Wait. Did he just say that we’re going to the observatory together either way?
I tried to gather my wits about me. Behind Max, I heard something—were the other guys snickering? I tried to ignore it.
“But—” The word came out as a hoarse whisper. Hailey elbowed me and nudged me with the back of her head.
I cleared my throat and tried again. “But how do I know what’s new to you? How do I know if you already know it or not?”
“Hmm, interesting question,” he said slowly, “because you kind of make it sound like you’re expecting to lose.” His grin was of dizzying splendor, and his voice was completely relaxed.
“Um, well.” I cleared my throat again and reached deep for the sass that had been coming so naturally just a minute ago. “Of course that’s not going to happen. But let me put it this way. How do you know what I don’t already know?”
“I think,” Josh said, “that you should both just focus on teaching me some stuff. Like, what are these meteors anyway? Where do they come from? I’m serious this time.”
“You know, Josh,” Juanita said, speaking across all of us from the opposite end of the row of chairs, “you could have Googled this stuff to avoid sounding like an idiot.”
“Aww, come on, like you’re such an expert?” he retorted. “You watch these mainly because Clara’s into it, right?”
As they spoke, Max leaned in closer to me, and as I turned my face toward his, he whispered, “I’ll just keep trying until I find something you don’t know.”
His face was so close to mine. Another inch or two, and I might have been able to feel his breath. But then he shifted away again.
“So, same thing,” Josh was saying to Juanita, calling out across the rest of us. “I’m doing it for my pal Max. A show of support.”
“Hey,” Gavin shouted, “what was that thing that just flew by?”
“Another meteor?” I asked. “A point for Gavin!”
“No, no, not a meteor. Just right there. It went—Hey, there it is again!”
A tiny shadow had just swept through the sky, only a few feet above our heads.
“Oh crap!” Josh said, leaping from his chair. “It’s a bat!”
The form disappeared, but a moment later it came right toward us—only to turn, sweep across the pool, and fly away again.
“Is it the same bat?” Gavin demanded. “Or a different one?”
A little way off, another dark little form flew between the trees.
“Max, man, your place is crawling with vampire bats,” Josh said.
“It’s not a vampire bat,” I said. “It’s just a little brown bat, looking for some insects to eat.”
“I’m going after him,” Josh declared. “Do you have a broom?”
“There’s a fruit picker over there,” Max said, pointing to a long stick with a sort of metal claw at one end. “But why not leave the bats alone? We’re outside. It’s their territory.”
“Perfect.” Josh grabbed the fruit picker and ran off down the hill.
Gavin laughed as he ran after Josh. “Max, you’re shirking your duties, man. Leaving the bat chasing to your guests?”
“Let them go,” I said. “The bats aren’t going to hurt anyone. I just hope those guys don’t actually catch one.” But also, I didn’t want Max to leave his seat, with the risk that he might switch to a different one when he came back.
“They seem like good guys apart from the bat chasing,” Max said. “But to be perfectly honest, I’m not exactly sure what they’re doing here.”
I laughed. “What do you mean?”
“Well, they just showed up. They were saying something about playing video games. I guess they wanted me to go to one of their houses, or maybe an arcade or something. I’m not even sure. I told them I was staying here to watch the meteor shower and that you three were coming, and they decided to stay.”
“Well,” I said, “but you invited them to stay, right?”
He looked uncertain. “I don’t remember inviting them.”
Around the side of the house, Gavin and Josh shouted to each other. I couldn’t imagine what they thought they were going to do—stab the bats with the fruit picker?
Gavin reappeared at the edge of the light. “We need bigger weapons! Do you have a BB gun, or maybe an antiaircraft machine gun of some kind?”
Max shook his head. “We’re not the heavily armed types. Dude, it’s time to consider diplomatic channels. Or, you know, just forget about them.”
Gavin rocked back on his heels for a minute, looking up at the sky, then finally said, “Yeah, okay.” He looked over at Juanita, then at me and Hailey. “So, I need your help.”
“We’re not going to help you chase the bats,” I told him.
“No, not that. I’ve been trying to convince Max to join the basketball team. The season starts in a few weeks, so I want him on the team by Monday. Will all of you tell him how hot you find guys who play basketball? Please, help me out here.”
“The problem,” Max said, “is that being bad at a sport is never that hot. And I’m bad at basketball. Seriously bad.”
“What you might not realize,” Juanita said, “is that our entire basketball team is seriously bad. So even if you are as bad as you say you are, they can probably use you.”
My eyes widened. Was she really picking a fight?
Gavin pointed right at Juanita, and I had only half a second to cringe before he shouted, “Yes! That’s exactly right. Thank you! Our team sucks. We’ll take anyone.”
Max laughed. “That’s very flattering. But what happened to all that crap you were trying to sell me earlier tonight, about my obvious natural talent?”
