We were safely back in the RV on Saturday night when Jaz tried to turn me into a heathen.
“We won’t leave till noon tomorrow.” Blake was studying the navigation on his phone. “It’s a shorter drive from here to Albuquerque.”
My stomach flopped with that queasy feeling. The same one thinking about Albuquerque always gave me. But Blake kept talking.
“So, we can all sleep in.”
“Sleep in?” Jaz was doodling another of her limitless designs on her hand. She looked up and raised her eyebrows. “Does anyone want to go to church?”
“Church?” Blake’s expression wasn’t a sneer, but it was close. “On vacation?”
She shrugged. “I saw a church about two blocks from here. I thought we could just walk over there.”
“Not me.” Blake yawned and slumped deeper into the couch. “I didn’t come on vacation for praying and preaching.”
Jaz’s eyes narrowed by just a fraction. “I think we could all use some praying and preaching, actually. But okay. Anyone else want to go?” She glanced at me. “Jenna?”
I hesitated. I’d actually been hoping to escape from Gran’s hellfire onslaught while I was on this trip. But I didn’t want to seem as if I shared Blake’s irreverence either. “I, uh, yeah. Okay. Except, I don’t have anything to wear.”
“None of us do.” Kason tapped his WE ARE HAPPY CAMPERS shirt and grinned at me. “That doesn’t matter.”
“Exactly.” Jaz shrugged. “God doesn’t care.”
I didn’t know if God cared about dress code or not, but in my experience, His people definitely did. I just nodded. “All right.”
And that’s how I ended up walking down the road the next morning with Jaz and Kason, Texas sun already blazing, wearing clothes that looked more summer-camp than first-row-pew. I kept scanning for this supposed church but didn’t see anything that resembled a place of worship.
“Okay.” Jaz pointed. “Right there.”
Right where? Just off the road were a truck stop, a Chinese restaurant, and—oh. Built into the storefront was a little space with DESERT GARDEN COMMUNITY CHURCH in block letters over the door.
As we stepped through the doors, I was still trying to recalibrate my lofty-steepled, solid-brick image of a church building when a woman all but attacked us with a greeting. “Hello, all of you! Welcome to Desert Garden!”
We wouldn’t be welcome after she saw our clothing, surely. But when I dared to make eye contact, I realized she was dressed, shockingly, no more formally than we were. Jeans and a lacy tunic over a white T-shirt.
“Thank you.” Jaz gave that sunrise smile and took one of the woman’s offered bulletins.
“Just visiting today?” When the woman turned her head, the stud in the side of her nose glinted. She was wearing a piercing to church?
“Yes, we’re from Ohio. Passing through on a road trip with some other friends.” Jaz had clearly become our spokesperson.
“Ohio!” The woman’s brows lifted. “That’s quite a ways. And where are you headed?”
Jaz had clearly settled into the groove of the conversation, so I quietly edged away. I was far too uneasy to swap small talk with a stranger. For one thing, standing in a church in a T-shirt and denim cutoffs made me feel all but naked. Gran would have called down the wrath of God on me if only she’d known.
But even worse, I was starting to realize something very unsettling: this so-called church was nothing like normal church at home.
I glanced around the foyer area. It smelled of coffee—at least that was the same—but the people buzzing around were all dressed as casually as if they were heading to a concert. And the inside really looked no more church-like than the outside. Concrete floor, industrial-looking brick walls decorated with curling-edged posters whose slogans could have been pulled from Jaz’s graphic tees.
GO, GIVE, GOSPEL.
MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
LOVE GOD, LOVE OTHERS.
WE ARE BECAUSE HE IS.
BE THE CHANGE.
I threaded my way through the crowd toward a door in the back of the room. Was this the sanctuary? I peered inside and caught my breath faster than you could say heresy. Instead of rigid pews and stained-glass windows, there were blackout curtains and theater-style chairs facing a stage with—I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true—a drum kit. Drums! On the stage! In church!
What lions’ den had I mistakenly stumbled into?
