Clues to the Universe

by Christina Li

  The happiness dissipated from my chest.

  “So . . . we’re moving?”

  “Baobao, it would be a good way to start over and settle down for real,” Mom said. “And I thought you’ve always loved the city.” She paused. “And I know you and Benji are good friends, but you won’t be far from him.”

  But we wouldn’t be a three-minute bike ride from each other’s houses.

  “What do you think?”

  I loved visiting San Francisco. I loved seeing the fog roll over the Golden Gate Bridge and driving through winding hills. I loved going to all these different restaurants and trying chicken and waffles one day and mochi the next. I loved going to my grandparents’ favorite dinner place in Chinatown, where we’d sit around a huge circular table and try everything on the rotating platters and see Dad’s face turn bright red after he ate anything with spice in it.

  But I’d never truly imagined living there, because moving meant I would have to leave this place.

  Moving to San Francisco meant leaving the place where Dad and I would look for meteor showers from the back of his truck. We’d leave behind the breakfast diner I’d been going to all my life with my favorite strawberry milkshakes in the world.

  “I know you miss him,” Mom said, as if she’d read my mind. “Just because we’re leaving doesn’t mean we’ll stop missing him. But I want us to be surrounded by family. It’ll help us heal, maybe just a little bit.”

  I thought of the boxes of Dad’s stuff that had stacked up around the house, untouched for months. I thought of the times Mom had sat at the dinner table, staring at the painting Dad had gotten her; I thought of all the potted plants and the vines of English ivy that she’d bought in the months after That Night, that she’d carefully cultivated until they spilled across the kitchen, as if she were desperately trying to breathe some kind of life back into the house. I thought of the times I heard her crying, softly, behind her closed bedroom door.

  Maybe, just maybe, moving to San Francisco would be the Next Best Step.

  I couldn’t look her in the eyes. “I have to think about it.”

  She nodded, chewing her lip. “Okay.” Her eyes softened. “Thank you, baobao.”

  Leaving Sacramento also meant leaving my best friend, and that thought bothered me more than I thought it would.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Benji

  IT WAS WEIRD, not having a mission. I mean, I’d spent pretty much my entire life missionless. And Ro and I still hung out after school, and then after school let out, we called each other in the mornings and met up anyway. Sometimes we went over to Vic’s and got huge waffle cones; I mixed it up every time, and Ro consistently got strawberry. We walked along the river until it got too hot and the ice cream dripped down our fingers. But most days, we biked over to Hogan’s and still read comics. I caught up on the latest installment of the X-Men series. Ro had moved on from The Flash to Wonder Woman. We’d found out that Mr. Voltz was planning on taking a cross-country road trip with his dog.

  “It’ll be like what John Steinbeck did,” he said, while he was tidying up the register.

  I stopped inspecting the candy shelf. “Who’s John Steinbeck?”

  “He’s a famous author,” Ro said, finally looking up from her comics. “Right, Mr. Voltz? My mom reads some of his stuff. He took a road trip with his dog and wrote about it. Can we help plan out your trip?”

  Still, it was weird to go home and do nothing again. And as school got out and the summer days got sticky-hot, Ro practically peeled me off the carpet of her house and told me we had to do something.

  And that was how we ended up at the state fair. I hadn’t been in years, but it was pretty much how I remembered it. There were white tents and colorful rides. I could smell the corn dogs and funnel cakes from the other side of the fairgrounds. The sun was hot on the backs of our necks and made our shirts stick to our skin.

  I guess some things were better this time around. They’d added new rides with flashing lights. Danny had driven Ro and me here, so I could stuff my face with as much cotton candy as I wanted without Mom hovering over my shoulder.

  Plus, I was completely crushing Ro at the carnival games.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she said as I beat her at another round of balloon darts. “Somehow my angles are always wrong.”

  “Angles don’t cut it.” I shrugged. “It’s all about instinct.”

  “Okay, teach me.”

  “Not until I beat you another round.”

