What Stars Are Made Of

by Sarah Allen

  I’m pretty lucky, actually. Since my doctors figured out about my Turner syndrome stuff soon after I was born, that meant I got to start shots early and do plenty of growing. Sometimes girls with Turner syndrome don’t find out until it’s too late for the shots.

  The needles don’t scare me. They’re small. My bedtime supplies aren’t that different from everyone else’s. Toothbrush, pajamas, needle. Check, check, check.

  Mom used to give me the shots. Then I told her I wanted to learn how to do it on my own, and after she taught me, I did it in one try.

  In one shot. Ha-ha.

  Easy as brushing your teeth.

  (Okay, sometimes Mom still helps with my shots if I’m doing the shot in a place I can’t reach, like my shoulder or my gluteus maximus, which is a noun meaning: butt.)

  My big, tough, blowtorch wielding brother-in-law, Thomas, can work with flames and dangerous buzzing tools inches from his face no problem, but needles? Total heebie-jeebies. It still makes me laugh when I think about his face the first time he saw me do my shots.

  The thing is, though, shots don’t make me feel brave because they’re not even scary. It’s only medicine. A little pinch. Done.

  For other people, maybe shots are scary. Thomas once told me if he’s around needles it’s hard for him to be brave. But then, he doesn’t need to be brave about talking to new people and making friends. Even at a really hard job, the annoying people he works with end up his friends, and grumpy old bosses turn out to like him a lot. I remember once when he visited and we went out as a family he talked to the waiter at our table and the ticket taker at the movie theater like they’d known each other all their lives. Like they’re best friends. I don’t know how he does that.

  Nonny says when he asked her out for the first time, he wasn’t shy or awkward at all. If a boy ever asked me on a date (when I’m forty-two, like Dad says) I would definitely need to be brave. Even lab partners give me butterflies.

  It’s not that I’m shy. I’m really not. I get A’s on all my class presentations, and I think doing high school drama will be really fun. Talking to people isn’t the hard part. It’s that I can never tell what people think is the wrong thing to say until after I’ve said it.

  Like asking Ms. Trepky about homework that isn’t due for more than six months.

  Or telling a teacher about my bestie, the library.

  Me trying to figure out who to talk to at a birthday party?

  I’d rather stick a needle in my butt.

  Growth Hormone and Marmalade

  We stayed up too late. We basically must stay up late when Nonny’s home.

  Mom used to make marmalade toast when we were sick, and it’s especially great on her fresh, homemade bread. Mom, Nonny, and I sat at the table in the kitchen eating too much toast.

  Mom took a sip of her tea. Nonny took a sip. Nonny rubbed the table with the sleeve of her sweater, wiping up the wet ring from her mug. Maybe watching people drink herbal tea sounds boring but I could have stayed up watching them forever.

  “You’ve got school in the morning, sweetie,” Mom said.

  “And I’ll drive you,” Nonny said.

  “Deal!” I said.

  Mom finished the last bite of her toast. “I know you want to stay up but it’s time to start getting ready for bed.”

  Right then Dad sashayed into the kitchen, blaring Beyoncé’s “Run the World” from his phone. He pulled Nonny up from her seat and twirled her, and she nearly bumped her nose into his armpit. I laughed so hard I snorted. Even though Nonny had told Dad the special news a couple of weeks ago, while the adults were coordinating her coming home and everything, having Nonny actually here meant he’d been distracted from lesson planning all night long.

  “You are ridiculous,” Mom said.

  “I was thinking,” Dad said, “that even though we don’t know the sex yet, and nothing changes how perfect my new grandbaby is going to be … Wouldn’t it be great to have a baby girl in the family again?”

  He grabbed my hand and tried to twirl Nonny and me in some kind of knot-windmill move but we ended up crashing into each other and laughing.

  “Okay, okay, you sillies,” Mom said. “A couple of you really do have school tomorrow.”