“There you are, Jenna!” Jaz swooped up beside me—apparently she’d finally disentangled from the greeter—and pulled me toward the second row of chairs. Far closer to the front than I wanted to be.
I pulled back. “So—uh—the service is in here?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t even blink. Did she not notice how many bizarre pieces were in this puzzle? Drum kits and theater seating and people in shorts?
“Um—” I dreaded what I already knew the answer would be, but I had to ask the question. “Is this—is this a Baptist church?”
“Nondenominational, actually.”
Nondenominational? My anxiety pulled the fire alarm. I’d heard Gran’s TV preachers toss the word around when they thundered about narrow gates and unequal yokes and lukewarm believers. Nondenominationaldescribed churches that were liberal and lax, compromising with the world and blending in with the bad guys. Drum kits today, Satanic rituals tomorrow. Or something like that.
From the chair where she’d settled, Jaz eyed me quizzically. “That’s okay with you, right, Jenna?”
“Uh—actually—” I perched uneasily on the edge of the seat and thought about all the Harvest Hill envelopes Gran relegated to the junk mail stack. Harvest Hill was nondenominational. I was breaking every rule in my grandmother’s book just by standing here.
And Jaz was acting as if all this were perfectly normal. What kind of heretical church did she go to back home?
“Hello, everyone!” The lights dimmed, and a guy holding a microphone strode onto the stage. He had a lumberjack beard and was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. I know, jeans. “It’s great to be in the house of the Lord this morning! Let’s worship Him together!”
Kason appeared from somewhere—who knew where he’d been—and slipped into the seat next to me. No escape now. I bit my lip. Jaz and Kason didn’t seem like infidels. If they thought this was okay—well, maybe it wouldn’t hurt. One Sunday here wouldn’t make me a heathen, right?
A full-on band—guitars and all—was filing onto the stage. I sank farther back into the chair and tried not to inhale all the heresy in the room. I would never tell Gran about this. Ever. I could hope that God might forgive me for showing up at a false-prophet church, but I knew Gran never would.
The band launched into some song far more upbeat than the slowly-plodding choruses from the hymnal—too upbeat to be a church song, in my opinion. It was something about Jesus being both the Lion and the Lamb. Next to me, Jaz sang out exuberantly, hands in the air, body swaying as if she were grooving at a concert. Wasn’t she concerned about what the rest of the church would think? But when I glanced around, I saw several people moving just as she was.
I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my shorts and tried not to think about all my sins tipping the cosmic scale. Disobeying Gran. Attending a liberal church. Wearing shorts on Sunday morning. Listening to worldly music.
The song ended, and the guy in the jeans started talking about some Bible verse. Kason leaned closer to me. “You okay?”
He’d noticed my discomfort? My cheeks warmed. “Uh…” What could I say? I’m afraid God is mad that I’m at church? That sounded crazy even to me. “Yeah, this is—it’s just not the type of church I’m used to.”
“What’s your church like?”
Dusty hymnals and uncomfortable pews and many more commandments than just ten. “Um—more—structured.”
“I see.” He nodded. “But God’s the same, you know.”
“What?”
“People worship Him in different ways, but that doesn’t change Who He is.” He squeezed my shoulder, a brief reassurance. “Just focus on that.”
The band launched into the next song before I could respond. But as I stood there, once again pretending to mouth the lyrics and wondering how the JK twins seemed to know every word, I thought about Kason’s words.
Think about Who God was? What was there to think about? God was—well, God. Something ever-present but impersonal, like the weather or the law or the force of gravity. Someone Who existed to set the rules and then enforce them. Kind of like a shadow Who pointed His long, accusing finger over your life.
But…
Kason and Jaz knew Him as Someone else.
Jaz said He was the one who counted the sand, who could lovingly pick out every face in a crowd. Kason said He was the blurring edge of light, the mystery beyond our flimsy theological rules. And they seemed to find him in everything. In the bedrock under our feet, in the fires that formed the crystals, in the lines between the stars, even in a so-called church where people with guitars were probably singing heresy—although I hadn’t caught any blasphemies yet.
