THE STARS AT THE FINISH LINE
by wendy mass
2,563 DAYS AGO…
Three more kids until my turn, and I had no idea what I was going to say.
“Fireman!” Jimmy Anderson shouted.
The class laughed. Jimmy had nearly burned down the school last year lighting leaves with a magnifying glass.
“Race car driver!” announced Rick Atterly from two seats in front of me.
The class laughed again. Rick’s dad owned the biggest tractor store in town. No wonder Rick wants to go faster than five miles an hour.
When it was Tabitha Bell’s turn to respond, we all waited expectantly. No one knew anything about her except that she was smart. Really smart, like scary smart, and she had a funny name that I secretly repeated to myself when I couldn’t fall asleep at night (Tabitha Bell…Tabitha Bell). She walked into our fourth grade class two months ago, and suddenly I wasn’t the smartest kid in the class anymore. For instance, I knew that Athena was Zeus’s daughter, but Tabitha knew that Athena had sprung, fully grown, from the top of Zeus’s head. I knew the temperature at which water boiled, and she knew the temperature at which atoms got so cold they stopped moving. We were all waiting to hear what someone who could be anything in the world would choose as a career.
“Astronaut,” Tabitha Bell said quietly, but firmly. “I’m going to be an astronaut.”
“Me, too!” I called out, surprising everyone, including myself.
“That’s wonderful, Mr. Berman,” Miss McIntire said, jotting a note in her book. “I’m sure you’ll both succeed.”
Tabitha turned around in her seat. She narrowed her grass-green eyes at me, sizing up my very soul. The youngest of six, I was not used to being noticed so intently. I instinctively pushed myself against the back of my seat. My flinch made the corners of Tabitha’s mouth twitch upwards. “Bring it on,” she said with one sharp nod.
We were nine years old, and the competition had begun.
The sun has risen and set 2,563 times since that day, and the two of us have spoken exactly 238 words. That’s, like, less than a five-minute conversation. And those words were spread out over years. 224 of them were during our sixth grade science project where we got stuck on the same team, two of them came from an accidental brush in the hall in eighth grade that required a mumbled “Oops, sorry,” and the rest resulted from a request to pass a beaker of liquid hydrogen in AP Chem sophomore year. In the beginning I tried to be friendly, but she’s never given me the time of day. Literally. I once asked her the time because my watch had stopped and she wouldn’t tell me. Stuff like this used to drive me crazy, but now it’s the end of our junior year and I’m used to it.
Since we’re in every honors class together, I spend a lot of time staring at the back of her head (even in high school we still sit alphabetically). Honors English is about to start when Tabitha walks in and heads to her desk. It takes me a few seconds to realize that instead of sitting down, she’s standing next to my desk. In fact, she’s actually talking to me. This does not happen. I blink and sit up straighter.
“How could you not have told me about this?” she demands, waving an orange flyer in my face. “That’s not fair!”
Okay, so just because Tabitha and I don’t talk, that’s not to say we aren’t aware of each other. We always know what grades the other receives, what extracurriculars the other is involved in, what accolades or awards we earn, how many laps around the field we can do before getting winded. Getting into NASA requires being in peak physical condition, an advanced degree in something like astrophysics or aeronautical engineering, and that most mysterious of qualifications—the “Right Stuff.” Without saying a word, we push each other to be our best in every area. We “bring it on” every day. When I sit down to a test, I see Tabitha’s face in my mind, her eyes challenging me to beat her score. Before, I never cared much about grades; I just enjoyed learning for its own sake. Because of her, I now have straight A’s and am pretty sure I can get a scholarship to college, which my family never could have afforded otherwise. Instead of practicing quadratic equations alone in my room, I’m the treasurer of the junior class. And I owe all that to her.
The thing is, sometime over these same 2,563 days I probably should have told Tabitha I don’t actually want to BE an astronaut. I get carsick on any road that isn’t perfectly straight. I almost fainted from fear on the Care Bears roller coaster at the county fair when I was seven. The likelihood of me becoming an astronaut and zooming into space at thousands of miles per hour and then floating around at Zero Gravity is zilch. I know I should tell her that she doesn’t have to worry about me taking her spot at MIT, but honestly, our wordless competition has made my life so much better and I don’t want it to stop.
