She smiled and waved it in front of your face. You took a step backward toward your room, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“We should go tonight,” she said suddenly. “I can’t take the smell in that room anymore. It smells like a candle store. Oh, and I have this hilarious new phrase to teach you! Baba let it slip when she was trying to get the cable box to work. Get your keys, dude!”
She was laughing now, but you couldn’t seem to move. Your socks might as well have been Velcroed to the carpet.
“I think it’s better,” you said, “if we didn’t… do that tonight.”
It was amazing how fast her smile disappeared, like someone had spliced the movie of this moment and removed a few frames.
“Oh,” she said finally. “Sure. I mean if you don’t…”
Her whole posture changed, and that’s when you came to a realization that made all of this so much more painful. Those nights at Perkins, just sitting in a peeling vinyl booth, talking about nothing and drinking bad coffee, were actually important to her too. You always assumed she could take them or leave them, and that when Sean finally woke up and decided to pay attention to her again, she would happily go back to spending most of her time with him. But here was Sean, awake and giving her his all, and here was Diana in the hallway again, asking you to leave with her.
You wanted to take it all back in that moment. You wantedto tell her you were kidding, that of course you were going to get your keys, and you hoped your favorite booth was still open. But something had already shifted. She was looking at you with such disappointment. She was not playing it cool. She didn’t understand what had changed, and you were powerless to tell her. So, of course, very quickly, your anxiety showed up at the party. You could feel the sweat prickle at the nape of your neck. Above your lip. You started to feel lightheaded.
“I have to go,” you said, and your voice sounded like it was being played a click too fast.
“Just wait a second,” she said.
Your mouth was so dry.
“What?” you said, and just stood there dumbly.
She pushed her bangs away from her eyes. Then she stuck a hand in her pocket and pulled out a small rock. She reached over and opened your hand and pushed the rock against your palm. You closed your fingers. Your breathing was speeding up, but the rock slowed it again. Just holding something tangible, something substantial, allowed you to take a full breath. You looked at the stone. It was diamond shaped and jet black. Almost like a piece of charcoal, but it left no residue on your fingers.
“What is this?” you said.
She looked at the ceiling, and you couldn’t tell for a moment if she was going to answer you. Then she looked you in the eye.
“My uncle lives in Detroit,” she said. “And a couple of years ago there was this flash in the sky at night. Like, super bright. People thought it was a bomb or a UFO or something. There were 911 calls. The whole city was freaking out. Then the next day, my uncle goes outside and he finds these weird rocks on his lawn.”
“No…,” you said.
She nodded.
“A meteorite?”
“They think it was about five feet long when it came shooting in, but it, like, broke up into all these pieces when it hit the atmosphere. A couple of them landed in Uncle Novak’s yard. He was shaking his head when he talked about it. Saying, ‘This is from space! It could have killed me!’ Then he handed one to me. It’s always kind of creeped me out, to be honest. So now I’m giving it to you.”
You didn’t have time to say anything.
“Hey, babe!” came a shout from your brother’s room, startling you. “C’mere. I want to read you something.”
“Sweet Jesus,” she said. “If he’s writing poems again…”
Earlier, she might have looked at you for a conspiratorial laugh, but now there was nothing. She was just talking to herself. And you felt it then: the full impact of the heartbreak. Everything was changing between you and Diana. You knew it and she knew it, even if she didn’t know why. You felt some anger, sure, but mostly just the ache.
You were heartbroken that your brother, who you loved and idolized, had just taken away your best friend so effortlessly. Because that’s ultimately who she was. Even if she would never love you the way you loved her: She was the friend you liked best. You were heartbroken that he didn’t understand something so simple—Diana meant something to you too and now you had to lie to her.
Suddenly, you felt pain that was outside your mind, and it wasn’t until you unclenched your fist in the hallway that you sawwhat had happened. Your palm was bleeding. Right where the rough edge of the meteorite met your hand, it sliced open the skin. This rock had survived its white-hot passage through the earth’s atmosphere only to smear your fingers with sticky blood. And when Diana closed the door to Sean’s room behind her, without once looking back, you were faced with another one of the sayings that had been taped to the outside.
Love is the whole thing. We are only pieces, it read.
You weren’t sure what it meant.
For a few seconds, you tried to understand. Maybe it was saying that love is bigger than any one person. That it is this incredible force and you and everyone else are just tiny fragments. Or maybe it meant that everyone is broken and you are united by your brokenness. You just didn’t know. You only knew that your hand was bleeding, and so you walked into the bathroom to clean yourself up.
And when you grabbed the bandages, you found that you were still gripping the rock, holding it tight even through the pain. It felt, in that moment, so silly and humiliating. Your unfortunate crush. Your ridiculous hope. Your belief that Sean would do the right thing even though he usually didn’t when it came to anyone else but you. And you knew then, as you switched on the hot water and watched it steam, that it was probably time to let go.
