We All Looked Up by Tommy Wallach

them, and they were his enemies.
    â€œThanks again, James.”
    â€œDon’t mention it. Stay safe.”

    After school, a few dozen students assembled on the grass outside the refectory to sky watch. Someone had brought a telescope from the science building, though it was being used primarily to look down people’s throats and up into the offices on the top floor of Bliss Hall. Everyone was joking around and having a good time, but Eliza couldn’t shake a sense of foreboding. Even if James was right, it wasn’t easy to be relaxed about a giant rock flaming through the sky at a gajillion miles an hour.
    When she got back to the condo, her dad was sitting in front of the TV, watching the news. Even though she knew he was equally sick wherever he happened to be, Eliza always thought her dad looked about a million times healthier at home than he did in that beige, fluorescent hellhole they called a hospital—all beeping machinery and mechanical beds and death smells.
    â€œHey, Dad.”
    â€œHey, Gaga. Looks like someone left a love letter for you on the kitchen table.”
    A piece of notebook paper with a childish scrawl on the front was propped up like a little tent: Thanks for stranding me in the suburbs, bitch .
    â€œYou wanna talk about it?” her dad asked.
    â€œNot even a little.”
    She sat down in a puffy red chair next to the couch. On the TV, a couple of news anchors were talking about the asteroid, which appeared in a CGI rendering as a colorless rock pocked with craters, like a small misshapen moon.
    â€œ. . . our conspicuous new friend will be with us for at least a few more weeks. Labeled ARDR-1388 by the scientists who first discovered it, the asteroid is now affectionately known as Ardor.”
    The CGI disappeared, replaced with a white-bearded man with wire-rim spectacles and altogether too much enthusiasm. The sub­title said he was Michael Prupick, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Washington.
    â€œIf Ardor has broken its orbit, we’ll be able to watch it blaze across our sky on its way out of the Milky Way and into deep space. Near-Earth objects may get a bad rap in Hollywood blockbusters, but they’re incredibly useful to astronomers, not to mention the fact that mining companies are researching ways to exploit asteroids just like this one for rare elements in the very near future. In short, we could not be more excited about Ardor’s appearance.”
    The news anchors popped back up onto the screen.
    â€œSales of telescopes at local camping and toy stores are already up twenty percent this week—”
    Eliza’s father muted the television.
    â€œSo what poor slob did you strand in the suburbs?”
    â€œDid I not say we wouldn’t be discussing that?”
    â€œDid I agree?”
    They sat there in silence for a few seconds, while the talking heads on the TV continued their Muppet-y mouthing, but Eliza could feel her dad building up the energy for another push.
    â€œIt’s just that I need to know you’re gonna be able to take care of yourself. With me heading toward, you know, the margins of the picture, and your mom and everything—”
    â€œDon’t start.”
    â€œI’m just saying that stuff like this is on my mind, all right? Fucking sue me.”
    Eliza thought the rules were understood, even if they’d never been stated explicitly. She and her father were never to bring up either (1) the fact that, within a year, he’d almost certainly be dead, or (2) the fact that Eliza’s mother had fallen in love with another man and moved to Hawaii with him. And now her dad was breaking both rules at once. She got up and sat down next to him on the couch.
    â€œDad, what’s going on?”
    â€œNothing. I don’t know. I think it’s that fucking rock. It’s got me all worked up.”
    â€œI asked some kids at school about it. They said we