So now she’s waiting for me to form words, and I can’t seem to answer. Because here’s the thing. Even though she annoys the you-know-what out of me, I still repeat Tabitha’s name to myself in bed at night. And it’s not because the melody of it (Tabitha Bell…Tabitha Bell) lulls me to gentle slumber. It’s because I’m madly in love with her.
My feelings began in fifth grade, when she made a diorama of the Pantheon in Rome complete with statues of all the gods modeled out of Ivory soap. Then in seventh grade, when she constructed a wave pool in science class to show how all matter behaves both like a wave and like a particle, my heart started to flutter. Anyone who would try to explain quantum mechanics to seventh graders is a special girl for sure. But then last year she won the high school speech competition by talking for an hour about the existential meaning of Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill every day. And that did it. From that moment on, I was hers. Or she was mine. Or something like that. Not that she knows, of course, considering how, you know, we don’t talk at all.
“Peter?” she demands, all golden eyes and honey-brown hair and tank top. How am I supposed to ignore all that and just answer her?
I stall by glancing at the flyer. It’s for the big Star Party the local astronomy club is hosting out in the desert next weekend. This year they’re running an all-night Messier Marathon. My name is listed at the bottom as the Youth Advisor.
“I found this on the community board at the rec center,” she says accusingly. “Why didn’t you tell me you were involved with this?”
I finally find my voice. “It’s not a secret,” I tell her. “You know I’m into astronomy.”
She stares at me like I have two heads. “No, I don’t.”
This surprises me. Perhaps she hasn’t been paying quite as much attention to me as I’ve been paying to her all these years. I don’t know what to say, so I stare down at the flyer. When I look back up, she inexplicably has a tear in the corner of her eye. It glistens on her lower lashes like a diamond. I redden and resist the strong urge to dab at it. She blinks quickly and it’s gone. Her eyes narrow and she asks, “Can you tell me how much hydrogen gas the sun transforms into helium per second?”
“Um, no.”
Tabitha tosses her book bag around the back of her seat and sits down, still facing me. “Well, I can. I know the exact orbits of the planets and the names of Jupiter’s moons. But you know what?”
I shake my head. This conversation is very weird.
She exhales loudly and says, “I’ve never seen them. Any of them. I’ve never looked through a telescope in my life.” She picks up the flyer and waves it at me. “When I saw your name on this I realized how stupid I’d been to ignore basic observational astronomy. Clearly you knew enough to study it. How can I expect to get into NASA if I don’t know the difference between Cassiopeia and Andromeda? If I’ve never seen the Ring Nebula with my own eyes?”
Without waiting for an answer, she does something she’s never done before. She touches me. Or, more accurately, she clutches my arm in a death grip. “You’re taking me with you. I’m going to do that marathon, or whatever it is, and it’s going on my college application.”
I don’t want her to know the effect her touch is having so I blurt out, “You don’t even know what the marathon is?”
Her grip tightens in response. I can’t help but squirm. “Okay, okay, I’ll tell you. Charles Messier was a French astronomer at the turn of the nineteenth century. He made this list of deep-sky objects, you know, galaxies, nebula, star clusters. He was trying to find comets, and kept coming across these other things. So he started keeping a chart so other astronomers wouldn’t confuse them with comets. For a few days in March each year, all 110 objects are visible sometime between dusk and dawn. So the idea of the Marathon is to find and identify all 110 objects on the list.”
“Fine. Then that’s what I’ll do.”
“Um, doing the marathon is really hard. Most people don’t get everything. A good goal for a beginner would be a dozen or so.”
Her grip tightens even more. “You don’t think I can do it?”
I fear my circulation is being cut off. She’s getting harder to love. “Look, finding deep-sky objects that are millions of light years away is hard enough. But going from one to the other in a race against the dawn, well, that takes a lot of practice, that’s all. I’ve never done it, and I’ve been studying the sky since, well, for a long time.” I might not want to fly in outer space, but I love looking at it. I recently took a picture of the Copernicus Impact Crater on the moon that is SO COOL that I hung it up inside my locker.
Tabitha releases my arm and I have to shake it to restore feeling in my hand.
She blows her hair out of her eyes. “I’ll just practice then.”
I point to the flyer. “It’s in four days.”
