It was a cold night, the night Tommy’s life changed.
A cold September night, specifically, somewhere between the middle and the end, and the sky was clear and sparkling with all the stars the small town’s light pollution would allow. A school night, which usually would mean both Naomi Walker and Tommy Cho wouldn’t be allowed to spend it on the roof of Naomi’s house. However, this night was an exception, because it was a night Naomi had been waiting for for most of her life. It was on that night that Naomi’s life would change, too, though neither of them knew it.
“Whoa, I think that’s the closest I’ve ever seen the moon come to Earth,” Naomi said excitedly that September night, blithely unaware of her fate. “Wonder what that’s about.”
Finger pressed against the paragraph he was reading, Tommy looked up from his history textbook to find his best friend balancing precariously along the edge of the roof, her hands wrapped around her prized telescope. She was pointing it directly up at the sky above their heads, where the moon sat round and almost completely full, and watching patiently for the night’s event to start. Less interested in what the night sky had to offer, Tommy had opted for working on his homework instead. He now regretted that decision, but it had nothing to do with the stars.
“Naomi,” Tommy groaned, his voice slightly pitched in alarm. He snapped his textbook shut and set it aside. It slid against the tiles, forgotten immediately as he climbed to his feet. “Could you maybe just move the telescope instead of—whatever it is you’re doing? You’re one step from falling off and I don’t want to be the one to tell your dad I didn’t stop you.”
Naomi snorted and did not move an inch from her position. Her glasses were shoved up into her hair, creating a neat dent in the cloud of it haloing her head, and Tommy stared at it as he found his way next to her. She was squatting with one knee on that edge like she was planning on proposing to the stars. The sight of it alone made Tommy’s throat go tight with anxiety.
“Naomi,” he repeated, Mr. Walker’s grave face flashing through his mind. Naomi was allowed on the rooftop whenever she wanted to be, and Mr. Walker’s only request was that she always be careful not to fall off. Usually, Naomi was adamant in adhering to this single rule, but something about tonight seemed to strike her rebellious side. Tommy didn’t like that side. He didn’t like the idea of her getting hurt.
“You worry too much,” Naomi teased lightly. Lilting her face slightly away from the eyepiece, she gave him a lopsided grin, the scar on the corner of her lip pulling tight. He felt the matching scar he had on his collarbone itch, like it felt the stretch of hers through the connection of being created at the same time, during a moment of utter stupidity. “Besides,” she continued, “he knows you couldn’t order me around even if you tried.”
Tommy pressed his lips together. She was right, and she knew it. He said nothing as she returned to her task, leaving Tommy to stare her down with a disapproving look they both knew had no real power behind it. After a handful of seconds where it became clear Naomi was definitely not going to budge, Tommy let loose a disgruntled noise and threw himself back on the pile of blankets they’d brought up to last them through the night, his textbook remaining forgotten.
-
“How long until it shows up?” Tommy asked, not for the first time, as he dropped another of his old Hot Wheels cars onto the tiles and watched it skid off the edge into the bushes below. That was his habit—one that he’d picked up a number of years back when he became too old for the toys in the traditional sense but was never bookish enough to simply bring a novel along—a way to kill time while Naomi tracked the mysteries of the universe. He always collected them in the morning, and, if he didn’t remember to, Naomi did. They remained at her house, regardless of who retrieved them, ready for their next chance to be careened off the edge of the abyss that was Naomi’s roof.
“Should be any minute now.” Without moving her face away, Naomi held her arm aloft in a wordless question, and Tommy pulled the pile of blankets apart until he found the old, worn one blue with the spaceships on it. He draped it on her arm. “Why is it always this one?” she complained when she finally surrendered her attention back to the surface of her own planet.
“You keep making me hand you blankets, I’m gonna keep giving you that one,” Tommy replied simply as she wrapped her shoulders in it.
“Been twelve years, bud,” she teased as she returned to her first love. “Let it go.”
“Over my dead body.”
“We can arrange that.”
