Clues to the Universe

by Christina Li

  There. My jeans were peeking out.

  “Her pants always look like they’re about to fall off.” It was the voice of Holly, the girl who sat next to Charlotte at the lunch table. “Does she shop at Goodwill or something?”

  “She probably got sweat all over my new shirt.”

  There was a pause. Holly asked, “What is she?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, she looks kind of Japanese or something. But I can’t really tell. Her eyes look different.”

  My cheeks burned. I thought about staying quiet and waiting for them to leave, but I didn’t want to hear them talking anymore. I slammed my locker door shut, a little too hard.

  Charlotte’s voice dropped to a whisper. “What was that?”

  I walked right past them, through the sickly-sweet strawberry-scented perfume cloud, and out the door.

  I usually liked informing people about things. I informed my English teacher the other day about a missing apostrophe. I liked reminding Mom to take her daily vitamins and to not forget her keys. I could have faced Charlotte and Holly and told them that I was exactly half Chinese, a quarter Scottish, and a quarter Irish, but my face felt all hot and my throat closed up and I couldn’t get the words out.

  When I got home, I poured myself a cup of milk and grabbed some Cocoa Puffs. I leaned back in my seat and turned the TV on. They were replaying the launch I’d seen that morning. Instinctively, I reached inside my backpack to pull out my purple folder and knew that something was wrong.

  It was the wrong folder.

  I set my backpack down and sat, the carpet prickly against the backs of my knees. The notes I’d scribbled down during the launch were gone, replaced by a thick wad of creased drawing sheets, watery colored-pencil stains, and three comic books so well-worn that the pages were fraying at the corners.

  How could I not have noticed? We had the same exact kind of purple folder. One labeled, one not. One that was mine, and one that belonged to the boy next to me in science class who’d scowled at me and then knocked my water bottle all over my Ticonderoga pencils.

  “Ro?”

  Mom emerged from the room behind me. It wasn’t quite a room, really. It was more like a closet. But Mom had stuffed the shelves full of her books—alphabetized by me—and crammed the single window ledge with her growing collection of potted pants. It was her Sun Library—Sunbrary for short—because the one window took up approximately half of the wall.

  She came over and folded me in a hug. She’d taken off her Stiff Fancy Work Jacket and instead wore a faded sweater. She smelled like the lavender lotion she always used.

  “You were so quiet when you came home. I almost didn’t notice you. You found your way around okay, baobao?”

  I nodded into Mom’s shirt. I looked up. “How was work?”

  “Not bad,” she said. A few stray wisps that had escaped from her short ponytail caught the light and turned her jet-black hair gold. “My client brought me cookies today.” She pushed a box of lumpy and homemade-looking snickerdoodles toward me. I bit down into the soft cinnamon sweetness.

  At least Mom didn’t have to change schools.

  As if reading my mind, Mom said quickly, “Look, if you ever want to switch back, we can always go back to the Day School. I mean, it’s probably only their first week—”

  “It’s fine, Mom.” I looked up. “School’s good. I promise.”

  If I really wanted to stay at the Country Day School, Mom would have written the check without hesitating. Mom had only told me that going to a public school would make things easier. But I knew what easier meant. Easier meant being able to buy groceries without worrying, even if Mom still used every single coupon she could get her hands on out of principle. Easier meant Mom not having to work more hours. Easier meant fewer SpaghettiOs dinners and more stir-fry.

  And the public school wasn’t that different from the Day School. Other than the fact that there were no uniforms. And the fact that the number of kids in my grade went from thirty-two to a hundred and twenty.

  Which meant four times the number of people in the halls during passing period, all wearing different-colored shirts. And four times the noise, the sound particles wildly oscillating within the narrow halls. People tossed paper airplanes across hallways. There were thirty kids in my science class. The purple-folder boy scribbled drawings through the entire class, and the teacher never noticed.

  Mom suddenly looked up. “I almost forgot. I have to water my orchids.”