“Then that gives me three nights to practice,” she replies matter-of-factly.
I want to tell her that even if she had three months it might not be enough time. Instead I ask, “Do you want me to help you?” Even as the words are out of my mouth, I know they are a mistake. Tabitha and I don’t help each other. To admit we needed help was unthinkable. She glares at me and whips around in her seat, her long hair actually skimming my nose.
I know she’s only talking to me now because she needs something from me, but I can live with that.
After all, her hair smells like strawberries.
I gently place my telescope in the back of the purple VW van Tabitha borrowed from her uncle for the trip. My eyes land on the big box next to it and almost pop out of my head. “You’ve got to be kidding me! That’s what you’re bringing?”
Tabitha shuts the back of the van—barely missing my fingers—and puts her hands on her hips. “What’s wrong with it? It’s a top of the line computerized telescope.”
“Exactly!” I reply, following her around the side of the van. “You can’t do the Messier Marathon with a GoTo! That’s cheating!”
She climbs into the driver’s seat and closes the door. I hurry around to the other side and slide in. I’m not sure how she became the one organizing this trip, but I should have expected as much. The ancient van groans and sputters, but finally starts. She pulls away from the curb in front of my house, the clutch grinding into second gear. It’s going to be a long five hours.
“Using a computerized telescope isn’t cheating,” she insists, reaching behind her to pull a bag of pretzels out from the stash of healthy food she packed. She offers me some. I shake my head and pull out a Charleston Chew instead. I had frozen it in preparation for the drive, and it’s still cold.
“You’ll never pass the NASA physical if you eat like that,” she says.
“That won’t be for, like, years from now.”
She shrugs. “Suit yourself.”
I take a big bite off the end and take my time chewing. I don’t want to antagonize her. But as much as the two of us have wanted to get ahead, we’ve never cheated. At least I haven’t. I didn’t even bring my equatorial mount because using the setting circles feels like cheating.
“Tabitha,” I say as gently as possible, “don’t you think it’s cheating if you plug in the coordinates of each item on the list, and then wait for your telescope to “go to” them? Where’s the challenge in that? How are you learning your way around the night sky?”
Instead of answering, she empties her bag of pretzels into her mouth, which I have to admit is impressive. Even the way she chomps on pretzels—crumbs and salt dotting her lips—is sexy. She swallows and says, “I’ve been doing some reading. The point of the Messier Marathon isn’t to learn the night sky; the point is simply to see all 110 objects. How you find them doesn’t matter.”
Technically, she’s right.
“Plus,” she adds, “I only had three days to prepare. If someone had told me about this earlier, I would have been able to learn the major constellations and then maybe I’d have a chance with a regular scope. But since no one told me, I had to rent this one.”
By sheer force of will—and the fact that I can see the outline of her bra through her thin white T-shirt—I don’t answer. Instead, I say, “Why don’t I just go over how things are going to work when we get there?”
“Oh, so now you’re going to help me?”
I gnaw hard on my Charleston Chew so I don’t say something I’ll regret. Focus on the bra strap, focus on the bra strap. I gulp down half of my water bottle. “If you’d rather do it all on your own, be my guest.”
“No, I want your help.” She glances fleetingly in my direction. Our eyes meet for a second and even though she drives me crazy, my heart skips a beat.
So I explain how I’ve made a chart of when each object will rise and set, and how we have to find them in this precise order, or we’ll miss them. I explain how the club chose this location because it has the clearest line of sight in all directions. Some objects will be very close to the horizon, and even a small hill could block out a whole galaxy. The fastest-setting objects—the spiral galaxies M77, M74, and M33, will be fighting the twilight, so they’ll be really hard to see. And in the morning M30 will be the biggest challenge because it’ll be practically dawn and it’s only one degree above the horizon.
“We’ll just use my scope,” she says confidently when I’ve finished my little lesson.
I shake my head. “Nope. We can’t use yours during twilight. We’ll have to do those early ones the old-fashioned way.”
She glances over again. This time she looks almost impressed.
“I got my Messier Certificate a few years ago,” I explain. “That means I’ve seen all the objects on the list. Never in one night, though.”
“So why do you want to do this, if you’ve already seen them all?”
Her question takes me by surprise. “Well, to be honest, it’s the only thing I haven’t done before.”
