Taking Off (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

I
read the article again before I went to bed.

In the morning, when I was headed off to catch the bus, I grabbed the magazine and stuffed it in my purse. I was becoming as obsessed as a
Star Trek
fan. I couldn’t get over how this woman seemed so ordinary but was going on this wild ride, turning her normal life into a remarkable one.

And I was going to meet her. I felt a little nervous, wondering if I could think of anything to say to her.

I’d met astronauts before. They were a part of our community, attending the local churches, joining in on cleanup days in neighborhoods, coaching swim teams, just like all the mothers and fathers of kids I knew from school. Many were aloof. But maybe they just felt awkward with small talk, like I did. Hard to believe, though. They were astronauts, after all.

In English, I was looking at the magazine photos again, wishing I had more information about Christa, wondering if the library would have other articles, when I heard my name. I looked up.

“The magazine needs to disappear, Annie. And hat and gloves off.”

I pulled off my black cap, then hesitated. “But my gloves are cool, Mr. Williams.” I stretched the knitted yarn to my wrists, then watched it pop back into place. One of the fingers was gone. I’d had to cut it away after it snagged on a zipper. I rubbed my skin, pale against the black of the glove.

“Annie.”

Reluctantly, I pulled them off. The gloves I knitted were my own teenage security blanket, disguised as a fashion statement.

“Thank you,” he said.

A hand in front shot up.

“What is it?” Mr. Williams asked. Blond-haired guys didn’t normally appeal to me, but Mr. Williams did. I didn’t know anyone, even my boyfriend, Mark, who was as fine as my English teacher, an opinion shared by half the students of Clear Creek High—the female half.

It wasn’t just his looks, though—which were eye catching, but not over-the-top gorgeous. It was his manner, his confidence, the way he carried himself. He seemed to know the world and all about what was out there.

“Mr. Williams?” asked Theresa, a girl who threw paper wads at people she didn’t like and always wore her hair in a ponytail to the side.

I thought Mr. Williams was even better looking when he scrunched his eyes in irritated anticipation of Theresa’s potentially, most probably, stupid question.

“How old are you?” she asked.

Okay. Not so bad, Theresa. I glanced around. All the girls were suddenly staring at Mr. Williams with eager faces. I could see their brains waiting to do some subtraction: I’m seventeen; he’s just a few years older. It could work.

He looked at me. “How old do
you
think I am?”

I laughed. “If I guess right, can I put my gloves back on?”

“Yes,” he said. “You may.”

I could feel my lips twitching as I tried to stop the smile. “I’d say … twenty-five.”

He gave me a slow smile. “Your hands must stay naked.”

Girls behind me giggled. The boys were probably scowling. Mr. Williams was an outrageous flirt, but nothing beyond that. He had a long-haired girlfriend working on her master’s at the University of Texas. I’d seen her at school a few times, visiting him, calling him “Marty.”

She always had a vintage bag thrown over her shoulder. It was well worn and all about a life I didn’t have. That bag had probably grooved to Beat poets on the decline and dozed in the sun on a blanket at Woodstock.

After class, Mr. Williams asked me to stop by his desk. A friend wiggled her eyebrows at me.

“Harmless,” I whispered as she walked past.

“Yes, Mr. Williams?” I asked, pulling on my gloves.

He handed me a paper. “Excellent essay, Annie.”

I nodded at the A. “You only read mine?” I asked, confused by the stack of papers on his desk. No grade on the one at the top of the pile.

“I started with yours and didn’t want to ruin my good mood.”

I laughed, flattered. “Okay. Thanks,” I said, holding up the paper.

“Your argument about Lear is solid, that Lear’s epiphany has value despite his death.”

“I think I read that somewhere, Mr. Williams. It’s not my original thought.”

“But you took it beyond the more traditional argument of Christian redemption. You
got
it, Annie, and argued it well for a …” He stopped and looked at me.

I laughed. “For a teenager?” His praise made me feel a little awkward, so I tried to cover it up with teasing: “And how many years has it been since you were an ignorant teenager?”

