by Christina Li
As I pushed aside my drawings to make more space, Ro asked, “What’s that all about?”
I looked up. “I’m building the base like you said.”
“No, that.” Ro looked at my drawings. “I’ve been trying to figure that out for weeks.”
She was looking directly at my hastily scribbled map, the starred cities, and a rough drawing of my dad. Instinctively, I pulled the drawings back.
“Who is that?”
My mouth went dry. No one, I wanted to say, but it came out as, “My dad.”
“Is he traveling or something?”
I shrugged, hoping she’d drop it. “Something like that. I don’t really know.”
She put down the two blocks she was taping together. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I don’t,” I said. It came out kind of sharp, and I could tell she was hurt, because she looked down and turned away a little.
I felt bad. She’d told me what she was working on, so I felt like she at least should get something. “I don’t really know. He’s not with us anymore.”
Ro looked up with wide eyes.
“No!” I felt my face turning red. “Not like that. He’s not like, dead or anything.” I added a lever to the bottom of the bucket. “He’s just . . . not around in my family anymore.” I could feel my face turning redder.
“Oh.” Ro slumped back into her seat. She gave me a look, but it wasn’t that scrunched-up pitying look that parents and teachers always gave me when they found out that my parents were divorced. And it wasn’t one of those functional divorces, like how Holly Berger’s parents bought houses on opposite sides of Sacramento and divided her weekends equally between them. But Ro didn’t look like she felt sorry for me. She looked like she was trying to figure something out. “So you don’t talk to him?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know his number. Or where he is. I just read his stuff.” I nodded at the comics.
Ro picked up the comics. “He wrote these? Your dad?”
“Pretty sure he did, yeah.” I paused. “Did you . . . read it?”
“Oh, when we switched on accident?” She closed the cover of the comic. “Nope. But the cover looks cool.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“He doesn’t write these anymore?”
“Still does,” I said. “They come out every four months.” I clicked the last part of the Rube Goldberg machine into place and set the marble at the top to roll down.
“So,” Ro said.
She met my eyes, and I swear, I could see the gears practically click-click-clicking in her mind.
“So he’s still out there writing these comics?”
“Maybe,” I said, as if I didn’t care. As if I hadn’t rooted through our entire house when Mom wasn’t looking, as if I hadn’t torn through the filing cabinets in case there was another drawing that he could have left behind. As if I didn’t count down the days until each Spacebound issue came out in the grocery store.
“I’ve tried reaching out to him before. He never answered.” The marble clattered down. I stared at the machine. The marble wasn’t fitting through one of the bridges. I held up one of the pieces. “It’s fitted wrong.”
Ro frowned at her drawing. “But I thought—”
“It doesn’t entirely fit in,” I said. “When the marble passes through it’ll collapse. We could try this.” I clicked it into place. The marble slid through perfectly.
She didn’t say anything for a second. I glanced up and she was giving me a look. “What?”
“Nothing.” A slow grin spread. “Nice job.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Drew in the back corner of the classroom with his partner, Eddie, telling someone to come look and see if his machine was functioning.
When Jimmy approached and leaned down to inspect it—splat—a hidden spoon catapult sprang up, flinging Jell-O onto his face.
“Sorry!” Drew said. “Guess I got a bit of my lunch stuck in there.”
Everyone around the table roared with laughter. Jimmy peeled the strawberry Jell-O off his face and smiled real hard, but his cheeks were bright. I looked away and felt a little awful.
Ro didn’t laugh. She glanced over and scowled, which made me feel slightly better. She turned back. “This is why you drew that map, isn’t it? You’re trying to find him.”
I dropped the marble from the top, not meeting her eyes. She didn’t even need a guessing game. She got it right on the first try.
“Hey, I told you about my rocket.”
She was right. I looked her square in the eye. “Yeah, I am. Or I was. Pretty dumb, right?” The marble clattered perfectly down each of the steps, and then through the tunnel that I’d built, and then down the chute I put to replace Ro’s tunnel. It dropped into the bucket. The lever launched it through to another tunnel, where it clattered through to the final chute. It hit the bell and dinged.
I looked up. “We did it!”
When the bell rang, I grabbed back the drawings and the comics, tucked them into my folder, and then made sure that they were both safely in my backpack.
“Hey,” she said, before I turned to leave. She nodded at the drawings. “You’re really good at this, you know.”
I grinned. “Thanks.”
Come to think of it, this wasn’t the worst lab partner setup in the world. Plus, we were actually kind of great at working together. We even had a normal conversation today—well, except for the part where I told her I was trying to find my long-lost dad through a trail of his comics. But still, she didn’t seem weirded out at all. Which was a good sign.
Things were looking up.
Chapter Five
Ro
SCIENTISTS LIKE UNCOVERING secrets. They’ll go into deep jungles filled with snakes and flesh-eating ants just to find a new plant species. They can brush off a single shell and use it to figure out how old the earth is. They want to figure out everything—how fast a hummingbird flies, how mountains expand and shrink in hot and cold weather, how our skin learns to heal itself after we accidentally slip and get rug burn.