  “Well, you’re being awfully secretive lately.”

  “Nuh-uh.” I leveled my dart and closed one eye to aim. Pop.

  “Yeah, you are. You won’t even show me what you’re drawing these days.”

  “Hey, that’s a top-secret project,” I said, turning to her. “I’ll show you first, I promise. Even before I show my dad.”

  “Huh,” she said. “You show him stuff now?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “I mail him some of my drawings. He sends me some of his sketches for Spacebound, even before they publish it. We call sometimes, too.”

  Ro grinned. “That’s good to hear.”

  “Yeah.” I smiled at my shoes. “He’s coming to visit us the weekend before school starts. Says he’s going to take us down to Disneyland. You wanna come?”

  Ro’s expression froze. “I don’t know.”

  “Come on,” I said. I launched another dart. “It’ll be our last weekend of fun before eighth grade starts. I heard all the homeroom teachers are super boring this year.”

  She wouldn’t quite meet my eyes. She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “I’m not coming back for eighth grade.”

  I stopped playing. “What?”

  “I was going to tell you earlier, but I didn’t know if anything was happening for sure or if we would sell the house but”—she took a deep breath—“we did. A week ago, actually. So yeah. We’re moving to San Francisco at the end of this summer.”

  Wait.

  What?

  Ro Geraghty was moving. To a whole other city.

  It was as if my heart had dropped into my stomach. Whoosh.

  I didn’t know what to say for a few moments. “That soon?”

  Ro nodded.

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  I looked down at the ground. I mean, I guess San Francisco wasn’t too far away. Two hours by car, tops. I could even probably bike there in a day. Not that I ever would, but it wasn’t like she was moving to Connecticut or something. Still, it was hard to think of her not being a three-minute bike ride from my house.

  “You can visit me,” she said. “When I move in. There’s tons of places I can take you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I will. And I’ll write you.”

  “You better.”

  Ro’s arms were crossed. I couldn’t tell if she was sad or excited or over the moon about this, to be honest. For the first time, I couldn’t read her expression.

  She sighed. “I just . . .” She scrunched up her face, like she was trying to think of what to say. “It took me a long while to agree to it. I love the city. My entire family is there. From my mom’s side, anyway. But I’ll have to start all over again. I’ll have to go to a new school where I won’t know anyone. I was kind of mad about it at first, but I’ve kind of come to terms with it. I don’t know. This could be good for us, maybe, in the long run.”

  “You’ll be all right,” I said. “You’ll probably meet some cool people in the city.” I smiled a little. “I’ll be replaced.”

  “You’re right,” Ro said sarcastically. “Guess I’ll just have to find another comic-book superfan with a secret famous dad to be friends with.”

  “Hey, you don’t know,” I said. “The odds could be pretty good.”

  “Anyway,” she said, looking at the ground. “I’m still around for a few weeks. At least.” She looked up. “Wanna try that?”

  I looked at where she was pointing. It was a carnival ride that was sh
aped like the top part of a funnel. It was one of those newer rides that were painted with bright colors, with lots of flashing lights and THE GRAVITRON spelled out in neon letters.

  “I’ve heard of these things before,” she said. “I heard that the centrifugal force is so strong that you’re practically glued to the wall.”

  “Let’s do this,” I said, even though I had no idea what on earth centrifugal force was.

  We got inside and leaned back against the walls.

  “I heard people try to turn upside down in these things,” Ro said.

  “Bet you can’t,” I whispered.

  “Oh, you’re so on.”

  Sure enough, the machine started spinning, slowly at first, and then faster and faster. My arms started feeling like lead. Ro tried to turn herself upside down on the wall, but the force was too strong, so she ended up in a weird position with her head leaning on my shoulder. And as the ride spun even faster and the lights blurred in front of me, Ro started laughing and her ponytail flew into my face, and despite the crushing weight, I couldn’t stop laughing, either.

