“So?” I said. “It’s only Artie, Ope and Ricardo.”

  “I know. But we might not even be here, Mom and I.”

  I cross my arms on the windowsill and lean my forehead on the glass.

  “Noah, I’m just not sure their parents will like us leaving you guys alone.”

  “We’re not going to raid the liquor cabinet, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I’m not worried about that.”

  “Oh, right. Drugs. I forgot. Yeah, well, Ric was going to score some spice from his big brother. Or maybe some bath salts.”

  “Bath salts?”

  “Synthetic cathinones: gotta keep up, Dad.”

  He sighed and leaned his head on the glass, too. He didn’t say anything, but it was as if the glass was transmitting his thoughts, forehead to forehead. He was going to leave it to me to give in — do the right thing. I was pretty reliable that way, but not this time.

  “Father,” I said, wanting to add a little tone to my objection, “have you ever met a nerdier group of twelve-year-olds than Artie, Ope, Ricardo and me?” I glanced sideways. His eyes were closed but he was smiling. “Think about it. They’re coming over to watch the Perseid Shower. We’re going to lie out on the back lawn in our sleeping bags, counting meteoroids as they burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s the closest any of us get to a sporting event. We’re going to eat too many Doritos — the original, unflavored kind — and drink too much Dr. Pepper — you know, counteract the heavy salt intake with a really high sugar intake. That’s about the extent of the trouble we’ll get into. We might forget to brush our teeth.”

  “Okay, okay, I hear you,” said Dad. He sounded weary. I didn’t want to fight with him, but this was a big deal. I was the last of the four dweeb-amigos to turn twelve.

  “This is the last birthday before I become a teenager. Next year, who knows what I’ll be up to? But you’ve got to trust me now.”

  “I do trust you, Noah. I trust all of you. I’m only saying their folks may not approve of us taking off in the middle of the evening. We might already be gone when the guys arrive.”

  “So, lets phone them first thing tomorrow,” I said. “Let them know what’s up. See what they say. Does that sound fair?”

  Dad pushed back from the sill. “Yep,” he said, but then he was distracted by a flash outside. Me, too. A shooting star over the woods behind the house. “Nice,” said Dad. He turned to go. Then we heard a noise and turned to the window again.

  “It’s just cars out on the highway,” I said after listening a moment.

  “Sounds closer,” said Dad. He was frowning. “You wouldn’t have left the gate unlocked in the back meadow, would you?”

  “Nope. Haven’t been out there for ages.”

  Dad nodded. “I’ll talk to Charlie,” he said.

  Just then the sound of a vehicle revving high cut through the cricket sounds. Could have been an ATV, but it sounded like a car. Whatever it was, Dad was right, it was close, even though we couldn’t see any headlights through the trees. He shook his head. Then he patted me on the shoulder and headed back to Mom.

  I turned to the window again. The baby wasn’t even born and he was already shaking things up. A mistake. The baby was a mistake.

  “Not really,” Mom had said. “Let’s call it — him — a surprise.” Him. A him who was on the way. Almost here. Whoa! He might even be born on my birthday! I rested my head against the glass again. Next, he’ll want my bedroom, I thought. I closed my eyes and into the darkness roared the sound of racing cars.

  There was definitely more than one vehicle tooling around. We had seventy-six acres of land. Most of it was bush, but there was old farmland out there that hadn’t yet been completely taken over by juniper and prickly ash and baby pines. Our neighbor Charlie kept sheep out in our back meadow, which was fenced off. But there was an old train bed bordering the meadow that the telephone company kept up for the cable they buried there. People used the train bed as a trail for cross-country skiing or snowmobiling in the winter, and for ATVs in the summer.

  But a chained gate was only a minor inconvenience to some of the yahoos in our neck of the woods. We once phoned in a stolen vehicle someone had parked behind the old run-down barn out in the meadow.

