﻿TWO DAYS LEFT
I am seventeen years and fifty-six days old when I realize I've been wrong about asteroids all my life.
When I thought of them—if ever I did—I pictured the grainy photos in last year's astronomy textbook. Smudged thumbprints of light, multicolored and coldly beautiful, blazing across the starspattered backdrop of outer space. Turns out, those were comets. Comets are made of ice and dust, asteroids of metal and rock. Which shows you how little attention I paid to the textbook versus the latest copy of MixxZine that I'd tucked behind it. Sailor Moon > the regular moon. So images of the asteroid Callisto on the TV in our dorm's common room take me by surprise. Ugly and pockmarked, like a battered chunk of human bone hurtling through the black.
Hurtling toward Mom and Dad down in St. Petersburg, Florida, while they sip their coffee on our porch swing, watching the evening breeze sway the royal palms (I want to picture them that way, instead of glued to CNN like me). Toward JoJo, my five-year-old sister, streaking through the sun-crisped grass in her jellies before bedtime. Toward Bubbe and Papa picking avocados in their backyard in the coolest part of the day, the whole ocean unrolling beyond their fence.
And hurtling toward the Frost Preparatory School for Girls in Boston, where I sit on this prickly couch in my common room, totally alone.
Even before the big news broke yesterday—before falling rocks from space decapitated the Great Sphinx of Giza and cratered Lake Nakuru in Kenya, RIP flamingos—the Frost campus was all but empty. I got permission to stay on the gated grounds for the summer because of my internship at the Museum of Fine Arts (awesome for those college applications I, along with the rest of the class of 1999, may never fill out). So it was always going to be the hall mothers who live on campus year-round, a few international students with similar arrangements, the janitorial staff, and me.
And Jem, as often as she could come. She was supposed to be here…
No. I don't need to think about Jemma Bridgeham when there's an asteroid-not-comet headed toward Earth, three days from impact. According to the clock in the corner of the screen, that's 43 hours, 18 minutes, and 6 seconds.
5 seconds…
4…
They've cut from a replay of last night's press conference with some NASA dude to the president, sweating behind the podium. He drawls, "My fellow Americans, we're being faced tonight with a dire challenge. The Bible's got a word for this—"
Across the common room, the phone rings. I stumble from the couch and sprint to reach it before it stops. "Hello?" Desperately, I cup the handset to my mouth like it's an oxygen mask.
"Adina?"
Because our dorms don't have phone lines, all calls come through the common room, one per hall. During the school year we have to sign up for a time slot in the call log. There are thirty girls in Tyler Hall, all fighting to call their friends back home or that boy they met at a mixed dance with Stamper Academy, our brother school. Serious calls—sick relatives or dead dogs, that stuff—came through the hall mothers' offices. But I saw Miss Potter, my own hall mother, leaving campus in the dead of last night. And Abrielle Boucher, a French student, tennis team captain, and the only other summertime resident of Tyler Hall, flew the coop this morning for her local boyfriend's summer house on Martha's Vineyard (I thought she might ask me to come with, but she didn't, which is fine). So there are no rules, and the only girl who could be getting calls is me.
"Hi, Daddy." I turn my back to the TV and press the plastic to my ear until I imagine I can hear the ocean. Not cold and gloomy blue, like the water that laps at the pilings in Boston Harbor, but jewel bright and Florida-warm.
"Sorry it's so late, honey."
"That's okay. Where's Mom? How's JoJo?"
"Mom's at Bubbe and Zayde's. We're moving them into the spare room, just until—just for a few days. Johanna doesn't really… we told her folks are getting ready for a really bad storm."
"That makes sense." JoJo knows about hurricanes by now.
"Listen, honey. I've been calling everyone I can think of since we talked last night. Airlines, every travel agency in the yellow pages, bus companies. I couldn't get through most of the time. Dial-up keeps going out, and folks aren't showing up for work since they heard the news. Plus planes aren't taking off with, you know, cause of the rocks flying around up there, so—"
"I can't come home," I finish for him, keeping my voice steady.
"I'd jump in the car this second if I could and pick you up. But all the channels are showing the highways parked up, saying interstate travel's almost impossible. I don't even think I'd get there before…" Again, he trails off, but this time I can't bring myself to end the thought. Dad clears his throat. "Who's with you, honey? Is the staff taking care of you?"
"Yeah, Daddy," I lie. What else can I do? Tell him that the grown-ups on campus have all fled or forgotten about me completely? My family can't do anything about it from over a thousand miles away, besides worry themselves into an earlier grave.
"Is your hall mother there?" Dad pushes. "I'd like to talk to her, make sure she'll look after you until—until we can get you home."
"She's in bed." And wherever she is, she might be. It's almost ten now, after lights out.
"Tomorrow morning, then."
