Page 11 of To the Moon and Back

It was summer, but there were still students on campus.

Young people were everywhere, cutting bare-legged across the grass, shoulders slumped under bright-colored backpacks.

A few wore bikinis and swim trunks, nowhere near water.

A tattoo-sleeved boy sat bare-chested on a bench and wrote in a notebook, heavy and thick-papered like my own.

Kayla stared down at her sketchbook. I looked out the window and saw who I could be.

Walking home from the library late at night.

Bent over a long black table, hands reaching for beakers and Bunsen burners, protective goggles pressing circles in my skin.

Sitting cross-legged in cold, damp grass outside the observatory shed where they stored the five Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes, waiting my turn to see the Cassini division in Saturn’s rings.

Our mother parked outside the Richard White Lecture Hall. She hurried around to the trunk. We had only twenty minutes, and still had to find good seats.

“Kayla,” she started. Her voice was quiet, strained. I thought maybe she’d found out about Brett and Beth touching each other. Or worse—she’d found out I hadn’t told her. “Did you pack clothes for you and me last night?”

“You didn’t tell me to,” Kayla said.

Kayla and I had gotten into bed early, her with her sketchbook and me with my geo-journal.

I wrote a sonnet about Meredith betraying me and Brett betraying my mother, and how love will always break your spirit.

We had just finished a unit on poetry in school, and—though I hadn’t admitted it—my geo-journal had long since stopped being for college admissions.

Beside me in bed, Kayla had sketched out her next project.

She carried fancy German watercolor pencils everywhere she went, her most prized of Beth’s defective gifts (in this case, every pencil was labeled a different, wrong color).

Instead of a traditional turkey feather cape, she now wanted a peacock feather cape.

I told her the drawing was pretty, and our mother told her it was historically inaccurate.

Peacocks were from “India or maybe Africa,” she said, “not from our traditional homelands.” If people saw photos of Kayla in peacock feathers, as an official Cherokee Nation junior ambassador, what would they think?

They fought, hard, and Kayla cried. “I’m sorry you don’t feel, like, authentically Indian enough,” Kayla said, “but that’s your problem!

Not mine! I don’t have to prove anything to anyone! ”

As I patted her on the shoulder with the flat of my hand, I was secretly grateful for the excuse not to talk about Brett.

In all this drama—which included a detour into how revealing Kayla’s clothing had become lately and what was up with that, did she want someone to get her pregnant or worse—there had been no discussion of her packing clothes for Duke.

Now, outside the Richard White Lecture Hall, our mother whipped away from us. “I told you…” she said. She paced up and down the length of the car, the muddy hem of her sweatpants dragging across the cement. “I told you to do it.”

“You didn’t,” Kayla said.

“Oh-hoh, you better think about what you—”

“Stop!” I shouted. Then I remembered where we were, lowered my voice, and tapped at my watch. “Mom,” I said, “your T-shirt is stained. Kayla, people don’t wear belly shirts to college.”

“I mean, they kinda do?” she said.

“Thank you for driving me to this university,” I said. “I will meet you both back here at three p.m.”

Our mother looked surprised and horrified. “If you think you’re applying to college here—and I haven’t even said yes to that, or talked about the application fees—then I get to see this place after my four-hour drive.”

She started for the door. I chased after her. My hands were shaking as I caught her hand. I begged her, choking on my words. Not here. Please don’t go inside. Please don’t.

“We embarrass you,” she said.

“No,” I said, too quickly.

What I didn’t say was that, on the night she ran, I wished she had kept driving. Farther north maybe, past all this. Our house was ugly and our town was homophobic and her boyfriend was unfaithful. If Brett left, I’d have no one.

Brett had never hit us. He had never yelled once, a kind of miracle to find in an adult.

Brett thought my interests were legitimate; he thought I was legitimate.

He loved space and he loved Earth, though he loved them with our people at their center.

He thought people were everything in the universe and I thought they were nothing, but the more time I spent with him, the more I thought I could maybe love Earth, too.

Or at least, the more I was interested in its geologic timeline and composition.

If it weren’t for him, there was no way I’d be thinking about taking some geology classes in college.

