Besides, it wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just a thing that was now true. Her mother was dying, where yesterday she wasn’t.
She opened the window and sat on the sill, her feet on the roof.
U awake?
The text was to Rodney, who probably wasn’t. He’d just begun working at the shake place in the Oakdale Mall, which was weird for her because she didn’t have any other friends who were holding down jobs, part-time or otherwise. He was her oldest friend, though—in terms of his actual age, not how long she’d known him—so it was appropriate he be the first to enter the work force.
He also lived right up the street, had a car of his own, and didn’t have a problem using it to go places in odd hours. She tried to take advantage of that whenever she could: it was only a matter of time before he decided he didn’t want to hang around with the little kid down the road any longer. Once he started dating girls his own age, she’d be a hindrance, surely.
Annie sort of wished she were older, because she sort of wanted to date him herself sometimes. Only sometimes, though. She had reached a peculiar age where about half the time the idea of having a boyfriend was the greatest thing in the world, and the other half of the time it was the most terrifying thing she could imagine considering. She decided that meant she wasn’t ready to start dating anyone for real. Fake-dating, sure. She’d been fake-dating Dougie off and on for eight years, but that was just playing. They kissed once, but that was just playing too. Although he might have offered a contrary assessment of their relationship if pressed.
No, I’m not. Sound asleep.
Me too. Good stars tonight.
Neither she nor Rodney knew more than a couple of constellations, and exactly zero star names (she wasn’t counting the sun, because it was the sun and because she couldn’t see it at night anyway), so they made up names. It was another one of those things she expected him to grow tired of, especially on nights when he had an early milkshake shift to get up for.
A meteor came streaking along the horizon. Her first thought was it was an early sign of the Perseid shower, but she knew from the previous year which direction to expect those from, and it wasn’t coming from that direction. (The constellation Perseus was one of the ones she could identify, specifically because of the Perseids.)
I should wish upon a star, she thought. Would that work?
Jiminy Cricket was now singing in her head, and that was unfortunate.
Meteors flamed out pretty fast when they hit the upper atmosphere. This one wasn’t, which made it a compelling surprise for about ten seconds, until it occurred to Annie that a meteor that made it all the way to the surface could cause a lot of damage, and this one was headed right for Sorrow Falls.
Or so it seemed. It was hard to judge real distance when looking up in the sky.
Just like every other kid—she assumed—when she reached a certain age she went through a UFO phase. Hers lasted maybe a year, which was long enough to absorb a few ideas on the matter of objects that flew in the night sky but could not be readily identified by the observer. One idea was that it was incredibly hard to distinguish between small and nearby, versus large and far away. Something a few hundred feet in the air and tiny, if misapprehended as something a mile in the air and large, could look like a vessel moving faster than a commercial airliner instead of, say, a firefly caught in a breeze.
She was pretty positive the thing in the sky at this moment was actually falling from outer space, but the illusion of it bearing down on Sorrow Falls specifically was probably just that: an illusion.
It was hard to shake, though. From her angle it hadn’t moved left or right, but it had gone from high in the sky to lower in the sky, and it had gotten brighter. That really did give the impression it was coming her way.
Look out the window.
It held position for another three-count, then zigged to Annie’s left, which was to say its descent angle clarified itself by heading northward. It was now traversing the sky from her two o’clock to her ten o’clock.
What for?
Just do it, quickly.
It wasn’t going to come near Sorrow Falls. It was headed for Vermont or Canada.
O cool.
Meteor gonna wreck Toronto prob.
It was still coming down fast, though, which she was calculating based on how bright it was.
It was at this moment Annie realized she was looking at something other than a meteor. First, there was the thought:
I shouldn’t still be able to see this.
If it was a meteor, it should have flamed out or slowed down enough by friction to stop causing the air around it to catch fire, which was what made them glow in the first place. This one was still glowing, somehow.
Second, and far more importantly, it turned.
She nearly fell out of the window when this happened. It was on its right-to-left trajectory, going down at about a fifteen-degree angle, when it maneuvered into a descent that was straight down. It did that for five seconds.
Her phone rang.
“Did you see that?” Rodney asked. “Holy crap, what is it?”
“I saw. And… I think it stopped moving?”
It looked like it stopped, but it was still getting brighter somehow.
“It didn’t stop, it’s heading straight for us.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Annie, that’s a spaceship. It has to be.”
She didn’t know what to say. Rodney was right, but he couldn’t be right.
For about five seconds, Annie thought the ship had plans to land right on her house, which would have been something of a capper for the way the evening had gone so far. It did come close, but once it was about two hundred feet up (probably?) the trajectory clarified again.
It was looking for a place to land. It was an alien spaceship and it was looking for a place to land.
The ship reached a spot down the road to her right, stopped dead in the air, and disappeared from view.
“Rodney, how soon can you be here?”
“We should call the sheriff.”
“We should get in your car and go meet the aliens. Then we can call the sheriff.”
“I’ll be outside in ten.”
ANNIE SNUCK out of her house on a semi-regular basis, either to go on a walk by herself or to drive somewhere with Rodney and whoever else he had tagging along. Getting out was easy enough, because the drop from the porch roof was only about ten feet.
Getting back in was a little harder. If she wanted to use the bedroom window she had to climb onto the roof, either by using the trellis on the side of the house or the tiny tree growing beside the porch. Neither of those things was built to support her, nor were they very good at it. More than once she ended up dangling from the edge of the roof and wishing she had sufficient upper body strength to pull herself up from that position. Twice, she succeeded in swinging her legs around and up, but it wasn’t a super pleasant experience because the roof tiles were like sandpaper.
Most times, she just snuck in the front door.
She hopped down from the roof and walked up the street to the standard meeting point, a large tree with a big enough trunk to hide a thirteen-year old girl behind. This was so Rodney wasn’t picking her up right in front of the house. Her parents probably knew she snuck out and were implicitly okay with it, but there was no point in treating them like idiots.