Tommy scoffed and slid back down, his arms cushioning his head and his eyes on the perfectly clear sky above. They were lucky. It was the best night to see Hermes’ Flight as it flew by Earth for the first time since the era when Romans ruled the world, and Tommy was fairly certain Naomi would kill to be able to have a sky like the one she had tonight. They’d discussed for years, almost as long as they’d known one another, about travelling somewhere for this very event in order to have the perfect conditions, only to be promised such by a nonplussed weatherman just in time to unpack the same bags they’d had at the ready for nearly the entire year before.
It had fizzled a grand scheme to run away in the middle of their senior year to chase down a celestial phenomenon, but, really, Tommy wasn’t all that upset by it. He actually did want to go to homecoming and prom and all those special events they held for the seniors, and he knew he’d be grounded for the rest of his natural life if he’d actually skipped town three weeks into the school year. He’d just never told Naomi that much—not when he’d promised to be by her side for the event back when he was ten and nothing was more important to him than being with Naomi for everything life had coming their way. His opinion on things might have changed seven years later, but that wasn’t a promise he was going to break. Luckily, he hadn’t had to, and Naomi remained none the wiser.
“There it is!” Naomi yelled suddenly, and Tommy startled hard enough to knock his head against the roof.
Wincing, he launched to his feet and rushed to Naomi’s side. She pulled away from the telescope and looked straight up at the sky. Tommy didn’t have to follow her line of sight, because the second he looked up, he saw it.
It was the brightest thing in the sky on that night of the nearly-full moon, a streak of light arcing across the clear atmosphere from behind the curve of the moon and rendering all the stars surrounding it to mere pinpricks of unimportant light. It was speeding so close to Earth in that hour that it was virtually trackable in its speed, the slow centimeter by centimeter of its journey able to be caught by the naked eye if you knew how to keep from blinking.
Tommy felt his breath catch in his throat as he watched it take over the entirety of the night, its tail a shifting mass of colors akin to that of a star, blurring blue and green and red and a dozen other colors Tommy had no names for. He felt the press of Naomi’s shoulder against his arm as she found her way to his side without breaking her line of sight, and he knew she wasn’t breathing, either.
It was beautiful, and it was almost terrifying, the way something so large had to come so close to his own planet to be seen at all, never mind in such a way as it was able to be seen now.
“It’s so much brighter than I thought it would be,” Naomi whispered. “None of the reports said we’d be able to see it moving.”
Tommy opened his mouth to offer some kind of awed reply, but then stopped short and frowned when he realized something.
Was it—getting closer? That couldn’t be right. It was a comet. Comets didn’t get closer to the Earth’s surface like that. He had to be imagining it.
… But if he was imagining it, why was Naomi tensing up as if realizing the same thing?
“Tommy?” Naomi said in alarm, and all of Tommy’s fears surged to the surface. Her hand was clamped around his bicep, and he realized faintly that his fingers had found the hem of the back of her shirt, clutching the fabric tightly. His heart started to hammer as his pulse raced, beating a frantic thrum of noise in his ears that nearly drowned out everything else.
“I see it,” he replied faintly, swallowing as much of his mounting terror as he could. “Should we be running?”
“We’re on a roof,” she reminded him faintly, even as she backed up a step, taking Tommy with her. “Running wouldn’t save us anyway. Not from something striking the Earth like that.”
“Ah,” Tommy croaked. “Fuck.”
Naomi’s voice was nothing more than a whisper when she said, “Language.”
A startled laugh found its way up Tommy’s throat, but it never came to life in the face of Tommy’s fear.
Naomi’s arms found his as the burning ball of colors careened across the dark of the night sky, pulling him close as he tried to tuck her away beneath his arm, only to lose the battle, as he always did, when she realized he wasn’t letting her stand on her own. Unconsciously or not—because her attention was definitely not on Tommy just then—Naomi maneuvered her way around the slope of her roof with Tommy close at hand, and together they watched the comet flash white, then blue, then a dozen other colors in rapid succession before flaring out completely and plummeting down to some unknown location.
And then, everything went utterly still.
No thundering. No shaking. None of the things one might expect from a hunk of space debris striking Earth.
It was silent. It was as if nothing had happened at all.
A heartbeat went by. Then, another. Then, finally, Tommy and Naomi slowly pulled away enough to look at each other in astonishment.
“Holy shit,” Naomi breathed.
