Niku tell us a ghost story or a UFO story
“Make a wish!”
“That wasn’t a shooting star. Ain’t no wish gonna come true on that.”
Carly rolled over onto her stomach from her back, her hands sliding from behind her head to support the bottom of her chin instead. Nich pretended not to notice the way gravity’s reversal affected her hair, spilling from between her fingers to end up around her forearms. A few strands had ended up getting caught beneath her palms anyway, and for some reason, this was as distracting as something could be when you were trying to pretend you were stargazing instead of watching someone out of the corner of your eye. “If it wasn’t a shooting star, then what was it?” she asked him, clearly skeptical. Luckily for Nich, it was the kind of skeptical that sounded half like it wanted to be convinced. That was all he needed to spread his hands out above him, framing the starry sky in the expansive goalpost made up of his thumbs and index fingers.
“It was a UFO, of course,” Nich told her with the confidence reserved only for fools and fifteen year old boys trying to impress a girl, though the difference between the two was still a matter of considerable scientific debate.
“What do you mean of course?” the currently unimpressed girl prompted, lowering one of her hands to pluck a few strands of grass circling the elbow of her other arm. She lined up her shot, and then took it. “If it was an unidentified flying object, then you can’t just say ‘of course’. You haven’t identified it.” There was an assured smugness on the edge of her voice, but it was nearly drowned out by the disappointment that he had gone for such a lame duck response in the first place. Shooting fish in a barrel might have gotten you dinner, but you didn’t take a picture with it after you pulled it out of the water.
Indignation was all it took for Nich to actually look at her head on, as it turned out. Pulling his head up and tucking his knees to his chest in a quick sit-up that would have continued to fail to impress Carly even if he had abs to do crunches with, Niche situated himself on the hillside so that he could fold his arms across the tops of his knees imperiously, all the better to look down on her with. “Well if you’re going to make a wish, isn’t the burden of proof on you to prove that that was a shooting star?” he shot back, knowing as all teenaged boys did that challenging someone was the quickest way to their affections. “Until it’s identified, then it’s unidentified, so it’s a UFO,” he shot right back at her, likely not even realizing just how redundant his response was. “Of course,” Nich added, just to rub the salt in the wound. The eye roll that rewarded him suggested he’d scored a point, but the only point he actually managed to earn was Carly’s index finger aiming between his eyes.
“I’ll prove it then. Let’s go find where it landed.” Imperiously, Carly tucked her finger back behind her thumb and then thumped Nich soundly across the bridge of his nose, prompting a cry that was more offended than genuinely hurt while she shoved the grass and hopped to her feet in one easy motion. The grass stuck here and there to the back of her jacket and jeans as much as it stained Nich’s palms from how long he had been resting on them before, and both teenagers ended up spending more time trying to pat the dewey greenery off of themselves than it had actually taken them to stand up in the first place.
“It didn’t land around here. We would have heard it, or felt an earthquake, or something,” Nich protested, though doing so hadn’t actually stopped him from getting up at the same time she had. “It would have been loud enough to wake the dead,” he added, clearly having thought of the joke a half second too late to make it seem seamless in his protestations. Carly at least gave him a sympathetic eyebrow raise over her shoulder before she traipsed down the incline of the hill, bouncing once or twice on the balls of her feet once she hit the flat ground below and stepped between the gravestones at the edge of the cemetery.
There was no reason to build a fence around the cemetery in a podunk like Mapleton. The worst kids in town still obeyed their curfews if it was a school night, and hell if anybody had ever been caught disrespecting a burial ground. There was every chance of a literal tarring and feathering for anyone who dared. Strictly speaking, Nich and Carly would have been up to their ears in hot water (if not tar) if anyone caught them hanging out on the stretch of hill between the tombstones of and the trees, but given that they weren’t defacing the property and weren’t necking (much to Nich’s chagrin), it would have been a pretty light scolding all told. Carly was a year older than him, which meant she was about a decade cooler. She liked all the best bands, even if most of them were too old for Nich to have ever even heard of them without researching them as soon as he got home after any time they talked music. She had inherited her older brother’s car when he’d gone off to college, and since she’d gotten her license a few months ago had been the ticket for Nich and their friends to go joy riding outside of Mapleton or make the two hour round trip to get to the nearest movie theater. She was the kind of first deep crush that Nich was probably going to hold a number of girls up against in the coming years. On the one hand, this would be deeply unfair of him, but on the other he’d end up breaking his own heart over the fact enough to make it unworthy of chastisement.
