Lynn Harris had warned Freya not to go downtown alone, but she couldn’t go back to the empty house. With no way to vent her discovery, the ideas would bounce around in her head faster and faster until she went into full meltdown.
The Starball was alien.
Not a meteorite. Not a military satellite. Not a dream or a figment of her imagination. An alien object, carried in her pocket for WEEKS. She thought about the first night where the shell had split. The way she’d been stuck as she handled it, the tiny dot of blood.
It was just a piece of the shell.
She’d looked at every part of the Starball. There were no protrusions, nothing to pierce her skin. She couldn’t help but shudder at the thought.
What if it put something in me?
This was too big, too much for her to process. The horizon spun. She sat on the curb and shut her eyes. When that didn’t help, she tried the breathing exercise. Breathe out negativity. Breathe in tranquility.
It didn’t help. All she saw was the bright red drop of blood on her palm, glittering in the halogen lights. She sat on the sidewalk, hugging her knees, and rocking back and forth with her eyes shut. If anyone saw, they would think she was insane.
Fear of being seen was enough to get her back on her feet. A navy- blue Acura climbed the hill to Grayson, and the middle-aged man driving it stared at Freya. He was probably someone’s dad.
She gave a limp wave and walked away, trying not to seem like she was fleeing. Behind her, tires slowly ground to a halt. She braced herself. If that man got out of the car, she was going to bolt. Freya didn’t look back until she was at the bottom of the hill, and then she checked to make sure he hadn’t turned around and followed her. The Acura was gone.
Freya’s hand was in her pocket, clutching the Starball because she was nervous. She shook her head at herself.
I’m such a mess. The worst part was there was no one she could talk to. Certainly not Lassa. Dr. Garbuglio had told her she could call anytime, but she would honestly rather drown. It was her own fault for being so weak and driving everyone away. Nobody was left to help her.
Fucking Wisconsin. For the thousandth time, she cursed Betty’s mother for taking her best friend away.
It was three in the afternoon, and the streets were empty. Everyone had finished lunch, and they were back in their offices digesting. Heavy-lidded eyes peered out at her from Lambert’s Delicatessen and Miguel’s Barber Shop, but nothing registered. They would forget her as soon as she moved out of the frame.
For all the old-fashioned light posts and red brick sidewalks, the tarnished bronze historical markers and carefully kept planters full of sneezeweeds and daylillies, there was just nothing to this town. Tourists stopped to get gasoline and ice cream and thought “How quaint!” and then never returned. When Freya left for college, she was never coming back.
If she left for college.
Freya walked down the winding path to the Thoreau Bridge Park. The Sillas river ran wide and shallow here. A rusting railroad bridge scrawled with graffiti ran alongside a newer span of concrete. They’d tagged the new bridge, too, but utility workers had blasted all the spray paint off in ugly vitiligo blotches.
Across the Sillas was the abandoned textile mill. Two tall black smokestacks overrun with ivy rose above walls of crumbling brick more moss than mortar. Freya walked under the bridges, peering up at the dark space where the hill met the underside.
Sometimes drunks slept there. But there were only empty bottles standing up along the concrete ledge. Up ahead, there was a bench beneath a half-bald tupelo tree, a carpet of red spread beneath it. Freya swept fallen leaves off the slats and sat.
There was a stretch of rapids downriver from the bridge, and Freya wondered if she might have washed up there. She should have weighted herself down before she jumped in. How would she do it? People were always slipping out of ropes as they rotted. She wondered if a climbing harness would work. Nylon straps would hold up for a long time.
Back here again already.
Freya tried to think about something else. It was useless to just sit here and pick at the wound. She tried to remember the feeling of drowning, how badly she’d wanted to get out of the river. She’d fought so hard. Where was that Freya when she was lying on her back in the rain, when she was hiding in a bathroom stall?
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She reached into her pocket for the Starball. She couldn’t ignore it any longer. She held the sphere in her palm and dreaded what it meant. This would be an enormous deal. She would be the girl who found evidence of alien life.
She would have to explain what she was doing at Daffodil Park on a rainy night, would have to lie and say she’d been there to look at the Taurids. There would be interviews, articles, a thousand kinds of attention she didn’t want.
They’d take the Starball away from her, and they’d wind up cutting it open to figure it out. If she went to the wrong scientist, and they got the government involved, they would certainly try to cover the whole thing up. They would put Freya and Lassa in top-secret protective custody. It was just too big of a deal not to.