  “Do I hafta?” Dad said.

  I went to the pantry where we kept peanut butter (for Dad), Chips Ahoy! (for Nonny), and a box of sterilized needles (for me). Then I got the small vial of medicine from the fridge. The vials aren’t any bigger than my dad’s thumb.

  “I haven’t watched you do this in a while,” Nonny said. “I’m still really impressed.”

  “Impressive is in her genes,” Dad said.

  Nonny flinches when she watches me do my shots. I think she’s just a tiny bit afraid of needles.

  I unwrapped the needle from its paper packaging and took off the long plastic cap. There was the tiny little needle.

  “Tell us your Hard Reading Words while you do it,” Mom said, “and then bed.”

  Holding the needle was as normal to me now as holding a pencil. I pushed the sharp tip into the rubbery top of the bottle.

  “Flabbergast,” I said. “It means to shock or amaze. Perturbed means annoyed.”

  I tipped the bottle so the clear liquid inside poured down to the top, where the needle was. This watery liquid was my growth hormone, the medicine that made me grow as tall as other girls. Dad calls it my Magic Beanstalk Juice.

  “Implore means to beg and beg.”

  Very carefully I pulled the plunger part down and down until the growth hormone filled the syringe to the exact right line.

  “Antagonize means to be mean or a bully.”

  I pulled the syringe out of the bottle and held it up close to my eyes to make sure there were no bubbles. I gently flicked the syringe a couple of times, like Mom showed me, to make double sure. I lifted my shirt just a little bit until I could see my belly button and I pinched a bit of my tummy pudge.

  “And persist means to keep going and going, no matter what.”

  Then bam. Poke the needle fast into the pinched bit of tummy, push in the Magic Beanstalk Juice slow like testing out a peach with your thumb, then pull the needle out.

  Easy peasy.

  “Didn’t hurt?” Nonny asked.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Man oh man,” she said. “I think when they give my baby immunizations I’m going to cry louder than the baby. And I hope … I really hope we’re out of this dumb financial black hole before—”

  “Don’t worry,” Mom said. “You’ll both figure something out. And we’re here to help.”

  “I remember when you guys got your first shots,” Dad said. “And I was the one who ended up needing a juice box from the nurse.”

  I thought about the baby in its brand-new diaper, with the tiny black raisin belly button still stuck on its stomach from the umbilical cord. I thought about the baby getting shots. Immunizations—normal shots. For a tiny baby, new to the world and not used to pricking needles, that would be bad enough.

  But what if the baby needed different kinds of shots?

  I knew better than most that needing shots could mean other things. Could mean much worse, something-got-messed-up things.

  What if the baby needed shots like mine?

  Not very many twelve-year-old girls have to give themselves shots every day. Nonny’s baby being one of them would hurt worse than getting the shots myself.

  Much worse.

  Back in my room, I thought about Nonny’s face when she was talking about a financial black hole. I hadn’t really noticed that she seemed a tiny bit scared until she said it out loud.

  My history book poking out of my backpack made me think of the contest Ms. Trepky had mentioned. I hadn’t gotten a chance to ask her about sending in a letter of my own, but I decided to look up the contest and see for myself.

  At my computer, I fast-typed Smithsonian Women in STEM contest and clicked through to the contest page.

  Exactly l
ike Ms. Trepky had said, it was a contest based on writing letters about underrated female scientists from history. The letters were supposed to be about how that special scientist and the spectacular things they’d accomplished had impacted the world, and then how she had impacted or inspired you in your own life. That was the first part. Then in the last part of the letter, you were to tell a story about something you had done to teach people about the scientist, to raise awareness. The deadline for the contest was Valentine’s Day, so I had months to do my awareness project and write my letter.