“Language,” Tommy tried to choke out, but wasn’t entirely sure he managed. His tongue felt cemented to the roof of his mouth, and his head started to ache with confusion.
“Did— Did you see that? Did that just really happen?”
“Where did it go?” Tommy asked instead of answering her question, knowing she wasn’t really looking for a response
Naomi shook her head as if shaking herself out of a stupur and lunged for the pile of blankets. “Northeast,” she said triumphantly, a stark change from the person she had been just moments before, holding up the compass Tommy had forgotten she kept with all her other night-watching things. She looked up from it at him, and the excitement Tommy found in her dark eyes sent a chill right down his spine. Naomi had always been able to shed fear easier and faster than Tommy could. She was the brave one between the two, and Tommy knew exactly what she was thinking.
“No,” he said immediately, because he’d known Naomi since he was in diapers, and that look never came with anything good for Tommy’s nerves.
“What if it’s close?” she countered, a lilt of pleading to her tone that Tommy also knew far too well. “What if it’s a new kind of space debris? What if we discover something revolutionary?”
Tommy bit his lip and looked out in the direction the flaming thing had disappeared. “There’s no way we’re the only ones who saw it. It could be a bloodbath, wherever it touched down.”
“Well, then, you know what that means,” said Naomi, pocketing her compass and walking to the edge of the roof where her window entrance sat, connected to the office room she shared with her father. She crouched down and swung her legs in, then looked back at Tommy over her shoulder with a grin on her face. Tommy knew what was coming before she even said the words, and he knew nothing he could say would change a damn thing about them. “We just have to get to it first, don’t we?”
-
Winston, Pennsylvania was a relatively quiet town in that day and age. Far enough from the local city to potentially be considered rural, but developed and populated just enough to be considered sleepy instead of ghostly. There was only land enough for a single farm, and that was so far from the town’s center that it was almost considered an unrelated outskirt despite its postal code. Nothing much happened in a town like Winston. Until tonight, that is.
The side roads were pitch dark that late at night, a danger to all who attempted to traverse them instead of going along the main road like a reasonable person might. The street lamps—dingy, old things that were so spaced apart that they were basically useless even where they were installed—flickered dully as Naomi and Tommy made their way past each of them, creating a chilling atmosphere that did absolutely nothing for Tommy’s nerves. He suddenly wished he’d been allowed to get his driver’s license before he graduated, if only for this moment to have a little more protection. A couple of bikes and a tire iron hastily shoved into a backpack wouldn’t do much if someone in the sleepy town of Winston decided right then that they wanted to murder a couple of dumb teenagers chasing down a fiery light at two in the morning.
His parents would flay him alive if they knew what he was doing, and he knew without even needing to think on it that he’d never tell them a word of it. This? Might as well not be happening, that’s how little about the event would pass Tommy’s lips if his parents ever asked.
He just had to make it out alive in order to lie about it in the first place.
Alive? he asked himself. Who said anything about potentially dying?
“Left!” Naomi yelled, her voice echoing down the empty street as she careened her bike in the direction almost a beat too late. Tommy, jarred from his thoughts, nearly wiped out as he copied her.
“Eyes on the road, Walker!” he cried, wobbling back into the momentum Naomi kept up much easier. Tommy was better on his feet, but running to wherever they were going wasn’t feasible.
Though he couldn’t see her face, he could hear the eye roll when she said, “I have to look at the compass, genius. We’ll never find it if I don’t keep us going Northeast.”
“Maybe that’s exactly what I’m hoping for.”
Naomi flung one hand up, the golden compass peeking through her deep-skinned fingers, glinting in the poor light. “Tommy, come on!” she called joyously, like they hadn’t been fearing for their lives not even thirty minutes before. Like they weren’t now chasing down the very thing that had caused that same terror. “Live a little!”
“It’s a rock, Naomi!” Tommy countered, then swerved to avoid a pothole he almost completely missed thanks to the lack of light and the way it basically blended seamlessly into the dark pavement.
“From space!” Naomi shot back.
She had a point, and Tommy snapped his teeth shut around any possible retorts he might have had. If Naomi noticed her victory, she made no indication of it, instead hunkering down on her bike and pushing her pedals faster. Despite being on the football team, Tommy found himself struggling to keep up. He silently blamed the cold.
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