Falling From the Sky (13 page)

Terrence nudges me in the arm as we follow Micah to Pax’s house.

“So, everything cool?” Terrence asks, keeping his voice low.

I nod. Concern is visible in his eyes, but I can’t go into the zombie kiss out here in front of Micah’s family, with Micah in earshot.

“You were right,” I say. “I was better off staying here because there’s no way in hell my mom would’ve broken out the grill.”

Terrence laughs, and nothing more is said. I’ll tell him about the kiss and all the other million things running through my head later – if I can find my courage to actually talk about it with someone other than Micah.

Poppa B hovers over the grill, spatula in hand. Abby and Jade overlap each other telling him stories about their dance class, and Pax is halfway in the back of Kyle the Ripper’s van watching a clip of a guitarist stage diving and accidentally kicking a girl in the face. I haven’t seen it, but Kyle bragged about it last night. Micah says it’s not as good as Kyle makes it out to be.

Micah motions for Terrence and me to follow him. We walk past the grill to where Zoey stands with an older lady, both of them unpacking crates and loading a table with bags of hamburger buns and condiments.

I hang back a few steps with Terrence as Micah eases closer, like he needs to approach slowly and cautiously.

“Hey Mom,” he says quietly. “I want you to meet some of my friends.”

She turns around, a bottle of mustard still in hand, and takes in the two of us ballers. She’s thin, like Zoey, and slightly shorter than Micah. She looks tired, and her age doesn’t hold well. I’m too scared to speak.

Micah introduces us, and she makes a remark about how she’s glad that he’s making friends. It should’ve been awkward, but it was more…aloof? This lady seems like she’s in the clouds. It makes me wonder if Micah and Zoey maybe raised themselves as much as I have been lately. Maybe that’s why he was so close to his Nanna.

We give Terrence the lone plastic chair. Micah opens a cooler full of leftover ice water and realizes it’s unneeded. So he turns it into his seat. He slides over, and I sit next to him. We don’t talk while we eat, mostly because we’re both starving. I try to process how someone as skinny as Micah can even hold as much food as he has on his plate. Pax sits across from me, and he hangs on every word that Kyle the Ripper says about Sebastian’s Shadow performing at the Pecan Grove Festival later this month.

“Sebastian’s Shadow?” Micah chokes out the words while chewing a bite of his hamburger. He taps his foot against the ground, and his leg bounces against mine. The cooler feels like an earthquake of excitement beneath us.

I grab Micah’s knee. “Dude, calm down.”

“Yeah, I’m pissed,” Kyle says. “That’d be the money maker show, and it’s just gotta be at PG Fest. But I’ve already talked to some people about a stage side spot, so I’ll still have good footage to sell.”

“Seriously, you have to save us stage side spots too!” Micah shouts at Kyle, even though he’s only six feet away from us.

Terrence waves his hands in the air, halting the conversation. He reminds me of a preacher getting all worked up during a Sunday morning sermon.

“What in the world is a PG Fest?” he asks.

“The Pecan Grove Festival,” Micah says. “Basic county fair kind of thing. Vendors, rides, live music. They come through here twice during the summer, but the second time is always better. They usually just have local talents at the first one, and really, none of our local talent is all that talented.”

Pax says that rock band Sebastian’s Shadow is the biggest musical act to ever play the Pecan Grove Festival, and Kyle mumbles something about free shows. And then I remember where I’ve heard about the PG Fest before – from Tuck, leader of the Graffiti Kings. Micah told him
we
would be there. Another horse.

A horse that Micah is obviously excited about. I reach my arm around his back and lock my hand on his shoulder.

“Can you please hold still?” I ask.

Micah turns to me, his face somewhat confused. Then he smiles one of those silly Abby smiles at me, and I laugh. But it doesn’t last long. My eyes meet Pax’s as soon as I look up, and he has one of those “I knew it” smirks on his face. Kyle raises an eyebrow. I can almost hear their thoughts, their obvious assumptions.

I jerk my arm back and resume eating my French fries. Zoey eases the awkwardness when she pops over with her cell phone and demands to take pictures, making Pax smile next to Kyle, and then turning to Terrence, Micah, and me. Micah attempts to look cool by throwing a peace sign into the air. Who the hell even thinks that throwing a peace sign is cool these days?

