Freya biked as hard as she could to stay warm, full of sudden purpose. The binoculars banged against her chest, and the case swung at her side as she fought to get up the big hill. All she could think about was the meteorite.
At the summit, she realized she’d stopped shivering, and she rocketed downhill. There was no fear this time, only tremendous speed and wind howling around her ears.
Home, Freya put her bike into the garage and saw she'd left Randall's bike off the rack. She lifted it back against the wall, wondering again why she'd pumped up his tires.
To sell it. To get rid of all this stuff. The house was full of little knives, digging into her everywhere she turned. They had to go, or she had to go. Freya wanted to talk to Lassa about it, but Lassa was in jail.
She should have gotten out of her wet clothes immediately, but the desire to look at the meteorite was all-encompassing. Instead, she grabbed a bathrobe and wrapped it around herself, then rushed to the kitchen table with the binoculars case.
The lights were brightest here. Freya took off the binoculars and set them on the table, then she opened the case. The meteorite was still there. It hadn’t been a dream.
Freya put a dish towel on the table, so the meteorite didn't scratch up the glass, and peered at the orb under the halogen lights. It was about the size of a baseball. The exterior was singed black. She took a piece of string, encircled the ball, and then extended a tape measure. 75 millimeters. Then she took the kitchen scale and weighed it, 1.96 kilograms.
She made detailed notes in her phone, and it reminded her of doing a mineral identification lab in Earth Science. Freya’s best subject had always been science. It was a topic both Lassa and Randall were always happy to talk about.
The meteorite had to be mostly nickel to be so heavy. Freya tried to do the math to figure out if it could be a pallasite, but she didn't know the density of olivine. After a few minutes of tapping and plugging things into the calculator on her phone, she decided it was probably just a big chunk of iron. It was exceptional, though, almost perfectly spherical.
It was a shame Randall didn’t own a bandsaw. Freya would have loved to cut the meteorite in half and look at its core. She wondered if she should bring it to someone first. Did they X-ray meteorites, or was there some other kind of imaging they used? She scraped at the fusion crust with a fingernail, but it was too tough to give. She picked up the meteorite and held it.
This was in space an hour ago.
Freya set the meteorite back on the dish towel.
An hour ago, she’d been in the river.
She finally stripped off her damp clothes and got in the shower, turning the water as hot as she could stand. She ratcheted up the heat until she couldn't take it anymore. Freya emerged in a cloud of steam, red as a lobster. The mirror was all fogged off, and she swiped at it with her towel and stared at herself through the smudgy moisture.
Too thin and bony. Breasts too small. Zit off-center on her forehead. Hair a mess from being toweled off. One eye blackened, the other with a dark well underneath, both red. Missing two toenails. She tried to picture what she would look like if she had drowned, deathly white from the cold, slowly turning green, then black in the river.
I can never tell anyone.
They would lock her up for sure. She’d be thrown in a padded room at Northern Light Mental Hospital and pumped full of Thorazine. She couldn’t even tell Betty. Betty might tell her mother, and then her mother would call Lassa. No one could know.
She spent a while rinsing all her cuts with peroxide. The toes hurt so bad she nearly started crying again. She slathered them in triple antibiotic ointment and wrapped them in Band-Aids.
Wound up in a towel, Freya scurried across the hallway, leaving damp footprints on the hardwood, and put on some pajamas in her room. Those footprints would have driven Lassa insane.
Freya's room, like the rest of the house, was a part of Lassa's domain. Her mother decided what could be on the walls, what furniture she had, and how it could be arranged. It had to be perfectly neat at all times, everything organized, even places you couldn't see like the dresser drawers and closet. Freya had complained once she felt like she lived in a hotel, and Lassa had smacked her hard enough she never said anything like that again.
There was a money tree in the corner of the room Randall bought the same week Freya was born. She was responsible for watering it every week and turning it. It had been repotted seven times and stood taller than Freya. The trunk was braided, and Randall always called it Yggdrasil, but he was the only one. To Freya, it was just a plant she had to take care of. She wasn't a green thumb like Randall, and neither was Lassa.
Randall had loved myths and legends, but no one else in the family had. Freya had caught Lassa's aggressive disbelief in anything superstitious at an early age. They'd never told her there was a Santa Claus or made her go to church. When she was older, Freya sensed Randall might have liked to do things like have a tree with presents at Christmas or paint eggs at Easter. There was no way Lassa would ever allow it.
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Still, he always seemed to do something nice for them all at the end of the year, a trip somewhere wonderful that would end up on pinned on the big map, or the bicycles.
Freya wondered if there was anything in the fridge. Lassa seldom shopped. She usually worked late and ate at the cafeteria at Hiidenkirnu if she wasn’t out for dinner with one of her new boyfriends. It hadn’t mattered because Freya was never hungry enough to bother with dinner. She was hungry now, though. Nearly drowning had worked up an appetite. She padded out to the kitchen in a set of thick socks, careful to avoid the wet footprints.
