What Stars Are Made Of

by Sarah Allen

  I nodded.

  “When that happens, the trick is sort of asking them the question in my mind. I ask one or maybe even all fifty of the questions that you probably have, but I only ask them silently, in my head, to the other person.”

  So it was like talking to my scientist friends in my head! Talking to them silently and so never saying the wrong thing because the stars and the universe helped you know the right words. This was exactly the same but with real-life people.

  “So it’s asking the exactly right question because it’s only in your head!” I said. “A Silent Question!”

  “Silent Question. I like that,” Nonny said, laughing. “That’s perfect. And after I ask a Silent Question then yes, exactly, it’s almost like the universe itself picks the very best of all the things I’m silently asking or saying in my head, and then the other person keeps talking like I’ve said or asked just the right thing. Like I’m really hearing them, really listening. My staying silent lets the other person say only the things they want to.”

  It was like the last puzzle piece in a super-hard thousand-piece Eiffel Tower puzzle clicked into place in my brain. There were silent conversations going on everywhere, between two people, between a person and the universe. And those conversations went two ways. I knew they did, because it had happened to me before. I’ve made deals with the universe, and with my scientist friends. I talked to them and the universe answered back.

  A couple of years ago my mom came back from the doctor looking pale and scared. She and Dad talked for a long time and then brought Nonny and me out to the couch.

  Here’s a big doctor word for you: melanoma.

  “They found skin cancer,” Mom said. “I’m not going to … to lie to you guys, it’s a pretty rare kind. They think we caught it in time, though. They said they’re ninety-percent sure it’s going to be fine.”

  When it comes to your mom, the only percent fine you want to hear is one-hundred.

  They took a long, football-shaped chunk of skin off my mom’s shoulder, then sewed it up into a long scar. They also took a few of her lymph nodes.

  When Mom went in for surgery, you can bet I talked to the universe.

  I talked to the universe for hours and hours. To Rosalind Franklin, specifically, because she was the one I thought could help. She knew about genetics, about cells. So I made a deal with Rosalind Franklin, and you know what? A month later, Mom was dancing around the bakery, covered in flour.

  Silent Questions with people. Silent Deals with the universe. How do people without good teachers and big sisters learn this stuff?

  “That is the smartest thing I’ve heard all day,” I said. “And that’s saying a lot because we talked about Albert Einstein in school today.”

  Nonny laughed.

  It’s my favorite thing, making Nonny laugh.

  No Payne, No Gain

  Here is what I know about Cecilia Payne:

  She was the first student, girl or boy, to get a PhD from the Harvard College Observatory, and the first female department chair at Harvard.

  She was the first person to discover the chemicals and elements inside stars.

  A professor told her that her research was wrong, and then published the same results four years later. He’s the one who got credit for finding out about stars.

  She is not in my textbook.

  That meant she was the perfect person to use for both my second-semester class project and the Smithsonian contest. A small, whiny voice in my head kept trying to remind me that I was competing with high school juniors and seniors for that grand prize. That didn’t scare me for too long, though, because I knew I would work harder than anyone. I’d write the best letter the Smithsonian people had ever read, and not just for a seventh grader. Then Nonny and Thomas and the new baby would be set. Then, after all these years of Mom and Dad and Nonny helping me, I’d actually be able to give something back. Something great.

  If I was going to use Cecilia for my letter, though, and do the most amazing awareness project the Smithsonian had ever seen, there was more to learn. I wanted to test out an idea before moving on to this semester’s person.

  I flipped open my computer, tapping my toe on the floor out of habit. I put my cup of green grapes next to the computer on my desk. Tippity-tap on the keyboard and pretty soon I was on the Harvard website. Maybe Cecilia wasn’t in my textbook, but after hearing about her on the documentary, I wondered what Harvard had to say. I typed in her name in the Harvard website search bar.

  Boom. A whole special astronomy lecture series named after Cecilia. That seemed pretty nice of the Harvard people.

  I kept looking. I clicked around and found the list of people who have been Astronomy Department chairs at Harvard. And guess what I found out.

  There have been seventeen Astronomy Department chairs at Harvard.

  Sixteen of them are men.

  I think that makes Cecilia even more special.

  The Astronomy Department chairs seem like cool guys. I mean, anybody who studies astronomy for their job has to be pretty cool, right? I wondered, though, if more girls would want to study the stars if they knew about Cecilia.

  One thing about me—I’ve had to stay home sick from school a little more often than other girls, but I think it’s worth it if it means watching documentaries about the world and the super-cool people in it. Turner syndrome meant I had a higher number of ear infections than most kids and an immune system whose only defense weapon seemed to be a squirt gun, but that was okay. Knowing Cecilia was worth a little flu, any day.

  I liked learning and teaching myself cool medical stuff, too, probably because I spend so much time around doctors. Most of that stuff is fascinating, and very good to know. A few things, though, are not so good.

  Like how sometimes when a baby is ready to be born, it isn’t facing the right way, and the baby and the mommy can get really hurt. Maybe even die. That is called breech.