“You look stupid, little brother,” Zoey tells him, studying the image on her phone.

Micah jerks it out of her hand and holds it up so I can see how ridiculous we look. Zoey is right – Micah looks pretty lame.

Once the food is gone and all conversation about sports, movies, and music has finally died out, Terrence decides to call it a night. Micah tells him that he’s going to miss the best part – the fireworks – but Terrence doesn’t seem too upset by it. He tells me to holler at him if I want to shoot hoops before Monday morning, thanks Micah for the invite, and heads back to his cousin’s house.

Finding a secret escape route on the elevator in level eleven of
Zombie Sanctuary 3
takes up the next two hours of my life. Micah peeks at the clock every twenty minutes and then glances out his window to see if anyone else has gone to stake out a spot for the show. It’s nearly nine o’clock when we leave his bedroom and start toward the end of the reservation.

I climb into Micah’s passenger seat. We ride in silence for the three minutes it takes to get to the spot. We seriously could’ve walked that, but Micah would’ve probably bitched about sweat or mosquitoes or his hair.

For once, there is no bonfire blazing, and everyone is, for the most part, pretty still. Zoey stretches out on a blanket in the sand. Kyle lies next to her. His black cap sits on top of his face, and I don’t know if he’s awake. Freak.

Micah drops the blanket from his arms onto the sand and spreads it out for us to sit on. The lights along the river have been shut off, and I wonder if all the streetlights in Bear Creek are blackened for tonight. Everything is consumed by darkness.

Micah stretches out, imitating his sister’s position, and nods for me to do the same.

“Get comfortable,” he says. “You’ll be looking up anyway.”

I glance around before doing so. Abby and Jade wiggle around on a blanket, watching the clouds with intensity. Pax and his sister are close by. He’s the only one of anyone still in an upright position, talking so quickly that I understand nothing he says, sort of like when Micah gets excited. I wonder if their overexcitement is genetic. Pax’s smile reminds me of Micah’s, minus the blue roses on his tongue.

Micah tugs on my arm, and I surrender. I expected more stars tonight, especially with the artificial lights out, but the sky is just a black haze with a few silver dots twinkling back at me. I wonder if Micah is looking at them too, but I don’t ask. I try to think of how to word that conversation without sounding like a total sap who absorbs the night sky, but the red flashing dot steals my attention.

I’m back in that paralyzed lungs, muted ears, syrupy eyes mode. My airplane prayer has become more of a checklist: Safe flight, check. No turbulence, check. Runway landing, check. Non-fuck up of a pilot, check. I’m not even sure of the last time I said a real airplane prayer. I just go through the motions now, and that’s when I’m actually paying attention and see an airplane. I’ve been a bit preoccupied lately.

Maybe that little red dot isn’t an airplane after all. Maybe it’s my dad flashing a stop light at me from heaven telling me to stop whatever it is that’s going on with Micah and me before it goes too far. Or maybe it’s an ambulance airplane who found my dad in the rainforest making cell phones for monkeys, and they’ve rescued him. Or maybe it’s…

My entire body spasms from the loud boom. Streaks of blue light up the sky, and purple embers plunge toward the ground. A burst of red sprouts out behind it, and the ooh’s and ahh’s can be heard from both sides of the river. I prop up on my elbows a bit but keep my eyes on the sky. Five piercing shrieks accompany the yellow dots that soar into the air. They erupt into mini-bursts of stars.

“Wow,” Micah says, jumping up from his position and grabbing my arm.

He doesn’t let go, so I sit up next to him and continue to watch. An orange glow spirals around until it bursts into horizontal streaks of light. Micah fingers tighten around my forearm. It’s easy to tell which ones are his favorites because his whole body tenses up, and I feel it in his hand. I know I shouldn’t look at him, but part of me just wants to see the excitement on his face, the way it’s written in his eyes.

The eruption of a green firework reflects in his eyes. He smiles like he did the day we walked out of the theatre after seeing
Brain Surgery
, when he told me we should go back to his house and he could teach me to play the zombie side of
Zombie Sanctuary 3.
I really never want to see that smile leave his face.

“That was better than any show Markham has ever had,” I say, sitting on the tailgate of Micah’s truck.