  The vehicles stopped, first one, then another, then a third. If I strained my ears I could hear yelling, laughing, like maybe there was a drunken party out there. Maybe they’d gathered to watch the shower. Somehow, I doubted it.

  * * *

  The Perseid Shower is my special birthday present. It lasts a few days but it reaches its peak right on August the twelfth. Thank you, Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. That’s where the meteors come from. Swift-Tuttle takes 133 years to orbit the sun, but every single year the Earth passes through its trail of debris, which is all that meteors are, really. Dirt. When I was a little kid I really thought they were shooting stars, especially the fireballs — they’re the ones that leave long wakes of luminous ionized matter. Ric said he used to call them glow worms, but whoever heard of a worm that traveled at sixty-five kilometers per second?

  * * *

  Dad phoned the parents the next morning and they all said it was fine for the four of us to be alone. There was one moment of panic. Ope’s mother suggested that his older sister could babysit us. But, according to Dad, as soon as she said it, a civil war erupted on the other end of the line. Mrs. Opeka got back on the phone and said, in a shaky voice, that it was okay for Justin to come alone.

  “There’s no way Ope would want Elsa to babysit,” I said.

  “She said she’d rather die,” said Dad.

  So everything was set. And as soon as everything was set, Mom went into serious labor, almost as if she’d been waiting. By four in the afternoon they were out the door and the house was mine. I watched them drive off, feeling nervous. They had so much stuff with them — bags and bags — as if they were moving away. I closed the door and leaned against it. We had been going to drive down to the Kennedy Space Center and catch a launch next spring. That wasn’t going to happen, not anymore.

  I shook it off. Got to work on the robotic arm building kit they’d got me for my birthday.

  Time flies when you’re building robotic arms and before I knew it the guys were arriving. The guys and the pizzas, courtesy of Artie’s mom.

  Artie got me an Optimus Prime wall decal.

  “I tried to get him life-size but I couldn’t find one,” he said.

  “Which is just as well,” said Ope. “At 6.7 meters, he’d go up one wall, across your ceiling and come down the other wall.”

  Ope got me an Albert Einstein action figure. I took him out of his box. “Hmm, the elusive unified field theory,” I said. I tried to make Einstein scratch his head but he wasn’t that versatile. “Nope, can’t figure it out.” Then I had Einstein point his finger at Ope. “Guess you’ll have to do it, Mr. Opeka.”

  But the best present was the last. Ricardo had made me a micrometeorite necklace just like his. Ric collects micrometeorites. This one was about the size of a pea. He’d fused it in glass in his microwave kiln. I put it on, and he pulled his out from under his shirt.

  “Mine’s bigger,” he said and we all laughed.

  “Yeah, well mine’s the biggest,” said Artie. Then he patted himself on the chest. “Oh, wait. I don’t have a micrometeorite necklace.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Ric, and then he pulled two more necklaces out of his pocket, one for Artie and one for Ope.

  When we were all wearing our micrometeorite necklaces, I said, “That pretty well proves it.”

  “What?” said Ric.

  “We are the totally flashest dweeb-amigos in the known universe.”

  * * *

  When you see a shooting star, it’s the light caused by the friction on a piece of comet debris entering our atmosphere. It might only be the size of a piece of popcorn but it heats up so hot it vaporizes. Every now and then one actually lands — not all that often, although we keep hoping we’ll find one.

  Meanwhile tons of micrometeorites fall to Earth every single day. Space dust. Ric gets micros from his rain gutter. True! Here’s how it works: rain washes all the crud that ends up on your roof into the gutter. If you filter out the leaves and twigs and other debris, and if you find something that looks like rock, chances are you’ve got yourself a micro. You can tell for sure if you put it under a microscope; it’ll be rounded and pitted, a sign of its fiery trip through the atmosphere.

  I looked at mine and thought about Mom’s amber brooch. Amber is sap that fossilized and sometimes something gets trapped in it, like an insect. Mom’s insect might be a million years old — maybe a hundred million years old. But a micrometeorite is a particle from the formation of the solar system and it’s over four billion years old.

