* * *
Before the door had slammed shut behind him, Pete was tossing the bags of soda and candy onto the kitchen table. Half a second later, he was rushing through the living room, past his parents, who sat on the sofa watching TV.
"Peter, are you okay?" Sarah asked. "I thought I heard shouting."
At the foot of the staircase, Pete stopped and pivoted. He looked from his father to his mother. His vision wavered and they were under water.
"Are you crying?" Joel said, rising from the sofa. "Did you and Rusty get in a fight?"
Pete nodded and fled for the refuge of his room. When he reached the first landing, Joel called out, "Whoa! Come back here. Tell us what happened."
"I can’t," Pete sobbed, turning. "It’s too stupid."
"You can tell us anything. Did he hit you?"
Pete shook his head at the absurdity of his father’s question, and Joel read the negation as his son coping healthily with whatever had upset him.
"Then who?"
"No one." Pete managed to smile, which made his parents smile. As long as they all pretended everything was okay, and nobody talked about anything unsettling, a certain harmony could be reached.
"So, the Perseids…" Joel pressed.
"Rusty isn’t coming. He has more important things to do."
Joel walked up the stairs and took his only son by the arm. "That’s alright. I’ll watch them with you."
Pete wiggled out of his father’s clutch, then laid a hand on his robed shoulder. "No offense, Dad, but there’s no way you can stay up that late."
"What time does the shower start?"
"Two."
"You’re right. That is too late for me."
Pete turned and said, "I’ll be in my room, if you need me, studying."
"Okay," Sarah squeaked. Leaning forward on the couch, she cleared her throat. "Are you sure you’re okay?"
Pete swiveled until he saw her. "Yes, Mom. I’m fine. Rusty’s just an asshole. That’s all."
Pete watched his mother’s face blanch before his eyes and instantly felt terrible for causing the reaction.
She’ll get over it, he told himself, climbing the rest of the stairs.
When he stepped into his room, he shut the door behind him and went straight to his desk. He opened the SAT study guide to a practice test and set the timer on his watch. Five minutes later, he was fully absorbed. Any residual thoughts of Russell and his bitch girlfriend were replaced by parabolas, analogies, and reading comprehension questions about boats, cooking, and Charles Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos Islands. If he could fill in those tiny bubbles forever, he would. But he wasn’t like Rusty. He knew that while it was comfortable—if not downright convenient—to ignore reality during the rough times, doing so only caused trouble later down the line. Keeping your head in the real world was better in so many ways.
After four hours of uninterrupted escape, he dropped the pencil in the book, shut it, and returned to the so-called “real world” he touted as being the be-all and end-all of existence. The fugue he had slipped into had been a nice escape, but if he spent his whole life buried in books (whether they be fiction or test prep), he would have nothing to compare it to. Red is only red when the background is a different color. If everything in the world were red, then red would cease to exist as a distinct color.
Leaning back in his chair and rubbing his burning eyes, his mind returned to what he had said to Russell. He felt a smidgen of guilt over the things he had said about Apollo, only because Apollo really was a good dog. But he believed he’d been justified in hurting Russell. Let him squirm a little bit, his mind told him. He doesn’t squirm enough. Shatter his illusions, break his spirit, make him question.
That’s his problem. He doesn’t question anything. He thinks he has all of the answers, but what he doesn’t know…
"Could fill a library."
And then some.
Pete got up and walked to the display case along the far wall and checked in on the insects he had spent countless hours capturing, killing, and categorizing. All lined up in perfect rows and columns, like dead soldiers. Each with a singular pin stuck through its thorax and a scientific name printed on a tab of paper taped to the pin. He turned away and gazed around the room, taking in for the first time the cold sterility of it. The fact that it was warm and dusty did nothing to waylay the vibe he was picking up.
Am I picking up vibes?
The telescope, the microscope, the Periodic Table of the Elements, the display cases, the Time Life Series: everything in the room pointed to one thing, a common disorder among the world’s Type A personalities, the illness that makes people push elevator buttons repeatedly when the elevator fails to arrive on the button-pusher’s rigid time schedule, that urges hurried souls to anxiously tap their feet while waiting in lines, that forces cynics to place all of their faith into the genetic component of beauty while completely disregarding the spiritual component, that makes fat assholes punch skinny assholes in the stomach because the skinny assholes act like little pricks who deserve to get punched in the stomach in the first place.