All of a sudden he looked very serious. I thought I’d gone too far in our playful bantering.

“Annie,” he said. “Have you thought about where you’re applying?”

“What? For college?”

“Yes, for college. I want to write you a recommendation.”

“Thanks, Mr. Williams.”

“Where do you want to go?”

I pulled at a piece of yarn. I wanted some new gloves. Maybe red ones. A brilliant red. I wondered if I had enough money for yarn. A string of words popped into my head:
Red yarn, color, craving color, this is going nowhere. Like me.

Was this normal? Did normal people have random words and phrases floating around up there, interrupting them when they were trying to have normal conversations?

“Annie,” he said again.

“My mom doesn’t have money for college, Mr. Williams.”

“You’re going to hang out in Clear Lake at the movie theater all your life?”

“Hey, how did you know I worked at the theater?” I asked. “I’ve never seen you there.”

“I want you to think about college.”

“What? You want me to be an English teacher?”

“What do you want to be, Annie?”

I have an impractical dream. One that makes no money. One I’m so horrible at, it only makes me cry and wad up paper after paper.

I shrugged, hearing my grandma’s voice in my head telling me not to shrug. “I like the theater.”

“An actress?” he asked, looking puzzled.

“No. I mean, the movie theater. I like selling popcorn.”

“And you want to work there the rest of your life?”

“I like movies a lot,” I said in a teasing voice.

“Get out of here, Annie.”

“Yes, Mr. Williams.”

“Annie?” he asked.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, dismissing me with a wave of his hand.

Mark was waiting for me out in the crowded hall. He threw his arm around my shoulders when I came out the door. “What did
he
want?”

I shrugged.

A girl glanced at us, though probably more at Mark. Mark was only about five feet eleven, not nearly as tall as the rest of the basketball team. But his maker had put every inch of his body to good use. He looked and moved like an athlete. He wasn’t cocky, but he did act like he was comfortable in his body, that it fit him perfectly.

He pulled me out of the path of a wild but friendly tussle between two freshmen. “He talks to you too much.”

I laughed. “Are you jealous of Mr. Williams? Come on.”

“He’s too interested in you.”

This made me secretly happy. And I was comfortable with secrets. “He wants me to go to college.”

Mark pulled me to him, kissing the top of my head. “You wouldn’t leave me, right?” He did smell good, a mixture of soap and just him, so familiar, like home should be.

But lately, I was feeling like something wasn’t right—about us. I slipped away from his grasp to open my locker.

He leaned beside me, peeking at me from behind the open door. “What are you doing tonight?”

“I have a paper,” I said. He swung the door back and forth, pulling my hair every now and then. “Come on, Mark.” I tried not to show him just how much this irritated me.

“I miss you, Annie.”

His eyes were brown and quite beautiful, but I wouldn’t get drawn in. “We’ve been together almost every day for two years.” I stared at the books in my locker. Where was I going? What was my next class? “I can’t tonight.”

He closed the door of the locker and gently pushed my back against the lockers, his face close. “You look so beautiful today.”

Ah, he felt good, so warm and strong against the length of me. I gave him a quick kiss, but saw Mr. Williams walking down the hall. He caught my eye and didn’t look away. But I did. I pushed Mark back a little. “Teacher to my left.” My cheeks felt warm.

“Since when do you care about that?”

I watched Mr. Williams’s back, glad he was gone. “I just don’t want the hassle,” I said, giving Mark a quick hug. Then I wriggled out of his arms. “Gotta go, Mark.” The bell rang. “Really have to go.” I turned away from his disappointed face and jogged to my next class, slipping in the door before the pad of pink slips was pulled out of the drawer.

“You almost didn’t make it,” whispered Lea.

I grinned. “But I did.”

“Miss Porter.”

Mrs. Moore was staring right at us. I cocked my head. I always thought her face had the shape of a hexagon. I wondered if math teachers ended up looking like geometrical figures, just as dog owners started looking like their pets.

I started writing down equations I didn’t understand.

CHAPTER 3

I
was nine when I realized that wanting to be a poet was best kept secret.

