We Dream of Space

by Erin Entrada Kelly

  “The countdown could be halted again,” Ms. Salonga was saying as she tightened and jiggled the various cords that snaked out from behind the television. “If that happens, don’t be too disappointed.”

  When the image came through fuzzy, a boy Bird didn’t know hopped up to help Ms. Salonga figure it out. Bird was near panic at the thought that the picture wouldn’t straighten itself out, but it did. She trained her eyes on the screen, her pen at the ready. She didn’t want to miss a thing.

  Someone turned out the lights. Ms. Salonga stood in the glow of the TV, where the shuttle sat on the launch pad. The astronauts were already on board. So was Bird. She could feel the weight of the helmet on her head. The push of the seat belt against her shoulders.

  Her notebook bounced on her lap.

  “After the launch, we’ll have a quick lesson to discuss what we witnessed, and how that relates to what you’ve already learned so far,” Ms. Salonga said. She smiled.

  In the dark, the quiet whispers and glow of the television made everything surreal.

  Bird heard a crackle.

  A man’s voice.

  Mission control.

  Was it really happening or in her imagination?

  “We’ve had a go for auto-sequence start,” he said. “The SRB hydraulic power units have started. T-minus twenty-one seconds and the solid rocket booster engine gimbal now underway.”

  Bird wrote down gimbal so she could look it up later, then she placed her hands on either side of her seat and held on. The engine rumbled. Preflight checks complete.

  Her heart pounded in her ears. Thrum-thrum-thrum.

  She was nervous. She had the sudden urge to jump out of her chair and leap into the television set so she could sit somewhere on that shuttle, anywhere, next to Judith, next to the pilot, in the cargo bay, even. She didn’t care where.

  She stared at the screen and willed it to happen.

  The television was the sun in a dark, dark room, but it didn’t hurt to look.

  Not yet.

  11:38 A.M. EST

  If you traveled out of Ms. Salonga’s class, into the hallway, and down four doors, you’d arrive at Mr. Wills’s social studies class. The students in Mr. Wills’s class were not watching the launch. They had not written essays in exchange for a seat in the auditorium. They didn’t know what was happening on the television, and they certainly couldn’t hear it. They didn’t know the news announcer had reached T-minus fifteen seconds.

  That was around the time Fitch dropped his pencil.

  He watched it roll under Penny Barnard’s desk. The lead point broke off along the way.

  Someone will step on that and they won’t even notice, Fitch thought. It’ll probably leave a scuff mark.

  His mind wasn’t exactly bursting at top speed, but it was difficult to get your brain moving in Mr. Wills’s class. Mr. Wills spoke in a monotone and seemed ready to fall into a deep coma at any moment. Most of his lectures consisted of him reading aloud from the textbook. He rarely stood up from his desk. Sometimes he gave them “free time,” wherein they were expected to dive into their social studies textbooks as he graded papers; in reality, most people passed notes, whispered back and forth, or drew crude doodles of Mr. Wills in ridiculous situations. Here is Mr. Wills flying a plane, half asleep. Here is Mr. Wills skydiving, half asleep. Here is Mr. Wills performing brain surgery, half asleep.

  Fitch’s eyes were trained on the pencil, as if it was putting him in a trance.

  He yawned.

  He looked at the clock for the five-millionth time.

  Everyone looked at the clock five million times in Mr. Wills’s class. Even Mr. Wills.

  At eleven-fifty, the lunch bell would ring, and he would be free. For today, at least.

  Fitch was thinking: I wonder what’s for lunch? when he heard a strange noise. Everyone heard it. Mr. Wills had been droning on about the New Deal but stopped mid-sentence and turned toward the classroom door. It was a scream, maybe, or a wail. It was hard to tell.

  No one moved.

  Then: another sound.

  WHAP!

  Fitch knew that sound well—it was a door ricocheting off an opposing wall.

  “What—,” said Mr. Wills, striding toward the hallway. He placed his hand on the door frame and leaned out.

  Something blurred past, down the hall.

  No, not something.

  Someone.

  Not just someone.