  We’re all just stardust, Mom likes to say.

  “What’s the matter?” said Ope. “You look stunned.”

  “He always looks stunned,” said Artie, “Now, he looks like he’s going to cry because he has the best friends in the world.”

  “The Brotherhood of Interstellar Dirt,” I said. We all clinked are micro necklaces together, like a toast, and then stuffed them down our shirts. It’s one thing knowing you’re a first-class dork, but you don’t have to go around advertising it.

  * * *

  We frittered the daylight away playing Civilization 1. Dad phoned and told me Mom was fine, but the baby was being stubborn.

  “Guess he’s happy where he is,” said Dad.

  “Okay,” I said. Wasn’t sure where to go with that.

  “You guys cool?”

  “Yeah, we’re playing Civ 1.”

  “What happened to Civ 6?”

  “We’re feeling nostalgic. Anyway, it’s hilarious. Gandhi keeps dropping nuclear bombs on people.”

  “Gandhi?”

  “Yeah, it’s a programming glitch.”

  “Okay,” says Dad, sounding bewildered. “Uh …”

  “What?”

  “Just a heads-up,” said Dad. “If the baby holds out too much longer, they might have —”

  “Yeah, I know. We talked about this,” I said. About how much trouble Mom went through having me. About maybe needing to have a C-section.

  “You there, Noah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, just wanted to keep you in the picture. They’re about to —”

  “I gotta get back, Dad,” I said, interrupting him. “It’s my turn and I need to enhance my alliances before Gandhi nukes me. Give Mom a hug.”

  I hung up before he painted the picture any more vividly.

  * * *

  Finally, it was dark. Good and dark. No moon. We placed our sleeping bags pointing in the four cardinal directions and lay down with our heads together at the center, like we were one joined hub of brainpower. That way, each of us could cover a quadrant of the sky.

  It wasn’t ten minutes before Ope yelled, “Fire!” and we all looked east. I missed it but I heard the click of his tally counter. He was the meteor-counting champion. Game on!

  “Fire!” yelled Ope, again, and I caught it, too, out of the corner of my eye. Click.

  We were in the heart of the meteor stream. When the timer on my phone signaled an hour had passed, I had counted seventeen. Ope was tops with twenty-three and it wasn’t even midnight. Soon they’d be coming fast and heavy.

  And then we heard the cars.

  “What’s that?” said Artie.

  “Whaddya think?” I said.

  “They sound close,” said Ricardo nervously.

  They did sound close, just like last night.

  “My brother knows these guys who do pop-up hot-rod racetracks,” said Ric.

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere. They don’t care.”

  “Like, on private property?”

  “Sure. Someone comes, they take off.”

  “But at night?”

  “Less chance of getting caught,” said Ric.

  “Also, way more risky,” said Ope.

  “They wouldn’t do it if there were sheep, would they?”

  “These guys,” said Ric. “They’d do anything for a kick. They’re the same guys who race their snowmobiles on the lake in late March.”

  “A dying breed,” said Ope.

  The cars revved and squealed — two at least, but maybe three or more. Even over the engine sounds we could hear shouts and laughter.

  “They sound closer than the back meadow,” said Ric, sounding more nervous than ever. I’d been thinking the same thing.

  “The high meadow’s where I’d do it,” said Artie. “There’s hazards everywhere: boulders and old rotten barbed-wire fences —”

  “Not to mention trees,” said Ope.

  “It’d be killer,” said Artie.

  “Let’s hope so,” said Ope. Then he yelled, “Fire!” And clicked his counter. He was the only one who caught it — the only one still lying on his back looking up. It was just too hard to concentrate with all the noise. My brain was working overtime.

  “They sound drunk as skunks,” said Ric. He sounded frightened.

  “How can you tell?” said Artie.

  “You’ve met Ric’s brother,” said Ope.

