What Stars Are Made Of

by Sarah Allen

  Then Dustin did raise his hand.

  Even though I was scared he would make fun of me, I called on him.

  “Why don’t you write a book about her?” he asked.

  Ms. Trepky’s grin reached clear up to her dark hair and I’d never seen her look so proud. “That,” she said, looking between Dustin and me, “is an excellent idea.”

  I finished my presentation, and I was glad that I’d practiced it a lot and worked hard on my slides because part of my brain kept thinking about Dustin’s idea. I knew I’d need a lot more time to think about it. Could twelve-year-olds write books?

  Later in class, Talia recited a poem she’d written about Ala Tamasese, one of the leaders of the Women’s Mau: Female Peace Warriors in the movement for Samoan independence. Talia wore a navy-blue lavalava with a white stripe and said that’s what the Female Peace Warriors of Western Samoa wore. Nobody else did anything quite as memorable as that. Then Dustin showed a video he made about James Naismith, who invented basketball, and even though a lot of the video was mostly Dustin showing off his free throws, he still told us about how early players used peach baskets as hoops.

  Every student worked hard on their presentation. Even Dustin tried his best on his movie, and it made me think that he liked this class, even if he’d never admit it. Ms. Trepky must have secret powers to put that spark in someone like Dustin.

  I imagined having lunch with Talia and Ms. Trepky for years and years, until Talia and I were grown-ups. I wondered if it was weird imagining having lunch with your teacher, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care, because I knew how good a person she was to talk to, just like Cecilia and Rosalind and Eleanor Roosevelt. Thinking about having lunch with Ms. Trepky and Talia forever and ever made my insides start to swell like I was going to need heart surgery again. Everything in the classroom, every little pencil and every scuff mark on the floor, poured meaning and happiness into me until it was almost too much for a body to hold. And that was only the stuff inside the classroom. There were also the stars. There were my parents and my sister. There was Cecilia and baby Cecilia. Especially there was baby Cecilia.

  Looking around at all that world, I think being born with a heart three sizes too big is worth the scars.

  Seventh/Eighth-Grade Division Winner of the Smithsonian Women in STEM Contest

  Dear Judges,

  Listen. I may be a young girl, but I’m writing to you about something important.

  My teacher once said that if we had a textbook that included everyone that mattered, we’d need a textbook of everyone. I think that’s true. But today I’d like to tell you about one special person missing from my textbook.

  Cecilia Payne was an astronomer who discovered what stars are made of. She wrote about it in 1925, in her PhD thesis at Harvard University. Someone else told her she was wrong but then published similar results several years later. But now Harvard University, where Cecilia was a professor, has a lecture series named after her.

  Cecilia was born in England, but in her time, the only job she thought women could have in her country was teaching, so she came to the United States for more options. As she studied astronomy, she figured out that the sun and the other stars were made up mostly of hydrogen, even though at the time most people thought something very different. She also studied the Milky Way, and the evolution of stars.

  Because of everything she found out, she didn’t just change the world; she changed how we thought about the whole universe.

  I have a genetic disorder called Turner syndrome. This means I have only one X chromosome, instead of two like other girls. This is one of the things I am made of. I am also made of marmalade toast and a love of lab coats. I am made of my family, including a brand-new niece who is also named Cecilia. We both have long scars from where we had heart surgeries. Stars are made of whizzing, flashing chemicals and power and heat, and maybe scars are what show us that we’re made of all that, too.

  This is one of the ways Cecilia Payne is an inspiration to me, as a girl with Turner syndrome. She figured out new and marvelous things about stars and the galaxy even though lots of people thought she couldn’t. She figured out that even though some stars are big, some are small, some are red, and some are white, some are round or lopsided or spotted, they’re all made up of the same stuff.

  Maybe Cecilia felt a little bit different as a woman in the Astronomy Department at Harvard in the 1920s. I know sometimes I feel different as a girl with a missing chromosome. But when it comes down to it, when you get down to atoms and the humanness that holds our atoms together, we’re all basically made up of the same stuff, too.

  That’s why, for my educational project on Cecilia Payne, I decided to make an exhibit at my school that combined stars with beautiful scans of the human brain. For my project I created a long black display of the night sky, with precisely measured constellations, but instead of stars I used small cutouts of colorful PET brain scans. They glowed pink and green and blue, perfect against the black background.

  When students at my school walked past this exhibit, they also saw a poster of Cecilia Payne, complete with her story about discovering what stars are made of. They read about her, learned her name, and might now think about her whenever they look up at the night sky. Or, maybe, when they wonder what they are made of.

  This wasn’t always my plan for my educational project. I had another idea, an idea that I worked at for a long, long time. But like Cecilia, I ended up having a hard time getting people to take my idea seriously. The people I needed for that project weren’t quite ready to listen. At first I wanted to give up, to put my “PhD thesis” in a drawer, but if there’s one thing I learned from Cecilia, it’s to keep looking up, to figure out what you’re made of, and to keep working at your ideas, not wasting time or energy blaming other people. A new idea sparked, and this time I had the right people around me, and we were ready to go.

  Does knowing these things about stars really matter in one person’s life? I say absolutely. It’s the perfect reminder that anything that seems too big or too bright to understand, or too far away to reach, is really just made up of ingredients you’ve been working with your whole life. Ingredients that make up you. When there’s the thing you know you’re meant to be, whether it’s a baker or a teacher or a neuropsychologist or a mother or a football player or a NASA technician or a rap artist, everything you need is already there.