  As she hurried back into her Sunbrary, I wandered into the kitchen. Towels and dirty plates were scattered everywhere. Mom tended to pile dishes in the sink, and without Dad here, the plates just sat there. I started organizing the towels by color.

  Blue on top of red.

  Red on top of yellow.

  Yellow on top of green.

  Green on top of white.

  Order calmed me down. It seemed like I was always cleaning up after Mom, but I didn’t mind. It made me less nervous when books were put neatly on shelves and towels were color-coordinated. Organizing made for a good Next Best Step.

  It was something I’d perfected over the last few months since That Night in March with the terribly white hospital walls and curtains and Dad’s heart beeping in the wrong rhythm because a drunk driver had swerved into the wrong lane. I remembered the smell of antiseptic making me sick and pattern of the tiles on the hospital floor. I remembered the nurse who hugged me tight and said, “I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” and Mom collapsed and cried more than I ever remembered her crying while I could only numbly stare at those tiles and at a pamphlet lying on the chair.

  Grief: The Next Steps.

  As if I could even think of taking more than one step.

  So I made up the Next Best Step.

  What was the best thing I could do right now, in this situation, to try to make things even a tiny bit better?

  They were small things. Like hugging Mom. Or eating an entire chocolate chip cookie. Or wearing Dad’s big digital watch on my left wrist and not taking it off except for showers. Or making sure I had tissues by my bed when I needed them. Mom’s Next Best Steps filled up her Sunbrary and spilled over to the kitchen. At first she just took care of aloe plants, and then it was English ivy. Now she’d gone on to orchids. She also talked to her parents for hours on the phone on weekends, speaking in a rapid-fire mix of Mandarin and English.

  Now, after an entire summer of doing little things, I’d moved on to bigger things, like taking inventory of the house. It was soothing, in a way. Plus, if I properly recorded the things we had in the house, they’d never be lost again.

  I closed the door behind me and sat on my bedroom floor next to a cardboard box. I grabbed a legal pad and a ballpoint pen, and opened up the box.

  For a long time after That Night, Dad’s things went untouched. It was weird, seeing his jacket lie across the chair as if he were going to come back and retrieve it, or seeing his watch on the table, or seeing his papers and folders on the countertop. But back in May, after Mom played the entire album from the Moody Blues, she stood up, put all of Dad’s things in boxes, and shoved them in our storage closet. I’d taken one of them back.

  I tuned my radio—the one Dad and I had built—to 93.7 FM, and to guitar intros of the Moody Blues, I started making a list.

  a copy of a 1978 April issue of Life magazine

  brass cuff links

  an empty carton of Marlboros: Dad had quit when I turned ten.

  a Giants figurine

  a baseball cap

  pictures: Mom and Dad out for dinner with my grandparents, Laolao and Wai-Gong; Mom leaning on their rusted Chevy during their cross-country road trip honeymoon.

  a copy of the poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman, with Mom’s note scribbled on the bottom corner of the page: I think you’d like this.

  a roll of film

  I looked at the picture of Mom and Dad on top of a mountain—in Yosemite, most likely—with
Mom standing on a rock and her arms around Dad, her chin resting on his shoulder, and suddenly, I understood why Mom couldn’t bear to look at these pictures anymore.

  There was something stuck at the bottom of the box, and gently, I pulled it out.

  A newspaper clipping from August 21, 1977.

  VOYAGER LAUNCHES DESPITE SHAKY START, CARRYING EARTH’S SOUNDS TO THE COSMOS.

  I remembered Dad sitting at the table with his steaming cup of coffee, carefully cutting it out from the newspaper. “They’ve truly got everything in there,” he’d said to Mom. “They’ve got pictures. They’ve got recordings of the human heartbeat and all sorts of cool stuff. Cheryl, this is history.”

  Mom sipped her tea. “Won’t it get lost in all that space out there?”

  “Exactly!” Dad said so excitedly that his scissors clattered to the table. “It’s like sending a message in a bottle. We’re putting a piece of ourselves out there so maybe someone—or something—could find it and see what we’re all about. Imagine your picture being found a million years in the future. We get to be a part of outer space!”

