Holly Black (46 page)

I tap her shoulder lightly. “Hey.”

“Hey,” she replies, not glancing up from the page.

“Um, sorry about before,” I say, plopping down into one of the chairs. “I’m happy to help. You just never, um, asked before.” I almost add how in order to ask me, she would have had to talk to me, but I don’t want to start another fight.

“Maybe not,” she admits. “But I’m asking now. I may be a little out of my league here. I mean, I don’t know M30 from M29!”

I laugh. “That’s easy. M29 is an open cluster, while M30 is a globular?—”

She rests her hand on my ankle and says, “I’m serious.”

I may never wash my ankle again. “Okay, we’ll do it together,” I manage to choke out.

Her shoulders visibly relax and she smiles, releasing her hand. “Cool. I was afraid you’d say no. I thought maybe you’d want to keep it off my college apps.”

I can feel the memory of each individual finger imprinted on my leg. I wish she’d touch me again. I clear my throat and say, “No worries. I already have those other Observing Programs under my belt. I can share this one.”

“That’s right,” she says with mock seriousness. “You’re already a Sky Puppy. What can beat that?” She pops open a can of Coke (
my
Coke) and takes a long swig.

I pretend to be insulted. “Hey, the Sky Puppy has a long and honored past.”

She laughs. “Maybe I should try to get
my
pin.”

I pop open another of the Cokes. “Too late. You can only do it before you’re ten years old.”

“So I guess this is my only chance to get a pin in anything,” she says, suddenly serious.

“Nah, there are lots of others.”

She shakes her head, but doesn’t reply. I wonder again why she’s never studied astronomy before. It just seems like a strange subject to have overlooked by someone who wants to fly through space. I lean back to check out the sky. The sun has turned the horizon a deep orange-pink, which normally I would stop to admire. But now it’s time to get focused. “There it is,” I announce, eagerly pushing myself out of the chair. I can see others around me getting down to work, too.

“M74? Where? You can see it already?” Tabitha cranes her neck in all directions. “That wasn’t so hard. One down, a hundred and nine to go!”

I laugh. “Not M74. Just the North Star. I need to use it to make the final alignments on my scope.” A few minutes later, whoops and yelps fills the air. “Here we go!” I call to Tabitha. “Grab the logbook!”

“M74 this time?” she asks.

“Yup!” I swing around to the west until I find Aries. I follow it down into Pisces until I have the general area. Then I get behind the scope. I’ve found M74 before, but not at this time of year. It’s a lot closer to the horizon now, which makes it even harder to find than usual. “Got it! Come look!”

Tabitha leans against my arm as she closes one eye and peers through the eyepiece. “That’s it?” she asks, sounding a bit disappointed. “It just looks like a blob of stars.”

I smile, using a pencil from my pocket to make a check on the first line of my log. “
You’d
look like a blob of stars at forty million light-years away.”

“Wow. Our eyes just absorbed protons that are forty million years old. How cool is that?”

“No time to dwell on that now. Gotta find M77. That one’s over
sixty
million light-years away. Wanna give it a try?”

She shakes her head. “It would take me too long. We’d get too far behind.”

That’s probably true. “Okay, I’ll find this one, but you’ll do the next one. That one’s so easy we won’t even need the scope.” Once I find Delta Cetus, the closest star to M77, it only takes a minute to find the spiral galaxy. I show it to Tabitha, who admits it looks slightly less like a blob than the first one.

“At this rate, we’ll be done before midnight,” she says, and dramatically crosses it off on our list.

“Sorry, doesn’t work that way.”

“I know, I know,” she says, rolling her eyes. “As the earth rotates, different objects come and go from view all night, blah blah blah.”

“You’re a fast learner,” I tease.

“So true, so true. So what’s the next one?” She looks down at the list. “M31, Andromeda Galaxy. You expect me to find that on my own?”

I stand as close as I dare (which is to say, close enough to smell her hair, but not close enough to feel it), and point out the five stars that form the
W
shape of Cassiopeia. Then I gently lift her arm. “Make a fist.”