  Bird.

  Fitch bolted out of his chair. The sudden movement startled several of his classmates. They jumped and stared at him. Everyone knew he was a hothead. Was he about to have a “moment”?

  No, he was walking toward the door, saying “That was my sister!”

  Fitch and Mr. Wills stood side by side, an unlikely pair, and watched Bird disappear into the girls’ bathroom. Fitch had conflicting instincts all at once: one of his feet wanted to chase after Bird, the other wanted to stay put until he knew what was going on.

  He listened to the second foot.

  He didn’t move until Mr. Wills started walking down the hall, toward the auditorium.

  Fitch followed him.

  Ms. Salonga was standing near the light switch. She had a strange look on her face. About a hundred kids were seated in chairs behind her, talking to each other, staring at a blank television, staring at Fitch, asking questions, shifting in their seats.

  Goose bumps erupted on Fitch’s arms.

  Ms. Salonga’s eyes were glassy.

  “What happened?” Mr. Wills asked.

  “The shuttle,” Ms. Salonga said.

  11:42 A.M. EST

  English was Cash’s least favorite class, which was saying a lot, considering he despised all his classes. But he was determined to raise his grade-point average by any means necessary. In this case, that meant he had to come up with sentences that used all their vocabulary words. He needed ten of them before the lunch bell rang, and thus far, he only had seven. Most of the class was already finished; their papers were facedown. He never understood how people got their work done so quickly. In the past, he would have rushed through it, written anything, just so he wouldn’t be last. Not today. Today he was determined.

  He tapped his pencil on his paper. He stared at the word melancholy.

  Melancholy. Melancholy. Melancholy.

  Oh, yes. He remembered what that meant.

  He had three words of his sentence using melancholy when someone knocked on the classroom door. Whoever it was didn’t wait. The door opened. It was Mr. Wills. He was frowning.

  The English teacher, Ms. Pachenko, stood at her desk and raised her eyebrows at him.

  “Yes?” she said.

  Mr. Wills blurted it out in three, quick words. “The shuttle exploded.”

  “The shuttle?” said Ms. Pachenko.

  “The Challenger. It exploded.”

  “How can something explode in space?” asked some kid who sat behind Cash.

  “It didn’t explode in space,” said Mr. Wills. He was still looking at Ms. Pachenko. “It exploded right after it took off. It never made it.”

  It never made it.

  Cash looked down at his vocabulary words again.

  He felt an emotion he couldn’t explain.

  The other kids were talking. Someone even laughed. Made a joke.

  What was funny about a shuttle exploding?

  The class spoke in whispers at first, then in normal tones, as Mr. Wills told Ms. Pachenko the few details that he knew.

  “Bird,” said Cash, to no one but himself.

  LUNCH

  Bird’s legs hurt. She’d been standing in the bathroom stall for a long time. She wasn’t sure how long. She’d darted out of the auditorium not long after the malfunction. That’s how she was framing it in her mind: a malfunction. Explosion didn’t seem possible. Malfunction felt safer, more comfortable. People survived malfunctions. Besides, that’s what the guy from mission control had said. Obviously a major malfunction, he’d said. And
he didn’t sound panicked, so maybe there was nothing to panic over. People panicked over explosions. They didn’t panic over malfunctions.

  That’s what she’d been telling herself.

  But the truth was the hardest thing to hear sometimes.

  And the truth was, she’d escaped into a bathroom stall because it was more than a simple malfunction, and she knew that. She knew machines. And she wasn’t an astronaut, but she knew this machine, the space shuttle Challenger. And she knew that it wasn’t supposed to break apart that way. As soon as the major malfunction happened, someone said, “Is that supposed to happen, Ms. Salonga?” but Ms. Salonga didn’t answer because she had her hand over her mouth. But Bird knew: No, of course not. That’s not supposed to happen.

  No one said anything. Or maybe people said things, but Bird couldn’t hear them. Her ears were flooded with the sound of her heart. She stared at the columns of smoke branching off in every direction and desperately wished mission control would say something, anything, either on TV or into her nonexistent helmet. She waited for the shuttle to emerge through the plume and continue on its way. She waited for Judith to speak.

