What Stars Are Made Of

by Sarah Allen

  It took her a long time, she told me, to find a new dream, but she realized that, like in music, you can say silent, special things to people with cakes and cookies. I’m not exactly sure what she means, because how can you say things to people without actually, you know, saying them? Anyway, she discovered that an only half-useful left hand doesn’t hold you back as much in a kitchen as it does on a piano keyboard. She’s even figured out how to manage most of the cake decorating with only her right hand, and she has an assistant at her bakery who helps, too.

  She still likes to play piano sometimes, but she gets frustrated when her left hand won’t do what she wants it to. She especially loves to play when my big sister, Nonny, is here. Mom can play the right hand if Nonny can do the left.

  Both Mom and Nonny won a piano contest called the Colorado State Young Musicians contest when they were twelve. When they were my age.

  I always wanted to win the Colorado State Young Musicians contest when I was twelve.

  I wanted to be Mom’s left hand, too.

  But here’s the thing about music and me.

  There’s something that happens to my muscles when I look at piano music. It starts in my shoulders, then spreads down my arms and to my gut. My shoulders become stiff and hard to move, and my hands get cold, and I suddenly have to pee really bad.

  Sometimes people talk about deer in headlights like it’s a cliché, but I read about it once in a magazine, and it’s very scientific. Adrenaline floods their body and literally makes their muscles freeze even though a big old truck’s about to blam right into them. I think maybe when my brain looks at piano music, it turns into a stupid, frightened baby deer that only sees an oncoming big-rig.

  I really tried. For three years I took piano lessons, complete with frozen-brain practicing sessions and one especially jaw-clenching recital that totally flopped. So when I was ten I finally quit.

  Afterward, when I wasn’t turned to stone on the piano bench anymore, I sometimes talked to Beethoven and Bach in my head, asking them why they had to make it so hard for people like me. Sometimes it felt like they looked down at me in their white wigs, pointed their fingers, and laughed.

  Nonny is really good at music.

  I don’t think Beethoven and Bach laugh at her.

  You might think this means that I’m jealous of Nonny because she can do all these things I can’t do. Not just piano. She can also help Mom in the kitchen without breaking bowls or messing things up. And she can do the monkey bars. I’ve never been able to do the monkey bars.

  Let me tell you the truth about Nonny.

  Nonny is my safe person.

  She’s the person I can talk to who never makes me feel like I’ve said the wrong thing. She’s even better and more helpful to talk to than the people in my head. Of course, my parents are also good to talk to. They never make me feel dumb when I say things, but they still sometimes get that look like I’m so precious or growing up so fast. I’m still their little girl, you know?

  Then there’s my sister, Nonny.

  Her real name is Naomi, but I couldn’t say it when I was little, and so now everyone calls her Nonny. She’s twenty, almost nine years older than me, but she doesn’t talk to me like I’m her baby sister. She has long, long dark hair and a clear complexion pale as starlight, and she’s married to a man named Thomas who has the best laugh and the broadest shoulders and can still lift me over his head with one arm. He’s got deep, night-sky skin, what Nonny calls a wrinkly-eyed Idris Elba smile, and he once beat my dad at Boggle, which is super hard to do. They met last fall, at Nonny’s first semester away at college. They fell in love fast, like gravity pulling two moons into orbit around each other, and then got married in May, right before the end of the school year. And right before Nonny’s twentieth birthday. I think my parents were really nervous about her getting married so young, except then we met Thomas. Then they weren’t nervous.

  Let me tell you a story about my sister.

  A couple of years ago, during Nonny’s senior year of high school, I got hearing aids. I didn’t know that kids at school would think they were weird until after I got them. Nobody made fun of me or anything. Then at the beginning of last year when I was on the playground at lunch I started talking to these two girls with bangle bracelets up both their arms, and they were nice but after a few minutes one of them said, “Sorry, I’m not really used to playing with people who wear hearing aids.” They went over to the swings and I went and ate my lunch in the library.