He rips open his first pack of Roman Candles and smiles. “Guess you’ll just have to come back again next summer, huh?”

I don’t want to think about next summer. I just want this summer to go on forever. I wonder what Mom would say if I called her and told her I wasn’t coming back.
“Hey Mom, sorry, I can’t come home for senior year. You see, Micah had this plan to teach me about his life through ten horses, but then he suddenly remembered that those twenty generic horses aren’t so generic, and I need first semester off to stay here and learn about them too. Oh, who’s Micah? Just this guy I think I might like.”

“Check it,” Micah says.

I can’t help but laugh at his choice of words. Terrence always says the same thing before he shows us some cool street ball move that coaches don’t teach you because it doesn’t qualify as ‘fundamental basketball skills.’ But Micah isn’t doing some cool lay-up twist or secret dribble that throws off the opponent. He lights the end of a red and orange Roman Candle.

Abby and Jade wait on Micah’s front porch, under those paper lanterns, watching with amazement. Zoey waits until Micah’s candle burns out before she lights both of her girls a sparkler and lets them run wildly across the dusty excuse for a front yard. They spin in circles, slinging stars into the air and making zigzag designs against the black backdrop of the sky.

The jingle of Micah’s keys makes me look away from my childhood painted before me.

“C’mon,” he says. “We’re going to go back down the res.”

He grabs the small packs of fireworks from his tailgate, and I lift it up behind me. He stuffs the boxes into the cab of his truck, and I climb in on the passenger side.

“Zoey’s paranoid, so we’re going to let them stay at the house while we go back down here and shoot off the cool stuff,” he explains.

I use my cell phone as a source of light and attempt to read the labels on his boxes, but he swats my hand away.

“Stop reading. You can see them when we shoot them,” he says.

Micah keeps to his word and manages to hide the packages until it’s time to shoot each individual firework. We go through the packs of Roman Candles and a few other random things he grabbed in his excited haste before he pulls out a small box that I know too well. He lights a sparkler and tries to hand it to me.

“C’mon, it’ll be fun,” he says. He lights another one, holding one in each hand, but I still refuse to take it.

“That’s okay,” I say. “I’d rather not.”

Micah waves them through the air. “Live a little,” he says. “It’s not like I’m asking you to do cocaine with me. They’re sparklers.”

He slings embers into the air until the sticks burn down to a tiny glows of orange.

“I thought you’d be more fun than this,” he says. “Maybe I should just call Terrence and tell him to get out here and make you liven up.”

Micah reaches into his pocket and pulls out my cell phone, which I thought was still in his truck’s cup holder.

“What the– Micah! Give me my phone,” I order him.

He shakes his head and slips it back into his pocket. He tosses the box of sparklers onto the sand near my feet and then chucks the lighter next to them.

“If you want your phone, come get it,” he says.

He turns and runs in the opposite direction. The streetlights have yet to come back on, and I can’t see anything. I kneel down on the sand and feel around for the lighter. I flick it ablaze and use it to see while I dig a sparkler out of the box. I should’ve just taken the damn thing when he asked. Now I have to chase him along the river’s edge with only sparklers as my light source and pray he doesn’t make any phone calls between now and when I catch him.

Fortunately, I’m faster than Micah, and the fact that he likes to tell me when I’m getting warmer doesn’t work in his favor. I can’t see him, but I know he sees me – or at least he sees the little glow of light in my hand. I feel like such an idiot. I see a shadow move, and I run after it, even though my current sparkler has dissolved.

I tackle Micah to the ground.

“Damn,” he says, sitting up in the sand. “You should’ve gone out for football.”

I sit up and help pull him into a sitting position. “Are you okay?” I ask.

“I wasn’t really going to call Terrence, just so you know,” he says, dusting the sand off of the back of his shirt. “Then he might actually come out here, and I’d rather have you to myself.”

He pulls my phone out of his pocket and waves it in the air over his head. I reach for it once, then twice, and finally knock it from his grasp.

My phone launches like a rocket, soaring toward the river, and falls from the sky. I dive after it, thinking what an idiot I am to have done that three feet from the edge of the water. The phone plunks onto the shoreline. The murky water splashes over it.