Peachtree Park, outskirts of Oceanside City, 9:35PM

"The meteor fell over here, guys! I'm sure of it."

Brenda Vogel led the way, a halo of dark curls a-bouncing over her chocolate features. While it looked like her outfit had been thrown together--a blue shirt knotted above her waist, denim cutoffs, and a pair of clunky wafflestompers--in truth it was anything but. The heiress to Vogel & Associates LLC GmbH was in Fifth Avenue brands head to toe, caring less about the optics of wearing fancy brands so carelessly then getting a little relief from the humid summer air.

Her roommate Patricia "Trixie" Marsh stumbled quietly behind, her pale hands clasped nervously. She kept fiddling with her eyeglasses, hoping no one noticed she was using it as an excuse to dart her eyes to Brenda's gyrating hips for a moment.

"Quit staring at Brenda's ass," said Julong "Jules" Li, lightly smacking her roommate on the back of the head.

"I-I wasn't!" Trixie stammered. Her hands flew to her head and she grabbed a double-handful of her hair--long and red to the point of being nigh pinko. Jules lifted weights semi-competitively, and even her most playful of smacks stung.

"Who thinks I caught Trix staring at Brenda's tush again?" Jules called back to their other roommates, following in single file.

"Definitely." Maya Patel replied without even looking up from her πPhone, her thumbs flying as she typed and tapped. A photo of Trixie holding her head was being uploaded to Ginstadram at that very moment, with the caption "TFW you're not sure if it was a meteor or a firework squib in the sky."

"Look at whatever makes you happy, girl!" cried their last roommate, Sarah Osborn, from the rear of their little conga line. She smiled and bobbed her head, blond waves standing out in the dusk almost as much as her bright pink top.

Trixie blushed still harder at the sight and looked back to Brenda, who had been totally oblivious to the conversation in her single-mindedness. "H-how close do you think we are, Brenda?"

"We're close, I know we are!" It had been Brenda's idea to abandon the girls' night out when she'd seen the flames in the sky, substituting meteor hunting for ice cream, and she led the way with all the confidence of a dual geology/paleontology major who had exactly one excavation under her belt.

"What exactly are we going to do when we get there?" said Jules. She was still wearing her workout clothes, having hoped to get a few laps of the park to work off her ice cream before the park closed, and bounced nervously on the balls of her feet every few steps, her tightly coiffed bob cut swaying, as if she was liable to break into a marathon at any moment. "We don't have any tools."

"We can take a group selfie," Maya said, looking up from her πPhone a moment. "D'you know how long it's been since I used the meteor emoji?" She took up of her some long, straight, dark hair and put it over an impromptu duckface. "Is hair mustache too cash for a meteor?"

"Yeah!" Sarah cried, leaning in with a V-for-Victory in both hands. "It'll be even better than the one we took with Brenda's boring old dusty bones!"

"They're not boring old dusty bones!" Trixie cried, huffing. "They were important specimens that Dr. Theresa was counting on Brenda to sort, and we helped her ace the assignment! Right, Brenda?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah, you guys were a huge help," Brenda said.

"No bones about it, huh?" Trixie said with a weak smile.

Jules smacked her on the back of the head again, a double tap this time. "One for a terrible joke, two for flinching."

Brenda, rolling her deep green eyes despite herself, moved the last bit of park foliage out of her way to reveal an open green, freshly mowed and planted with flowers by the Oceanside City Chamber of Commerce. Or at least it had been, until a celestial vandal had descended from on high to ruin it all. An impact scar of at least a hundred yards cut across the flower beds, scattering innocent petals in its wake, while a cooling crater had formed at its head, with a steamy mist rising from it.

"The meteor!" Brenda cried. "C'mon!"

The rest of her roommates, the Wright-O-Might Five from Wright Hall at Oceanside State freshman year, followed her. Nobody else seemed to have noticed or cared about the space rock that had rudely interrupted the landscaping. Everyone else in Peachtree Park seemed to be at the free movie on the other end—"Jurassic Park"—getting ice cream, or moving toward the exit, since the park had technically closed for the night ten minutes ago.

