He looks into the crater. “I’m starting to wonder if maybe I could make things a little better around here for someone else like me.”
“You definitely can,” I say. I think of everyone he’s already made it better for around here. Daniel Llamas and Beth Cox and Oliver Hedlesky. Chicky and me. “You’ve been sticking up for everyone but you for a really long time.”
He nods like maybe he knows I’m right.
“I’m serious,” I say. “Since your brother graduated, you’ve been the only reason half the school doesn’t wish for another meteor to fall on the cornhole team.”
He laughs. “Weirdest compliment ever.”
I want so much for this boy. I want so much for all of us. I want Cole to get the chance to love this town forever even if he doesn’t stay here. I want him to find a place where he can be who he is without feeling like he has to earn it. And I want that same choice for Chicky, and for Junior, and for me. I want places on this earth where Cole is seen for everything he is. I want places where the only insults Chicky ever gets are the ones from her sisters. I want places where Junior’s art is seen for how beautiful and brilliant it is, instead of something the Royces of the world can make fun of.
I want places on this earth where I am a girl made of stardust, not one crumbling back into it.
Just then, a meteor drags a thread of light across the sky. I wonder where it’s been, what stars it has seen, what might become of the star-stuff it’s carrying.
Where it might fall, what wonder it might seed into the ground where it lands.
Cole shuts his eyes like he’s making a wish, so I do too.
“What’d you wish for?” I ask.
He smiles. “I’m not telling you that.”
“Because then it won’t come true?”
He laughs. “Because I’m not telling you.”
The woven-together sounds of Chicky and Junior’s distant laughs is soft enough that I could fall asleep to it.
Being in the hollow of this crater where I first touched this planet, the inside of me feels like streams of light, like my veins are becoming the same glowing ribbons that shined off the rock.
I am so lit up with that feeling of glowing that when Cole’s fingers and mine brush between us, I think I might burn him.
But he doesn’t pull back.
We stay.
My eyes are still shut when the laughter fades, when it turns to the growing sound of footsteps.
I open them when Cole pulls me to my feet.
“What—”
Chicky claps a hand over my mouth before I can say anything else.
Junior leads us all into a shadowed patch of the crater, unlit by the moon.
“What is going on?” I whisper when Chicky’s hand gives.
Cole silently flicks his head toward the opposite edge of the crater.
Figures cluster along the rim of the basin.
“Do you come in peace?” one of them calls out.
“Do you bring greetings from your world?” another shouts.
“Have you come to destroy our planet?” a third asks.
We should have known this week would bring out the tourists not just to Meteor, but to where the meteor hit.
“Come on.” The boys hurry us toward the edge that will get us close to the road.
“Wait!” Chicky whisper-shouts.
We all stop.
Chicky raises an eyebrow at me. “These tourists want a show. What do you say we give them a real beaut?”
“A what now?” Cole asks.
“Gentlemen,” Chicky puts on her mafia don voice to address Junior and Cole. “If you’ve got the stomach, we could use a couple of guys with good brains and fast wheels.”
“Who even talks like that?” Junior asks, but he can’t hide his own smile.
“You two gonna stand there”—Chicky keeps on with the voice—“or you two gonna get the getaway car ready?”
She sounds so sure, and her Vito Corleone is so convincing, that the boys sneak off through the shadows like they’ve been dispatched on a mission by M herself.
Chicky pulls me onto the ground. “Stay down.”
My heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my neck.
“Gym roof, fourth grade?” she whispers.
I almost tell her that this is where I leave her, that I can’t do this. Not with the years we lost.
Not with why we lost them.
Then I feel the stardust snaking down to my knees. And the feeling of it glimmering across my skin leaves me with a question:
This whole time, I’ve been thinking about what I’ve wanted to take with me from Meteor, what I’ve wanted to take with me from this planet.
But now I’m starting to wonder: What do I want to leave behind?
“You’re not serious,” I say. “That took months of planning,”
Her eyes are flashing, thinking. “How about Maddie Bascom’s birthday party?”
I think back on how we hid and made enough ghost noises that everyone thought the bowling alley was haunted. The right sounds, at the right time. “Simultaneous approach?”
“You got it,” Chicky says.
We crawl into a hollow where they won’t see us.
“Ready?” Chicky asks, holding my forearms.
I nod.
We’ve both picked up from Cereza how to be loud.
But this is not shouting an order across Selena’s or proclaiming Juliet’s last words.
These are the strangest, most otherworldly sounds our voice boxes can make, like we are our own spaceship. Buzzing and whirring like we are the little green men people so often imagine. Pitching high and low as though we are part machine and part living things from other planets. Even a few robotic, nasal yells of “Greetings, Earthlings!”
This is us. This is how we acted out movies when we were little. It’s how we came up with note-passing schemes so elaborate we were sure we could sell the plans to MI6. This is how we convinced half the girls in our class that we once saw a spaceship deliver the mail.
The tourists reward us with wondering gasps that fill the crater’s basin.
They lean forward, like they’re considering coming down to greet us.
Chicky and I grab each other’s hands, and we run, staying low enough and deep enough in the crater edge’s shadow that the onlookers can’t see us. We fly up the far slope, pitch ourselves over the edge, and race toward the road.
Junior is driving, and Cole is in the front passenger side, and they’ve left the back door open for us to throw ourselves in. Between that and how they’ve stayed out of the tourists’ view, they’re the best getaway men two girls could ask for.
“Go, go, go,” Chicky yells, so Junior’s already rolling out of park by the time we reach the car.
Chicky shoves me in front of her, forcing me in before her. I grab her arm and pull her halfway in, then grab the loop on her jean shorts to tug her the rest of the way into the car, and we’re a heap of limbs by the time we get the door closed.
“Seat belts, ladies,” Junior says, trying to sound patient.
But he loves this. He loves that Chicky is both stranger and more of a leader than she realized.
Chicky and I buckle up like he asks. But as he gets up to sixty-five, we lean out the windows and yell “Greetings, Earthlings!” over the rush of the highway.