  It was true. Ricardo got the brains in his family. His older brother got all the alpha male idiot genes. The laughter was a long way off but it did sound kind of boozy.

  “They’d never make it up the trail, would they?” said Ric. “I mean as far as the house?”

  Not in a car, I thought. We bush-hog the trail all the way to the old train bed, but it’s pretty rocky.

  “Whoa!” said Artie suddenly, and we all caught it — a fireball — hurtling to Earth and disappearing into the trees.

  “That was huge!” said Ric.

  And then we heard the unmistakable sound of a car crash.

  * * *

  “Holy Roman Empire!” said Artie.

  Even Ope was climbing to his feet now with a hand from me and Ric. I raced up the lawn, up the stairs to the deck and looked out over the bush.

  “There’s a fire,” I said.

  Artie joined me and climbed up on the picnic table. “You’re right. Crap!”

  Next came Ric who helped Ope up on account of he’s so weak. The fire was flickering — a hot point of red in the deeper darkness of the forest.

  “A direct hit!” said Artie.

  “No way,” said Ric.

  “Highly improbable,” said Ope.

  “Then what is that?” said Artie.

  “Ope’s right,” I said. “The sound was metal on metal. Probably one of the cars rammed into another one.”

  “Or a metal meteorite the size of a basketball crashed into a car,” said Artie.

  “We’d have probably felt it,” said Ope.

  “I think I did,” I said. The others looked at me, surprised. “I felt something, anyway.”

  “What do we do?” said Artie.

  “Call 911,” said Ric, already taking his phone out of his pocket.

  “The fire brigade are volunteers,” said Artie. “They’ll take forever to get here.”

  “I can’t get a signal, anyway,” said Ric. “I’ll try the house phone.” He turned at the door to the living room. “Maybe we should, you know, go inside? Lock the doors?”

  “It’s not the zombie apocalypse, Ricardo,” said Artie. Ric glowered at him.

  “What if the bush catches fire?” I said.

  “There was a thick dew,” said Ope. “Remember when we laid down our sleeping bags?”

  “Yeah, but it’s been —”

  “Shhh!” said Artie. And we listened. The guys out there were screaming at each other. It sounded like a fight. Then one car roared into action and went squealing off — the other way, from the sound of it. Had to be. Then another car took off and a third.

  “Maybe it is the zombie apocalypse,” said Artie.

  “Better phone,” said Ope.

  “I’m on it,” said Ric.

  And as he was closing the door, I shouted, “Wait!” I raced after him into the house and while he went to use the phone in the kitchen, I raced up the stairs to my room. There was a lot of forest in the way, but from there I could see the fire better. Pinpoint it.

  “Got any idea where it is?” said Artie. He’d followed me, all out of breath.

  “Yep. You were right. It’s out on the high meadow, right near You and Me Pal Hill.”

  He joined me at the window. The fire was burning hot, flames leaping up into the night.

  Artie looked at me and some of that distant glow was in his eyes. “You wanna?”

  I nodded. And we took off downstairs.

  * * *

  “You are totally nuts,” said Ric.

  “It’ll probably just burn out,” said Ope, who was on his back again, staring up at the heavens, counter in hand. “The grass will be wet and there’s no wind.” Then he glanced at Artie and me. “Besides, I don’t think those will make much difference.”

  We were armed with fire extinguishers. I had grabbed the one by the fireplace, Artie the one in the kitchen. They weren’t all that big. We each had a heavy-duty Maglite, as well. We get a lot of blackouts where we live.

  “Leave it to the pros,” said Ope, turning his attention back to the sky.

  “Yeah, but what if someone’s hurt?” I had this vision of a body trapped inside a burning vehicle, writhing in pain. I had felt something — something deep in my gut. “I’m going,” I said.

  “Me, too,” said Artie.

  “Whoa!” said Ric. “Where’d you get that?”

  Artie had a meat cleaver stuck in his belt. “It’s in case of bears,” he said.