I didn’t deserve to get punched by Hector, and I didn’t deserve to have Rusty turn on me. He’s changed. I’m the one who has stayed the same. It was the bitch that did it. Michelle. I don’t know what he sees in her. She’s just as talentless as I am. In fact, she’s worse, because she sucks at math and music.
He wanted to scream these thoughts at his silent, angular roommates, his perverse instruments of dissection. But those objects—the telescope, the microscope—weren’t about to offer up sympathetic "Uh-huh, I hear yous" in response. Nor would they ever. They couldn’t see, hear, think, or feel. All could do was magnify. If he were to scream "Why am I always alone?" they would just remain silent, their cold, glassy eyes as blind as those of a Greek bust.
Standing there, peering around his room, Pete realized something that should have dawned on him years ago: Science really did suck. (Russell was right.) There just wasn’t any point to it. Sure, in its most altruistic distillation, science saved lives—but when had it ever made those lives worth living? The cold machine called science’s sole purpose, and Pete knew it now, was to drain the wonder out of things, to sap the imagination of its juices, to rob possibilities from dreamers. Science explained without ever getting to the crux of the matter, locking us all into a single paradigm of thought: that all we are is randomly accumulated stardust hanging out on a larger clump of randomly accumulated stardust that is spiraling out and away from other chunks of randomly accumulated stardust, on a collision course with an empty infinity.
"It’s a sham," Pete said, pushing the telescope so that it tipped over and struck the hardwood floor. He didn’t care. He went to the cubbyhole dormer, sat down, drew his legs up, and looked down at the white tube that looked so much like a short, fat anaconda that eventually, when he couldn’t stand the sight of it any longer, he looked away.
Sitting there, something unexpected happened. He discovered that he was no longer mad at Russell. Then again, he could never stay mad at the kid for long.
I’ll invite him over tomorrow night. If he doesn’t want to come—if he thinks I went too far with all of that dog talk—then that’s okay. I don’t need him to be happy. All I need is my telescope…
"Shit!"
He jumped from the cubbyhole, picked up the tube, and held it to his body.
He aimed it at the lamp and looked through the eyepiece.
Nothing.
Blackness.
Then, shaking it, something clunked about inside.
"Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit."
He placed the tube on the bed, next to the chessboard, and glanced at the clock-radio on the night stand.
It’s happening. If you want to see it, you better go outside.
And after all the day’s commotion and emotion, Pete still wanted to see it. After all, this was the biggest shower of the year.
Leaving the telescope,
he hurried for the door. When he entered the dark hallway, he stopped, turned, and went back into his room.
He walked to the window, crawled through the cubbyhole, and began turning the hand crank. When the panel was loose enough, he grabbed the frame and pushed the window open on its central pivot. Then he turned around, got down on his stomach, and inched his feet onto the rooftop. The toes of his shoes touched the gritty shingles first, then his knees, and finally, the rest of his body.
Outside, he curled into the fetal position. He tried rolling over onto his back, but fear kept him glued in place. After a few minutes of psyching himself up, he summoned the courage to turn his head. Above him, the sky was clear and the moon absent: a perfect night for stargazing. He found the constellation Perseus and waited.
A white streak scarred a small portion of the heavens. It was immediately chased by another one slashing from the opposite direction. Then two crisscrossed each other at the same time. Then another, and another, and another. And another!!
Pete watched in awe as the stars fell. At some point he forgot that he was deathly afraid of heights and stood up to get a better view. He walked around, searching for the perfect place to stand. He settled for the peak of the dormer window, finding that he could comfortably straddle it without straining his legs.
He had never seen a meteor shower like this. They just didn’t get any better.
"Rusty should be seeing this," he said wistfully.
He tried counting the streaks, but there were too many.
"Who cares? Look at this."
Holding his hands up, Pete smiled, half expecting to see a tiny, searing speck land in one of his palms.
"Oh, yeah. Rusty’s coming tomorrow."
Out of the corner of his right eye, he glimpsed a scintillating point of white light growing exponentially larger. Then a loud thud accompanied by a percussive shock to the right side of his head. His cheekbone shattered; his glasses flew from his face.
A meteorite! his mind screamed. I’ve been hit by a meteorite!!!
Then he fell. First, he dropped from the dormer to the roof. Then he tumbled down the slope, his broken and bleeding cheek painting dark smears of ichor as it came in contact with the shingles. As he rolled, he tried pushing his palms and heels into the grit, but the roof was slick with morning dew. So he slid. By the time he thought to reach out for the lip of the gutter, he was already plummeting to the brick patio below.
Part III
Every Dog Has His Day