God had a face to Jaz and Kason. A name. Even a personality. He was exciting and joyful and loving and adventurous.
When had I ever associated any of those adjectives with God?
The song ended, and the lights came back up. I sat with the rest of the crowd as another jean-clad guy—Texans really go for their jeans—came up to what I guessed was the pulpit. Although it was a slim, modern piece, not a heavy coffin-looking structure like at our church.
“Good morning, church!” The man smiled at everyone.
“Good morning!” Jaz shouted back from beside me. Apparently her inability to ever be quiet applied even in church.
“I’m so excited to share God’s Word with you today. If you have your Bibles, please turn to Jeremiah 29:13.”
Of course Jaz instantly produced a Bible from her bag. I stared. The cover was faded and peeling, the pages dog-eared with notes flapping out at random. Gran would have strangled me if I’d treated my Bible with such disrespect. It didn’t have a single mark in it.
“Jenna, did you bring your Bible today?”
How could I tell her that my Bible was back in Mount Victory? It was mostly a Sunday accessory for me, and I’d never expected to need it on this trip. I shook my head.
“No problem.” She opened hers and tapped the verse.
Add to my list of sins: using a non-KJV Bible.
I followed the words on the page as the preacher announced the verse: “You will seek Me and find me when you seek me with your whole heart.”
Before I could attempt to unwrap that statement, the pastor launched into his sermon. “We’re all looking for something, aren’t we? Some of us are looking for a new job or a new relationship or a really good parking space.”
Several people in the crowd chuckled, Jaz among them.
“But some of us–” He leaned on the lectern, scanning his congregation with kind eyes. “Some of us are looking for something deeper. Maybe we’re looking for truth. Or closure. Or certainty.”
Each word was touching something deep in my soul. I shifted forward in the chair. Okay, so maybe this was a heretical church, but it couldn’t hurt to just hear this preacher out.
“But the Scripture tells us to look for something far greater than any of those things.” He paused. “To look for God.”
His voice was earnest but still gentle. Compassionate, even. Unlike Gran’s TV preachers, who screamed and stormed about hell and heresy.
“And God promises that when we seek Him earnestly, when we’re really looking for Him—we find Him.” He rubbed his chin and looked down at his notes. “Let me give you this quote from famous author C. S. Lewis.”
C. S. Lewis.
Goosebumps prickled along my arms. What were the odds that I’d found myself here this morning? I was in a church I would have never gone to, in a state I didn’t live in, and here at this coordinate of time and place, the preacher was quoting my favorite author?
“‘Look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else.’” The preacher smiled. “I love those words of Lewis’s, because God invites us to seek Him. And He promises that when we find Him, all the things we thought we needed are fulfilled in Him.”
I turned that over in my mind for a moment. How did one seek God? Jaz and Kason knew, no doubt, but I was too embarrassed to ask one of them.
Anyway, did I really want to find God? My goal had always been to go unnoticed by Him. Just do the right things and keep my head down and hopefully fall beneath the radar screen of His condemning gaze. But the God the preacher was talking about seemed like a different God. A God Who really did count sand and connect stars and maybe, just maybe, even hold my lost story close to His heart.
I absently rubbed my meteorite, and for just a moment, I had that gravity-pull feeling again. That sense that all I’d never seen was tugging at me, coaxing me past the stark black-and-white lines of my life into a world that splashed with all the colors of the desert sky.
The idea was more disorienting than exhilarating.
I released the meteorite and took a deep breath. Who was I kidding? I shouldn’t be in the church at all. And anyway, whatever the preacher was talking about, I couldn’t think about it right then. I hadn’t come on this trip for a religious experience, and I certainly didn’t need any more hellfire-holiness in my life. I wasn’t looking for God. I was looking for my dad.
So what mattered wasn’t some wishful thinking about a God Who could be found. No, what mattered was what I’d find right here on earth, starting tonight.
In Albuquerque.