“Huh? Doing the Messier Marathon is the only thing you haven’t done before?” Her voice takes on a teasing tone, and for a second I feel naked.
I hurry to answer before my cheeks grow any hotter. “I mean, astronomy-wise of course. I’ve gone through all the observing programs that the Amateur Astronomy Association offers.” I start ticking them off on my fingers. “I got my Sky Puppy pin when I was ten, my Lunar Club pin at eleven, my?—”
She starts laughing. “I’m sorry, your Sky Puppy pin?”
I cross my arms over my chest. “Hey, don’t knock the Sky Puppy. It took me a year to earn that one. You have to be able to point out fifteen constellations and find five deep-sky objects like the ones we’ll be seeing tonight. Plus you have to be able to tell stories—like myths—about two of the constellations and how they got up in the sky. That’s hard when you’re just a kid.”
“I’m sure it is,” she says in mock seriousness.
I guzzle some more water and change the subject. “You brought everything I told you to, right? It gets really cold out there at night. Especially when you’re mostly standing still.”
She pushes her sunglasses up onto her head. “I know it gets cold at night, Peter. I’ve lived here eight years.”
“Eight years, two months, three days.” Wait, did I say that out loud? I sink down in my seat. Please don’t let me have said that out loud, please don’t let me have said that out loud. For a minute I think I’ve escaped, then the van swerves and I grab the side of the door.
“Why would you remember that?” she asks almost suspiciously.
I can’t look at her. “Um, I just remember how long it’s been since our, you know, competition started.”
“Our competition?” she repeats.
Now I turn to stare, a tingly feeling creeping up my spine. “The whole ‘bring it on’ thing?”
Her brows furrow. “You mean, like the movie?”
She really doesn’t remember. My mind races to all the things I’ve done over the past eight years because I thought I had to keep up with her. I can’t believe it was completely one-sided. How could I have thought that someone like Tabitha would ever really care what I was doing? I’m such an idiot! I shiver even though it’s warm in the van. A small choking sound escapes my throat.
“Hey, don’t choke, dude,” Tabitha says, handing me the water bottle I’d put on the seat next to me. “I’m just busting you! Of course we’re in a competition. If it wasn’t for you, I’d have seen that cheerleading movie. Or maybe even have been a cheerleader. Or had a boyfriend. Or gone to parties. Or, like, done a single thing just for fun.”
Relief floods through me, literally warming me up again. When my heart rate returns to normal, I say, “So just to get this straight, you’re blaming me for all the things you didn’t get to do? And to think I’ve been crediting you for all the things I have been able to do!”
She shrugs. “As my dad always says, that’s what makes horse races.”
“What does that even mean?”
“You know, if everyone thought the same way, they’d all bet on the same horse and where’s the fun in that? Tonight will prove which one of us really has what it takes. Which of us belongs in the stars, and which on the ground.”
“Does it have to be one or the other? Why can’t we both get what we want?”
“Have you ever heard of two people from the same high school becoming astronauts?”
I scan my memory and shake my head.
She continues, her hands gripping the wheel so tight her knuckles whiten. “It’s still harder for a woman. Did you know Judith Rosner got a perfect score on her SATs? That’s what it’s going to take for me.”
This was probably as good a time as any to tell her she didn’t have to worry about me taking her spot since I’m not planning on being an astronaut, but she’s not done talking.
“Hey, listen. I only half meant it about resenting you for making me miss things. Just knowing you were trying to achieve the same thing made me work so much harder. It was worth missing a few stupid parties. So seriously, thank you for always breathing down my neck.” She laughs. “And I mean that literally. Sometimes I could actually feel your breath on my neck in class.”
I redden again. Darn that alphabetical order!
“One more year,” she says, her usual look of determination on her face. “Then we’ll go our separate ways. Me to MIT, you to, well, anywhere else!” She grins at me.
I grin back. If I tell her the truth now, she might not work so hard. I wouldn’t want her to lose her focus senior year. So I lean back and enjoy the ride.
Two hours later, we pull into the makeshift parking lot that is full of cars from states as far as Illinois. Our 31 degree latitude is worth driving for. Up north they wouldn’t get to see everything.
“Hurry,” Tabitha says, jumping out of the van. “We need to get a good spot!”
