Page 3 of To the Moon and Back

At Space Camp, there’s a twenty-three-foot-deep neutral buoyancy lab for mission training.

At the bottom of the pool is the pretend wall of a pretend space station with loose screws and deep tears and faulty supply tanks.

A death trap—but pretend! You swim down with a scuba tank on your back, and they give you a problem and you fix it.

There’s an underwater countdown clock and a siren that gets louder and faster as you work, because it’s space, and in space you’re always one second from death.

A red light flashes through the water, your white suit turning from swimming pool–blue to danger-red, and then blue, and then red red red, system failure like in Starfleet when the captain calls blue alert and it’s dark and quiet and time to focus or else.

And you’re in your space suit, a hundred-pound mock space suit with the boots and everything, and with your clumsy, padded, white-gloved hands you’re trying to turn a small screw back in place with a silver wrench, your wrist turning and your legs flailing out behind you—you’re weightless, almost, you’re almost there.

We didn’t have that. We were driven to the creek behind Brett’s friend Beth’s house.

Beth sat up high on her porch in a pink bikini and sunglasses like Barbie, and every so often she’d wave down to us.

She held a cocktail with an umbrella in a tall glass, and I wondered again why my mother lived her life like fun was illegal.

Why she was so downtrodden. Sometimes at church, back when we’d been new to town and had gone more often, I used to see charity posters of poor people in other countries, staring into the distance with everything they owned wrapped in blankets on their backs.

In my mind I’d swap in my mother’s face.

“Ma, there’s a scuba park at Lake Tenkiller,” I said.

“Camp is free,” she said, and slapped a snorkel in my hand.

I laid my towel out neat on the grass and put on sunscreen, which no one else had bothered with even though skin cancer kills.

I moved slowly down to the creek, keeping an eye out for sharp rocks and snakes, making contingency plans for if I cut myself or got poisoned.

I only had about a decade or so to rid myself of every fear I still had.

In the place of all those old fears I would put a more honorable kind of fear, which I called (and which NASA called) awareness and preparedness and disaster response protocol.

By the time I made it up to my shoulders in the water, most of the group was downstream.

I hurried to catch up to them. John, a fellow almost ninth grader who had been mean to me when we first moved here, said he was Irish.

Gracey, an almost seventh grader who was consistently kind and boring, said English and Polish and Scottish.

Daniel said full -blood, the “full” sound like fool .

His accent was country, like my father’s had been.

My mother tried to correct us away from it.

It was a weird ritual, the listing of fractions.

But you had to be a tribal citizen to go to camp, which required having ancestors on a list of Cherokees the government had made a hundred years ago.

That left a lot of room for working out what now set us apart.

Meredith waved me back over to the group—I had been swimming away from them, inches at a time.

I smiled and shook my head and cupped my hands in the water, pretending to catch tadpoles.

When people asked “what are you,” they meant what was my mother and what was my father.

My father was white and dead. My mother refused to talk about him, except to say there’d been a car accident.

She wouldn’t talk about her parents, either, but that was because they’d kicked her out of their house.

Meredith shouted my name. Everyone turned and looked at me. I gasped in as much air as I could hold, pinched my nose, and sank underwater.

My eyes squeezed shut. My toes dug into the muddy creek bed. I made myself small.

My father was shouting about the universe again. The memory pushed into me like cold water on all sides.

“It’s like this ,” he said. The two of us, left alone together. The last few days had been bad ones. Soon I’d see him crumpled over the wheel.

My father stepped away from me, into the woods behind the house in Texas, and I was afraid. I was cold. I thought of my purple coat on its low hook by the front door but knew he wouldn’t let me leave. If I did, he’d chase me.

The white beam of a flashlight shone in my eyes, and a wall of black pushed toward me. I heard the heaviness of his boots on the ground. The crush of sticks and leaves.

“Can you see me?” he said.

I shook my head and turned away. Across the yard, through the bathroom window, I saw my mother bent over the bath. When my father had announced it was time for an astronomy lesson, she had let him take me.

I was getting too old to do bath time with Kayla. I missed our little boats with sails and our Marine Biologist Barbie. Our shark, toothy and open-mouthed. With a few turns of a crank, our father could make his fins move.