#
Church went later than we’d expected, and it was a quarter past noon before we were all standing for the dismissal prayer. The JK twins and I all but ran back to the RV park, but Blake was waiting outside for us with a scowl. “Guys, what took so long? We’re all ready to leave.”
“Church lasted longer than we thought.” Kason shrugged apologetically.
“Well, couldn’t you just leave early?” Blake’s face was red and shiny. Unhooking the utilities in the heat couldn’t have been fun.
Jaz leveled one of her stone-stares at him. “It’s twenty after. We’re not that far off schedule.”
“Far enough. This is a four-hour drive.”
“And sunset is not till what? Eight o’clock? Nine? And we gain an extra hour because of the time zone change.” Jaz swept past him into the coach and sat emphatically on the dinette bench.
I slid next to her into what had tacitly become my assigned seat. I wasn’t minding that as much as I had in the first few days of the trip. “I—uh—I think Blake just wants to make sure we get there on time.”
“Blake—” She stopped. Caught her bottom lip between her teeth. Then looked at me. “Jenna, don’t get too close to him.”
The warning was so random I didn’t have time to duck behind a denial. “I—what?”
“Give him space.” Her eyes held an urgency I didn’t understand. “Things are counting down for him. When it all cracks, he’ll take down anyone around him. Don’t let it be you.”
Take down anyone around him? I looked at Blake, settling into the driver’s seat. He looked much more relaxed now that we were all loaded, his face returning to its normal color. Her warning was a little oversized. “I—okay.” It wasn’t as if I were particularly close to Blake anyway, unfortunately.
“I mean it, Jenna.”
“Mean what?” Kason dropped into the seat across from us. He was wearing another WE ARE HAPPY CAMPERS shirt—this one the soft blue of a summer sky.
“Just trying to help Jenna figure some stuff out.” Jaz bumped my arm lightly. “Remember what I said.”
She rummaged in her bag for a pen, and Kason smiled at me. “Did church get better, Jenna?”
“Um—yeah. It did.”
“Good.” He leaned back, stretched his arms behind his head. “God’s bigger than all we say about Him anyway, you know.”
“Uh-huh.” Discussing faith with either of the twins made me feel awkward. As though we were talking about a mutual friend I hadn’t met. “So, uh, Jaz said there’s some kind of observatory in Albuquerque.”
“Yes. Magdalena.”
“What is that?”
“It’s one of the most pristine dark-sky areas in the U.S.” He pushed his glasses up, a sure sign he was entering nerd mode. “It’s an astronomical observatory way out in the desert. It has a 2.4-meter telescope and an interferometer.”
“Wow.” All I knew to say.
“I can’t wait to see the stars from there.” He rubbed his hands together. “One of the highlights of the trip for me.”
“That’s really cool.” And I meant it. I still didn’t understand Kason’s star obsession, but I was starting to appreciate the beauty he found in it.
Jaz clicked her multicolored pen and smiled at her brother. “We might have to leave Kason behind, Jenna. Once he gets to an observatory like that, he might not be able to be dislodged.”
He laughed in that nice, easy way of his. “It’s possible. I can’t wait.”
“Well, you don’t have to wait much longer.” Jaz pointed to a road sign zooming toward the RV. “Albuquerque, 228 miles.”
Three and a half hours from the place where my secrets were buried. My stomach lurched suddenly, and I sank back into the seat. We wouldn’t get there tonight in time for me to do any investigating, but Blake had already said we were spending Monday there as well. Somehow I’d have to get away from the group and find my way to that address in my father’s letter. And after that—
No, I couldn’t think about after that. The first thing was just getting there. I would take each step as it came. There was no use worrying over it already.
I told myself calm, rational things like that all the way there. And I thought I was believing myself until I realized I’d also chewed an entire pack of gum.