“You be ashamed all you want,” my mother said, linking her arm in mine, dragging me toward the entrance. “But I’m always gonna be here.”

The door slammed behind us. We were cut off from the light and sound of the world outside, thrown into the back of a very full, very dark room. Dr. Lars Carson was already speaking. He paused onstage, cleared his throat, and began again.

Dr. Carson lectured about the birth of a black hole.

He told a story about how, recently, the Hubble Space Telescope had detected a flash of light.

Within seconds, robotic telescopes around the world were redirected to face that light.

Automated phone calls went out to astronomers in North and South America, alerting them to come into work.

I imagined scientists waking up in the middle of the night, throwing coats on over pajamas, slipping into socks and slippers and running out into the cold.

Speeding down dark, quiet streets, skipping steps up a rickety spiral staircase to their observatories, their university offices, their telescopes on a hill.

Later they would share data. Giant observatories in Chile and Hawai’i would zero in on the light, would split it into different wavelengths and detect how far it had traveled.

They would learn it was a high-energy gamma ray burst. The brightest light ever detected by humankind.

It had traveled for 7.5 billion years to appear in our sky for thirty seconds.

It was sharing the news, very late and from very far away, that a black hole had been born.

Finally, and in my own way, I understood the nativity.

“An old star blows apart. A supernova forms. The collapsed core creates a neutron star. Imagine taking the mass of a mountain and collapsing it into a marble.” Dr. Carson leaned into the podium.

He smiled and rested his chin on his hand.

He took a sip of water from a plastic bottle, looked straight into the crowd—straight at me, it felt like—and said, “It’s gravity gone wild. ” He laughed.

I imagined myself meeting Dr. Lars Carson after his talk.

Dr. Lars Carson shaking my hand. Dr. Lars Carson offering me admission to Duke on the spot, buying me a computer, asking me for help in his lab.

I’d drag a step stool over to his chalkboard.

I’d erase his calculations with my shirtsleeve and start from the beginning, chasing down numbers and symbols like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting .

The part about the mountain crushed into a marble, though—that was the last I understood.

Dr. Carson turned on the projector. He flipped between slides, waving the red dot of a laser at graphs and charts and long lists of numbers.

When I blinked, bright squares were printed on the backs of my eyelids.

Dr. Carson opened the floor for questions. I raised my hand. My mother stood up and waved both hands at the front of the room. Then she pointed down at my head.

“Yes,” he said, squinting. “The kid in the back.”

I gasped. My mother sat, took my hand, and squeezed. A long-haired grad student in a suit appeared, holding a microphone right under my lips.

“Stephen Hawking has spoken about the possibility of time travel,” I said, “provided a ship could circle a black hole at the speed of light.” I hesitated; I’d never heard my voice so loud.

I took a breath and continued. “And, um, I recently read an article on the internet, in which a physicist stated that such a ship would fall apart. So, which do you think is more likely, for a ship to fly that fast or for a ship to stay intact?”

“Beautiful,” my mother whispered. She pinched a loose hair off the sleeve of my blazer.

Dr. Lars Carson gave a soft laugh. “Yeah, I saw that on space dot com,” he said. He took a long swig from the water bottle. “Neither is possible. It’s science fiction.”

The microphone was swept away from me and carried down the aisle.

My mother harumphed back in her seat. “She didn’t ask which was possible,” she muttered. “She said more likely , which means less impossible .”

I was a dummy. I’d believed in time travel, or something like it.

On Star Trek: Voyager , when the crew came across a wormhole and contacted a Vulcan from the past, I’d thought, Okay.

Sure. I’d thought if it were just possible to survive spaghettification and unimaginable force—if we could live through the things we felt sure would destroy us—then yes .

We would find something more than this. To hear Dr. Carson’s laugh, how confident he was, how at ease, it was like learning definitively that there was no heaven.

I shook in my seat. My mother rubbed my back, and Dr. Carson said words that were just sounds to me, and I felt like my heart was beating way, way too fast, like any minute I would die.

Kayla opened a bag of chips, dug her hand inside, and crackled the packaging. I snapped to the side to face her, my skin hot and itchy, my lungs gasping for air.

Our mother beat me to it. “Stop that,” she said.