As Freya stared at the violet orb, she realized she didn’t have to tell anyone. No one ever had to find out about this.
The enormity of the idea welled up around her. It was the biggest secret in the history of the world. Freya Jokela, who kept the only evidence of extraterrestrial life in the pocket of her jeans. She could reveal it anytime she wanted to, or never. It was such a monstrously selfish act. She could barely believe she’d thought of it. Freya smiled.
A hand shot from behind Freya and plucked the Starball out of her palm. She was too slow to react, her fingers closed on nothing. With a yelp, she jumped to her feet, wheeling around with both fists balled.
Malcolm Lewis had snuck up behind her and stolen the Starball. He smirked as he held it out between thumb and forefinger.
“Give it back,” she demanded.
“What’s this, Freya?” Malcolm crooned. She darted forward to grab the Starball back, but he held it up too high for her to reach.
“You out here playing with yourself, Jokela?” Malcolm teased in an infantile voice. She knew he was doing it to make her mad. It still worked.
“Give it back!”
“Or what? Are you gonna snitch on me again?”
“I didn’t say shit! You were on camera, stupid. It’s your own fault. I told you to leave me alone!”
That wiped the grin off his face.
“That shit wasn’t my fault. I didn’t even do anything. I literally just sat next to you.”
“Why? There were other places to sit. Why do you keep following me around? It’s so creepy. I’ve asked you so many times to stop.”
“I didn’t do anything to you,” Malcolm repeated, as if that would convince her. “I was just being friendly and saying hi. Why do you have to be so stuck up?”
“I don’t want to talk to you! I don’t like you! Just leave me alone!”
Freya was almost screaming at him. He flinched.
“Okay, fine. Go ahead and be on your own. No one else gives a fuck about you,” Malcolm hissed. He looked like he was about to cry.
Freya stared at him, trying to figure out if he was really upset or just trying to manipulate her. Either way, she wanted nothing to do with him. When she didn’t respond, he turned his back on her and started walking away.
“HEY! FUCKING GIVE IT BACK!” Freya howled.
“Oh, this? Here.”
Malcolm turned around. There was no weight on his voice now, the sad expression was gone. He pretended to toss the Starball back to her, then wound up and threw it as hard as he could. Freya watched the Starball arc through the air and plunge into the river.
“Go get it,” he taunted.
Before he could get the words out of his mouth, she was running down the hill. She hit the shore and never hesitated, crashing into the river with her eyes locked on the spot where the Starball fell.
Cold, black water was in her shoes, soaking her legs, and she kept going, wading in waist deep. The river was so cold it forced the air out of her chest, but she didn’t stop. Malcolm shouted behind her, but she couldn’t understand him. She only heard the water splashing around her.
As she neared the center of the river, the water was chest deep. She swam, wishing she’d stopped to take her shoes off. She was near the spot she thought the Starball had fallen. She dove to look for it. The cold water was stunning at first, but she could bear it.
She grasped at the riverbed and came up with nothing but mud. A part of her knew this was insane, it was impossible to find a marble thrown into a river. She ignored it. The Starball was all she had.
Freya ran out of air and went back up to breathe. The current carried her downriver. The cold water had driven all thoughts away, and she felt strangely, as if she watched this happening to someone else. She dove again, concentrating only on the Starball. She clawed the mud at the river bottom, getting nothing but fistfuls of cold clay. Then her fingers closed around something hard. She felt a familiar shape in her palm.
She had it!
The Starball was the only warmth in the world. She swam for the opposite side of the river, trying to get as far away from Malcolm as she could. It was awkward swimming with the orb locked in her fist, but she wouldn’t let go. She reached the opposite bank and climbed out.
Just like last time, her shoulders were hunched, and her teeth chattered, but she didn’t care. She’d done something almost impossible! She shook as much from excitement as cold. Freya bent down and shook her hand in the river, washing the mud off the Starball.
“What’s wrong with you?” Malcolm yelled across the river.
Freya stood up, wringing her hand. She held up the Starball, then flipped him the bird. Her hands were so numb it was difficult to get the Starball back in her pocket afterward. She managed to get her phone out of the other pocket. It was meant to be waterproof, but she’d never tested that before. The battery was nearly dead.
“Hey, S-S-Siri. Call a cab,” Freya chattered. It took a few tries to get the phone to understand her.
Across the river, Malcolm saw her with the phone and turned and ran away. Leaves drifted by on the Sillas River and disappeared in the rapids, bound for the bottom.