  She felt sick.

  After the words “major malfunction,” Ms. Salonga turned to them with a strange look in her eyes, like she’d forgotten they were there or what she was doing. Then she rushed to turn off the television with shaky hands. She didn’t know what to say, that much was clear. She just stood there, frozen.

  That’s when Bird took off.

  Her notebook fell from her lap to the floor.

  She thought she was going to throw up.

  She went into a stall, leaned over the toilet, but nothing happened.

  She stood up. Leaned against one of the walls. There was no cover on the toilet seat, so she couldn’t sit down. But she didn’t want to go back to that room. That’s where the television was. That’s where the major malfunction happened. That’s where her teacher was standing, dazed and confused.

  Everyone had seen her run out, but no one had come to look for her.

  That was fine.

  She needed to be alone, anyway.

  One of the benefits to being invisible.

  When the bell rang for the next period, she was still standing there. She’d missed lunch, but so what? She wasn’t even hungry. Girls shook the handle on the door, then saw her feet and used another stall. Bird maneuvered herself between the toilet and the corner and was able to relax her knees a little. She listened to girls talk about nothing and giggle over nothing. How could anyone think about anything else? The shuttle, the shuttle, the shuttle. It ran through her mind on a loop. All that smoke curling off like devilish fingers against a bright, blue sky.

  Then finally: someone mentioned it. Mr. Crowe, the principal, made an announcement over the PSA.

  After lunch, students would be dismissed for the rest of the day.

  “. . . to mourn the loss of the space shuttle Challenger,” Mr. Crowe said.

  The girls in the bathroom clapped. They remarked on their good luck. School was out for the rest of the day! It was like finding a ten-dollar bill in your pocket that you didn’t know was there. They were happy.

  Bird felt sick again. She put her hands over her ears.

  How could they clap? How could they be happy?

  No, this was all wrong.

  They were supposed to be going to space.

  They were supposed to be going to space.

  A DIFFERENT SPACE

  You wouldn’t have guessed that there had been a national tragedy. Most kids were giddy in the seventh-grade hallway, brimming with possibility at their day off. Fitch had a feeling Vern would be one of them, so when he saw him down the hall, lingering near Fitch’s locker, waiting—no doubt—for their inevitable trip to the arcade on Main, Fitch ducked out of the way. He’d wait until Vern lost patience and left. He couldn’t handle Vern right now—not his voice or his chattering or his excitement. Fitch felt no levels of excitement. All he could think about was Bird.

  Vern craned his neck, looking. Fitch turned toward the wall, mostly hidden behind a bank of lockers, and discovered he was looking directly at the nose of the Challenger, taped to the wall. He was in front of Ms. Salonga’s classroom. The door was closed and the lights were off, but sunlight filled the room anyway and he saw Ms. Salonga sitting at her desk. She wasn’t doing anything. Just sitting.

  Fitch’s heart skipped. He felt like he was seeing something he wasn’t supposed to see, but he didn’t want to walk away. He knocked lightly, but Ms. Salonga didn’t respond. He knocked again. When she turned toward the door without getting up, he slipped inside, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible so none of the other kids noticed.

  They didn’t.

  They were too busy embracing their freedom.

  Fitch stepped inside and closed the door. He’d been in this classroom a hundred times, but it seemed like a completely different space now. The desks were empty. Ms. Salonga wasn’t at the board, tossing chalk and putting them into groups. She smiled at him faintly, but still didn’t get up.

  “Hi, Fitch,” she said. “Did you need something?”

  Her eyes were tired. Maybe she’d been crying, but she wasn’t now. There was something unnatural about watching a grown-up cry right in front of you. He hoped, with every molecule in his body, that she wouldn’t. What would he do if she did?

  He shoved his hands in his pockets without stepping further into the room. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, exactly.

  He never knew.

  “No. I just . . .” Fitch stammered. Sounds from the hallway drifted in. Someone was laughing, loudly. It pierced through the silent classroom. “Uh. I don’t know. I guess I wanted to ask if you were okay?”