  “Come on, Richard,” Mom said, but she smiled into her mug because she secretly liked it when Dad got all excited about things.

  Over the next couple of days, Dad recorded every news segment that talked about the two Voyager space missions. “Look, Ro, they put whale songs on there too! And human greetings in sixty languages!”

  Dad had dreamed about becoming an astronaut until the day his eyesight officially got too bad to allow it, but he still recorded every launch and space mission he could get his hands on.

  I stared at all his things strewn around me, the trinkets and the papers and the pictures. I thought about today in my reading/LA class, when Mrs. Carey told us to bring in a thing that represented us. I thought about what I’d pick for Dad.

  I couldn’t let his things just sit in a box.

  Then I suddenly got an idea.

  I went over to my closet and opened the door, and reached for another box. I looked over the body of the rocket and the wires and nuts and bolts.

  Dad and I had already gathered a few of our materials. He’d gotten me two rocket motors and planks of balsa wood for the fins. He’d even bought a nose cone. We’d already attached the airframe—the body of the rocket—to the nose cone. Dad and I had sketched out pages of designs. We’d calculated the dimensions of our rocket.

  But that was it, really. We’d only scratched the surface, and now the actual work—setting up the payloads and the things that actually went inside the rocket and made it fly—were all up to me. And the more I scoured the Handbook of Model Rocketry, the more materials I realized were missing. I had to build the entire electric ignition—the thing that activated the motor and counted down the launch—by myself. Dad had planned to buy me a rocket camera from the Estes catalog to keep track of the flight, but I knew Mom and I could never afford that now.

  Still, I couldn’t stop staring at the half-built rocket some more, and then at the pile of Dad’s things, and slowly, the curiously impossible idea sank in.

  I’d always dreamed of building rockets someday, but it had never occurred to me that I could launch Dad’s things into outer space. I could put his cuff links and the picture of him and Mom and his Giants figurine into a box, and the rocket could carry it past Mars and Jupiter and far, far into the galaxy. And in a million years, if someone or something found this rocket, floating through space like a message in a bottle, they’d open it up and see the cuff links and the picture of Dad smiling with his arms around Mom, their giddy smiles saved forever.

  I just had to learn how to build a rocket first.

  I reached for the folder and opened it up, forgetting that it wasn’t mine. The paper was crinkled where the water had spilled. Still, the purple-folder boy was a good artist—really good, actually. There were aliens. A drawing of a planet that looked like Saturn, kind of, if Saturn were blue and purple. Comic explosions and speech bubbles and bright splashes of colors, mixed together. His pencil lines traced down in smooth curves that slowly became hard, straight angles.

  I closed the folder.

  I could try to get the rest of the supplies. I couldn’t buy a rocket camera, but maybe I could build a radio transmitter instead. The parts weren’t expensive. And I could make one from scratch—Dad and I had built radios before. I had money saved from Chinese New Year’s and birthdays.

  It was all possible.

  I took out every single tool I had in the Rocket Box. I redrew my sketches for the rocket and did some calculations. I reached for my legal pad and flipped to a new sheet. On the top I wrote List of Missing Materials and underlined it.

  The Next Best Step, I decided, was to finish building this rocket. After I got my notes back, of course.

  Chapter Four

  Benji

  OKAY, I HAD exactly three seconds to panic.

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three—

  It really was gone. I stared at the other folders. Math was the red folder. Reading/Language Arts, the yellow. Science, green. None of them had labels. But the purple folder, the one that I actually cared about—the one with my entire set of comics and the doodles of aliens and random three-dimensional cubes and whatever else I drew when I was bored—was missing, with another purple folder, neatly labeled Science, in its place.

  I had no time. Danny was coming any minute now. I peered into the parking lot, but I didn’t see his car. Maybe I had a minute. To go back and see if—

  A honk jolted me back around. Danny rolled down the window of his car and stuck his head out. “Benji!”

  I made my way to the beat-up bright blue Ford, to the driver’s side. “Hey, Danny,” I said quickly. “Look, is there any way I could run and get something?”