“Steph!” he said. “Try again! Can you see me? ”

He turned my head back toward him and shook the light in my face. I closed my eyes.

“No, sir,” I said, careful. I needed my coat, the toilet, whatever my mother had saved for me from dinner. It would be a long time before my turn in the bath.

“Exactly. Quasars are supermassive black holes, feeding on gas in young galaxies. They’re like flashlights! So bright you can’t see what’s around them, or behind them—none of the whole rest of the galaxy.”

I nodded, eyes still closed, and my father continued to talk.

He held the light steady in my eyes and told me to be tough.

Earth was tiny and unprotected. The universe was big, deadly, not known well enough to trust. It didn’t matter who you were or where you came from.

This part mattered because my mother was “part-Cherokee and stuck-up about it.”

Whoever you were when the end came, you had to be ready to run.

“I am,” I said. But he never believed me.

“I’m trying to protect you,” he said, when my eyes filled with water. “To teach you. It could be an asteroid! A super volcano. Nuclear war. Whatever it is, there’s gonna be a battle for resources. You gotta run before that, Steph. To the moon and back, if you’ve gotta.”

“I know,” I said.

My father nodded. With one hand, he brought the flashlight closer to my eyes. With the other, he counted out options for the end of the world. The Big Freeze, the Big Rip, vacuum decay.

I felt the wet on my cheeks. My eyes hurt so, so bad.

“Don’t tell me you forgot what those are?”

“No, sir,” I said, but it was a lie. I was five.

I came up for air.

Meredith spat water out her snorkel, dangerously close to Gracey’s face. Gracey laughed good-naturedly. I climbed out of the creek, unsure where I was supposed to go now, and Meredith called my name again.

“Um, I’ve got cramps!” I shouted, running toward the woods. When I looked back, Meredith nodded slowly and swam away from where I’d stood in the water. John stared at me, forehead creased, like I had broken a rule.

Creek Day, I knew, would stretch well into the afternoon.

My suit was too tight, a one-piece with bright yellow fabric pinching at my bottom, and the sun was hot on my back.

I sat at the foot of a tree and closed my eyes.

I remembered the mosquitos and opened my eyes again.

I wanted to yell out in frustration. I wanted to be somewhere else.

I slapped a mosquito on my leg, and blood shot across the surface of my skin.

My thighs were heavy now, and therefore more often covered, and lighter-colored than the rest of me.

The line where my suit hit my legs had hairs peeking through, a new and humiliating problem that I might never solve.

I pulled my legs up to my chest and held myself, covering my thick thighs and pointy knees and oily face.

You can’t be the kind of person who cares about this , I told myself.

I was better than other girls, better than Brittany and Gracey and even—especially—Kayla.

Kayla took a lot of pride in what she looked like.

Because of that she had many burdens, like having to brush her hair every day. But I was different. I was a scientist.

I heard a laugh, high and fast, and then “hey, shut up!” Another laugh, deep or trying to be. I stood up and tiptoed forward.

The voices started up again, fast, excited. “You don’t think she got in?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Daniel, please, it’s June! She can’t keep waiting at the mailbox. It’s sad.”

The air was hot and humid, my skin wet from the creek or sweat or both.

Quietly I stood up. Every step hurt the soft bottoms of my feet, not used to the twigs and rocks and cracked acorns strewn across the ground.

The trees overhead made pretty patterns on my arms, surprising me, the sun passing through them to print a hundred little leaves against my skin.

My arms were strong, even if they didn’t look it, and my fingers were long, thin—just right, I imagined, for fixing mechanical errors on a ship.

I was just observing, I thought to myself. Observe, orient, decide, act. They do that in the air force. A lot of astronauts start out in the air force.

I saw a foot sticking out behind a tree, a bare shoulder leaning against the bark.

“I mean, hasn’t she always been like that? Like, kinda off ?”

That was Daniel.

“No! She’s fine. Normal. But sometimes it’s just like, we get it! You know a lot of shit about space!”

My sister.

Daniel laughed. He made his voice go up high and dumb and ridiculous, like a girl. Like me. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I feel like the aerodynamics of this stickball game are highly problematized. If you’d simply anticipate the coordinates of this dimension…”