Construction on I-40 slowed us down, and then there was a fuel stop, and then we had to pull over at a Petco for Adam to run in and buy some more food for that lizard, and then we had a hard time finding the RV park. By the time we got into our site, we were all tired and more than a little grouchy. And I was exhausted from all the gum-chewing and worry-chasing. Plus when I thought about actually being in Albuquerque—about finding my dad in the next twenty-four hours—I felt as if I’d stepped off the edge of Palo Duro Canyon in the dark.
I settled into my bunk fairly early and tried to distract myself by opening The Horse and His Boy. I’d been rereading it the whole trip and had just made it to the part where Shasta crossed the mountain pass into Archenland at night. The only thing that kept him from falling off was the lion that walked beside him.
Jaz would say that my own steps had been that carefully ordered. That I’d never been alone, and that Someone bigger than I knew was keeping step with me, guiding me on a precarious way.
I wasn’t ready to think about that. I closed the book and opened my notebook.
Sunday, June 16
Amarillo to Albuquerque
289 miles
What else could I say? How was there a way to neatly sum up the fact that the whole throbbing city right outside the window held the answer to every one of my questions?
Tomorrow I will
I didn’t know how to finish the sentence, but maybe it was good enough as it was.
I flipped to the back of the notebook and took out the letter that had been riding there the whole trip. Again, I fingered the scratchy handwriting, my mother’s name shaped across the front. I didn’t need to read the words, not when I’d nearly memorized them, but I pulled the paper out anyway and reread the section that meant the most to me.
You’ve seemed kind of lost lately, and I understand. I’ve felt that way too.
Lostness I could understand.
Not that I can tell my folks that. They think I’m a heathen already, haha.
I thought about the church service this morning, the pastor who didn’t shout, Jaz and Kason who acted as if God were a friend sitting beside them. Were those the kind of people my dad’s family would have considered heathens? Had his parents been like Gran, ranting about false preachers and wolves wearing wool?
But—I’ve been thinking. The stars here in the desert are clearer somehow. Like they’re closer. And it makes all the answers neither one of us can ever quite find seem closer too.
Clearer stars. Closer answers.
This was the same desert sky my father had watched. I peered out the narrow strip of glass that fronted my bunk. But the streetlights from the RV park blurred out the black. On the horizon, the sprawling city glowed like the embers of a fire.
Somewhere in those lights was my dad.
My stomach did the same whooshing thing it did every time I thought about that reality. I rubbed the meteorite and looked back at the letter.
The pendant is a meteorite—yes, a real one. Wear it over your heart and remember that even stars get lost sometimes, but answers are closer than we know.
Answers were close. Very close. Frighteningly close.
I needed a plan for tomorrow. I closed my eyes and tried to make a mental list of the information I had.
1. Mrs. Inger had said my father’s initials were TJ. His first name was Thad. His last name had to start with a J.
2. His parents were church planters who established the First Baptist Church of Albuquerque. (My inability to escape Baptist churches struck again.) I had memorized the address long ago. 689 Becker Street, which I knew from Google Maps was right downtown.
3. … and that’s all I knew.
I turned the meager facts over and over and over, trying to stretch them to fit between the gaps of the story, but I couldn’t do it. There was so little I knew. What did I think I was going to do? The church wasn’t there anymore. How would I start? What would I say? Why was I even doing this?
Gran would kill me.
I tried to think, tried to plan out my steps in a logical, orderly sequence. But all I could do was circle the idea that my father was so close.
The stars here in the desert are clearer…it makes the answers closer…
I must have gone to sleep, somehow, because suddenly I jerked back to alertness, and the air felt different. The letter was fallen open beside me on the bunk. I cautiously sat up. The RV was dark and still. What had awakened me?
I was about to lie back down when a flicker of movement out the front window caught my eye. Blake? What was he doing outside the RV in the middle of the night?
I knelt for a better view. He was standing in the puddling shadows right at the edge of the light, his hands on his hips. Even from here, I could recognize his irritated pose. He was saying something, peering farther into the shadows. Then another form crept up beside him. Brooklyn.