They formed a circle around the crater, each within an arm's length, with Brenda bending over to get a closer look. "Look at that," she said, gesturing at the lumpy rock. "Just like in Dr. Theresa's class!" The meteor was about two feet long and a foot wide, pitted and almost peanut-shaped.

"What kind of meteor is it?" Trixie said eagerly. "Can you tell?"

"It's not coming out very well," groused Maya, who was trying to take a selfie both with and without her πPhone's flash. "Shouldn't it be glowing or something?"

"I, ah, wasn't paying super close attention that day in class," Brenda said. She'd actually been reading a copy of Captain Blasto tucked into her textbook while Dr. Theresa had been blah-blah-blahing. "I don't think it's hot though. I think it's supposed to be cold? Dr. Theresa made an ice age joke about it, I think."

"So we could touch it?" Trixie said.

"I could grab it up from there, then," Jules said. "Carry it home. You could study it on the coffee table."

"Or we could donate it to someone in need," Sarah said brightly.

The others looked at her. "You mean like the university museum?" said Brenda.

"No, just someone who could use a meteorite," said Sarah. "If it's from their astrological sign, this rock could be very lucky to somebody!"

Her roommates stared a moment longer.

"Also, since it didn't kill anybody, it's vegan and cruelty-free," Sarah added. "If it's a siderite or ferrous meteorite, it would make a great iron supplement for someone who wanted it ethically sourced."

Brenda, still crouched, reached out a hand. "I'm gonna touch it," she said. "It should be cool, I think, and if it's not I'll have one heck of a story to tell about the burn."

"I don't think that's a good-" Jules started.

Before she could intervene or even finish her sentence, Brenda had reached out to touch the stone, which was almost the same light brown as her hand. "It's actually kinda cold," she said. "I almost got a little shock from it. Come on, guys, give it a feel!"

Trixie didn't need to hear another word. She immediately dropped down and assumed an identical squat, slapping her hand toward the meteorite. She hoped to put her hand atop Brenda's, "accidentally," but her friend courteously moved out of the way, leaving Trixie to simply high-five the space rock. "Ooh, it is cold," she said. "I got a little shock too, static electricity or something."

Not wanting to be left out, Sarah trotted up and slapped both hands on the galactic iron. "So chilly!" she said. "Think we can cut it open, Brenda? Maybe see some Widmanstätten lines?"

"I bet Dr. Theresa has the tools to do it, if I sneak into her lab," Brenda said, grinning.

Maya leaned forward, touching the meteor with a single coquettish finger and smiling for her πPhone. "New profile pic," she said triumphantly. Then, frowning at the still-dark image. "I'll fix it in post."

Jules squatted over the meteor and dug her hands beneath it. "I bet I can pick the whole thing up and get it to someplace with good lighting for you," she said. Grunting and sweating, she did in fact manage to hoist the thing out of the ground, and though it weighed about ten times what it looked like it should have, that wasn't a problem for an experienced deadlifter like Jules.

"Hey, you there!" a voice cried sharply from across the green. "Drop that!"

The girls looked across the park and saw a flashlight bobbing toward them, which quickly resolved itself into a police officer, a woman with short-cropped hair, sprinting toward them.

Jules obligingly dropped the meteor back into its hole. "Cheese it!" she cried. "It's the fuzz!"

"Hey, wait!" Brenda cried as her roommates took off running in four seperate directions. "We can keep it! I'm sure there's some kind of meteor law that my dad can-"

The police officer--Officer Novak, according to her name tag--reached the crater and grabbed Brenda's wrist. "Stop right there!" she said.

Instinct took over, and Brenda quickly wriggled free. The seven years of ballet her parents had forced on her had yielded that dividend, at least. For good measure, she gave the cop a quick sweep with her legs. The six years of judo her parents had forced on her was good for something, finally.

Her arms two wild windmills for a moment, the cop belly-flopped into the crater, taking a moment to right herself before pressing off of it with both hands. By that time, though, the girls had vanished into the night.

"Polly, what's going on over there?" her radio squawked. "Did you find what made that fireball?"

Officer Polly Novak dusted off her patrol blues and responded: "Affirmative," she said. "Had to scare away some teens, but I found it. Oceanside University's gonna want to see this, I think."