The fridge was a stately moon gray, and inside was just as desolate and barren. There was baking soda in a special glass container so Lassa could be spared the horror of having a box of Arm & Hammer in her refrigerator. There were cans of Ensure Lassa drank for breakfast each morning, but Freya hated them. They tasted like chalk. There was literally nothing else except for Pellegrino, some withered lemons, and a jar of mustard.
It was so strange to be hungry! The swim was the first real exercise she'd gotten in months. Freya guessed she could choke down an Ensure, but even with her stomach making demanding noises, the idea seemed repugnant.
It dawned on Freya she could have food delivered. Lassa wasn’t around to give her a hard time about eating junk. She could even order Chinese food, and there would be no lecture about MSG or unfair labor practices or anything.
How much of her problem was just living with Lassa?
Freya was used to dealing with her mother. She hadn't stopped to consider what life would be like without her. The last time she had seriously wanted to run away she was eleven years old, and Randall was still around. She’d just sort of surrendered, told herself she was too sensible for that kind of thing and accepted her place in the flock.
Freya was torn between not wanting to download the ordering app and not wanting to talk to someone on the phone. Not wanting to talk won out, but then she found they didn't have the Pu Pu platter on their online delivery menu. She had to call Panda Pete’s anyway. The woman on the line didn’t speak English well, and it took about four tries to get her to understand Freya needed the delivery driver to have change for a hundred.
After the call, Freya wondered if she’d done the right thing for her lost toenails. As she searched her phone, she heard a loud crack. Her first thought was that a window had broken, and her mind flashed forward to the gun in Lassa’s closet. Her eyes darted around the living room to the front door, but no one was trying to break in.
On the kitchen table, her meteorite had vertical crack in it. As she watched, it split into two silvery halves and came apart. Each half settled onto the dish towel with the broken face pointing upward.
At the center of the half to her right, there was a gleaming violet sphere embedded in the metal, about twenty-five millimeters across. The opposite half had a depression, perfectly centered. It was like an avocado pit.
The sphere caught the light. It was the slightest bit translucent, so it seemed to almost glow in the bright halogen lights. Freya looked closer at the inner shell, wondering if she might see Widmanstätten patterns, but then she remembered they only appeared after a meteorite was acid-etched and polished.
Freya reached out to touch the violet sphere. She was surprised when it yielded slightly to her fingertip as if it were a grape. But when she pressed it again, it was as hard and rigid as glass.
Freya gently pulled the orb from its shell between two fingers and held it up to the light. It came loose easily. It seemed completely opaque. Had it grown darker? She felt a slight vibration and set it on the glass tabletop to observe it closely, but it didn't visibly move.
She was so excited she could barely breathe. She couldn't identify the mineral. The unusual, round meteor split perfectly in half. The polished, spherical core. What if it wasn't natural? What if this was a relic of an alien civilization?
She snapped a hundred pictures of it on her phone from every possible angle. If only Randall was here!
She searched on her phone, trying to find any other meteorite that had a core like this one and finding nothing. Searching, she turned up an article about a meteor observed in 2006 going 300 kilometers per second when it struck the Earth's atmosphere. Its trajectory was so abnormal, the astronomer who'd observed it thought it was possible it had come from another galaxy!
She picked up the sphere, her mind reeling with the thought. Of course, it was far more likely this meteorite had come from within the solar system.
As she held the sphere, Freya felt a sharp prick against her palm. She nearly dropped it in surprise. She held on and set it carefully back on the dishcloth. When she looked at her palm, there was a minute dot of blood.
How had it done that? The sphere was smooth and round. Prodding it with the eraser end of a pencil, she turned the sphere over, looking for any sign of a protrusion or jagged edge, but it was featureless all over.
Her empty stomach twisted with fear. She toyed with a rock from outer space. She'd picked it up with her bare hands. What if it was radioactive? What if it was alien technology? She set it back on the dishcloth.
"Uh…hello?" she asked the rock but, of course, nothing happened. She waited a few moments to see if she would keel over from poison, but nothing happened.
This was a big deal. Freya realized she should take the meteorite to the authorities. But then she would have to explain why she was at the Daffodil Park in the middle of the night. If she did, Lassa would get the full story out of her. It was inevitable. She could sense when Freya lied or held something back, and she never stopped prying until she ferreted it out.
Freya wondered if she could anonymously send it to a scientist, but would they even know what they had? It might lie forgotten in a box forever. She wished she had a microscope to take a closer look at the orb. Tomorrow, she could go back to school and use the biology lab. Then she remembered she was supposed to stay home.
Forget that.
Freya decided she would go back to school with the rock after she bailed Lassa out. She hadn't done anything wrong, and Mr. Evers had only suggested she stay home, it wasn’t a demand. She would still have a black eye, and people would gawk at her, but she didn't care.
She would use the microscope in the biology lab and get a better idea of what she was dealing with, then she would decide if she wanted to tell Lassa about it. If it was radioactive or poisonous or made her sick, what did it matter? Two hours ago, she was about to drown herself.
The doorbell rang. It was her dinner. She tipped the delivery man ten dollars. The Pu Pu platter was kind of a ridiculous thing to order for dinner and, even as hungry as she was, she could only eat half. It wasn't as good as she had remembered it being with Randall.
But nothing was.