably forgetting something. If Lucy were here, she’d tell me. She forgets nothing and notices everything. That’s part of why we’re good together, like Mama said. We balance.
“Remember the rules,” Mom says.
“I know, I know. No drugs, alcohol, speeding, getting anyone pregnant, or being a juvenile delinquent.”
Mom crosses her arms. “You forgot the most important one.”
“What’s that?”
“Have fun,” Mama says with a smile.
My shoulders drop, and I smile back at her. At both of them. I pull them up against me in a none-too-gentle group hug, then kiss each of them on the top of their head. “Love you, love you. I promise to have more fun tonight than I’ve ever had in my entire life.”
“Well, maybe not too much fun …” Mom says, a warning in her tone.
“I’m going to have exactly zero fun if you guys don’t let me go.”
They both drop their arms and back off. Mama tugs Mom out of the room. “Come on, Lex, time to cut the cord.” Then to me, she says, “Be safe, JJ.”
“I will. Don’t wait up for me.” I usher them out of my room and downstairs.
“Don’t be out all night,” Mom volleys back.
“I won’t,” I promise. Just half the night. Or three-quarters, if things are going really great and I “accidentally” lose track of time.
At the bottom of the stairs, they go through the kitchen and out to the backyard to feed the horses. Shayla’s probably already out there refilling water buckets. I usually help them, too—many hands lighten the load, as Mama would say—but not tonight. I make it all the way to the front door and get as far as grabbing the doorknob before I remember, with a frustrated groan, that my keys are still sitting on my nightstand.
Rushing upstairs, I pat my back pocket—got my wallet. Okay. Good. And I put the telescope in my trunk last night, after Lucy reminded me, so we wouldn’t have to come back here to get it before heading out to the bluffs later. I stretch across my bed and snatch the keys off my nightstand, hoping that was my flub of the night. Everything I do has one screwup, that’s just me. Sometimes it’s big, sometimes small. At least I got it out of the way early this time, and all it did was make me a little bit more late. Nothing too major.
As I skitter down the stairs, my phone chimes. A new text.
Lucy: On your way yet?
Me: Yes I’ll be there
in ten
More like fifteen, but she doesn’t know I haven’t actually left.
Lucy: Are you texting and driving?
Lucy: Don’t answer that if you are!
Well, now what? If I answer her, then she knows I’m not driving yet. If I don’t, she might think I got in an accident from texting and driving. I take the neutral middle road with a quick thumbs-up, then pocket my phone, hop in my car, and crunch tires down our driveway, out to the country road. It’s clear and the asphalt is dry. No imminent dangers. My promise not to speed echoes in my mind, but I’m late and Lucy’s stressing about it. She had this planned so we’d get there right before dinner is served at eight. That’s almost impossible now, even if I didn’t have to pick up Jenna, too. This night is supposed to be fun for us, and it won’t be fun if Lucy is stressed the whole time.
I press the gas pedal down farther. The engine revs, then shifts gears. I’ll be there in ten.
Only three minutes have passed before Lucy’s texting me again, the chime ringing out from my hip.
“This better be an emergency—” I twist to get into my pocket, inadvertently pushing harder on the gas pedal, just as a big curve in the road approaches way too fast. I know this road, I know this turn, so I should know better. It’s not just a sudden curve but also a steep descent. The phrase “chaos personified” is actually flashing through my mind in bright neon lights when a series of things happen all at once, but also, weirdly, in super-slow motion.
I untwist and yank my hand out of my pocket, still holding my phone but then quickly releasing it, and the thing goes flying toward the passenger seat. I hear it knock against the window. Clunk!
Grabbing the steering wheel with both hands, I hit the brakes and manage to keep control of the car as it hugs the sharp bend at no less than fifty miles an hour, all while wondering how exactly am I not dead? Momentum pulls me hard to the right as I steer left and my seat belt locks.
And just as I safely reach the other side of the bend and the bottom of the slope, and my brain remembers breathing is necessary, something big, orange, and billowing in the spring breeze—a dress? in the middle of the road?—flashes by my windshield. I swerve hard to the left again and slam the brakes even harder. Tires squeal and someone screams. Someone on the road? Or was that me? Then the front end of my car dips on the left side—I overcompensated and hit the ditch—and I swerve to the right again, pulling back up onto the asphalt just as everything comes to a screeching halt.