  Like how sometimes a baby gets born much, much too early, and it’s like taking muffins out of the oven when they’re still soupy goopy dough, except with a baby it’s things like their heart and lungs and brain that aren’t ready. That is called premature.

  Like how sometimes if the mom’s body can tell that there is something wrong with the baby, something like a missing chromosome, it will get rid of the baby on its own. Whether the mom wants to or not. That’s that scary word again: miscarriage.

  Now that there was an actual new baby coming into the family, I couldn’t get those things out of my head. I was lying on my bed thinking about my letter and everything I knew about pregnancy and looking at the posters on my wall, and I think that’s what gave me the idea.

  Everything was converging, and Cecilia was in the middle of it.

  It was time for a Universe Deal. The most important deal I’d ever make.

  There are two posters next to my bed. One is of the muscles in the human body. Those are much harder to memorize than bones. The other poster is of the Milky Way.

  I could hear Mom and Nonny in the kitchen down the hall, laughing about something. The whole time she’d been here we’d never stopped talking about the baby. She finds out next month if it’s a boy or a girl. She and Thomas haven’t decided on names yet.

  I knew exactly who could help. Cecilia wasn’t a biologist, but she took something beautiful and mysterious and figured out each of the beautiful and mysterious things that went into it, and isn’t creating a new person the exact same thing? If there was someone on the other side—someone in the afterlife—who could figure out how to keep Nonny’s baby perfectly healthy and perfectly safe, maybe it was her. Plus, Cecilia had had kids. Three of them. She knows what it’s like.

  I knew Cecilia could help me, because the woman who figured out what stars are made of had to be one of the smartest women in the world. She was there in the middle of both of my Big Questions, my answer and my solution to helping Nonny with both her financial black hole and with being sure of a safe, healthy baby.
>
  I walked to my window and looked out at the sky that was still bright and clear and blue. Remember that old song from the movie Pinocchio? About wishing on stars? Did you ever wonder where the idea of wishing on stars came from? I looked it up once, and it goes back a long time. A way long time. So it went like this—way back in ancient Greece there was this guy Ptolemy. He wrote about how sometimes the gods got bored doing their normal, godly things and sometimes they would look down from the heavens onto the human, mortal world. And sometimes when they did that, a star would accidentally get knocked loose. So when you saw a shooting star it meant they were looking down on you. It meant they were listening and might possibly grant you your wish.

  In the middle of the afternoon I couldn’t see any stars, especially shooting stars, but I knew they were there.

  Here’s what I’m asking for, Cecilia Payne, I thought.

  No complications.

  No defects.

  No missing chromosomes. No extra chromosomes. No syndromes.

  I knew Universe Deals went two ways, and I knew I needed to do something for Cecilia Payne, too. Do something important for her, so she could do something important for me. The most important. It would be like putting something good into the stirring soup of the universe until it swirled and swirled its way back to you. Before, when I made the deal with Rosalind Franklin, I used the papier-mâché projects we were doing in art class. I sculpted a tall, spiraling ladder of DNA. It turned out sort of flaky and droopy, despite working my absolute hardest on it, but I painted Rosalind’s name a bunch of times on the inside, like she was holding up the whole thing. And she did. Mom got better.

  So what about this time? My history book was at the foot of my bed, open to the page on Eleanor Roosevelt. I’d picked her for my first-semester presentation because I couldn’t get that quote that Ms. Trepky had said out of my head, and when I really looked at pictures of Eleanor she seemed a bit odd-looking, just a little, and that made me want to know more about her. I was glad she was in my textbook, so lots of other odd-looking girls could read about her.

  That was what I could do for Cecilia, I thought.

  And that was what I could do for my Smithsonian Women in STEM contest project.

  I will get you in my textbook, I told Cecilia.

  What better way to teach people about Cecilia and raise awareness of her work? Ms. Trepky would help me. The contest deadline and the baby’s due date were right next to each other, practically on the same day, so if this idea worked it would be like the planets aligning, each one reflecting its light toward us at the same time. I’d get Cecilia into the textbook, then win the Smithsonian grand prize.

  That is my promise.

  I didn’t say it out loud, at least not yet, but that is the promise I made in my head to Cecilia Payne, PhD.

  That is the wish I made.

  I made the promise, and then my hands felt cold. Seniors had a lot more writing practice than I did, and writing a letter as good as the letters they might write wouldn’t be easy. Plus, I didn’t even know who made textbooks. Can you call the textbook people? Are there textbook people?

  I would have to find out.

  Because what if the baby was hurt or sick? What if Nonny got hurt? What if …

  No, I wasn’t even going to think about that. Because I would write the best letter, write it over and over again until it sparkled so bright they couldn’t ignore it. They’d read it and see what I saw about Cecilia. And in return Cecilia would make sure Nonny and her baby were fine.

  They had to.

  Give Nonny a perfect baby, I wished with every nucleus of every cell in my body. A safe, healthy, undamaged baby, I wished on every shooting star I or Cecilia might ever have seen, and I bet she saw a lot.

  And we will start learning about the woman who discovered what stars are made of.

  How Not to Make Friends

  When I brought my lunch into the library a few days later, someone was already there. Talia was sitting in the armchair over by the National Geographic magazines. That’s where I usually sat.