Dad was a chemist, which meant that he mixed together acids in a lab until they sizzled and made something new. At home, he figured out the exact ratio of blue and purple food coloring to use to make the perfect periwinkle frosting for Mom’s birthday cake. When we went to Disneyland, Dad stayed behind to watch a magic show, watching the man flip cards over and over again, eyes trained on the man’s white-gloved hands until he had figured out the trick, then ran after us to explain it. And when we were driving back from the supermarket one night and there was a flash of orange in the sky, Dad turned off the radio and pulled over to the side of the road, and in the still silence we looked up at the night sky and wondered what had happened.
I got Dad’s science genes. Or so Mom has told me ever since she saw me measuring milk to get the perfect Cocoa-Puffs-to-milk balance. When I first heard the word genes, I thought of the pants you wear, and so for months I went around thinking that if you wore their jeans, you could be good at certain things. Like if I wore Mom’s high-waisted jeans, I could speed through novels in an hour and visit the Crocker Art Museum without getting bored. Instead, I got Dad’s worn Levi’s genes, and that meant that I figured out secrets in millimeters and tick-tick-ticks of a clock. It meant that I understood numbers better than I could figure out what kids were saying when they whispered about me. It meant that when I came across a newspaper article about a Russian satellite that had burned up in the atmosphere and caused an orange flash, I rushed to Dad to show him. It meant that every once in a while when we were driving that same road back from the supermarket, I would ask Dad to pull over. We’d open the trunk and sit at the back with our blankets, and we’d search the night sky because space was full of things to figure out: the distance between stars, the path of a comet, what it would be like to step on Mars.
I liked uncovering secrets, and here it was. A big, fat, juicy secret from Benji.
I couldn’t st
op thinking about it as I sorted Dad’s stuff. I put trinkets in one pile. Papers and pictures in another.
Benji’s dad was somewhere out there. He still published comics that came out every four months.
The question was—
Where was he?
It was like one of those big puzzle projects, the kind with a thousand pieces where I wouldn’t know where to start. But I’d figure out the corner pieces. And the edges. And I’d work faster and faster, until the puzzle finally started to come together.
I just had to figure out the corner pieces. A phone number. A publisher’s address.
I carefully took out another picture. It was Mom and Dad, sitting in Mission Dolores Park, with the buildings of San Francisco rising in the distance. Mom had pink-framed sunglasses. Dad wore a big striped shirt and had his arm around Mom, his hair a wild, unruly mess. Nana once told me that Dad had had a hippie phase; his hair was longer than Mom’s at one point. In the picture, Mom was laughing into Dad’s shoulder.
It was never a mystery how Dad died. In fact, I’ve known how it happened ever since the night the cop showed up at our door. How it occurred between ten p.m. and eleven p.m. How it happened on that same winding road to Raley’s. How the alcohol that made up exactly .25 percent of the other driver’s bloodstream was more than enough to cause him to veer onto the other side of the road at a velocity of seventy miles per hour, at an angle that led him directly to where Dad was.
I knew what all the details were, but this time the details weren’t enough for me. It didn’t explain why an average person lived to be sixty-seven years old and Dad didn’t get twenty-two of them. The police never told me how to finish sixth grade or spend a summer with a black hole growing in my chest.
I set the picture of Mom and Dad down and leaned against the wall.
My dad was never coming back. That much I knew.
But Benji’s dad could.
I couldn’t sit still. And after a moment, I reached for my notepad and started a new list.
Chapter Six
Benji
“WE’RE FINDING HIM.”
Ro plopped something between us, breaking the unofficial Science Table Divide.
I looked up from the latest X-Men issue. “Huh?”
The letters were printed perfectly on the sheet of paper she’d dropped on the table: Reuniting Benjamin Burns with His Long-Lost Father.
“Like I said”—she leaned in—“we’re finding your dad.”
I stammered, “We?”
“Yeah, I’m helping you.” She grinned.
Whoa, what?
I peered at the paper. She hadn’t actually written anything else down, but there were ten bullet points, spaced exactly the same width apart. She’d even written this list on graph paper. Graph paper.
She was actually such a nerd.
Ro said, “What do you say?”
“I mean, I wasn’t even that serious about finding him,” I lied. “It’s just wishful thinking, really. It’s not like some Indiana Jones mystery. He’s impossible to find, Ro. Really. He didn’t leave behind an address or a phone number or anything.”
“So? We can still put together some kind of plan. We have his comic books.” She leaned in some more. “We have two brains. A map.”
“And way too many number-two pencils.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.” I frowned. “What makes you want to do this so badly?”
She shrugged. “I just like figuring things out.”
Suddenly an idea came to me. I cleared my throat. “Okay, yeah, you can help. But one thing, though.”
She tilted her head.
“If you’re helping me with this,” I said slowly, then swallowed, “I’m helping you build your rocket.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“You really don’t have to,” she said quickly. “You don’t have to do something for me just because I’m doing something for—”
“Can’t hurt to have help.”
She pushed up her sleeves even more. “Technically it can. If the measurements are not calibrated right or if the design’s even a bit off—”
“Okay.” I sighed. “I’ll stay out of your way with the building stuff and the cali-whatever. Just let me do whatever helps you. And, you know, we could even put it in the science fair.”