  For this contest, Cecilia would work perfectly. The contest had three divisions—eleventh/twelfth grade, ninth/tenth grade, and seventh/eighth grade—which meant that I, Libby Monroe, could enter. I just had to write the most perfect, well-crafted letter, and come up with the most spectacular project idea to teach people about Cecilia. Each contest division would have a winner who would receive a plaque and five thousand dollars for their school.

  And then there was the grand prize.

  What that one grand-prize winner would win almost made me spill my drink in my lap.

  Ready for this?

  The grand-prize winner of the Smithsonian Institution’s Women in STEM contest would win twenty-five thousand dollars.

  That’s right. Twenty-five thousand dollars.

  That’s twenty-five with three zeros after it, for them to use however they want. Plus another twenty-five thousand, for their school, which made it even more unbelievably spit-take, drink-spillingly mind-blowing.

  But twenty-five thousand dollars. I knew exactly what I’d do with it, too. Because twenty-five thousand dollars is enough money even in adult terms for a down payment on a house your sister and her husband are trying to save up for.

  I couldn’t be Mom’s left hand. I couldn’t be a mother the way Nonny would be.

  But if I worked hard enough, I could calm that financial black hole in Nonny’s mind.

  I could help bring Thomas home, so he wouldn’t have to take any more faraway jobs.

  Kids sometimes weren’t the very nicest, and sometimes that would remind me that I had a scarred heart and missing chromosomes and didn’t play any of the games in PE very well. If I could do this one humongous thing, though, this biggest of all accomplishments, then maybe I’d have that inside me like hot herbal tea and warm marmalade toast no matter what cold words anybody else said. Even if nobody else knew what I could do, I would know.

  Sometimes in my brain, an idea arrives huge and round and blocks out most everything else, like an eclipse. I could feel this idea of the contest, of helping Nonny, doing exactly that. Mom knows my mind works this way sometimes and calls it my tunnel vision. She knows I can get too focused on something when it’s so bright in my mind’s eye it’s like the sun, that one idea shining its own light over all the rest. But winning this contest and helping Nonny? Yeah, that could be my sun for a while.

  I could do it. I had to.

  Silent Questions

  With Nonny staying, I decided to try talking to some new people at school. If it didn’t go super great, like last time, Nonny and I always had Celtic Woman to cheer me up. And my new secret mission made me feel braver, somehow.

  At lunch I brought my peanut butter sandwich to a table with some new girls. One girl had the NASA logo on her T-shirt, so they seemed like they would be fun to eat lunch with. They smiled when I sat down, which was good. I told them my name and they each told me theirs. The girl in the NASA shirt was named Charise.

  We talked about classes and then I talked about my sister and her piano and how beautiful her wedding was and also about my mom’s bakery.

  “She makes these special cupcakes with dark purple frosting and white sprinkles and it makes them look like constellations,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “One time I was helping her make the cupcakes and my grandma had given us this big ceramic yellow bowl that we keep apples in and I was moving it to make room on the counter and then I dropped it and it totally broke.”

  “Oh no,” they said.

  “But you guys should come try those cupcakes sometime. They’re really good. You can get chocolate or vanilla flavored.”

  “Okay.”

  It seemed to me like everything was going great until they finished eating and picked up their lunches and left.

  It was okay. I ate my sandwich by myself. I guess I ate even faster because without other people I wasn’t talking so much. Except to Cecilia Payne, in my head. If we can figure out the stars, then why are other people so confusing? I didn’t hear an answer, but a narrow square of sunlight coming in through the lunchroom blinds sat in the seat across from me.

  When I got home from school, Nonny set a plate of marmalade toast on the coffee table in the front room, next to the papers she was reading for her new online college classes. (“Thank goodness for scholarships and supportive career counselors,” she’d said.) She was on the phone, holding it up against her ear with her shoulder, but she’d made toast especially for me. I wasn’t sick, but I sure needed some marmalade toast.

