The sudden passing of eighteen-year-old Lily Hamill's grandmother causes Lily to return to her Nana's bizarre hometown of Willowbrook after a ten-year absence. There she meets a strange boy named Marcel, who offers her a mysterious parting gift inte...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The three of us sat in a semi-circle in the back room of the hardware store.
In the center of our circle I'd placed the canvas bag. The newspapers were sticking up out of the bag like tissue paper on a birthday gift. Marcel and I shared a mutual glance in each others direction.
"Well, I don't know about you two, but the suspense is killing me," Daniel said with an impatient groan. He peeled down the bag from around the sides of the meteor like a banana.
There really was no way for me to explain what we were looking at. It was a rock, but it wasn't. It was a meteorite, but it wasn't like any I'd seen on the internet before.
I was willing to accept the possibility that maybe this had actually fallen form the sky, but I stilled had so many questioned regarding it.
"Nana's kept this hidden for eighteen years. Why would she do that?" I asked as I pressed two fingers against my temples.
"I have no idea," Marcel expressed with honestly.
"Maybe she did it because Mrs. Whitman asked her to hide it? I mean, okay let's pretend for a second that we all believe 100% that Marcel was born from this thing. With researchers visiting if they found any shred of truth to that then they would have taken Marcel away and done all those freaky alien autopsy tests on him, right?" Daniel tried to reason.
I wanted to roll my eyes, but I refrained from doing so. "Okay, and now that we've entertained a totally impossible theory, how about a more logical one?"
"Well, I was born that day, that is a fact. The pieces of meteor that I have connect to this larger piece, that is a fact too. My grandmother has dementia, and it's very easy for her to get confused about things. Logically, maybe your Nana wanted it hid away to not trigger any possible delusions from my grandmother," Marcel offered.
It was nice, but oddly, it just didn't sound right. The impossible theory sounded more like something my grandmother would do than the logical theory.
"I feel like we're really missing something big. Like, if this was officially a meteor, why is there no mention of it anywhere? It's just kind of a town rumor. And if it wasn't really a meteor, then why is the area it landed in all fenced and closed off? Why is it that nothing grows there like it's a radiated site?"
"Okay, I have another theory. What if it's not a meteor? That's why it isn't officially listed as one, because it isn't. What if it's a some form of an alien egg or incubator?" Daniel was back to his wild ideas again.
"Daniel, can we please at least try to work within the realm of possibility?" I begged.
"Hey, science used to say being gay was a mental illness, okay? So excuse me for not having a whole lot of faith in being logical. I embrace all possibilities," he said with such sass and flare that I actually couldn't find fault in what he said at all.
The universe was vast, ever expanding and a gigantic question-mark. Who was I to say if this was or wasn't a meteor?
"I think Daniel's right. I don't think it's a meteor at all. I think we should send a piece of it anonymously to be tested," Marcel said.
That was something I could definitely agree with.
"There was a Doctor of meteor astronomy mentioned in the paper. We could contact him and send it," I suggested.
Marcel looked at me in a way that was really different than before. He gazed at me like he was in total awe. No one had ever looked at me like that before, not even Alex.
Daniel stood and smoothed down the front of his shirt. "Well, this meeting of the cosmic club is adjourned then. I have a bunch of boxes of nails to shelf before I gets late."
Daniel was quick on his feet, it wasn't even a few seconds before Marcel and I were left alone in the room.
I became a lot more aware of my closeness to Marcel when it was just the two of us. We sat beside one another, but we had the distance of an arms length between us. My hand was pressed flat against the floor and so was his. Thought we weren't touching, I could still feel the electricity just from his proximity.
"I kind of hope at the end of all this we discover that I'm just a normal eighteen-year-old," Marcel suddenly said. He hadn't stopped staring at me.
"I can prove to you that you are," I said with a confident smile. "Let's do something normal eighteen-year-old do. We'll have a movie night and watch all the sci-fi movies about space that we can and compare them to you. I'm pretty sure after you see Aliens and E.T that you aren't going to feel like you're from the sky anymore."
"Sounds like a great time." He seemed happy with the idea at first, but then concern washed over his face. "Actually, do you mind if we have it at my house? The insurance company has cut the amount of hours a nurse can be over at the house with my gran, so most nights I have to stay close to home."
Marcel had to work to take care of his grandmother. He obviously managed all the bills and care for her by himself. He could have had his grandmother go to a nursing care facility and he could have sold the house and ran off to college, but he didn't. Marcel sacrificed his schooling to stay home and be there for his gran.
"Of course and if you ever need my help with anything else while I'm here, I'm just a knock away." I meant every word I said, but at the same time, I wondered why I felt so comfortable around Marcel.
It somehow felt like we were connected.
A flash of a memory flickered through my thoughts. I remembered a time before where I had sat this close to Marcel. It was when we were eight, I could remember him leaning over to give me my very first kiss from a boy. It was an innocent peck against the cheek.
The minute the memory returned to me, Marcel's eyes seemed to light up. I hadn't said a word, but somehow it felt like he knew exactly what I had thought about.
We both remembered, and he knew it.
I kind of liked that with Marcel I didn't have to really explain every little thing I was thinking. I liked how intuitive he was. Around Alex I felt like I constantly had to explain myself, it was work to keep him interested in me. I had to always look a certain way, behave a certain way and be involved in certain things.
Marcel felt like a guy I could just be myself around, and after the loss of Nana, I felt drawn to the idea of making a friend out of Marcel.
I knew that it was an total impossibility, but if I just pretended for a minute that the rumor might have been true, then it'd mean I had my first kiss with a boy from the stars. . .