  Want to know the weird part? I didn’t even feel bad about it. At least not at first. I just thought, Okay, and I went and read a book about the discovery of penicillin. (Penicillin was an accident, by the way.)

  When I got home, though, I had more time to think about what had happened. That wasn’t so good. I didn’t cry or anything, but when I was done with my homework I couldn’t think of anything to do except sit on my bed and feel very, very small. Sometimes you feel like you could shout and scream so loud your lungs would burst, and to the rest of the world it would only be about as loud as a mosquito fart.

  Then Nonny came home from school. She came in and said hello to me, and she could tell that I wasn’t having the greatest day ever, and then I told her what had happened and she paused for a moment, but not for too long, and said, “Wow, they must not know very many interesting people at all.”

  Then she brought me into her room and we blasted Celtic Woman (her favorite) and danced around with hairbrush microphones.

  You may not think that Celtic Woman is good blasting-dancing music.

  If you think that, let me tell you something.

  You’re wrong.

  Especially if you’re singing with Nonny.

  X’s and O’s

  There are a few reasons I’m different from Nonny. A few reasons why piano doesn’t work out so well for me. Why I’ll always be shorter than her, why my heart was ballooned up way too big when I was born, and why I have to wear hearing aids.

  It’s sort of a big bundle of crazy, chaotic, dangerous weirdness that happened when I was born.

  You ready for this?

  Here it goes.

  Picture this:

  The big tube of blood in your heart—it’s called the aorta—squeezed, pinched, and constricted so blood can’t get through and your heart has to pound harder and harder, growing bigger and bigger until it’s ready to pop like some cheesy love song.

  Your small intestines in a sack outside your stomach where your belly button is supposed to be, and the doctor carefully pushing them back into place. (Gross, but also kind of totally awesome.)

  The umbilical cord wrapping tighter and tighter around your neck like a boa constrictor.

  Fun times, right? When I was two weeks old they took me in for heart surgery, stretching my arms up above my head so they could go in under my ribs instead of cracking open a two-week-old sternum. I always imagine it like some kind of medieval torture. I still have the long white scar across my left side from where they fixed my heart.

  Wanna know why my heart was squeezed like a cat’s head in a toilet-paper tube?

  Here’s how Mom and Dad explained it to me when I was seven years old.

  It’s like your body is a recipe cooked in your mom’s belly. (I know what a uterus is now, but when I was seven and we were in the middle of a restaurant, they called it a belly.) The Recipe of You has forty-six ingredients. Those ingredients are called chromosomes.

  Red hair? Chromosomes. Bad eyesight? Chromosomes. A nose like your great-grandpa Stan’s? All thanks to chromosomes.

  You get twenty-three ingredients from your dad, and twenty-three from your mom, and together those ingredients make up the Recipe of You. There are two special chromosomes that mean you’re born male or female, and you get one of them from your mom and one from your dad.

  Except when you don’t.

  The two female chromosome ingredients are XX. That means your mom is XX, and so when you get your twenty-three mom ingredi
ents, you get one of her X’s.

  Male ingredients are XY. That means it’s your dad’s ingredients that decide if you’re born male or female. Here’s how it works. Y is the “male” ingredient. Since Dad is XY, if he gives you an X, you get one X from Dad, one X from Mom, and boom bam, XX, you’re a girl. If Dad gives you a Y instead, though, then you’ve got X from Mom, Y from Dad, and XY, happy birthday, it’s a boy.

  But it doesn’t always work out like that.

  Sometimes you’re just X.

  One X and something’s missing.

  XO.

  Which doesn’t stand for hugs and kisses.

  It stands for Missing Ingredient.

  It doesn’t bother me too much. In fact, some people who are called boys or girls when they’re born decide that, actually, that word and all its associations doesn’t suit them after all. But I’ve always felt like a girl, all the way from my head to my toes. So I once asked my mom if having only one X meant I might be a boy—and she said it’s not like that, because I don’t have the Y “male” ingredient, and plus I don’t feel like a boy at all. That means I’m just as much a girl as she is.