  I think if Cecilia were here today, she would say, I discovered what stars are made of. Are you ready to find out?

  Libby Monroe

  Camilla Junior High

  Acknowledgments

  First thanks go to my parents. Only one of you messed up when giving me my DNA, but I owe you both thanks anyway. Thank you for always believing in me and treating me as if I was just as capable as anyone else; for never once considering a missing chromosome as something that should, would, or could hold me back; for always having stacks of books all around the house and for not batting an eye when I told you I wanted to be a writer.

  To my siblings, I blame all seven of you for making everything I write a “sibling story.” Thank you for being excited with me. I raise this Disneyland churro in your honor. And to my grandparents, my roots, my safety, and my forever support.

  To Dr. Swineyard, the greatest pediatric endocrinologist in the world. The bit about liking doctors’ offices is your fault.

  This book is only possible because of the small army of incredible writing teachers I have behind me. This army stretches back to my first middle school and high school English and creative writing teachers, Mr. Matt and Mr. K. There’s maybe no greater gift you could have given than genuine belief and interest in the first writings of a thirteen-year-old, so thank you. Thank you to John Bennion, Chris Crowe, Dawan Coombs, Bruce Young, Steve Tuttle, and all the incredible English department faculty at Brigham Young University. A special thank-you to Martine Leavitt, in whose class I wrote the first draft of this novel. That my return for an MFA and your semester a
s visiting professor happened to coincide was not, I will never believe, coincidence.

  A huge thank-you to all the incredible writing friends and supporters I’ve made over the years. To Kim, Jessica, Jen, Tiffany, Bridey, and Roommate—my miracle friends. To Kristy, Tesia, Amanda, and Madeleine—for letting me be weird even in graduate school. To Elise-Merry, Amanda-Pippin, Kinner-Sam and Bobbi-Frodo—from Sarah-Smeagol, for letting me be weird from the very beginning. To my North Star mentors, Cindy Baldwin, Amanda Rawson Hill, and Ellie Terry, all the other amazing Pitchwars mentors, and to my incredibly supportive Pitchwars ’16 crew. I would truly be lost without you.

  To Brianne Johnson, superagent and fairy godmother. Thank you, thank you, for being the first to see Libby’s story and believe it deserved to be told. You are a magic maker and wish granter, and I can’t believe how lucky I am that I was found by someone as masterful as you. To Brianne, Allie Levick, and the rest of the Writer’s House crew, thank you. And to Melissa Warten, for championing this book and for edit letters that inevitably make me whistle and go dang she’s good. If this book shines it’s because of you. To Melissa and the whole team at FSG/Macmillan, thank you for taking me and Libby on.

  Lastly, to all the girls born with a missing chromosome. I know each of us has a different story with Turner syndrome, but I wrote this for you. I hope more than anything to meet you one day, and if you want, you can use the code word Cecilia Payne and I’ll give you a giant hug. You are what stars are made of. Here’s what I believe: I believe the maker of stars, the maker of the whole universe, made you. And you are his most perfect and precious creation, just the way you are.

  About the Author

  Sarah Allen has been published in The Evansville Review, Allegory, and on WritersDigest. She has an MFA from Brigham Young University. Like Libby in her novel What Stars are Made Of, Allen was born with Turner Syndrome. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  An Anti-Grinch Gets Excited

  My Best Friend Is a Room

  Home Is Where the Bach Is

  X’s and O’s

  Better Than a Puppy

  My Sister Is Sick and It’s a Good Thing

  A Shot a Day Makes the Doctor Say Yay

  Growth Hormone and Marmalade

  Silent Questions

  No Payne, No Gain

  How Not to Make Friends

  Art Show

  Seventh-Grade Writing

  Beach Bum

  First Draft

  The Doctor That Isn’t Mine

  Audacity

  Friends and Consequences

  Some Dead White Dude

  How Grown-Ups Listen

  Second Draft

  Houston, We Have a Problem

  What’s in a Name?

  Textbook People’s People

  Twitterpated

  Out Loud

  Thanksgiving Break

  Silence

  Sound

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Gray Walls and Gas Masks

  Long Distance

  Doctor Who Was Right

  The Impossible Dream

  A New Doctor

  NLD

  There’s a Monster at the End of This Brain

  Master Plan

  The Day

  The Night

  Hospital

  Waiting

  Big Doctor Words

  Doctor Who Was Wrong

  Septal Defect

  Waiting Again

  A Glass Box

  My Body Versus Me

  Home Is Where the Heart Is

  My People’s People

  First Period

  She’s Got the Whole World in Her Head

  What Brains Are Made Of

  One Month Later

  When I Showed My Family the Email

  On an Ordinary Sunday

  What You Do with History

  Seventh/Eighth-Grade Division Winner of the Smithsonian Women in STEM Contest

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers

  120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271

  Copyright © 2020 Sarah Allen

  All rights reserved

  First hardcover edition, 2020

  eBook edition, March 2020

  mackids.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Allen, Sarah Elisabeth, author.

  Title: What stars are made of / Sarah Allen.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. | Summary: Twelve-year-old Libby, born with Turner syndrome, is determined to win a science contest and use the money to help her older sister’s growing family, while surviving middle school.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019013249 | ISBN 9780374313197 (hardcover)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Middle schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | Sisters—Fiction. | Turner syndrome—Fiction. | Genetic disorders—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.A4394 Wh 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013249

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  eISBN 9780374313241