8 years after the unusual meteor shower

Boston, Massachusetts 

"Those big rocks that fell from the sky, they were real strange, Mayet." Simon breathed. "Some of them made a big crater, and some of them looked like they stopped before hitting the ground. And they were all funny colors. You remember those colors, Mayet?"

"I sure do!" Mei answered proudly at her grandfather's side. "Red, green, purple, brown, silver, black, and blue." She counted off proudly.

"You've been studying, have ya'?" He chuckled. Mei's version of studying meant grilling him again and again to tell the same story each time they visited. He never got tired of telling it.

By now, Simon Hedge and his wife were on their deathbeds, Tom and his wife Julia, his teenage son Lag and his five and a half year old daughter Mei, whom everyone called Mayet for whatever reason, would come by. And every time, the same greetings would be exchanged. The same smiles, the same conversations devoid of any point. Then, there was grandpa's crazy story.

"Again!" Exclaimed little Mei, bouncing excitedly next to the old man. "Tell me the story of the boy again!"

Simon wheezed a laugh, his lungs were giving out, he knew it, and took a small breath. "He was a small boy, not much bigger than you, Mayet. (Hey! I'm big!) Climbed right out of the ball as if he did it every day. Not a scratch on him or his ball. Patricia and I were surprised, for sure, but when he started shivering, I knew something was comin'."

He paused and started to cough and wheeze. Julia exchanged a worried look with Tom. She bent over gently. "Mayet, dear. I think grandpa's tired. Perhaps we should..."

"Hey, I'm still in tip top shape!" Simon barked. In truth, he knew it was soon. He knew he needed to tell the story one more time for little Mei to remember. For her to never forget. He had to tell it one more time.

"I grabbed Patricia, she was passing out, and rushed her inside. I was still carrying that damn shovel. God knows why I held onto it. I knew something was comin' but nothing could've prepared me for what did come."

He leaned his head back and mustered up the energy to keep talking. "I thought a bomb had gone off in the kid. He went off like a three tons of TNT. I hadn't seen anything like it since the war, and that was one heck of an explosion."

He paused again, catching his breath.

"We couldn't believe it, when we went out. The roof was loose, the snow had been blown away from him, creating a clearing around. Some trees had been tilted, others uprooted. Whatever happened, it didn't harm him one bit. He was completely untouched. We didn't quite know what to do with him. We brought him inside and laid him out on the couch.

"Why didn't you keep him?" Mei asked, as she always did. "We could've played!"

"He wasn't a pet, you know, Mayet. And even if we'd kept him, he wasn't safe. We didn't know what he could do."

Simon began to drift off. He could feel his time was short and shortening by the second.

"No, not one you wanna have around. But maybe we should've taken 'im anyway." He sighed. " I love you." He said, to no one and everyone.

Simon Hedge closed his eyes to sleep one final timel

.

Servy, Canada

2032

The final bell woke me up like a slap to the face. I sat up straight and looked around to see my classmates filing out of the classroom group by group. Mrs. Sandlan stood at her desk, looking at me with disapproval.

I groaned and rubbed my eyes. Here it comes.

"Sam, that's the fourth time you've fallen asleep in class this week. This week. How I never notice you is beyond me." She sighed and chuckled a little to herself.

Mrs. Sandlan was a sweet old lady, always with an amused sparkle in her eyes. She always acted like she was half her age. Also, when she scolded, she had trouble staying angry.

"Your behavior is unacceptable. I would say you should pay attention to improve your grades, but you're already the top of the class!" She shook her head and chuckled again. "Smart kids are hard to nag, dumb up a bit, will you?"

I couldn't suppress the smile playing across my lips. Talking with her always made me smile. "I always have been, ma'am. I just sleep a lot, otherwise my mind will be overloaded with info and I'll lose the ability to speak."

She nodded, laughing, then a stern look came over her. "Sam, you're a smart boy. Absurdly so. Almost incomprehensibly. You're just missing one thing. You need to start putting effort into your work. Your projects are interesting, but the visual presentations are torture to look at! I thought my head would explode it was so disorganized." She made a poof gesture with her hands from her head. That's just how she talked. All her body thrown into the words.

I nodded. Admittedly I had started on that project a little late. Around the day before.

"And your tests. The answers are correct but your handwriting makes it almost impossible to tell!" She threw her hands into the air. "And when you erase, erase it completely! I can clearly see all your answers overlapping!"

Is it my fault I always want to be doing something else during tests and let my gaze stray from my paper to, say, the pretty redhead girl with astonishingly riskily cut pair of jean shorts?

She sighed one last sigh. "Try putting in some effort from time to time. It'll work out for you, I promise."

"I will, Mrs. Sandlan." I said. "But I can't guarantee."

Another sigh. More airborne hands.

I got up and stuffed my binder into my bag. I was late for the best part of school: leaving.

"Have a nice day, Sam." I heard her call in a tired voice.

"I will! You too!" I trotted down the hall to my locker. Everyone was already out. The speed of students leaving their high school is comparable only to a pack of charging buffaloes. 