She looks doubtful, but does it. “Now move your fist so it’s directly under the lower part of the W and hold it there.” I get distracted for a second by the graceful way her sleeve slips down toward her shoulder, and I freeze up.

“Um, arm getting tired here,” she says impatiently.

“Sorry.” I hand her the binoculars. “Now look right below your fist and scan the area for a bright blob with faint light coming off both sides.”

It takes a while for her to coordinate looking through the binoculars without moving her fist out of position. Standing so close to her as darkness falls all around us is kind of making me breathless. Then I hear a sharp intake of breath from her. “I think I found it! Does it look kinda like a flying saucer?”

I smile, proud of her. “Yup, that’s it. Congratulations. You now know how to find Andromeda and Cassiopeia! You’re on your way!”

She lowers her fist and the binoculars, and beams at me. For a few long seconds neither of us moves. My heart starts beating crazily. The stars are coming out in full force now. I’ve never had a more romantic moment. Should I kiss her? “What are you waiting for?” she says.

She
does
want me to kiss her! What if my lips don’t line up right with hers? What if we bang noses? She’s waiting. I hope for the best, pucker slightly, and lean in closer. The binoculars whack me on the forehead as she lifts them to her eyes. “Well?” she says, seemingly unaware she just wounded me. “Aren’t you going to show me more stuff?”

Thoroughly humiliated, I rub my forehead.
What are you waiting for
clearly didn’t mean the same thing to her as it did to me. Did she know I was trying to kiss her? Is that why she moved the binoculars? Should I be humiliated? Before I can apologize, she cries, “Oh, no! Look at that huge cloud!”

I follow her gaze, but the sky—almost totally dark now—looks perfectly clear to me. “What cloud?”

“That long one!” She waves her arm in an arc clear across the sky. “Is it going to mess everything up?” Her eyes search mine in a panic.

I’d laugh, but my mood is kind of low right now. “That’s not a cloud. That’s the Milky Way. You’re looking at the edge of our galaxy.”

“Huh?” She bends her neck back and stares. “I’m sure I would have noticed that before.”

“You have to be somewhere like this, far away from any city lights. A few hundred years ago everyone on Earth could see it.” I swallow my wounded pride and say, “C’mon, we’ve got to keep moving down the list.”

“Uh-huh,” Tabitha replies, still staring at the Milky Way. “Whatever you want.”

If only that were true.

After returning to the scope and finding the last few early-setting objects, we take a break before embarking on the next round. I set up Tabitha’s GoTo while she munches on a carrot. I’m holding my red flashlight with my teeth to free up my hands and to give myself an excuse for not talking. I can’t believe I thought she wanted me to kiss her. What was I thinking? I’m not the guy girls want to kiss. I’m the guy they want to copy homework off of. My mother once told me I would “come into my own” in college. I hope she’s right because it’s no fun pining away for someone who would never be interested in you. And right now it would be a whole lot easier if that someone wasn’t right next to me in the dark. I stall a little longer by attaching my camera to my scope. Focusing on the North Star, I set the lens to f/8, the ISO to 100, and open the shutter for a long exposure.

The longer we stay here not talking, the more I just want to crawl into a hole. I need a break. I pick out a set of star charts and hand them to Tabitha. “Here’s the information you’ll need to enter. Just type in the coordinates listed next to each object and your scope will find them.”

She looks down at the pages in her hand. “What are you going to be doing?”

I glance around helplessly. “I’m going to see if anyone needs help. I’m the Youth Advisor, after all.” She can’t argue with that.

She waves the charts in the air. “But then you won’t be able to do the Marathon.”

I shrug. “It’s okay. I’ll do it next year.” I turn away before she makes me change my mind. I feel slightly guilty. It’s not Tabitha’s fault that she doesn’t feel the same way about me as I feel about her.

She calls after me. “I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me!”

