“Don’t you ever get tired of showing your same dumb old horses all the time?” Nate pushed his chair out from the table. “The kids in your class are probably sick to death of them.”

Junie didn’t cry, but she looked like she might. She set her spoon down and studied her brother’s face hard. And for some reason, the sight of her doing that—those off-center pigtails, with the bits of hair coming out the sides—made Nate feel even worse.

“Just because you’re worried about Daddy doesn’t give you dibs to be so mean,” she told him.

Then she picked up her jacket and headed outside to wait for the bus.

Mad as Nate was, he almost wanted to hug her for speaking their father’s name.

Nate always knew, even when he was little, that his father was different from other kids’ dads. It used to be that was a good thing. Larry’s dad had all these rules: The kids had to be in bed, eight on the dot; children should be seen and not heard. The Kowalskis had a schedule for when to get up, when to eat breakfast, what the chores were.

In Nate’s family you never knew what might happen. When Dad was in one of his moods, you’d better leave him alone. For a few days at a time he might act like he didn’t even see you, and you wondered if he’d come in for dinner, or he’d just sit out in the barn in the dark or spend hours with a shovel, digging irrigation ditches by hand, not even responding when you spoke to him. But when things were good, nobody was more fun, and it seemed like he had some double-voltage power pack strapped on.

One time his dad came into Nate’s room in the middle of the night. No time to get dressed, even: There were meteor showers. Nate must have been very small, because he could remember sitting on his dad’s shoulders out in the darkness of their yard, looking up at the sky. Now and then a brilliant streak of light flashed for a fraction of a second across the blackness.

“The pictures we’re seeing are of things that happened years and years ago,” his father had explained. “That’s how long it took for the light to reach us.”

Nate knew what shooting stars were—meteors, falling through the atmosphere. Millions of years before, one had hit the earth and caused a darkness so profound, it had killed off the dinosaurs.