  A couple of moms behind us in the pickup line honked.

  “No can do,” my brother said. “I’m almost late for my shift. Come on, get in.”

  With a sigh, I tossed my backpack inside. I looked out the window as Danny hummed to the radio, his fingers drumming on the steering wheel. Of course he was wearing his varsity letterman jacket over his work uniform—he never took that thing off. He seemed to be having a good day. But then again, school wasn’t really a problem for my brother. Nothing was.

  Danny peered over at me at a stoplight. “First day? How was it?”

  I looked down at my damp backpack.

  Everything Goes Wrong for Unsuspecting Seventh Grader!! Can He Turn Things Around and Save the Day in Time?

  “It was all right,” I finally said.

  “Any classes you like?”

  I picked at the worn car seat. “Art. Although Mom might pull me out of it for extra study hall.”

  He smiled sympathetically. “Nah, she wouldn’t actually. She never did it to me.”

  I stared out the window. She would have, if Danny’d had the sixth-grade report card that I had. But of course he hadn’t. “Dunno. She seemed pretty serious about it the other day.”

  Mom had two full-time jobs: nurse and Worrying About Benji. She even said I gave her extra wrinkles.

  Danny shrugged and went back to finger-drumming, switching over to whistling as we pulled into the Hogan’s General Store parking lot, the car rattling the whole way. The car always seemed to be on the verge of falling apart, but Danny was real proud of it because he’d bought it off some senior on the baseball team for a cheap five hundred bucks, and he’d paid for it all by himself too.

  Mom was always wondering why I tagged along to Danny’s job. I could have just biked home. I mean, Mom was closer to Mr. Voltz, the Hogan’s manager, than either Danny or I were. She was the on-call nurse who’d always taken care of his wife in the hospital back when she was sick. Mom always stayed on after her shifts to chat with her or bring her some treats. She’d been real protective of her. Nowadays, my mom still brings over the occasional lasagna to Mr. Voltz’s place, just to check on how he’s doing. He doesn’t seem to particularly like a lot of people
. He and his wife used to decorate their whole house with Christmas lights and hand out full-size candy bars at Halloween and host summer barbecues, but after his wife died, people said he got kind of weird.

  But, still, Mr. Voltz liked Mom, which meant that he was pretty okay with Danny and me. And so when Danny got a job at Hogan’s, Mr. Voltz let me sit next to him on the counter and, if I was super-duper careful and didn’t crease anything when I put them back, he let me read the comics on the newsstands. He also gave me the occasional Werther’s caramel.

  Mr. Voltz nodded to Danny and sent him off to organize the appliance shelves on E7, which left just us at the counter. Mr. Voltz leaned back against the wall.

  You know how some people have a thing or two you remember them by? Like with Mom, it was her purple nurse scrubs and her poufy mane of reddish curls. With Danny, his thing was the varsity letterman jacket. But with Mr. Voltz, it was his stare. Big caterpillar-like eyebrows perched on top of his glasses, framing cobalt-blue eyes. And his suspenders. I couldn’t think of anyone else who wore suspenders.

  “Had a good day?” he asked shortly.

  “Yeah,” I said, and he grunted and turned back to sorting coupons.

  That’s also what I liked about Mr. Voltz. He wasn’t one of those grown-ups who needled you with questions.

  I wandered past the frozen food aisle. The doorbell jingled as a couple of other people came in. Back when Danny and I were little and it was the middle of August and it got so hot and dry and still in Sacramento that our brains couldn’t function, we’d bike over to Hogan’s and stand in the frozen food aisle, our noses pressed to the glass as cold air trickled out. Now, I moved on to the comics section.

  It was good that I’d come today, actually. Maybe I could find an extra copy of Spacebound. Of course, it wasn’t as good as owning one and getting to read it as much as I wanted and not having to worry about crinkling the pages. But it would do. Worst-case scenario, I’d settle for some Justice League.

  I pulled out the purple folder. Ro Geraghty was printed on the right-hand corner in neat letters. Maybe I’d accidentally stuffed my comics in her folder.