“I really don’t think we need to worry.” I wave my arm at the miles of open space.
But she already has her metal cart set up and is yanking at her scope.
“Hang on,” I tell her, reaching over to help. “You have to be really gentle with these things. If a lens slips out of place, you’re out of luck.”
She steps back, and I push the scope back into the van. “Let’s set up our station first, then get the scopes, okay?”
She salutes me. “Whatever you say.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” I reply, swinging my backpack onto my shoulders. I stick the waterproof blanket and my sleeping bag under one arm, the two beach chairs under the other, and trudge after her. After making a wide circle, she plops down her stuff. “Here looks good to me.”
We spread out the blanket and arrange the chairs. Reaching into my backpack, I line up a gray hooded sweatshirt, a battery-operated alarm clock, a bottle of Tylenol, four bottles of water, four cans of Coke, long underwear, four peanut butter/jelly/fluff sandwiches, a regular flashlight, a red-bulbed flashlight, extra C, AA, and AAA batteries, an assortment of eyepieces, a dew cap for the scope, a wool hat, my Marathon Observer’s Logbook, my well-worn copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to Stars and Planets, laminated sky charts, an extra pair of socks, my cell phone that probably wouldn’t get a signal anyway, a foldable tripod, a pair of fingerless gloves, the digital single-lens reflex camera I’d spent a year of lawn-mowing money on, four granola bars, four apples, and a thermos to fill with hot chocolate later. I’m double-checking my battery supply when I notice Tabitha watching me. Suddenly, she grabs my now-empty backpack and starts frantically searching through it.
“Where is it?” she says, rummaging into its depths. She makes a big show of turning it upside down and shaking it. “It’s got to be here somewhere!”
I snatch the knapsack. “What are you looking for?”
“The kitchen sink! You have everything else, so I figure it’s got to be here.”
“Wow, I didn’t know you had such an outstanding sense of humor.” I carefully replace my supplies. “I hope you’re as prepared as I am, or you’re going to be mighty cold and hungry tonight.”
She grabs the Field Guide. “At least I’ll have good reading.”
I grab it back. “Not if you don’t have a flashlight.”
“Of course I have a flashlight.” She reaches into her bag and holds up a small white plastic flashlight with a picture of Hello Kitty on it.
“You’re kidding me. Do you know how dark it’s going to get out here? Darker than you’ve ever seen in your life. That thing doesn’t look strong enough to shine more than three feet.”
She frowns and turns it around in her hand. Then she grabs my red-bulbed flashlight before I can stuff it back in my bag. “I’ll just use this one, then. You don’t need two.”
“As a matter of fact, I do. The red one is so you don’t ruin your night vision. I’ll use it to consult my charts once it gets dark.”
“You mean, we’ll use that one,” she says, “to consult our charts.”
I look up, surprised. “I thought you didn’t want my help.”
Her eyes darken. “Fine,” she says, her voice clipped. “You’re right.” She turns on her heel and marches toward the tent marked BREAK STATION. I watch as she strikes up a conversation with a young couple setting up a huge coffee machine. Well, that probably could have gone better. I didn’t say I wouldn’t help her. I just thought she didn’t want me to. She didn’t have to storm off like that. She can be so annoying.
I busy myself by setting up my scope. I want to make sure it’s completely cooled down by the time twilight arrives. I align the scope’s finder and then calibrate my eyepiece. Tabitha still hasn’t returned by the time I’m done, so I grab one of my sandwiches and wander around greeting people I know from the club. A big group of kids—mostly made up of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts—ask for help setting up their telescopes. It’s fun seeing all the different types. The troop leaders show me their plan of attack for the night and I make a few tweaks to it. By the time I get back to our blanket, probably another fifty people have arrived and their varying scopes are glinting in the last of the sun. It’s such a big space that everyone has allowed a sizable distance between themselves and their neighbors. Tabitha is lying on her belly reading my Peterson’s Guide. Why does her butt have to be so cute? It’s hard to stay annoyed at a butt like that.
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 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.”
I nod and clear my throat. “That’s true. That’s why I love taking pictures of the sky so much. It’s like taking a snapshot of the past, and of a past that only exists from our exact vantage point. At any other position in time or space, it would look different. It’s like taking pictures of ghosts.” I’ve never said anything like that to anyone before.