I found my friends on the rooftop of the school. From here, you could see the whole city stretching out in every direction. It wasn't very big, but from the top of Courtney hill, it was impossible to miss anything. The mall at the top of the hill was the only thing out of sight, which wasn't much of a loss anyways.

The rooftop was high enough for the wind to blow at you, unimpeded.  In most schools, hanging out so high up wouldn't be allowed, but ours held several activities here: The volleyball games, the eating competition (which only happened once. The winner got indigestion from bad plums and the school almost got sued. I honestly have no idea what they were thinking), the tennis games, which usually ended when the ball got blown away by the wind (we have a tree behind the school that everyone named Tennis Ball Birch, even though it's not a birch tree) and beach volleyball game (a bunch of guys smuggled bags of sand to the roof and poured it all over the volleyball court. They had to sweep it up, later).

"Fell asleep again, Sam?" Asked Tommy. My eyes passed over the hulking mass that was Tommy. His grin stretched across his face the way it did when he sees a puppy in the park. It looked like he was either going to run up to the puppy, stuff dynamite down your pants, or kill the owner. He didn't do any of those things, because he's afraid of dogs. "Mrs. Sandlan, She of The Hawk's Eye. How does she not notice you."

"She probably turns a blind eye. Seriously, just get married already." Tevin flipped the can of soda he'd just bought, which was probably a bad idea. I decided to let it explode in his face, for that comment. He was just Vin to his friends, which was to say, the two of us. He's the kind of kid you'd find hanging around the basketball field, pretending he can play when he really can't, just bouncing it around his legs but never really shooting. Like Kevin Hart, except smaller.

"Let's get going!" He shouted, tossing the ball at us.

I caught, braced myself and shot, my feet clearing Vin's shoulders in a leap the students of this school could only ever dream of making. 

The ball bounced dejectedly off the backboard and back into Vin's hands. He whistled. "Nice display of strength, you should show that to your girlfriend, when you get one."

"I think it was a good shot." Tommy mumbled.  

I had the reputation of being strong, as in I could hurl a stone way beyond the other side of a large riverbank. But, indeed, I was so inaccurate there was a running joke I'd once missed the riverbank and thrown it the length of the river instead. People were sometimes surprised by my strength, because I was far from muscular.

I was rather short and somewhat slender, according to Vin. I had dark hair that was sometimes compared to a spread out feather duster ("You really should think of getting a haircut, North. You're amassing dust as you walk through the corridors." Mrs. Sandlan once said. Not unkindly, but a little briskly). My eyes sometimes made people uncomfortable. They were a strange, very deep, black. Besides that, Tommy said he thought I had a kind of reserved look on my face. He had a knack for being able to read people, so I took his word for it.

The three of us walked through the empty halls, every noise we made magnified and reverberated off the walls. There's something weirdly enlightening about walking in the school when everyone is gone. Some kind of feeling of liberty in a usually discipline based area.

"It's not often this place is empty." Vin pointed out. "Kinda mysterious."

"What if, like, a girl in a filthy white dress and black hair suddenly appeared behind us." I said. the lights start flickering as she slowly raises her head and..."

"Stop, you're describing The Ring, I hate that movie." Tommy shivered. "You guys made me watch too many horror movies."

"Aww, you afraid something's gonna be in the lockers?" Vin poked him in the side, earning a yelp.

"Shut up! It's not impossible." He glanced around nervously and we laughed.

"Nothing's there, Tommy. Seriously, these are movies. Fiction. None of it is true."

"Well, you can't prove the opposite, can you?"

"You've been watching creepy videos on youtube, haven't you?" He chuckled. "Boo!"

Tommy didn't flinch, he just punched Vin on the shoulder.

...is here...

"What?" I asked.

They both looked at me. 

"Did you forget something?"

"No, I mean. Didn't you guys hear that girl?" I looked around at them.

They exchanged a nervous glance.

"Um... I don't know. Is anyone else here?" Vin asked, glancing around. "Everyone should be gone by now."

I did a quick three-sixty. No one in sight.

"What'd she say?"

"I dunno." I frowned. "She wasn't very clear, but I heard: is here."

Vin stared a bit, glancing around, then he broke into a grin. "You're not getting me this time, Mister Mime, I can see your nose shooting the length of the hall." 

Tommy's eyes darted around the silent corridor. "Guys, lets go, please?"

For the first time, we realized that he really was truly scared. Like, break down into tears scared. We liked poking fun at him, but it hurt to see good old Tommy's face as pale as that. He looked like he was about to be sick. 

"Yeah, okay." I patted him on the back. "Everyone knows ghosts are fake, man."

"Yeah, no big deal." Vin threw an arm over his shoulder.

 "And besides, your mass, Vin's speed and my strength? We'd eat Sadako for Breakfast, lunch and dinner and have her eyes for aperitif."

 Tommy scrunched up his nose, smiling a little. "Oh, gross!"

"Yup!" Vin threw in. " And we can throw her back, butt and boobs into a pot to make triple-B stew." 

We laughed together and the mood lightened. Ghosts didn't exist, nothing could hurt us. We'd turn it into triple-B stew.