  When we coasted to a stop, we were so dizzy that we almost fell over each other trying to walk out. Ro turned to me, her freckled grin wide and her hair messy and sticking up, like she’d stuck her finger in an electrical socket or something. “You’re right,” she said. “Couldn’t do it.”

  “Told you.”

  “Come on,” she said. “I bet I can kick your butt at the ring toss.”

  “Fat chance,” I said.

  I wasn’t okay with Ro moving away. Not one bit. But I guess I always kind of knew that something like this would happen. Because the truth was, a place like this couldn’t always contain her big grin and her crazy smart ideas and her wild experiments. And I knew that wherever she ended up in the future—in San Francisco, or in a spaceship that traveled to the edges of the universe—she would be just fine.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Ro

  THERE WERE A lot of things I didn’t know yet.

  I didn’t know the exact science behind the Gravitron ride and how it could make your limbs feel like they were a million pounds. I still didn’t exactly know how to launch a space shuttle into orbit. I didn’t know the exact rate at which the universe was expanding, or if aliens existed, or whether space and time differed across different galaxies. I didn’t know if there were other solar systems with life on them, or if there were alternate universes, or if there was an alternate universe where my dad never collided with that car on the way back from Raley’s. I didn’t know if the fluttering feeling in my stomach when I accidentally leaned my head on Benji’s shoulder was because of the ride, or if meant something different.

  Because here’s the thing about the universe: sometimes it doesn’t tell you all its secrets at once. Sometimes you have to spend years, decades, to answer a question you have. Sometimes you have to travel to the deepest of jungles or to the edges of space to figure things out. And sometimes you don’t figure things out, but get one step closer.

  Tonight, with the smell of funnel cakes in the air and live music playing from the speakers by the stage, and with Benji sticking out his cotton-candy-stained blue tongue at me as I beat him at the ring toss, I realized that maybe it was okay to not know any of those things for a while. For tonight, at least. Because I was sure I would eventually figure it all out.

  Epilogue

  September 3, 1984

  Dear Ro,

  It’s Benji Burns here, reporting live from Sacramento, California.

  Imagine this: disaster reigns. The water tower has burst. The clouds have turned dark, and storms are gathering on the landscape; the crops have wilted and died. The town is being taken over by mind-reading extraterrestrial creatures and the moon has disappeared—

  Just kidding. Things are totally fine here. Everything is normal. Well, as normal as things can be.

  I hope this is the first letter you’ve gotten in your new apartment. What’s it like? Is it twelve stories up? Can you see the bay? Do you have an incessantly annoying neighbor under you who owns a hundred cats with suspicious motives? Are there a thousand honking cars? Does everyone drink coffee? Do you get lost? Actually, I know that you never would get lost because you’d always have a map on you. Please tell me everything.

  Okay, I have something to confess. Everything really is normal here, except for the fact that it’s kind of not because you’re not here. School’s started over here, and it’s weird not having you as a lab buddy. Science class is going to be a lot less fun this year, even if I’ll probably know what’s going on now. I’ve started hanging out with Jimmy Katz some. You remember him from class, right? He’s started coming over to my house some. But it’s not the same. I don’t have anyone to share my comics with, and my packets of Red Vines go so slowly now that you’re not here to steal half of them. They’ll probably expire and get moldy. Except probably not, because Mom says Red Vines are probably made of plastic and chemicals and Red 40 dye and will never decompose and make me grow fangs or something. But there’s still no chance she’ll get me to stop eating them.

  It’s weird that a year ago, I didn’t even know who you were. But secretly, I’m kind of glad that we accidentally took each other’s folders on the first day of school, even if we were a little weird to each other. Because I would have never accidentally-on-purpose found my dad if it weren’t for you. Or built a giant rocket.

  Because the thing is, you go and do impossible things. Everyone else likes watching TV and pulling whoopee-cushion pranks on substitute teachers or whatever, but you like building rockets. You like doing experiments and wondering about what lies beyond our solar system. Sometimes I think you’re too much of a nerd. But you’re also one of the coolest people I know, and I hope you never change.