  I got out my math book while Nonny was on the phone. I worked on my worksheet while Nonny said “hmm,” and “oh wow.” The other person was telling some kind of story. Sitting on the couch listening to her made me feel like I’d taken a time machine back to when she was in high school. She talked to people on the phone a lot back then, the same way she did now. Like dozens of people knew that she was the one to call when they had questions or problems, and after they talked to her everything was a little better.

  Nonny didn’t say very much herself. Sometimes she asked a question. The words she did use always seemed to be exactly right, like they were some kind of magic healing spell.

  How did she learn to say those perfect magic-spell words? Maybe it was the questions she asked? Or was there a special way she told the other person she was listening?

  Nonny stayed quiet for a long time, and I thought maybe that was part of the spell. She did something in her mind when she was quiet, some special way of thinking or listening, and that made her know the right words to say when she finally said them. There had to be a way to learn her trick, whatever it was.

  Most days I’m super-good at doing my homework right away, but today I listened to her instead of focusing on my math. After she said goodbye to the person on the phone, she put her cell in her back pocket, and came and sat by me on the couch.

  “So how did the genius do at school today?” she asked.

  Of course, I didn’t have the right words to answer, so instead I took a bite of toast. Nonny knows how to do toast perfectly, where the bread is the exact right level of crispiness, and the marmalade is spread thick over each crumb and corner.

  Nonny waited for me to finish my bite and answer.

  “It wasn’t my ultimate best day ever or anything,” I said.

  She tucked her hair behind her ear and settled into the couch, looking at me. She waited again.

  “I … I tried sitting by some new people at lunch today,” I said. “One girl was wearing a NASA shirt. She was cool. Her name was Charise.”

  “Good for you!” Nonny said.

  “I don’t know about that,” I said.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “I think maybe they’re already friends together,” I said.

  Nonny put her arm on the back of the couch and her long hair spread over her shoulder like a waterfall. She kept watching me, waiting for when I was ready with the right words. Sometimes it really was easier to sit with a square of sunlight or talk to the spirit of a great astronomer than people in real life. At least then I never said the wrong thing.

  “Were you talking to a friend?” I said. “On the phone? I remember you had a lot of friends at school.”

  “I like talking to people,” Nonny said. “Especially you.”

  “What do they talk to you about?” I said. “I mean, you’re so smart about it. It’s like talking to you is magic and then they’re happy again.�
�

  Nonny laughed. “I don’t know about magic,” she said.

  I was already feeling better simply being with her, so I knew Nonny had some kind of magic no matter what she said. “Oh, come on, tell me the secret spell.”

  “No spell, but I guess there’s something I do in my head. Kind of a trick maybe?”

  “A trick?”

  “It’s sort of a trick for having lunch with new people, but it works for people you already know, too.”

  I took a sip of tea and put the mug down. I wanted to pay attention to this. “And this is why people are always calling you? Like your friends always calling and asking you for advice?”

  Nonny did a quiet smile. It’s easier for me when I think of quiet smiles or loud smiles. It makes it easier to know what the smile means.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  I crossed my legs and faced her. “Tell me the trick!”

  “Well,” she said. “You know how sometimes you want to get to know somebody, and it’s hard to know what to ask them? And maybe it’s easier to talk about things you know, because they might know about those things, too?”

  I almost choked on my toast. That was exactly what had happened with Lunch Table Girls.

  “That happens for you, too?” I asked.

  “Then there’s times when someone is telling you about something really difficult they’re going through and you’re not quite sure what to say? When you’re pretty positive nothing you say will help or make anything any better?”

  I realized I was twisting the hem of my pants without noticing. This wasn’t something I’d talked a lot about before, not even with Nonny. “Even when they’re not saying hard things it’s sometimes like I always say the wrong thing back.”

  “Oh Libby,” Nonny said. She put a hand on my knee. “Sometimes it’s hard to know what to say, or sometimes there are too many things to say. I know you always have fifty questions for everyone, and everything, and maybe it’s hard to know what to say because there’s so much.”