“Exactly!” she says, leaning up on her elbow to face me. “So my image of Earth isn’t real, either.”
“Well, it’s still real. It’s just not the whole picture. Does that matter so much?”
She sighs. “I’m not sure. It just means I’m going to have to look at things differently. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Why do you want to be an astronaut?”
Well, now or never. “I don’t,” I say simply.
Her brow wrinkles adorably. “You don’t what?”
I meet her gaze. “I don’t want to be an astronaut.”
Her eyes almost pop out of her head and she sits bolt upright. “Because of what I just said? I don’t know what I’m talking about, you can’t go by?—”
I smile, sitting up, too. “No, not because of what you said. I’ve actually never wanted to be one. I’d much rather take pictures of outer space with my feet planted firmly on the ground.”
She shakes her head in bewilderment and lies back down. “Then why? Why did you work so hard all these years?”
I glance around us, but no one is close enough to hear. I lie back again, too. The darkness is complete now, and without a moon, it will be this way for many more hours. The sky is so crowded with stars that it’s dizzying. I know they’re not the only thing making me dizzy. Under the sleeping bag Tabitha puts her hand on my arm.
“Peter, tell me why. Why did you say you wanted to be an astronaut?”
She squeezes my arm a little, and I flash back to class the other day when she gripped it so tight. That feels like so long ago now. “I said it because you did.”
“Huh?”
I can’t help but smile at her confusion. “If you had said you wanted to be a chimney sweeper that day in fourth grade, we might be in a competition to see who could sweep the most chimneys right now instead of lying here.”
She stares at me like she’s never seen me before.
I continue. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad you said astronaut. Otherwise, I never would have learned about the stars. Plus, I think the ash in chimneys would be bad for my allergies.”
She laughs. “You’re crazy.”
“Maybe.”
Then she leans over and kisses me square on the mouth and stays there. No build-up, no time to obsess over where my lips should go on hers, what I should do with my tongue, if anything. No time even to close my eyes. All I can see is her face, her beautiful hair, and thousands of stars behind her. I kiss her back, and am surprised at how much this tops anything I could have imagined. My fingers instinctively lace with hers and we hold on tight. We stay like this for an hour, not talking, our bodies pressed together in the deep blackness. Her stomach growls and mine growls in return. We both laugh.
“You wouldn’t have any more Charleston Chews, would you?”
I shake my head. “But I have peanut butter and fluff sandwiches.”
We slowly untangle ourselves and get to our feet. My body misses hers already. As we head back, she says, “It takes a secure man to admit he eats fluff sandwiches.”
I take her hand and flick on my red flashlight with the other. “I also still watch cartoons. And not the cool ones on at night. The Saturday morning ones.”
“I sleep with seven stuffed animals,” she says. “And two dolls.”
“You win. You’re the dorkiest.”
When we reach our scopes, I go check my camera while Tabitha gets the sandwiches. I’d set the exposure for eighty minutes, and it had just ended. Flicking on the screen I call Tabitha over to show her the results. Hundreds of concentric circles made of light.
“Wow, you’re really good. How did you do that?” she asks, looking from the screen to the sky overhead, and back again. “I don’t see anything that looks like those streaks of light.”
“Those are stars.”
She looks closer, puzzled. “How can those streaks be stars? The stars aren’t moving like that.”
“Ah, but they are moving like that. We just don’t see it because we’re moving, too.”
She sighs and steps back. “Just one more way that reality tricks us.”
I shake my head. “We’ll never have a true picture of reality; it just doesn’t exist. But I’m real, and you’re real, and those fiery balls of gas up there are real, and right now that’s all I need to know. That, and if we hurry, we might be able to catch up to the Marathon. We’re two hours behind, but if we work with both scopes we might be able to do it.”
She looks at my camera screen again. “Or…we can go back where we were and get under the sleeping bag again. You know, to see if we can catch the stars streaking like that.”
“Yeah, yeah, let’s do that one.”
I awake at five AM to cries of M30! M30! Hurry! coming from all directions. Tabitha is just waking up, too. My first thought is to protect her from my morning breath. My second is that I can’t believe Tabitha Bell fell asleep in my arms. Her smeared makeup and tousled hair look so sexy I literally can’t bear it. If Charles Messier were alive he’d be getting the mother of all thank-you notes from me.