“Seriously, you don’t think we’re going to find anything do you?” Nich asked after they’d made it halfway through the rows of headstones, many of them bearing similar names. Even families who left Mapleton tended to come back when it was time for a burial. Carly was moving with enough purpose that it seemed like she knew exactly where she was headed, and it wasn’t back toward the road where her brother’s old car was parked. Instead it was toward the back of the plots, the garage that held the gravedigging equipment standing out like a sore thumb before the woods swallowed up the remaining land behind it. “We would have heard something like a meteor striking.”
“I thought it was a UFO. Those can land quietly, can’t they?” Carly challenged him without even looking, conversationally deferring to him as the expert in all things extraterrestrial.
“But we’re proving that it was a shooting star,” he shot back immediately, though it was fairly clear that neither of them were quite sure what they were arguing about in their excuse to go explore the darker edges of the cemetery. Even the kids who broke their curfew to hang around a bunch of gravestones and stargaze on the hillside didn’t tend to want to go tromping through the woods surrounding the burial ground. Nich might have followed Carly just about anywhere though, and Carly might well have been abusing that so she wouldn’t have to explore the woods by herself. Selfishness was the initial driving force behind a great many young friendships, but being open about it was what made them last.
“I’m pretty sure it’s a UFO now, actually. My wish didn’t come true.”
“Oh yeah? What did you wish for?”
“Can’t tell ya. It wouldn’t come true if I did.”
The woods were darker than either of them had anticipated, once they were under the cover of the trees. The dazzling number of stars in the sky couldn’t pierce the canopy above them, and brief spots of moonlight proved to be the only source of illumination they had to go by. Carly stepped on enough leaves and twigs that Nich could have followed her with his eyes closed anyhow, though she also stepped on enough leaves and twigs that there was every chance in the world that he was actually following a bear by this point. The sound would have been remarkably similar. After a couple of minutes of comfortably tromping non-silence, Nich cleared his throat. “How far are we going to go exactly to find your shooting star?”
“As far as it takes to find it,” she replied in a tone of voice as sensible as if she’d been talking about how many stamps she needed for postage.
As it turned out, that was only about a hundred feet further. The moonlight that just barely showed the silhouettes of the pair became the same color as the darkness around it, fading away from the brighter light of the shooting star that waited for them in the center of the clearing. There had been trees here before, where the clearing stood. The trunks were still there, standing at odd angles, but they were all missing their tops. The star was exactly as bright as a star was supposed to be, and even though both Carly and Nich knew you weren’t supposed to look directly at a star, the star didn’t seem to mind. It twinkled a bit, rather than blinding them, as it swam back and forth in elliptical patterns.
“It’s a UFO.” “It’s a shooting star.” they said so simultaneously that afterward, they couldn’t even decide who had made which argument, settling for watching the star wobble back and forth for a bit instead. The star brushed against a tree, and silently, it erased every spot of it that it touched. The eraser continued through in the blink of an eye, quietly removing a line out of the tree trunk in the trajectory that the star had been orbiting, and the entire top of the tree vanished the moment that it was no longer supported. “Don’t touch it,” they both agreed, stepping back to give the wobbling star room to explore, wobble, or whatever it was doing.
“Damn, I wish I’d brought a mason jar,” Nich finally sighed after they spent a few more minutes watching the star circle, wobble, and occasionally erase most of a tree from existence.
“It’s not a firefly,” Carly suggested, though some part of her voice sounded like it wished that he had remembered to bring the jar anyway.
“You don’t know that. We haven’t actually identified it yet,” he pointed out, though that got him a pretty quick look that told him if he got anywhere close enough to the star to try to identify it then Carly would be quick to erase whatever part of him the star didn’t. They continued to watch it. There was nothing hypnotic about the motion of the trapped star, exploring the woods without ever seeming to know precisely where it was. There was nothing romantic about it that turned their friendship into the kind of explosive affair that Nich’s hormones liked to occasionally put on for his imagination, complete with title cards and indie-rock soundtrack. They just watched it, both aware of the fact that they should have been in awe and grounded in the fact that this was something to watch while they had the opportunity.
“I wished I could see a shooting star up close, to prove that they were real. Because then maybe wishes would be real too,” Carly finally admitted, her voice respectfully quiet.
And then the star shot straight up, out of the woods, and back into the sky.
“If you say it, it doesn’t come true,” Nich pointed out.
“Stars aren’t smart enough to know what a paradox is,” Carly shrugged.
She held his hand on the way back to the car. It was just friendship. But high school friendships lasted a hell of a lot longer than high school relationships did. Even in a podunk like Mapleton.
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Topic: Mr. Niku, tell us a story! (Read 1710 times)