Rocks ground together in my gut, and I shrank back. I had no desire to witness their midnight tryst. But—something seemed off. Brooklyn had wrapped her arms tightly around her torso, as if she were holding herself together. She kept her eyes down while Blake said something else, his hands flung wide in exasperation. Then she shook back her hair and looked up. It was hard to tell in the weird light, but—had she been crying?
She was saying something to him, hands shaping her urgency. She stepped closer. Explaining? Demanding? Begging?
Blake crossed his arms. A barred gate.
Brooklyn shook her head and said something else. Whatever it was must have stung him. His shoulders angled rigid again, and he said something back, something fast and strong.
An uneasy feeling was squiggling in my stomach. Something about this whole thing felt…off. Why were they out there in the first place? And what were they talking about? I could almost draw the lines of tension in the scene. Most importantly, why did Brooklyn look so upset? Something about the way Blake had been looking at her seemed…
Jenna, give him space. Things are counting down for him. When it all cracks, he’ll take down anyone around him. Don’t let it be you.
Outside the window, Blake had turned away for a moment. He shoved his hand through his hair—his signature gesture of weariness—and said something else. The tide of his frustration was going back out, I could tell. And then he suddenly swung back around and folded Brooklyn into his arms, pressing in for a kiss. She held herself stiff for a moment, but he was relentless, and in a moment, she seemed to soften against him.
I’d seen more than I wanted to. I laid down with my back to the window, trying to erase the image of Blake’s hands on Brooklyn’s face, trying not to imagine what it would be like to be the one he—
Tears I would have never allowed myself to cry during the day stung my eyes in the comforting dark of the RV. Clearly my “talk to her” advice to Blake had worked well. Very well, in fact.
Why could girls like Brooklyn treat a guy like a disregarded dog, and he’d still come crawling back every time?
Fine. Fine. What Blake or Brooklyn did was really of no concern to me. I didn’t have time for their drama, not when I was in Albuquerque, a stone’s throw from all that really mattered. I squeezed my eyes shut, summoning other images. My mother’s name across the front of an envelope. The way my quartz crystal burned with the light.
And the jackrabbits that knew when to stop listening.
#
But no matter how much I tried not to care, the caring was still there, hurting in my chest and keeping me from sleep. Probably part of me was subconsciously waiting for Blake and Brooklyn to come back inside, which they didn’t do for at least half an hour. I could hear the rustle of a whispered conversation as they crept in the door, but I couldn’t make out the words. Then I heard Blake settling back down on the couch and Brooklyn slipping through the sliding door into the bedroom, where Jaz had no doubt slept solidly through the whole thing. Why did nothing ever keep Jaz awake?
I slid fitfully in and out of sleep, dreaming about Blake turned away from me, and my father sliding a letter in a post office slot, and my mother pulling the needles into her arms over and over, and myself sprinting across scalding sand toward disappearing mountains. I had just jerked awake for what had to have been the twentieth time when I heard movement near the door. Blake and Brooklyn again? I sat up to see—Kason? Was everyone sneaking out tonight?
“Kason?” I whispered.
He turned. “Jenna? You awake?”
The shadows inside the RV were softer. I glanced out the window and could see that the black was fading to gray along the horizon. “Is it morning?” Dumb question.
His laugh was soft. “Not for everybody else, I guess.”
“Where are you going?”
“Meteor shower. The Arietids.”
Meteor shower. As if the pages of my father’s letter had sprung to life around me. I touched the stone around my neck. “Can—can I go with you?”
Even without seeing his face, I could feel his surprise, but he didn’t hesitate. “Sure.”
I scrambled down the foldaway ladder and slid my shoes on, then followed Kason out the door. The air was colder than I’d expected, here in this darkness before desert dawn. Our shoes crunched across the gravel as Kason led the way to the open space at the edge of the park.
“Did you have trouble sleeping?” He was back to wearing the #INEEDSPACE shirt.
I wasn’t planning on telling anyone about Blake and Brooklyn. “Sort of.” I hugged my arms around myself. “Where do we look for the meteors?”
