of her baseball cap, but there was no denying the gleam in her eyes. She was enjoying the spectacle.
Mother fussed over me, grabbing my chin and moving my face from side to side, as if making sure everything was still in place.
“Mother, really. I’m okay,” I said, ducking away.
“Someone better start talking,” Father ordered.
I opened my mouth to plead my case, but my brother beat me to it.
“We don’t know what happened!”
Father crossed his arms, covering the Pittsburgh Pirates logo stretched across his chest. “You don’t know?”
“Right,” Ishmael confirmed.
“There’s a hole the size of a pickup truck in our field, and you don’t know how it got here?” (Later measurements showed the crater to have a radius of approximately 2.5 meters.)
“Well, see, we were in Gideon’s lab doing, you know, science. And then there was this sound. Out of nowhere, boom! So we ran outside and…” Ishmael gestured toward the crater. “I think it came from the sky.”
Mother gasped. Father narrowed his eyes. I silently pleaded for my brother to stop talking because I doubted there was even a 5 percent chance my parents would believe a mystery object had fallen from the sky.
“It came from the sky,” Father repeated evenly.
“Right,” Ishmael agreed.
“What came from the sky? I don’t see anything here but a hole.”
“Maybe it was, you know…” Ishmael floundered.
I wanted to make the situation go away. I needed to make the situation go away. Which meant, unfortunately, assisting my brother. I looked at my parents and said, “A meteor. It could have been a meteor.”
“Yeah, a meteor! It must have, like, fallen from the sky and exploded itself or something. That can happen with meteors, right?”
Technically, yes.
But before I could share that information, I saw a sight even more alarming than the crater: the chief of police walking across the field toward us.
Interview
Ishmael: When I saw Chief Kaufman I totally freaked, because, like, how did she even get there so fast? And I kept looking at you for—
Interviewer: Do you remember what we talked about? About pretending I wasn’t there?
Ishmael: But you were there, dude. It’s super weird to pretend you weren’t.
Interviewer: Ishmael. This is supposed to be impartial. If the readers of this account know the person conducting interviews was intimately involved in the situation, they’ll think the data is compromised.
Ishmael: But isn’t it compromised?
Interviewer: Please just do this my way.
Ishmael: Also, can you not use the word “intimate”? It sounds sexual, which is pretty awkward.
Interviewer: It has nothing to do with sex. Intimate means close. I was closely involved with the situation.
Ishmael: Then why can’t you just say closely? Why do you have to make it weird?
Interviewer: Ishmael!
Ishmael: Okay, fine. Whatever. Should I start over?
Interviewer: Just pick up where you left off.
Ishmael: There’s no reason to get upset, dude. Anyway, as I was saying… What was I saying? Oh yeah, I saw Chief Kaufman and was like, “Whoa, did you teleport here?” Then I realized she’d come over to see Dad and it was just, like, majorly bad timing that she got there during the explosion. I guess I wouldn’t have said something fell from the sky if I’d known the police were gonna get involved, but by that time it was too late to take it back. But, I mean…it wasn’t that bad of an excuse, was it?
Event: Interrogation
Date: Sept. 7 (Thurs.)
Chief Kaufman was sharp. Too sharp.
Father had been friends with her since their junior year of high school, when she’d petitioned to join the boy’s baseball team—he was one of the few players who supported her. The petition failed, and some people say Kaufman’s revenge for the slight was becoming the highest-ranking law enforcement official in town. Revenge or not, the job wasn’t given to her unjustly. Since she’d become chief, Lansburg had the third-lowest crime rate of any town in Pennsylvania. (It should be noted that the top two towns were Amish communities.)
While Father took the chief aside to speak privately, Ishmael and I retreated to our house. We waited in the living room, slumped on opposite ends of the floral-patterned sofa that had probably been in our family for as many decades as the farm itself.
Ishmael’s eyes were fixed on the flat-screen television that hung above the fireplace—the only sign of modern life in the room. The sound had been muted, but the TV was still tuned to Pitch, Please, where a couple pitched a competition involving kittens and an obstacle course.