We All Looked Up by Tommy Wallach Page A

shouldn’t worry.”
    Her dad shrugged. “Maybe. But just in case, could you humor me on one thing?”
    She already knew what he was going to say. “No.”
    â€œCome on!”
    â€œWe’ve been through this. If Mom wants to talk, she can call.”
    â€œShe tried that.”
    â€œNot since last year.”
    â€œBecause every time she tried to talk to you, you’d just tell her what a shitty person she was and hang up!” Her dad was actually shouting at her; Eliza couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that.
    â€œShe deserved it.”
    â€œNo, she didn’t! I told her she could go, Eliza!” His voice got quiet again, and he put his hand on top of hers. “I told her she could go. Because she was in love. And arguing with that is pointless. It would be like”—he gestured toward the TV—“trying to stop that asteroid with a fucking BB gun. But I know it tore her apart to leave.”
    â€œShe still did it.”
    Her dad nodded. “Yeah. She did.”
    â€œAnd I don’t forgive her.”
    â€œWell, that’s another thing. I’m just asking you to talk to her.”
    Eliza rolled her eyes. “Jesus. Fine. I’ll think about it.”
    â€œGood.” He patted her hand. “So what’s for dinner?”
    â€œI was thinking I’d make something.”
    â€œOh yeah?”
    â€œYeah. Like, make a call to Pagliacci’s for delivery.”
    Her dad smiled, one of those wistful smiles, like he was already missing something that wasn’t gone yet. The kind that made her want to cry.
    â€œWorks for me,” he said.

A nita
    ANITA HAD PREPARED HERSELF FOR the interrogation. She had prepared herself for the lecture. She had prepared herself for the threats, the grounding, the silent treatment, the wagging finger, the shaking head, and all the general parental bullshit that was bound to result from her unprecedented escape from Casa Graves the previous week. What she had not prepared herself for, however, was the loss of her car key. With it went the very soul of adulthood—the freedom to be alone. She was under constant surveillance now. Every morning her father drove her to Hamilton on his way to work, and every afternoon her mother would arrive promptly at three forty-five to take her home. Even inside the house, Anita wasn’t left to herself. Every twenty minutes or so, someone would knock on her bedroom door to ensure she hadn’t pulled some kind of Rapunzel or Juliet and shimmied out the window.
    An only slightly lesser evil was the talk radio her father listened to in the car.
    â€œA trickle of news about our friend Ardor from the eggheads over at NASA today,” said some loudmouth host that you could practically hear getting fatter and dumber as he spoke. “You’d think they’d have something better than this, given that all they do these days is spend our tax dollars and complain about how they don’t get enough of our tax dollars, but hey, what do I know? Anyhoo, initial estimates placed the asteroid about two million miles away from Earth as it passed through our solar system. But now they’re saying it’ll be more like half a million miles, which in terms of deep space is a pretty close shave. And it’s funny, you know, those NASA guys have been drowning us, literally drowning us in all this talk about man-made climate change and holes in the ozone layer and all these problems that we know aren’t really an issue, and now we’ve got this asteroid that we’re gonna be dodging like one of those bullets in The Matrix , and the eggheads just say, ‘Oh well, we didn’t quite see it, sorry about that.’ So maybe these guys need to adjust their priorities a little bit, is what I’m saying. Back in five after this.”
    â€œAre your science teachers talking to you about global warming?” Anita’s father asked, turning