Page 7 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH SECRETS OF THE EARLY UNIVERSE

Despite everything that had happened in Tulsa, we still had all the parents waiting for our performance at the closing ceremony back home.

Camp was ending. We lined up on the edge of the stage and sang our pop song in Cherokee like a funeral dirge.

Kayla and Daniel held hands through the whole thing, taking a stand for their love.

We were still in our orange shirts. Mine had a small tear at the sleeve, and I worried no one could see it.

No one would know how much I was hurting.

Everybody clapped, and my mother hurried away from me.

Brett gave me a long, hard look from his place behind the podium, like he sensed something was wrong but didn’t know enough to take sides.

Only Beth came up to me after the performance.

She gave me a tight hug, and a small, smooth rock, about the size of a quarter.

She said it was called a moonstone. I wished it were a moon rock.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked. I didn’t mean to be rude. That was just how she got free stuff at her job. There had to be something wrong.

“Nothing!” Beth said, like she’d surprised even herself.

She laughed, saying she’d almost forgotten how to buy things the regular way.

And then she stopped mid-sentence. She saw me, my eyes, how hard I’d been trying not to cry.

Beth took a step back and lowered her voice.

“There is nothing wrong with this stone, Steph,” she said. “It’s perfectly fine, just like you.”

She squeezed my hands in hers, once, firmly, and nodded at me. Like sending a soldier into battle, or one grown woman to another. I swallowed and nodded back at her. She left to find Brett and squeezed his hands, too.

Alone in my room, no one checked on me. The air conditioner broke.

I was wet with sweat and miserable. No one seemed to notice my absence, except Kayla, who brought me a plate after dinner.

We stayed up late trading stories about what a jerk our mother could be.

Our mother had skipped Kayla’s end-of-year art showcase at school because it was held at one p.m. and she was at the factory.

I thought that was fair, but didn’t say so to Kayla.

In the morning I heard Brett’s voice. Up the walls, the floors, and through the grate at the foot of the bottom bunk.

“Hannah, are you serious right now?” he said. “How could you do that to her?”

My scholarship. So she’d kept it from him, too. I hurried down to the grate. I wanted to find out if she’d decided to confess on her own that morning, or if he’d had to push her into it.

But it didn’t matter. I had lost my spot. Soon, the academic year at Exeter would begin without me.

In the popular but scientifically inaccurate understanding of the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics, some other version of myself might be getting ready for boarding school.

I was tired enough—sweaty and dirty and sore from the day before—for that to be a comfort.

Brett and my mother yelled at each other while my sister slept through the morning with a pillow over her head and my stomach tightened up, waiting for something bad.

And then the sound of footsteps. The front door, the car door, wheels turning over gravel.

I put on my bathing suit. It smelled like mildew, from snorkeling in the creek two days before. I had forgotten to wash it.

The air-conditioning was still broken. I took a Coke from the fridge and lay on the cool kitchen floor with a book. The can felt good on my forehead and neck.

My mother lay down next to me in her stretched cotton nightgown. On the floor in front of her she set a red chipped mug of coffee. It was steaming, even in the heat.

She picked up my book. The Big Bang: Secrets of the Early Universe.

She gave me a nudge. “Well? What are the secrets of the early universe?”

I shook my head. She had thrown a whole thread of my life away.

She lowered her voice. “I wasn’t making fun of it, honey. I’m really curious.”

I tore my book out of her hands. She hadn’t asked if she could see it. I went back to reading.

My mother moved her mug onto a folded magazine, protecting the floor. “What was there before the Big Bang?”

I snapped my book closed. She jumped a little. Good.

She was never going to apologize for Exeter. And this was rare, her interest. I wanted to know where she thought she was going with this shit.

I edged toward it. “What do you want to know?”

I thought she was a creationist. She had, in her more desperate years after Texas, taken us to church. But she liked the Cherokee story of creation more, the one with the water beetle and the mud. Everything suspended from four ropes in the sky, which will someday break.

She smiled tentatively. “The Big Bang is supposed to be the beginning of the universe. How could anything come before that?”

“The inflation period,” I said, with enthusiasm.

I couldn’t help myself. “Maybe a bunch of repetitions of the Big Bang and then the Big Bounce and then the Big Bang. A cyclical universe, where it maybe goes bang, bounce, bang, bounce? The singularity. Um, everything ever—like future galaxies and everything—was the size of a peach.”

The peach was a quadrillion degrees , I wanted to add. What a fun, weird fact. But I was embarrassed. It felt like she’d asked me about God, my deepest and most personal thoughts about God. And I was still mad at her.

My mother nodded. At first, I thought she just didn’t get it. Then I thought, maybe she saw me struggling.

In truth, this was my third time reading The Big Bang: Secrets of the Early Universe. It had been my goal to understand the origins of Earth, the universe, and everything in it by my fourteenth birthday. I was behind schedule.

She moved closer to me and leaned her head on my shoulder. I stiffened. She stayed. “When was the Big Bang?” she asked.

An easy question. A gift.

“13.8 billion years ago!” Most people my age didn’t know that.

“Huh.”

I could almost feel her smile.

My mother said, “Do they bother with time before all that?” She circled her hand in the air, gesturing at the expansion of the universe from a highly compressed state to this —her hand, the floor, and the broken air conditioner.

“It’s actually a controversy!” I had been too starved for her approval, for this brief feeling that I was okay. “There’s some people who say that time started with the Big Bang, and you can’t go further back in time than when time started .”

“Oh?”

“Like, they say time didn’t exist. But then other people , they say that where you put the zero is arbitrary. We happened to set the clock where we did, and like—you have to start counting from somewhere.”

I had, it seemed, forgiven her.

“But what was there?” she said. “If there wasn’t time?”

I had thought she was humoring me. Saying sorry in her own way. But her voice was different, hollow and sad, and the questions kept coming. All morning and into the afternoon, when the thick, wet heat pushed down to the floor and Brett had still not come home.

The questions came one after another, falling onto us, pressing us together. Each, one step closer to fear. How did it happen? Why did it happen? When will the stars burn out? What will happen to us then?