Fire in the Sky

I saw it because I couldn’t sleep.

I couldn’t sleep because it was the fourth Friday, and Mum and Dad ring on Sundays, and Friday is the furthest you can get from a Sunday. Everyone says the homesickness stops after the first half-term. Everyone says it in the voice people use for things they want to be true.

So I was at the window of the Year 7 dormitory, with the curtain held against my face so the light from the corridor wouldn’t get in, looking at nothing. And then the nothing lit up.

It came from the left, very high, and it was not like a shooting star. A shooting star is a scratch. This was a line of white fire, green at its head, so bright that the shadow of the window frame moved across the floor behind me. It went on for so long that I had time to think that is not stopping, and then it did something I did not understand until later: it broke. The single light became three, then five, and the pieces went on side by side, fading, and then there was only the dark and the orange of the town beyond the hill.

I counted. I don’t know why. I think I thought it would explode. I got to a hundred and forty and I was about to stop when I heard it: a low, soft thud, like someone dropping a mattress in a room far below, and the window gave a small rattle in its frame.

I stayed where I was, with the curtain against my face, waiting for something else to happen, and for a long time nothing did. Then, perhaps a minute or two later, there was one more sound, much smaller: a sharp tick somewhere above the window, like a bit of gravel thrown at glass, and then a soft rolling noise over my head, like a marble going down a gutter, which stopped. I thought it was one of the rooks that live on the roof. I got back into bed.

My phone buzzed under my pillow. We’re not supposed to have them after lights out. Ada had given me hers from last year so we could text, which is also not allowed. She’s “Adie” in it, which nobody else is allowed to call her, and I’m “Stells” in hers.

I didn’t. But she didn’t text again, and eventually I did.

I should say now, before anyone who knows my sister reads that and thinks I’ve made it up: yes, that is how Ada texts. The girl who wrote the notebook you are about to read, with its powers of ten and its rules, also texts “lmaooo”. Both of those are her. It took me most of that term to understand how, and when I did, it went into my word list, and it’s in this book too.

And while I’m explaining that phone: it had almost nothing on it. That isn’t because we’re saints. It’s because of Mum’s phone rules, which in our family are said as if they had capital letters, and which Ada and I can recite, in Mum’s voice, at speed. Mum writes software for a living, and has spent her whole life finding out how things work, from the inside of a computer outwards: Dad says she has read about nearly everything, and when she hasn’t, she goes and finds out. She says the first thing you learn in her job is that somebody designed every screen you have ever looked at, and that it’s worth asking what they designed it for. Do Not Disturb, most of the time: definitely when you’re doing something, and absolutely when you’re asleep. Notifications off for everything except your favourites, the short list of people Mum and Dad have agreed to, and those are also the only people who can get through Do Not Disturb, because the point of a phone at night is that your family can reach you in an emergency. No app whose whole point is to keep you scrolling, because somebody is paid to make it hard to stop, the way the claw machine at the seaside arcade is made so that you always think the next go will be the one. Decide what you picked it up for before you unlock it, and put it down when that’s done. And the big one: anything on it might be a lie, so before you believe something, ask who’s saying it, and how they’d know.

Mum isn’t against phones. She says a phone with the internet on it is the most astonishing thing a person has ever been able to carry: every map, every dictionary, every lecture anybody has ever recorded, most of what people have ever found out, and your sister, in your pocket. The trick, she says, is to use it like a library and not like a claw machine. She told us once about Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who spent years watching people at work, and found that once they’d been interrupted, it took them on average more than twenty minutes to get back to what they’d been doing. Ada, who was nine, worked out on the spot that if every buzz cost you even five minutes, twenty buzzes a day came to nearly twelve hours a week.?20 buzzes × 5 minutes = 100 minutes a day. 100 × 7 = 700 minutes a week, and 700 ÷ 60 ≈ 11.7 hours: about as long as two whole school days. Mum said that was exactly the point, and Dad said it was also past her bedtime.

So that night the phone under my pillow was on Do Not Disturb, as it was every night, and it did one thing, and one thing only. It buzzed when my sister texted, because my sister is a favourite, and Ada had decided that a fireball counted as an emergency.