She peered at me suspiciously. “You’re either asleep or drawing half the time in class. Since when do you care about the science fair?”
Turns out, when your mom is threatening to take away the only class you actually care about, you can care about it a whole lot.
“Hey, I really need the extra credit. My mom says if I don’t do well in science then she’ll switch out art class with extra study hall. But I’ll be helpful, I promise.”
Ro raised her eyebrows and then shrugged. “Okay, fine.” She straightened up. “Fine. You can help me with my rocket.”
I reached up to the sheet, crossed off my name, and changed it to Benji. “And you can help me find my dad.”
Ro grinned wide, the kind where the corners of her eyes crinkled and I could see the freckles on her cheeks real clear. It was the kind of beaming grin that somehow made me kind of excited, too. “Deal.” She reached out her hand.
“We gotta spit on it,” I said, with a completely serious face.
She pulled it back. “Gross! You know how many germs are in saliva? I would never—”
“Kidding,” I said, with a grin. “Gotcha.”
We shook hands.
“First,” I said, shoving a pile of Spacebound comics over to her, “you’ve got some reading to do.”
Chapter Seven
Ro
I HURRIED INTO science class the next day and set the stack of Spacebound comics down on our table.
Benji raised an eyebrow. “Whatcha think?”
“You got the next issue?”
A slow smile crept over his expression. “You loved it.”
I composed myself. “It was all right. A little imaginative, sometimes. Some parts of it are a little unrealistic. Like, a human can’t actually survive being pulled through a black hole because the energy would crush them. And galaxies take light-years to merge, not two weeks. But—”
“Oh, come on,” Benji said, not believing me for a second. “I gave you six issues and you read them all in a day. You loved it.”
“Okay, I did!” I picked up the comics and hugged them to my chest, unable to contain my grin. I’d stayed up past midnight last night, something I never did because it would mess up my circadian rhythms. “How could I not? There’s a spacepup. And do we find out if she escapes from those three-eyed aliens? Or if she discovers more of her superpowers with the Titanium Rod?”
“I can’t spoil anything,” Benji said with a wicked grin. He pushed over another copy. “But here’s the next one.”
I set the comics back down and cleared my throat. “Okay, speaking of these, we should really focus on—”
I was cut short by the bell. Mr. Devlin walked in, wearing a tie full of smiley faces.
“Okay, folks. Get excited, because today we’re talking about acids and bases.” He set his coffee mug down and leaned over his lab table.
I turned around. Benji opened his notebook and started doodling a planet, rings and all. I waited for a moment to speak, because I had it all planned out in my head, but Mr. Devlin kept talking, all while drawing huge molecules on the board and talking about how acids stole electrons from bases like pickpockets.
I couldn’t wait until the end of class.
I reached for the edge of my notebook, where I knew Benji would see. I printed out, So let’s get this started.
Benji stopped sketching his rings.
He scrawled, under my writing, Get what started?
I smiled to myself. I wrote, Finding your long-lost father, of course.
Benji: Oh, you’re actually serious about this thing.
I’m always serious.
Benji looked up. Okay, C
aptain.
I wrote, Meet after school today?
He paused, and then scribbled, My house. I’ve got some more comics back there.
Me: Possibly volume 2, issue 7?
Him: Patience.
“You have to be careful with some acids,” Mr. Devlin went on. “Some of them are highly corrosive. They can dissolve metal or, at times, human flesh.”
The class went, “Ewwwwww.”
I tuned back into class and started taking notes.
Benji kept on sketching. I leaned over and wrote in the corner of my notebook, Stop drawing and pay attention, doofus.
He saw my writing and laughed a little bit, and then turned my Os into a set of monster eyes. He then drew a wave of acid eating up the monster’s arm. With a few pencil marks, he’d turned the monster’s expression into a look of horror.
Who says I wasn’t?
I stared at the wave of drawings taking over my neatly printed numbers and my carefully hand-drawn periodic table, but I couldn’t help but smile to myself. He was hopeless. I turned back to Mr. Devlin.
As I biked to Benji’s house after school, with him doing small pop wheelies off the sides of the curbs, I realized that Benji lived only five blocks away from me, on Chestnut Avenue. How had our paths never crossed?
I guess I just never knew any of the kids near me who went to the public school. I’d never really met Drew Balonik, the kid a street over who set off the fireworks this summer, but now I saw him everywhere, usually with his friends, or friendly-teasing Charlotte.
“You nerd,” Benji said over his shoulder. “You really brought a clipboard and everything?”
“Told you I was serious about this.”
“You know, I just realized. Mom’s probably going to be mad that I invited someone over without cleaning up.”
“What do you mean?” I looked around. Some things stood out. Like the bright orange pillows on the blue couch, or the ratty braided rug or floral curtains. But the books on the shelves were sorted, the dish towels stacked neatly on top of each other. In my kitchen, my mom wasn’t afraid of a mess, often dusting flour down the entire counter and even the floor a little when she made cookies, or accidentally leaving out a pot of soup when she was running late for her open houses. I made a note to myself to color-code our books, too.