A bullhorn sounds. “C’mon, everyone! You’re almost at the finish line! Don’t give up now!”
Our eyes meet. She narrows hers. I narrow mine. She grins. I grin back. In unspoken agreement, we throw off the sleeping bag and take off in a run. We may have missed most of the Marathon, but we are NOT ones to miss a challenge. I reach my scope first, and am glad I had the foresight to put the dew cover on before we left. Tabitha grabs for the star charts and frantically presses buttons on her GoTo. I search for Capricornus, and then use the eyepiece to starhop down the chain of stars off to its left. I barely have time to move the scope before the coming dawn obliterates the pattern of stars I just left. I don’t think I’m going to make it in time. All over the world people are looking for M30 right now and I’m going to miss it. I risk stealing a glance at Tabitha to see her progress. She feigns a yawn and says, “Will you hurry up, already? Some of us are ready for breakfast.” I turn back and peer into my eyepiece again, but I know it’s hopeless. My scope just isn’t powerful enough to cut through the light.
I hold up my hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, you win. You found it and I didn’t.”
“Wanna see it?” she asks coyly.
I hurry over and put my eye to the rubber eyepiece. Her scope is so powerful the globular cluster glows, even in the twilight of dawn. I can even make out the colorful double and triple stars that surround the core. “Thank you, it’s really beautiful,” I say, not caring if that sounds corny. I might have to change my opinion of computerized scopes. And who knows, maybe my mom was wrong. Maybe I won’t have to wait till college to come into my own.
A little later the man with the bullhorn comes by with a stack of certificates. “So how’d we do?” he asks, his magic marker at the ready.
“We made it to the finish line,” Tabitha proudly announces.
“Wonderful!” the man booms. I shake my head at Tabitha admonishingly.
She reaches out to stop him from handing us a certificate. “But we missed the eighty objects before it.”
“Ah,” he says, tucking the papers back under his arm. “Well, I’m sorry it wasn’t a more successful night for you. You can always try again tonight if you’re not too exhausted.”
Tabitha whirls around to face me. “You mean it’s not just once a year? I’ve been crazed all week when I could have done this later on when I was more prepared?”
“There’s a block of a few days when there’s no moon out that’ll work,” I admit. “But it wouldn’t have bought you much time. Most people chose last night because, well, it was a Saturday night.”
“So what do you think?” the man asks. “You up for coming tonight? A bunch of us will be here again.”
I look at Tabitha. “What do you think?”
She contemplates for a minute, and then says, “Well, I never did get to see the Ring Nebula….”
I feel a grin spreading across my face. “We’d have to miss school on Monday. We never miss school. But it is for a good cause….”
“Definitely an educational pursuit,” she adds, slipping her hand in mine. “And this time we’d actually do it though, right?” She blushes and the pink on her cheeks match the approaching sunrise. “I mean, we’d do the Marathon this time. And not for our college apps, but just because it’s fun?”
I smile. “I knew what you meant. Yes, we’d really do the Marathon this time. Well, except for between midnight and two when no new objects rise or set.”
“What would we do during that time?” she asks teasingly.
Instead of answering, I lean in to kiss her. I’m a few inches from her lips when I hear the guy with the certificates clear his throat. I’d totally forgotten he was there!
“So you’re in, I take it?” he asks wearily.
I quickly un-pucker and step back. “We’re in.”
“We’re definitely in,” Tabitha confirms.
“Teenagers,” the man mutters. He shakes his head as he walks to the next group.
We turn to each other and laugh.
“What should we do now?” I ask.
Tabitha picks up my star atlas and settles into one of the beach chairs. “I’m going to read this cover to cover so by tonight I’ll be able to teach you something. What are you going to do?”
I sit down across from her. “I’m going to watch you read that cover to cover.”
“I don’t think that will be a very exciting use of your time.”
“Oh, yes, it will,” I argue.
“Whatever you want,” she says with a shrug, and opens the first page. For the next four hours I watch her face as she teaches herself thousands of years of astronomical history. I watch as the patterns of the stars take up residence inside her head. When she turns the last page, she pushes the book into my hands. “Thank you, Peter,” she says so earnestly I want to scoop her up and run around the field with her.
So I do.