  I stopped when I saw her, but she didn’t see me. She was leaning back in the chair with her eyes closed, and earbuds in. I took a few steps and when I got closer I could see on her phone a picture of some street art and the name Logic.

  When I looked back up at her face she was watching me.

  “What’s Logic?” I said. “Is it a band?”

  She didn’t speak for a moment. I realized she didn’t look too thrilled about me walking up to her and looking at her phone.

  Maybe that wasn’t really a socially acceptable thing to do.

  So of course I had done it, because I always mess up like that.

  Talia sighed and took out one earbud. “He’s not a band. He’s a rap artist.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’ve never heard of him.”

  Talia’s shoulders slumped and she sighed again. “I knew this place would be totally hick.”

  “So where did you come from?” I asked.

  Her hand paused in midair, ready to put her earbud back in, and I realized I’d interrupted her music again and was probably bugging her. Then I realized she’d insulted my hometown. Hick? That didn’t seem quite fair. Boulder was a college town, after all.

  “San Francisco,” she said. “But I’m Samoan, since obviously that’s what you were really asking. Now can I listen to my music, please?”

  I said, “Oh.”

  I carried my lunch over to the other side of the room, where the textbooks were.

  The Silent Questions! I’d forgotten! And this would have been the perfect opportunity to try it out.

  So Libby to go overboard and forget the Silent Questions.

  I sighed. Oh well, back to the textbooks.

  Textbooks from Knight-Rowell Publishing especially. That’s who published my textbook Survey of Modern America. I’d been researching.

  My history book was the sixth edition. I kind of guessed they wouldn’t be able to get Cecilia Payne into this edition, but if I could start working with them on getting a new edition published with Cecilia in it, then that’s what I could write about in my Smithsonian letter.

  I had a stack of almost a dozen books in front of me before I remembered I needed to eat my lunch. I pulled out my peanut butter banana sandwich and then saw Talia looking at me.

  “Are you reading history books for fun?” she asked.

  I looked back at the books at my feet. I mean, it was a little bit fun, but that wasn’t the right word.

  “It’s important,” I said.

  “Whatever,” she said, and put her earbud back in.

  Art Show

  I did some research on Samoa. Guess what I found out?

  Government officials from different areas in Samoa are called matais. There are twenty-five thousand matais in Samoa, and only five percent are girls. One of the coolest people I’ve found is a woman who was once the Minister of Communication and Technology in Samoa. Her name is Safuneitu’uga Pa’aga Neri.

  There’s pretty much not a more spectacular name on the planet.

  Other things I found out?

  The Samoan islands were made from volcanoes. That means volcanoes under the ocean erupted in huge explosions and then boom, Samoa. How marvelous is that? There are places on the islands that are big fields of hard, dried lava.

  That night we piled into the car for the high school art show, where Dad’s students present their work. They do an opening show and closing show each school year, and it’s pretty much a holiday in our family, where we go out to dinner and get ice cream and everything. So on the way to the show I told Dad about someone I’d discovered in my research, a Samoan painter named Fatu Feu’u. He’s from a village in Samoa and has paintings in collections all around the world.

  Dad showed us around the halls, giving us a tour of his students’ artwork like he was a curator at a museum. The students had done a shadow-hands assignment, Dad explained, with charcoal and conté crayon. The wor
ks looked almost like cave paintings. Dad took us down the row one by one, talking about how they’d been studying positive and negative space, how the lines weren’t drawn, only implied. He called the students his kids, like he always did, and since my dad had so much awesome I didn’t mind sharing. He looked as proud as if they’d discovered a new species or conquered Everest.

  After the show we went out for our traditional ice cream excursion. I sent Thomas a Marco Polo of some pictures I’d taken of the artwork, and he responded with a message showing himself holding up a totally terrible stick figure drawing and I laughed so hard I almost choked on my rocky road. Nonny also kept saying thanks to Mom and Dad for taking care of her and buying her ice cream, and I’m pretty sure that financial black hole is always sucking at her thoughts.

  I showed Dad some paintings by Fatu Feu’u on my phone. They’re colorful patterns like a quilt, with flowers and shapes and sometimes wide-eyed faces popping out. I wondered if Talia had ever heard of the village he was from. Or if, just maybe, her ancestors were from around the same place.

  Dad liked the paintings, and thought he could maybe even show them in his art class. Do a pattern assignment, maybe. I told Dad about an art organization that Fatu Feu’u started with some of his friends. Dad said he seemed really cool.

  I think so, too.

  Seventh-Grade Writing

  I thought carefully about what to say to Ms. Trepky about my idea for the Smithsonian contest. I didn’t need to tell her about the Universe Deal or the financial black hole, but I knew she could help me write the best letter ever. I knew she’d be willing to help me.

  I stayed after class while everybody else packed up and went out for lunch.

  “Ms. Trepky?”

  Ms. Trepky sat in the chair at her desk and pulled out a book. “What can I do for you, Ms. Monroe?”

  I hitched my bag over my shoulder and stood in front of her desk. “I have a question.”