I take a deep breath and keep walking. Of course she’ll be fine. She’s always fine. She knows exactly who she is, what she wants to be, and what she needs to do to get there. I don’t know any of those things. All I know is what I don’t want to be, and that’s not the same thing at all. I see groups of club members huddled behind their scopes, but instead of stopping, I walk right past them. I walk past the break tent, and past the scouts who somehow managed to get pizza delivered in the middle of the desert. I debate going back to get one of my sandwiches, but I don’t want to risk a confrontation. When I get away from most of the crowd, I lie down on the hard ground. It’s been getting progressively colder since the sun set a few hours ago. I wish I had put my warm clothes on. I stare up at the sky, so familiar to me. Turning to the western horizon, I easily find Venus, the evening star, the brightest in the sky. Tabitha is like Venus. She has this presence that’s brighter than everyone else’s. Soon Jupiter will rise, surrounded by its moons of ice that could hold the building blocks of life. If Tabitha is Venus, I’m like Europa, a big ball of ice that might have a few surprises inside me if anyone bothered to look. I close my eyes and try to imagine I can feel the turning of the earth beneath me.

“Hey,” a voice says softly, kicking my toe. I quickly sit up. It’s Tabitha. She’s holding the blanket, my sweatshirt, and her sleeping bag.

When I find my voice, I say, “What are you doing here? You can’t be away from your post for too long, or else?—”

She shrugs. “I thought you might be cold.”

“How did you find me?”

She points to the binoculars around her neck, then tosses me my sweatshirt and spreads open the blanket. “Room for one more down there?” Without waiting for a response, she lies down. I lie next to her, barely breathing. Then she puts the sleeping bag over both of us.

“So,” she begins. “Tell me a story.”

“About what?” I ask, my voice cracking.

“You said you had to learn stories about the stars for your Sky Puppy pin, right?”

For the first time she doesn’t laugh when she says
Sky Puppy
. I nod in the dark.

“One of those, then.”

I notice she’s using her bunched-up sweatshirt as a pillow, so I do the same. “Well, I only remember one of them. It’s sort of a poem. A Native American poem.” I can’t tell if the heat radiating through my body is from the sleeping bag, or from her nearness.

“That’s cool,” she says. “I like poems.”

I take a deep breath. “It’s called ‘The Song of the Stars.’ It talks about these three hunters, and they’re the three stars in the handle of the Big Dipper. See it up there?” I point, and a few seconds later she nods. “Okay, so the hunters are the handle, and there’s a bear, too. He’s the cup thing at the end of the handle. Then the Milky Way is like a road. That’s what you need to know beforehand.”

She nods again. I take another deep breath and can feel the heat from the side of her body electrifying my own. Staring upward and trying to focus, I recite:

We are the stars which sing.

We sing with our light;

We are the birds of fire,

We fly over the sky.

Our light is a voice;

We make a road for spirits,

For the spirits to pass over.

Among us are three hunters

Who chase a bear;

There never was a time

When they were not hunting.

We look down on the mountains.

This is the Song of the Stars.

She’s so quiet for a minute I’m afraid she fell asleep. When I get up the nerve to turn my head toward hers, I can see tears silently flowing down her face. The poem is pretty good, but I doubt it’s worthy of tears. She hastily wipes them away.

“Tabitha, what’s wrong?”

She doesn’t look at me. Finally she says, “Do you know why I want to be an astronaut?”

Surprised at her question, I reply, “Well, I figured it was something to do with wanting to explore outer space, do experiments, see the Space Station.”

She shakes her head. “When I was eight, and my parents were fighting all the time, and we were moving again, I saw this picture from one of the space shuttles. It was a picture of Earth, seen from space. Just a blue and white marble, surrounded by blackness. It was that blackness that interested me, that endless nothingness. That’s why I was never really interested in learning about the stars. They just interrupted the dark. I thought, if I could get up there, if I could see the Earth like those astronauts did, if I could see it as it really is, then my problems wouldn’t matter. I’d get a true perspective of things. I’d be above everything. But I realized something tonight. If we’re looking at stars whose light is millions of years old, we’re not seeing those stars as they really
are
. We’re seeing them as they
were
, millions of years ago.”