by Sarah Allen
And what if the baby had something that could never get better? Something that maybe meant a damaged heart or kidney and shots every day? What if she was scared of shots like Thomas? What if there was someone in the baby’s class who thought they were super clever about mean nicknames? Or worse?
This was why it didn’t matter if I was the only one with Turner syndrome—because the alternative was a whole lot worse. Maybe even dangerous.
And there was another thing. A silly thing, maybe. Because really, no matter what, Mom and Nonny would look at me the way they always had. The way that said, You are my sister who I love no matter what, and, You are my daughter who I love with my whole universe no matter what. They’d look at the new baby the same way, too, no matter what. But in the place inside your head, the only person you’ve got there looking at you and talking to you is yourself. Like you’re staring into a mirror that shows what you really look like on the inside, and if I failed in this deal, even if nobody else knew, I’d know. It’d be like a sticky note taped to the corner of my Inside Mirror that said, Here’s another thing you missed.
Here’s another thing you couldn’t do.
I’d recently watched a documentary on the History Channel about the Apollo space missions and how dangerous and important they were. The title of the show came into my head while I sat in that hospital room.
Failure Is Not an Option.
What’s in a Name?
Nonny came home pretty quickly, with the assignment to get lots of rest. The doctors said morning sickness like this was a bit unusual, but that she’d be okay if she drank lots and didn’t overdo it. Mostly things went back to normal, but any time Nonny only nibbled her food, Mom’s face seemed to get one more tiny wrinkle. Other times I’d hear Nonny on the phone with Thomas, worrying about what they were going to do for his next job, telling him how much she missed him. Those times were reminders for me. Reminders of how important my mission was.
Her baby bump was also starting to show. That was another reminder. She wasn’t nearly at bowling-ball level yet, but there was a roundness in her belly that you could tell was something special.
I sent another email through the Knight-Rowell Publishing website. And I wrote another letter to Mr. Trent Hickman.
Nonny had this look that I started to think of as the After the Doctor Look. Usually her appointments were during school, so I didn’t get to go after the first one, but when I walked in the door and she was on the couch with the sugar-glazed eyes and more light in the room came from her face than from the lamp by the piano, I knew she’d seen one of those TV-static pictures of her baby.
One day when I came in from school, before I could even drop my backpack in my room, she grinned at me wide and patted the seat next to her. “Come here, I want to tell you something.”
I slid my bag onto the floor and hopped onto the couch next to her. I wanted to snuggle up to her, but I didn’t because I also wanted to look at her face and the swirl of fireworks happening in her eyes.
“We went to the doctor today. We’ve sort of known the gender for a while but today it was definitely confirmed. And … and I talked to Thomas and we’ve picked out a name.”
I bounced up and down. “You did? Boy or girl? It’s a girl, isn’t it? What’s the name?”
“Yes, it’s a girl. She’s a little girl.”
More bouncing. “You’re having a girl! I’m going to have a niece!”
“And we’ve decided to name her Cecilia.”
I stopped bouncing.
I felt a jolt between my shoulders.
“Are you okay?” Nonny said. “Do you not like the name?”
“I…” I swallowed, gripping the edge of the gray couch cushion. I wished I could get such a grip on my own thoughts. If I’d had any doubts about my deal with the universe—with Cecilia—I couldn’t doubt anymore.
This was like Cecilia herself calling me up on the phone.
I hear you, I thought.
“I like it,” I finally managed to say. “I love it. What … what made you choose it?”
“Well, it’s Thomas’s grandmother’s name,” she said. “And I think it’s beautiful.”
“It is beautiful,” I said. I looked at Nonny, at the tiny girl growing in her belly, and then looked out to the sky. I made a promise to all three. “And your baby will be beautiful. She will be perfect.”
Textbook People’s People
More and more time went by without any word from Mr. Trent Hickman at Knight-Rowell Publishing. Calling on the phone wasn’t helping, either.
I needed a new plan.
A phase two.
Pacing helped the juices flow and I began walking between my bed and my desk, back and forth, over and over.
I only had a short amount of time left. Just a few months until the baby was due. If I was going to keep my deal with Cecilia Payne, PhD, I was going to have to start thinking big.
I even thought about flying to New York. I thought about marching up the steps into the office of Knight-Rowell Publishing and standing firm until Trent Hickman had to see me. Except where would I get the money for a ticket? How would I convince my parents to let me go? I’d told them I was working on a special project but hadn’t told them too much about it yet because when I won twenty-five thousand freaking dollars, I wanted it to be a super-amazing eye-buggingly spectacular surprise. Besides, if I talked too much about it then I might have to go into the whole Universe Deal thing, and at least for right now, that needed to stay in a warm, secret place inside me.