  Here are some more facts: 1 in every 2,500 girls is born XO.

  This is called Turner syndrome.

  Sometimes when a baby is getting made and the mom’s body senses that it’s missing an ingredient, her body stops making the baby and it dies before it’s even born. That’s called a miscarriage. A miscarriage happens to 99 percent of babies who are being made with a missing ingredient.

  That means I’m really lucky.

  Dad says it means I’m meant to be here.

  There are lots of other ways things can go wonky with the ingredients. For example, it’s also possible to get an extra chromosome. An extra number- twenty-one ingredient from Mom or Dad. That is called Down syndrome.

  Maybe it’s miraculous anybody is born “healthy” at all. A miraculous protostar bursting out of a perfect mix of dust and heat.

  Turner syndrome fiddles with my body in some ways. Like my ballooned-up heart.

  Like my neck that’s a bit thick on the sides.

  Like my ribs that are round like a barrel.

  Like my low-set ears that don’t hear exactly perfectly.

  Like how I have to give myself shots every day.

  But that’s just physical stuff. My brain is still intact.

  I’m still going to get an A in Biology.

  I’m still going to be a scientist.

  Better Than a Puppy

  Ready for the surprise?

  Want to know what’s better than a puppy?

  I practically burst through the school doors after the last bell rang, and Mom was there waiting for me in the pickup zone. She knew I wouldn’t be doing any slowpoking today. (Although I’m not ever really what you could call a slowpoke. Mom says I’m a human espresso. Well, I espressoed my way to the van, that’s for sure.)

  I yanked open the back door. “So it’s time to go get my new puppy, right?”

  Mom laughed. “You’ll see. Wait till we get home.”

  I admit, I had my suspicions that the surprise had something to do with my sister. Mom and Nonny had been talking on the phone a lot lately. Like, seriously a lot. There was almost no day that I didn’t come out from school and see Mom talking on her phone while she waited for me. And I knew it was Nonny she was talking to, because I could tell by the way she gestured with her hands, and sometimes I would open the car door and hear her say something like, “Love you, too, sweetheart,” or once I heard her say, “Let me know how the appointment goes.”

  I also knew their phone calls had something to do with Thomas’s job. He does special welding for big projects, and a couple of months ago the company he worked for had to lay off lots of people. Thomas was one of them, which makes me think that the company wasn’t very smart because Thomas was definitely their best guy. He’d been trying to get another job but it wasn’t working out so well.

  I had asked Mom about fifty times what was going on, but Mom kept saying she’d talk to me about it later. I hate later. Later is the worst.

  But maybe Later was finally Now.

  Mom usually had splotches of sugar or flour on her clothes somewhere, because she always came straight to my school from the bakery, and she usually went back for a couple of hours before dinner. Today she didn’t. Today she was clean.

  “Tell me! Tell me!” I said.

  Mom grinned. “You’ll see.”

  When you don’t know when Later is coming it sucks, but knowing that it’s almost here and that it’s getting closer and closer is wonderful and exciting, and being excited is the best feeling in the world.

  It had been an exciting day.

  On the drive home, a drive I’d done millions of times before, every tree seemed new and beautiful. Every house seemed important, like the person who would figure out how to cure cancer could be living inside it.

  And when we got home, there was the surprise, waiting for me on the front steps, her big-sister arms open wide enough to jump into.

  My Sister Is Sick and It’s a Good Thing

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to pick you up,” Nonny said when we were inside on the couches. We each had herbal tea and orange marmalade toast and I don’t think I’d ever felt so warm and snuggly on the inside. “I was already feeling carsick and wasn’t even in a car.”

  “Carsick? Are you okay? Is Thomas here, too? How long are you staying?”

  Nonny laughed and Mom stroked my hair. Here are the answers they gave to my questions:

  Nonny would be staying for six months. Six months. When they told me that I nearly bounced off the couch.