He pointed toward a thin edge of pink just beginning to blur on the horizon. “Eastern sky. The Arietids are primarily a daytime shower, so they’re pretty hard to see. But sometimes you can catch them right before sunrise.” He shrugged. “I like to check, anyway.”
The predawn stillness settled around us both. The world seemed to be holding its breath. As though everything were watching the east, ready to worship the sun. And somehow, in the reverent hush, questions seemed easier. I took a deep breath. “Kason?”
“Yes?”
I stroked my thumb over my necklace. “What is a meteor, exactly?”
“Well, a meteor starts out as a meteoroid.”
Okay, I could already tell this was going to be way too nerdy for me. I sighed. “Which is…”
“A piece of space debris.” He adjusted his glasses. “A meteoroid is a piece of rock or mineral that breaks loose from something else, usually an asteroid, and gets caught in an orbit around the sun.”
“So what’s the difference between that and a meteor?”
“Well, sometimes a meteoroid will make it into Earth’s atmosphere. Once that happens, it’s called a meteor.”
I considered that for a moment. “So if we can see them, they’re meteors?”
“Exactly.” He gestured at the sky. “Hence, meteor showers.”
The pink streak was widening, muted colors starting to seep back into the shadows around us. But so far I’d seen no meteors.
“The light we see from meteor showers—” Kason was still in educational mode—“is actually the meteors incandescing. Basically, burning up, because of friction they encounter in the atmosphere.”
“But—some of them make it to Earth, right?”
“True. Then they’re called meteorites.”
I hadn’t intended to tell him, but somehow I felt safe, here in the cocoon of quiet before the day broke. “Is this one?”
“Is what one?”
“This.” Before I could change my mind, I slipped my necklace over my head and handed it to him.
He made a soft sound, something between surprise and interest. He rotated it in his hands, studying it until I could almost see his thoughts clicking away in connections. “Where did you get this?”
“My—” No, I wasn’t ready. Not yet. “Someone gave it to my mom. A long time ago. But she never got it.”
“Your mom?” There was more than a question behind those words. As if he’d been wondering for a while.
“She’s dead.” I pushed the sentence out before it could hurt. Tried not to think about the meteors burning themselves out, caught in something they couldn’t control.
He flicked me a quick, penetrating glance. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.” My standard response, perfected long ago to keep the story shut, to prevent people from feeling obligated to walk into the shadows with me. I brushed my hands along my shorts. I was getting goosebumps standing out here. “So—is that real?”
“It certainly looks like it.” He grinned at me, the pearly gray light just catching his face. “This is really cool, Jenna.”
Some unexplained warmth thawed through me at his words. “Oh—thanks. I wear it all the time.”
“I knew you wore a necklace.” He folded the chain almost reverently, handed it back to me. “But you usually have it inside your shirt, so I never knew what it was.”
He’d noticed that? The warmth increased. “Yeah.” I slipped the chain around my neck, but I left the meteorite out this time.
“Thanks for showing me.” He stepped closer. Close enough that I could feel his warmth.
I glanced at him. He was studying the sky with that infinite patience of his. That calm observation, as though he could watch the world for a thousand years and take everything he saw into his heart. And something about that gave me a strange security.
“Of course.”
The first coals of the sunrise were kindling, right there against the desert. Somewhere in a scrubby tree to our left, a bird began warbling, a trickling, liquid song. In a few minutes, the sun would erase the stars.
And then suddenly Kason pointed. “There! Right there!”
And I saw it as he did. A meteor. A streak of light as if God had struck a match against the sky. And then it had plunged itself out into the clouds around the sun.
“That was it?” I couldn’t believe it. I’d seen a meteor? Just like that?
“Yeah!” Beside me, Kason laughed suddenly. “Shooting stars. So cool.”
The sun pulled itself above the horizon, slanting the shadows along the ground. But suddenly, I was ready. Ready for this day and for whatever truths it held.
Because my father had been right. Under the desert sky, the answers really were closer.
And soon they would fall like fiery stars.