The s'mores were perfect. That's the part I want to remember.
Jen had this whole system — graham cracker on the bottom, two squares of chocolate, marshmallow still on fire when she slapped the top cracker down. Naomi kept burning hers on purpose because she liked the char. I was somewhere in the middle, rotating mine over the coals like a rotisserie chicken, trying to get that even golden brown that never actually happens outside of commercials.
It was our last night. Not officially — we still had the hike back tomorrow, the bus ride, the awkward goodbyes in the parking lot. But this was the real last night. The one where you sit around a fire with people you've spent four years with and pretend you're not counting the hours.
"Meteor shower's at midnight," Naomi said, pulling up something on her phone. "We should hike to the top. The view up there is insane."
Jen looked at the trail like it had personally offended her. "It's ten-thirty."
"So we'll make it by eleven-thirty. Come on. When's the next time we'll be out here with zero light pollution?"
She had a point. I was already reaching for my backpack — the one that weighed approximately one thousand pounds because I'd packed it like I was moving into the woods permanently. Phone with the solar charger clipped to the side. Jacket, because September on the East Coast is a coin flip between summer and winter. Canteen. Sandwiches. Snacks. Swiss army knife. Fishing line. A small bell. Medication for the headaches I'd been getting lately. Everything short of a kitchen sink.
Jen once told me I packed like a doomsday prepper. I told her I packed like someone who'd been cold and hungry before and didn't plan on doing it again.
We started up the trail.
The mountain wasn't huge — maybe an hour's climb on a good path — but at night, with nothing but our phone flashlights cutting through the dark, every root and rock felt personal. Naomi led. She always led. Jen stayed in the middle, complaining about her knees in a way that was half-serious and half-performance. I brought up the rear, adjusting my pack straps every few minutes because the weight kept shifting.
We made it to the top at 11:30.
And — okay. I need to describe this right, because it matters.
The town was below us, a scatter of lights that looked like someone had dropped a handful of stars on the valley floor. Above us, the sky was so clear it didn't look real. No haze, no clouds, just black and stars and a full moon sitting fat and white like it owned the place. The air was cold enough to feel clean in my lungs but not cold enough to need the jacket yet.
I sat down on the grass and pulled out the sandwiches, the canteen, and a bag of trail mix. Handed a sandwich to Jen, another to Naomi.
"You brought food," Jen said, like she was surprised, even though I always brought food.
"I brought food."
Naomi was already eating hers. "Heather, what do you want for your birthday? It's in like two months."
"Good fortune," I said. "For all of us."
Jen stared at me. "That is the cheesiest thing I have ever heard in my life."
"But you'll take it."
"I'll take it."
Naomi giggled, and for a second it was just — us. The three of us on top of a mountain, eating sandwiches, waiting for the sky to do something extraordinary. I knew this was it. The last time we'd be like this before graduation scattered us into different cities, different jobs, different versions of ourselves. Jen was going into accounting. Naomi had a media internship lined up. I was still figuring it out, which at nineteen felt like a personal failing and at the same time felt like the most honest thing about me.
(Two months until twenty. Two months until I was supposed to have a plan.)
Then the sky lit up.
It started slow — a streak here, a streak there, like the universe was testing the lights. Then it opened up. Meteors everywhere, all sizes, some so small they were just a flash and gone, others dragging long tails across the dark like bright chalk on a blackboard. We lay back on the grass, phones up, recording, laughing every time a big one crossed overhead.
"Make a wish!" Naomi yelled.
"That's shooting stars, not meteors," Jen said.
"Same thing!"
"Literally not the same thing."
I closed my eyes and wished anyway. I don't remember what I wished for. Something small, probably. Something safe.
We stayed until 2:30 in the morning. My eyes were heavy and my back was sore from lying on the ground, but I didn't want to move. Moving meant it was over.
"All right," Jen said, standing up and brushing grass off her jeans. "If I don't sleep in the next hour, I'm going to become a different person."
We packed up and started back down the trail.
That's when it happened.
A sound first — not a crash, more like a deep thud that I felt in my chest before I heard it with my ears. Then a glow, off to the left of the trail, through the trees. Something had landed. Close. Way too close. Meteors burn up in the atmosphere. That's the whole point. They don't just — land next to you on a hiking trail in the middle of the night.
"What the heck," Jen said.
"What the heck," Naomi said.