  Thomas was not here. Yesterday he had flown from their apartment in Chicago (where his parents also lived) to a job doing some crazy project in the Florida Keys. Nonny said it wasn’t his favorite job but he had to take it because they needed the money. They were trying to save up for a house. He would be gone for nearly six months before that job ended and he’d have to find a new one. Nonny told me that last night by herself was the worst night of her life.

  She was okay. She sometimes felt a little nauseated, but that was to be expected.

  Expected, because she was pregnant.

  “Pregnant!” I said. “A baby? A real-life baby? This is the best day of my whole life! Six months, holy cow … but … oh my goodness.”

  A baby.

  Nonny was going to have a baby.

  My mom and dad were going to be a grandma and grandpa.

  Nonny was going to be the greatest mom.

  I was going to be an aunt.

  “Yep,” Nonny said. She was smiling clear up to her eyes, and even though she looked a bit tired, she proved that pregnancy-glow thing was real. Total glow.

  “Tell her more,” Mom said. “Tell her when.” Mom was practically glowing, too. I thought her face was going to break, she was grinning so wide.

  “Well,” Nonny said, looking at me. “I’m four months along, and the baby is due February seventeenth.” She looked down at her stomach. “That’s the other reason Thomas had to take this job. So I’ll need your help taking care of me since Thomas isn’t here.”

  I was going to take care of my sister and her unborn child. I had maybe never heard anything so wonderful in my whole life.

  Nonny looked at Mom. “I still … I mean, I got pregnant so much quicker than we thought. Thank goodness for online classes so school isn’t stalled entirely. The timing, though … I mean, I really hope they’ll let him off for a good chunk of time when the baby’s born, even if he has to go back. For a couple weeks, though, he won’t be here.” She looked back at me. “But you’ll take care of things.”

  “Yes,” I said, my fists clenched tight because I could hardly hold my body together. “Yes, yes, I will.”

  Nonny smiled, then laid her head back on the couch and closed her eyes. Mom gave her That Look, that Too Precious to Handle look, and I admit it, it was actually nice to see that n
one of us ever grew out of being her little kids, no matter how old or married or pregnant we got.

  How pregnant Nonny got, rather. That one would only ever be her.

  There’s an app on my phone called Marco Polo that Mom let me download especially so I can send video messages to Thomas, and I sent one then. “She’s here!” I said. “She made it! Everyone say hi to new dad Thomas!”

  He sent a message right back, his hard hat on and his face sweaty. “My main people! Aw, I miss you guys. Thanks for the chat, Lobster. Keep me updated on you-know-who, mmkay?”

  (Yeah, he calls me Lobster. Let’s just say the first time he came to meet the family we went out to a seafood restaurant and there was an incident involving my dinner still having eyeballs.)

  I looked at my sister while her eyes were closed. She didn’t look pregnant. Except for the glow. I decided I should watch her very carefully in the next few months. Maybe I should document the experience. Track when her ankles started swelling. Track how big her belly slowly grew. Track when the morning sickness went away. Go with her to doctor’s visits, if she’d let me.

  Otherwise, I’d never know what it was like.

  A Shot a Day Makes the Doctor Say Yay

  Not very many twelve-year-old girls have to give themselves shots every day, but really it’s not bad at all.

  Sometimes Turner syndrome messes with your heart. (It messed with mine pretty good.) Sometimes Turner syndrome messes with your thyroid or your kidneys. (Mine? So far, so good.) But there are two things that Turner syndrome always does:

  Turner syndrome means you can’t have babies of your own. Nonny’s taking care of that one for our family, and I don’t even need to think about that right now anyway. Right?

  Turner syndrome means you don’t grow to a normal height. Not on your own, anyway. But there’s special medicine called growth hormone and if you give yourself a shot of that stuff every day for a while, you can do a pretty fine job with the whole growing thing. I’m already over five feet tall. Without the shots I’d barely pass four.