  And guess what? Mom said I could visit San Francisco in October sometime. I’m coming ninety miles to see you, which is not a long distance, but it sure seems like it is. I hope you take me to all the cool food places and Chinatown (I’m going to eat ten of those pork buns, I swear). And we’ll visit all those cool buildings and I’ll probably wander off and get lost, but it’s okay, because you’ll have a map with you and you’ll find me.

  Anyway—until then, I hope you enjoy this thing I made. It’s a space story too, but this one has radioactive robots and evil mad scientists and all the things I wished were in comics I read.

  See you soon,

  Benji

  P.S. Sorry about the aliens in the corner. Couldn’t help myself.

  I unwrapped Benji’s project from the tissue paper and nearly dropped it.

  Because it was a full, whole comic book, with pages and a cover. I flipped through the pages. I looked at the artwork sprawling across the pages and the dialogue bubbles inked out carefully, at the characters bounding across cities and the spaceships hurtling through galaxies.

  The pages were colored in with incredibly vivid colors and fine pencil lines. I looked at the bold block letters and the carefully sketched expressions on the characters’ faces, and knew without a doubt that this was Benji’s work.

  I flipped to the cover.

  It was a figure against the backdrop of a rocket, the universe painted in dazzling hues of blue and purple and black, clouds and dust and stars inked carefully, the planet a beautiful mix of red and orange.

  And the figure in the center, piloting the rocket . . .

  She was me.

  I could see her freckles, her spacesuit that closely resembled my windbreaker, a superhero cape flying behind her as the rocket shot for the stars. I could see her hands on the throttle of the rocket, a corner of her mouth quirked up into a confident smile. And printed carefully across the cover was:

  Across the Galaxy: The Chronicles of Ro.

  My cheeks hurt from grinning so hard. I ran my hands over the cover, unable to speak or cry or laugh. Words disappeared from my tongue.

  It was perfect.

  And on the top was a sticky note, with Benji�
�s unmistakable scribble:

  I’ve been reading about other people’s superheroes all this time. I thought it was about time I drew one of my own.

  Acknowledgments

  Endless gratitude goes to my fantastic team at Quill Tree Books. To Alexandra Cooper, for championing Ro’s and Benji’s stories with incredible heart, guidance, and wisdom. It is an honor to work with you. To Ji-Hyuk Kim, for creating the cover of my dreams. To Allison Weintraub, Rosemary Brosnan, Shona McCarthy, Erin Fitzsimmons, Cat San Juan, Vaishali Nayak, Emily Zhu, Jackie Burke, Patty Rosati, Mimi Rankin, Katie Dutton, and Maya Myers: You helped make this book into what it is today. Thank you.

  To my absolutely inimitable agent, Jess Regel. You took a chance on a nervous sixteen-year-old and nurtured my career with kindness, patience, and whip-smart insight. I can never thank you enough and I am so very lucky. To Mike Nardullo, for helping get my books to amazing places.

  To my dad, for believing in my dreams even before I did. I owe everything to you. To my mother, for your strength and wit and brilliance—you inspire me every day. To Justin, for always rooting for me and for just being an all-around fantastic sibling. You’re the best.

  To Katia, for endless support and love and phone calls, for putting up with my crazy stories over the years, for providing sharp and insightful feedback, and for being there for me from the very, very beginning. You are my lighthouse.

  To Maya, for reading those first words and for your priceless insights and friendship. You first made me believe this manuscript could see the light of day.

  To Andi—you are my forever Yoda. You are my voice of reason. Thank you for the years of emails and phone calls and for patiently guiding me back onto the path when I lost my way.

  To Becca, Lucas, Conor, Matin, and Dori, for providing invaluable feedback and for helping me make this book into the best version of itself. To Paula and Dave, for putting up with my questions and for creating such a wonderful home away from home. To Maya, Dave, and Tori, for teaching me all about rockets and space. I am so grateful to you all.