For the first time since I’d come up with my project plan, I heard one tiny, buzzy voice in the back corner of my brain wondering if I was too small for a plan so big. Nothing could ever make me give up, of course. But if we didn’t even learn about Cecilia Payne in school, the person who had discovered these amazing things about the universe, how hard was a new audacious plan going to be for a scar-hearted girl eating yogurt while her mom braided her hair?
Then I had Ms. Trepky’s class.
“How many of you have heard of Rosa Parks?” she started. Most of us raised our hands. (We’d read about her in our assigned reading, so it wasn’t smart that Dustin didn’t raise his hand because then Ms. Trepky knew he hadn’t done his homework.)
We talked about Rosa Parks for a while. We talked about how she was brave. Ms. Trepky wrote the words Civil Disobedience on the whiteboard and we talked about following the leaders of our world, and thinking for ourselves, and the times those two things overlap, and the times they don’t.
“Now,” said Ms. Trepky. “How many of you have heard of Claudette Colvin?”
At first I was worried, because I hadn’t heard of her, and I thought maybe I’d missed something in our reading, but when I looked around, nobody else was raising their hand, either.
“Claudette Colvin did what Rosa Parks did. She refused to move to the back of the bus when someone told her to, and she got arrested. Plus, she did it nine months before Rosa Parks.”
So Ms. Trepky knew about people who should have been in our textbook, too. How many were there? A hundred? A thousand?
I raised my hand.
“So why isn’t she in our textbook?”
Ms. Trepky looked at us, scanning our faces.
“That’s a very good question,” she said. “It’s hard to say why certain people gain renown and others do not. Perhaps another way to think about it is this: If we had a textbook with everyone of importance, we would need a textbook with everyone.”
She let us think about that for a minute. I pictured myself in a textbook, my face a small square photo next to a block of text and a heading with my name. I imagined a girl just like me reading about … me. What would it say? I looked around and imagined a section about everyone in the class. Even Dustin would have a section. That made me want to laugh.
Maybe I didn’t need a section in a history textbook, but I still thought I knew someone who did.
Don’t worry, Cecilia. I’ve got this.
Ms. Trepky sat on the edge of her desk. I could have sworn she was looking at me when she said, “One individual can make an incredible difference, but that individual is shaped and created and influenced by thousands of other people. And that person shapes and creates and influences thousands of other individuals in return.”
I felt Ms. Trepky’s words slide under my skin and into my bones. The words had so much truth it felt like a rainstorm on my head. I knew exactly what she meant. The world was shaped by billions and billions of unknown hands, by people living their own lives and thinking their own ideas across the whole planet, changing the universe just by being there. That meant I could sculpt and write on the DNA of the universe from my little corner of it, too, no matter my smallness or genetics or scars. I saw my own constellation spinning around in my head, the constellation that made me, the constellation of my family and bakeries and libraries and Nonny and a bright new Ms. Trepky star. Together, it was the universe that had reached out and shaped me like a clay sculpture, missing bits and scarred bits and all.
Now it was time for me to put my hands out into the universe and shape it back.
Twitterpated
I talked to Talia about it after school. “I really have to do something. Cecilia is depending on me.”
I said it, even though she didn’t know there were two Cecilias depending on me now.
Talia and I sat down on the sidewalk, leaning against the school while we waited for our parents. “I mean, my cousin is a flight attendant,” she said. “I could ask her about flights to New York or something.”
“I don’t know. I need to think.”
“Hmm.”
We sat quietly, and Talia started tapping her thumb against the concrete. She had this weird, funky rhythm she would tap out whenever she was thinking.
“Hey, how did that poem go?” I said. “The dead white dude one?”
Talia stopped tapping. “It went … okay, actually. I think.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Mr. Gradey gave me another sonnet to read, but this time it was Shakespeare, and it was … good.”
“He read your poem and then gave you more sonnets?”
“Yeah, because Shakespeare was sort of making fun of sonnets, too. At least in this one. It’s about how … well, it starts, My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”
“Not like the sun?”
“Yeah, weird, huh? He even talks about her stinky breath.”
“Seriously? In a love sonnet?”
“Yeah. I know. But it’s still a love sonnet.”
I saw our blue van pull up, and Mom waved to me. I scooped up my backpack.
“I have an idea,” Talia said. “Have you checked his Twitter?”
“Twitter?”
“Yeah, the editor guy. I bet he has a Twitter account.”
I slapped my hand on my forehead. “Oh duh! How could I not think of that?”
Sometimes when my mind spun circles around one bright idea—when I got into tunnel vision mode—I had a hard time seeing the other options and strategies, like they were hiding in the shadows, away from the glare of the sun.
“I’ll check it right when we get home,” I said, running to the car.
“Update me tomorrow,” Talia said.