I’d found poetry on a headstone in the cemetery next to my grandma Winnie’s house and was so taken with it. With one hand gripping the cool stone, I’d whispered the engraved words over and over, liking how they sounded, yearning to find the meaning created by the words, but not quite understanding. It seemed a wonderful mystery for a Sunday afternoon.

Grandma said the poem was by Emily Dickinson, and I thought it was so nice of Miss Dickinson to write the poem for the woman who died. I asked my mom if that was what I could be when I grew up, a poet who found the words for someone’s life. She laughed. My aunt laughed. Then my cousins laughed. Mom said, “No, you can’t. Go play.”

The doorbell rang, interrupting my reminiscing.

“Could you get the door?” Mom yelled from her bedroom. “It’s probably Mark.”

I put down my library book of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. It was dark out. I had my pj’s on.

The doorbell rang again.

“Annie? Are you getting that?”

I threw on a jean jacket lying on my floor. “Got it,” I called out as I went down our short hallway.

It was Mark. He leaned in, his arm on the doorframe. “Wanna come out and play?” He grinned.

I put my hand on his. “It’s late.”

“I gave you time to finish your paper. You got it done, right?”

“Yes. But now it’s late.”

“Not even ten.”

I looked back over my shoulder. No Mom. I thought I’d heard her on the phone. She was on the phone a lot lately. “We have school tomorrow.”

“I have a present for you.”

“For me?” I asked, my hand to my chest. Mark was always giving me little things: a key ring, flowers, a Swiss Army knife, a cassette, anything. He took my hand, opening it, placing a small red heart in the center of my palm.

“For your charm bracelet,” he said.

“Ooh, so pretty,” I said, caressing the metal and admiring the color. Mark knew I liked color. “Thank you.”

“Come out and look at the stars with me, Annie.” He touched my cheek and gave me a gentle kiss. A surge of delight shot through me. He knew how to woo me.

I put my heart in my pocket and let Mark lead me out onto the cool grass.

My mom and dad and I had spent a lot of time in our yard watching the stars. Mom would spread out a blanket and the three of us would lie down on it, with me in the middle. Dad would show us Polaris and Venus, the constellations Orion and Cassiopeia, and tell us stories about them. Over the years, I’d listen to him, watching him point out the stars, and think I had the smartest father in the whole world.

When my parents split up, something inside of me ripped open. I didn’t realize it at first because I was only eleven. But I carried around an empty feeling that seemed to stretch from the pit of my stomach to right behind my eyes.

No one wanted to look at the stars anymore. But I did it anyway. It was hard at first, not so much because I was alone, but because I’d remember what it’d been like to have my mother on one side of me and my father on the other. Those first few nights, the sky felt as empty as what had opened up inside me.

But the stars were beyond beautiful and held such promise. And they were constant. Then Mark came along and would look at the stars with me. That empty feeling inside me wasn’t completely gone, but his love had pushed it to a small corner of my heart. I loved him for that.

He and I sat down cross-legged, looking at one another. He took my chin in his hand and gave me a slow, sweet kiss.

I pulled back and grinned. “This is looking at the stars?”

He laughed and fell backward onto the grass, with his arms out. I lay beside him, using his arm as a pillow. We looked up.

We stared and stared, not saying anything for a few moments.

“You know what Van Gogh said about the stars?” I asked him.

“The painter?”

“Yeah, I found a book of his letters the other day. He said: ‘For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.’ ” I turned my head to look over at Mark, tears pricking my eyes. “Isn’t that so lovely and true?”

“It is,” he said, squeezing my shoulder, still looking up.

Van Gogh saw so much in the sky.

For me, the stars shone wonder and hope—the unknowable in an amazing night sky. A simple image, really: white twinkling lights against a background of deep black. But it was more than that. It was what it suggested. It showed us what was beyond us, but also what was inside of us. It reflected back our souls.

I wished Van Gogh was beside me now. I couldn’t tell Mark the way I felt about the stars, but after reading Van Gogh’s letters, I thought the painter might understand. His words had made me feel less alone.