"Sure," I say feebly. Maybe I'll come up with something by the time Dad tries again.
Honestly, I'm a little disappointed with myself—you'd think I'd have a better plan for the end of the world than cowering in my bedroom, alone. Jem and I even talked about it once. We rented Independence Day with her dad's Blockbuster card last winter, and Jem said she wouldn't have bothered trying to leave the city, even with an alien ship hovering overhead. Why go out on a highway? No, if she had one day left, she'd spend it doing something she really wanted, but was too scared to do in the before-times. Like breaking into the zoo to pet the giraffes. She's so soft for animals; she melts like butter in a microwave when she passes a dog on the street, or even sees a field mouse scuttling across the grounds of Frost. I snuggled into her, buried my face in the warm crook between her jaw and collarbone, and said I'd come too, because I'd only want to spend the last day with her—
Oh yeah. The Bridgehams.
"Actually, I'm going to Jem's house tomorrow. To stay with the Bridgehams. So it's okay, Dad. I'm gonna be safe."
You might guess that Mom and Dad weren't thrilled by the idea of their daughter spending a minimally supervised summer in what seems to them like The Big City, especially before my final year of high school. So I reminded them that my girlfriend and her parents live only fifteen minutes away in Jamaica Plain. Jem could easily be a day student, like half the girls at Frost, but her dad went to Stamper, and loved it, and wanted her to have the full boarder experience. Anyways, I told my parents her family would drive to campus once a week, and I could sign out to go to dinner with them, or to a movie at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline. The Bridgehams, I promised, would keep an eye on me.
And that was the plan at the time. Jem was gonna work it all out. She was gonna tell them, she promised to tell them. I found the guts to tell my parents I had a girlfriend—I came out to them in eighth grade when I was getting bullied at public school in St. Pete for supposedly peeping at Lisa Katz in the girls' locker room, which I did not—but I never talked about that night in early June. Our shouting match behind the tennis courts, and the Best Summer Ever that never was.
"That's really good, honey." Dad sounds so totally relieved that I don't regret the fib. Until he suggests, "Call us then, as soon as you're settled in. I want to thank her family."
Well, shit.
"It might be pretty late."
"That's okay. We'll be waiting."
"Sure," I mumble, stunned by the trap I set for myself and strolled right into.
"Then I'll talk to you real soon. We'll see you soon. The astronauts and the constr—the demolition experts, they're gonna take care of this. They know what they're doing. So you don't have to worry."
"I know, Daddy."
"We love you, Dina Bean-a."
I drop the phone onto the wall cradle before his pet name puts a wobble in my voice, then turn back to the Kennedy Space Center just in time for the launch countdown to reach zero. The Hallelujah, a huge shuttle stuffed with astronauts and like, construction workers ("demolition experts," the NASA dude insisted) lifts off. Of course, the government has known about Callisto for weeks, and this is the plan they came up with. The last hope of the planet rises into the night sky, flames roaring and smoke roiling, trailing bright white flame. I can't help but picture the people on board in hard hats instead of helmets.
The countdown-to-impact clock now reads: 43 hours, 9 minutes, and 15 seconds.
None of this is fair. This was supposed to be the Best Summer Ever. Jem was supposed to be around all the time. But it's August now, and we haven't talked once. And now, I have to get myself to her house by tomorrow night and sweet-talk her family into taking me in. That, or confess to my parents that I'm all alone. Then they might just pack JoJo, Bubbe, and Papa into the car and spend the next two days—maybe the last two days—inching toward Boston, arrival not guaranteed.
It's late, but I don't fall asleep for hours. I just lie on the common room couch with the TV turned down low, the final fight with Jem playing and rewinding and replaying behind my eyes.
ONE DAY LEFT
After accidentally sleeping through most of the morning, I waste another half an hour crying about it, unhelpfully. Lunch is cheese and peanut butter cracker sandwiches and a lone strawberry Smirnoff Ice I find in the mini fridge in Miss Potter's office. I drink it while catching up on the news. The astronauts and construction workers docked with the International Space Station in the early hours after I passed out. It split in half somehow, I guess—the Space Station, not the Hallelujah—but everyone's fine. When I can't put it off anymore, I step outdoors for the first time in two days, a little fuzzy headed and blinking in the midday sun.
According to the brochures the middle school guidance counselor in St. Pete gave my parents, the Frost campus is "20 beautiful acres of study gardens, soccer fields, tennis courts, and classrooms where your college-bound daughter and future leader can thrive." The brochures didn't lie. From where I stand on the white gravel path outside Tyler Hall, I can see the other halls, Hunt and Thorton, to the right. To the left, the library with its little koi pond and stone benches. Behind me is the visual arts building, my favorite part of campus and a huge part of why I'm here, and on scholarship.