As soon as we got home I said a mega-fast hello to Nonny (who was lying down on the couch—she’d been doing that a lot the last little while) and bolted to the computer in my room.
Mr. Trent Hickman did have a Twitter account. Of course he did.
I spent about ten minutes scrolling through his Twitter page. He tweeted about submissions, about his cat, and there were also a remarkable number of quotes from some writer called Ayn Rand. At first I felt excited scrolling through his tweets, like looking down the key of a treasure map. Then after more about cats and more about Ayn Rand, I started losing momentum. What was I expecting, anyway? What exactly was it that I was looking for?
Then I saw it.
A tweet from last September:
New conf schedule up on website. Come see me if you’re in NY, FL, TX, or CO!
CO. I’d never been so excited to see those two letters in my entire life.
I clicked so fast on the link that I nearly dropped the mouse. It led me to the calendar page of Mr. Hickman’s personal website.
The Texas and Florida events were past. So were a couple in New York, but he still had another one at NYU at the end of the year.
And he was coming to the University of Colorado in Boulder. In January.
It was too perfect. Nonny’s baby name, now this.
I about kicked myself in the head for not seeing this before. For not thinking about checking it out earlier. But it wasn’t too late.
All of this was meant to happen. I could do this one thing for Cecilia Payne, and she’d be the centerpiece of this deal that would make a happy home for Nonny and Thomas, a perfect, healthy baby. This was my sculpture, the universe I was molding for my sister and her little family. What could be more important—what was I here in my universe to make but this?
Out Loud
I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around the fact that Mr. Trent Hickman, editor at Knight-Rowell Publishing, was coming to Boulder. This was my chance to meet him, to get going on this project for my Smithsonian essay. But I couldn’t figure out what to do about it. I kept seeing Nonny’s face when she was sick in the hospital, and it made it even harder to think and plan because I had to get this right. It was like I’d been chugging along and suddenly the wheel had come off the track. My brain did that to me sometimes, when my bright tunnel vision plan needed to be changed or adjusted.
So I knew I needed to talk it through with someone.
I didn’t get a chance to talk to Talia before school started, but I hurried to her locker as soon as the lunch bell rang.
“Talia!”
She slammed her locker and when she looked at me her cheeks were pink. At first I was scared I’d done something wrong and she was mad at me, but when she saw me she sighed and smiled and said, “Hey, Libby.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She sighed again and gave her lunch bag a swing. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
I opened my mouth to ask her something else, but right then I remembered the Silent Questions. This was a perfect moment for them. In my brain I asked her every question I had. In my imagination I knew exactly what to say and do to make Talia feel better.
Nonny was right, of course.
After a couple of seconds, Talia started talking again.
“It’s … well, Mr. Gradey keeps bugging me about this Poetry Out Loud contest thing.”
Now it was time for an out-loud question. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, you submit a poem and perform it at this contest and the winners go on to the next round and all that crap.”
“But … you’d be great at that! You’d be amazing!”
Talia huffed. “I probably wouldn’t win. I don’t know. I mean, nobody would care.”
“Would you care? About doing the contest, I mean?”
Talia shrugged, but her eyes weren’t shrugging. Her eyes were swirling.
“Isn’t this sort of what you like? You said you want to be a rap artist, right? Well this is sort of
maybe—”
“Who’s ever heard of a Samoan rapper. I mean, there aren’t even hardly any girl rappers. Plus you can’t make a living as a musician anyway.”
I couldn’t think of the right question to ask, or the right thing to say, so I practiced another Silent Question.
Then she said, “Nobody cares what I say anyway.”
The Silent Question had worked again.
“I think they would,” I said. “If they heard you say it.”
Talia gave her lunch bag another swing. “Anyway, so what did you find out?”
“Oh yeah!” I nearly popped out of my boots. “It’s so perfect it’s almost freaky. He’s coming to Boulder! To UC!”
“Who?”
“Trent Hickman. The editor. He’s coming here!”
“No way. Seriously?”
“I know!”
We started walking toward the library.
“So when’s he coming?” Talia asked.
“January twenty-sixth.”
We took a few more steps, both quiet and thoughtful. Then she glanced at me and gave me that mischievous beach bum smile.
“That gives us about two months,” she said, “to formulate a plan.”
Thanksgiving Break
Thanksgiving turned out to be smaller than usual. Sometimes we had friends and extended family over, and sometimes the people who worked with Mom at the bakery, but this year it was only Mom, Dad, Nonny, and me. Plus of course on-the-way-baby Cecilia, if you counted her, which I did.
And we missed Thomas. He had to stay in Florida because of the extra holiday pay. If I could get this plan to work, maybe it would be enough to get them started so he’d never have to do something like that again. I sent him a Marco Polo of the table with all the food. When he responded he said, “Save that whole turkey leg for me, okay, Lobster?”