"What the heck," I said, because apparently that was the only phrase any of us had left.
We stood there for a second, staring at the glow through the brush.
Jen spoke first. "Could be anything. Could be radioactive."
We both nodded.
Then Naomi's eyes lit up. "It'd be fun to record for YouTube though."
They both turned to me. That was the thing about our group — when it came to decisions that could either be amazing or get us killed, they looked at me. I put my hand on my chin and thought about it.
"I like Naomi's idea," I said. "And yours, Jen. But it's our last time together. Let's be careful — and record it."
They nodded. Naomi jumped about three feet in the air, phone already out.
We started walking toward the glow.
Naomi had her camera on, narrating the whole thing for her imaginary viewers. "Okay, so we just saw a meteorite land like fifty feet from our trail. We're going to check it out. This is Heather —" she swung the camera to me — "birthday in two months, turning twenty. What do you want, Heather?"
"I already said. Good fortune."
"She already said good fortune. Cheesy queen. And this is Jen —"
"Don't point that at me."
The brush got thicker as we pushed through. Branches catching on my jacket, leaves crunching underfoot. I could see the glow getting brighter ahead, a soft pulsing light that didn't look like fire. Didn't look like anything I had a word for.
I pulled out my phone to check the GPS coordinates and — nothing. The screen was glitching. Lines of static running across it, the display flickering in and out like a bad signal.
"Naomi, check your phone. Is yours glitching too? Jen?"
They both pulled theirs out. Same thing. Naomi held Jen's phone up to her camera — the screen was scrambling, and the speakers were making this sound. Like an old radio crossed with Morse code. Rhythmic. Almost like something was trying to talk through the static.
(That should have been the sign. That should have been the moment I said "let's go back." But I didn't. Because I was nineteen and it was my last night with my friends and a glowing rock had fallen from the sky, and when do you ever get to say that happened to you?)
We found it.
The meteorite was sitting in the middle of a circle of mushrooms.
Not scattered mushrooms. A circle. A perfect ring of them, pale white caps glowing faintly in the moonlight, forming a boundary around the crater where the rock had landed. The meteorite itself was black, about the size of a softball, and it was glowing — a warm, pulsing light that shifted between gold and something I didn't have a color for.
"Kind of odd that it's right there in the middle of that circle," Jen said.
Naomi and I agreed.
"Let's just pick it up and go," I said.
"Wait." Naomi held up her hand. "I've heard of these. They're not just mushroom circles. They're called fairy rings. Or fairy circles."
Jen rolled her eyes. "Those are just stories people tell kids so they won't eat wild mushrooms and get poisoned."
I looked at Naomi. "Have you been watching too much anime again?"
She stuck her tongue out at me.
I stepped into the circle.
And — this is the part I can't explain right. I can tell you what happened, but I can't make it make sense, because it didn't make sense then and it doesn't make sense now.
I heard voices. Chattering, overlapping, like a crowd talking in a language I almost recognized but couldn't quite catch. I thought it was Jen and Naomi behind me, so I didn't turn around. I just kept walking toward the rock.
I bent down and picked it up.
It was warm. Not hot — warm, like it had been sitting in someone's hands. Still glowing. Lighter than I expected. I turned it over, looking at the surface, and something shifted. Not in the rock. In everything else.
The air changed. The temperature changed. The light changed.
I looked up.
It was daytime.
The trees were different. The ground was different. The sky was a shade of blue I'd never seen before — deeper, almost violet at the edges, like the atmosphere itself was made of something else. The air hit my lungs and it was — clean. Painfully clean. Like breathing for the first time after spending your whole life in a room you didn't know was stuffy.
I turned around.
The mushroom circle was still there. The rock was still in my hand.
Jen and Naomi were gone.
The mountain was gone. The trail was gone. The town lights, the campsite, the whole night — gone. Just me, standing on unfamiliar ground, holding a glowing rock, in a world that was not mine.
"Where the hell am I?"
My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. It hit the open air and disappeared, swallowed by a silence so big it had weight.
(Okay. Okay, Heather. Think. You're standing in a place you don't recognize. Your friends are gone. Your phone is dead. You're holding a rock that might be responsible for all of this. Think.)
I looked down at the meteorite in my hand. It had stopped glowing.
It was just a black rock now. Slightly warm. Completely ordinary.
I shoved it in my jacket pocket and started walking.