  He discovered now that this was the truth.

  Yes, this was why he’d walked in.

  He wanted to check in on his teacher.

  Imagine that.

  “No, but I will be,” Ms. Salonga said. “Don’t worry about me. Just keep an eye on your sister. Okay?”

  Fitch nodded.

  A lump had formed in his throat, though he didn’t know why or when.

  “Okay,” he said.

  HOME

  Cash and Fitch were waiting for her at the front doors. This was further evidence that the day was abnormal. In all the years they’d gone to school, her brothers had never waited for her unless one of their parents made them. Yet, here they were, standing side by side, looking for her.

  They didn’t look happy that school was out for the rest of the day.

  In fact, they didn’t look happy at all.

  “I’m sorry, Bird,” Fitch said, as soon as she came into view.

  “Yeah,” said Cash. “Me, too.”

  They fell in step, the three of them.

  They had never fallen in step before.

  But Bird didn’t have time to consider what this meant, if anything.

  What did it feel like when the engines turned on? Were the astronauts holding on tight? Did they feel the rumble in their chests? Was Judith smiling? What did it feel like to have a “major malfunction”?

  Machines were supposed to be reliable.

  Machines were supposed to do what humans told them to do.

  Machines weren’t supposed to make mistakes.

  Mistakes were for humans. Not machines.

  Bird looked at her feet as she walked. Her brothers stayed with her, even though she was moving slowly. She wanted to look at the sky to see if she’d see anything—anything at all—but she was afraid, so she didn’t. She kept her eyes down.

  They walked in silence all the way home.

  Fitch got the key out of the mailbox. Once they were inside and had their jackets on pegs, Fitch went into the kitchen and asked Bird if she wanted a sandwich. She didn’t answer, so he made one anyway. Peanut butter and jelly.

  Cash turned on the television. They were showing footage from the explosion. Part of Bird wanted to watch it—Maybe there was a m
istake? Maybe she dreamed the entire thing?—but another part of her didn’t want to see anything.

  Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Cash turned it off.

  “I don’t feel like watching TV,” he said.

  But that wasn’t true.

  Cash always felt like watching TV.

  Bird didn’t say anything. Her mind struggled to understand this strange new world.

  If she and her siblings were a machine, she would call quality control. Things were out of the ordinary. The machine wasn’t working right.

  Since when did her brothers care?

  Since when did anyone?

  Wednesday, January 29, 1986

  TICK TICK

  When Bird took the key out of the magnetic door knocker at Dani Logan’s house, she acted casual, as if this were an everyday occurrence. Blood rushed her ears. Her heart beat all the way up to her throat. She half expected a wail of sirens to blare as soon as she put the key in the lock, but it turned easily. The door opened easily. She stepped in easily.

  Everything that happened at Dani Logan’s house happened easily.

  It was nine o’clock in the morning, and no one was home. The Logans were at work, presumably, and Dani had gone to school. Bird had not. She’d spent the previous afternoon, evening, and night in her room, although she wasn’t sure exactly how she’d passed the hours. She emerged to eat dinner—everyone in their separate quarters, as usual—and said a few obligatory words to her parents, but mostly she stayed tucked away, on her bed, curled up in her pajamas. The TV seemed to play nothing but footage from the disaster, comments from experts, statements from politicians. Bird heard the muffled sounds of it all through her door. Once she went into the kitchen to get a glass of water, and caught her dad mid-sentence, “. . . teachers aren’t real astronauts, so it doesn’t make sense that NASA would . . .”

  She thought of Ms. Salonga.

  She didn’t wait for the rest of the sentence.

  In the morning—just hours before she found herself here, on the Logans’ doorstep—she told her parents she didn’t feel well and they said she could stay home. It was easy for Bird to get a pass from her parents. She never did anything wrong; why would they worry?

  Once inside the Logans’ house, she took off her shoes and set them aside. Those were the rules, after all. Her feet were cold. She rubbed one socked foot on top of the other while she stood there.