The day began bad and stretched into something long and dreadful. It rained as Freya biked to school and, when she finally arrived, she was soaked through. She had to go change into her gym clothes, and she felt awkward in the halls, like everyone looked at her.
She had to explain herself again in every class. Her teachers all had distrustful looks, as if she would lie to them to get away with wearing musty gym clothes. She checked her locker after lunch, but everything was still damp, it was going to be a uncomfortable ride home.
In all the empty spaces of the day, she kept remembering the awful look on Lassa’s face. It was the shittiest thing Freya had ever said to her mother. The apology didn’t matter. Neither of them would ever forget it.
Classes dragged on. There was something wrong with the school network, and none of the interactive whiteboards worked. No one could retrieve anything off the shared drive, and it made all the teachers irritated, except for Mr. Manzinni.
When they sat for Trig, Mr. Manzinni gleefully wheeled out an old incandescent lamp projector, the kind you used with transparency sheets and Vis-à-Vis markers. As he set it up, he cackled about how he hadn’t used one in almost a decade. It was kind of retro at first, but the novelty wore off quickly.
Freya squinted at the screen, wondering if that squiggle was supposed to be a four or a nine. At the center of the whiteboard, an image of an ethernet jack with a break in its cord kept blinking. She ran her fingers over the Starball in her pocket.
Is it you? she wondered. She remembered when their internet at home had gotten messed up. The mysterious entry in the DHCP table maxing out their cable modem. What if that wasn’t just some neighborhood kid running torrents? What if it was the Starball?
Freya frowned at the implausibility of it. For that to be true, it would require that, two weeks after crash landing in the river, this probe from an alien civilization had figured enough of the OSI protocol stack to communicate with their router. Not just communicate, it would have had to crack WPA to even authenticate in the first place. There was no way.
She couldn’t believe it would go to such crazy lengths without even bothering to pulse “Hi!” at her in Morse code or flicker the lights in her bedroom. Freya would have gladly told the Starball anything it wanted to know.
Still, the possibility had to be addressed. How could she test that hypothesis? Her first idea was to put the Starball in a heavy lead box to see if isolating it fixed the network, but she didn’t have anything like that. Then she wondered if it had to be lead. Pretty much any metal was good at blocking wireless transmission.
It was a shame she didn’t have the halves of the meteorite with her, she’d brought them home and hid them in her closet. She tried to think of where she could find a metal box to act as a faraday cage and realized she could just put the Starball in her locker. Her clothes were in there right now, probably still damp and dripping. She could put the Starball in the pocket of her jeans, shut the door, and see if the disruption stopped.
As she was thinking about it, there was a chime from the intercom, and everyone looked up. A technician announced they’d fixed the problem. He apologized for the disruption and asked teachers to manually reboot their whiteboards.
Feigning outrage, Mr. Manzinni trundled over to hold down the power button, and the Grayson Logo appeared. The whiteboard booted back up and found the network. Freya frowned at the screen.
Can it read my thoughts? Did it know I was about to put it in my locker?
It was a weird thought, and it made the whole interaction this morning seem even stranger. Had she really drunk the Ensure? Freya tried to remember if she’d had a weird taste in her mouth when she woke up and couldn’t. She was usually out of it for a few minutes after waking.
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
Was Lassa right about the Lunesta? Freya doubted everything. Maybe she’d just gone mad with grief or suffered brain damage getting socked in the eye. Maybe the Starball was just an ordinary rock, and she’d imagined everything at the river. Maybe she’d died that night and Hell was just Mr. Manzinni going on and on about polynomials. As the hour stretched on, it seemed more and more plausible.
When class finally ended, Freya remained behind as everyone else stampeded for the door. She was the only one left in the class, but she still looked over her shoulder before she pulled the Starball out of the pocket of her shorts. It was real, she hadn’t dreamed this.
“Do whatever you want, I don’t care,” Freya whispered to the orb. She waited for any communication at all, but there was nothing.
Trigonometry was her final period. Outside the hallway was a surge of people scrambling to leave Grayson. She entered the stream, feeling increasingly uncomfortable in the herd. When she couldn’t take it anymore, she ducked into an empty corridor that led to the covered walkway to the arts building side entrance. No one ever came this way. There was a bench halfway across the walkway where she could wait for the madness to subside.
The arts building was a blocky hulk built in the mid-1970s. Every year, the school board discussed tearing it down to put up something more modern, but they never quite found the money. The building’s façade was concrete inlaid with pebbles. Over the years, many of the stones had fallen out and. near the entrance to the building. the wall was studded with used gum people had stuck in the gaps.
A steady rain fell. Freya swept water off the bench and sat, feeling dampness soaking through her the back of her shorts. It didn’t matter. She was about to change into wet clothes, and then bike home in the rain. She would basically never be dry again.
Freya told herself she was just waiting for the mob to clear out, but nearly everyone was gone already. Time continued to creep along. She grew colder and wetter, but she didn’t move. The day had drained everything out of her. She didn’t even want to go home.
As rain hissed around her, she had the peculiar feeling once more. This was all happening to someone else. She was just a disembodied observer, watching someone pilot a malfunctioning human.
Down the hill, Freya saw the spot she’d lain in the grass and let the rain cover her. She imagined herself melting in that rain, dissolving into the earth like salt until a patch of dead grass was the only sign she’d ever existed.
Her spiral of self-pity was interrupted by lights flicking on in the nearest classroom. It was a dance studio. The walls were floor-to-ceiling mirrors ringed with ballet barres. Girls in yoga pants filed in, forming small clusters of conversation. Peering from her perch on the bench, Freya saw thin slashes of the class through the recessed arrow-slit windows. A boy in a leotard entered and stood apart from the others.
Freya knew him: Radomir Stich. His father, Dymek, worked for Lassa at Hiidenkirnu, she was his boss’s boss. Radomir was rail-thin, with thick eyebrows and large, wide-set eyes, Freya had been friends with him since middle school. They’d once been close but no longer. Just like everyone else.
Radomir stood at the front of the room and said something. Everyone turned to face him. Freya realized he wasn’t taking the class, he was teaching it. She was afraid he would look out the window and see her skulking in the rain, but he was completely focused on teaching.
The rain roared against the steel roof of the walkway, but she perfectly imagined what he sounded like. When they’d first met, his Russian accent had been so thick she could barely understand him. He’d gotten so much better in just a few years.
Freya looked at the way the girls stood as he spoke with them. Radomir used to shrink into his shoulders and stare at people’s shoes when he talked. Now, he was in his element, holding his head high and speaking confidently.
Radomir showed the class a series of steps that looked simple when he did them. When the class tried, many faltered. Freya watched through the window, trying to pick out who the good dancers were.
Radomir stopped everyone and corrected a girl who was a head taller than him. Though Freya couldn’t see her face, her hair gave her away. Curly and black, her ponytail could barely contain it.
That had to be Jennette Lewis, the captain of the Lacrosse team. She was ferocious on the field but didn’t seem like one of the better dancers. Freya watched her bring her palm to her forehead in embarrassment. Radomir said something short to her, and then went to another girl, moving out of the frame. Jennette’s head tracked him for an extra beat. Freya wondered if there was something to that, but she couldn’t tell from this position.
Another lost cause. She kept staring at the class, getting colder as they worked up a sweat. Contracting while they grew. She wanted to leave, but she couldn’t find the strength.