“Dude,” Gavin assured him, “you’re the tallest guy in the school. You’ll be our star player. Juanita, you’ve been to some games. Tell him exactly how bad we suck.”
Juanita said thoughtfully, “I think I might be a better judge of how the guys look in their uniforms. The Los Pinos guys looked pretty great in theirs. Oh, and ah, yeah . . . That’s right. They creamed us.”
“That’s exactly right,” Gavin said triumphantly as he flung his lanky frame into a chair next to Juanita, “and, Max, my man, we would be happy to train you up to that same level of suckage.”
Josh rounded the corner, bent over his phone. “All right,” he said to us without looking up. “Vanessa and Jasmine are coming over. Lindsey, too, I think. They were watching a movie at Lindsey’s house, but I guess it sucked.”
Max laughed. “Did you tell them about the bats?”
“Hell, no. Then they’d never come. I didn’t even tell them the other girls were here.” Josh swung himself into his chair as a bat flew over his head. Looking up at it, he said, “But I’m looking forward to seeing their faces when they get here, that’s for sure.”
I looked over at Juanita. I knew we should leave, for her sake. The last thing she needed was to see Lindsey. Or, for that matter, Vanessa and Jasmine—Josh’s and Gavin’s spawn-of-Satan girlfriends.
But she met my eyes and shook her head, as if to say, We’re staying.
But that was just wrong. I couldn’t put her through that. I leaned back, and as I tried to think of a good excuse to leave—one that would even convince Juanita—a brilliant light streaked across the sky. It was so bright and covered such a large swathe of sky that for a moment I was speechless.
When I spoke, my voice came out quiet and a little breathless. “Meteor.”
“Meteor,” said Max at the same moment, sounding equally awestruck. And then, a second later, “Jinx.”
“You guys are, like, weirdly into this crap,” Josh said. “What’s up with that?”
Max looked thoughtful. “I don’t know. It—it’s hard to explain, right? I just . . . I look out there at the stars and I think—I feel . . .” He exhaled loudly. “I don’t know.”
My heartbeat started accelerating, the way it always does when I kind of want to say something but I’m not sure if it’s the right thing,
or whether I should talk at all. And I thought, No, I should just stay quiet. No one will understand what I’m talking about. They’ll look at me like I’m a—
Oh yeah. They already do.
I cleared my throat. “Did you know,” I said to Josh, “that when you look at those stars, you’re looking into all different parts of the past? That star over there”—I pointed to Bellatrix, the nearest star in Orion—“is two hundred and forty-three light-years away. We’re looking at light from before the Declaration of Independence. But then when you look at that other star, down there”—I pointed to Alnilam—“that star’s light has been traveling toward us since the early Middle Ages.”
Josh looked skeptical. “Okay, and I should care because . . .”
“Because it’s amazing,” I told him, “that just by looking up above us, with no equipment but our own eyes, we can see such huge distances that we’re actually seeing right into the past.” I was gathering confidence now, and I tried to lean in Josh’s direction, though I couldn’t lean far, with Hailey behind me. “It makes you think about where Earth is in relation to the rest of it. It makes you feel how small we are. How small everything is that happens here. What a tiny, microscopic little window of time and space we ever see in our lifetimes. Can’t you feel that?”
Josh shrugged. “Okay, but why would I want to feel small?”
I sighed, ready to give up, as Hailey and I leaned back together in our chairs. But then I looked at Max, and he was staring at me, and there was something both pleased and eager in his expression.
“It’s not so much that you’re small,” Max said, looking at me as he spoke, “it’s that everything around you is small too.”
I sat up again, pulling Hailey with me. “Right! It all seems so big, but it’s just a blip in space-time. Less than a blip.”
Max nodded, still looking at me. “Do you ever wonder about the creatures that must be out there on other planets?”
My breath stopped. I wanted to say, I think about that all the time. I want so badly to meet them. I dream about communicating with them. The thought that we’ll never find them in our lifetimes makes my heart hurt.
But all I said was, “Well, yeah.”
He said, “Do you ever wonder what they’d think about us?”
“What, are you worried about it?” Juanita teased him. “Like, whether the aliens will like your hairstyle? Will the extraterrestrials think you’re cool?”
Max laughed. “No, kind of the opposite, right? Because how is an alien going to notice the difference between a cool haircut and a dork one?” He leaned toward me. “You know what I mean, don’t you? I’m trying to come up with the words, here.”
I took a deep, shaky breath. I had never really tried to express any of this out loud before. “Well, this might be different, but . . . whoever’s out there, sometimes I wonder what constellation they imagine when they’re looking at our sun. Like, maybe we look over at their star and see it as part of a great hunter’s belt, and maybe they look over at ours and see it as part of some animal or shape that we can’t even guess. And we could never see what they see, but it’s still just as real.”
Max’s eyes had been on me the whole time I was speaking, and they stayed on me as he said, “I would kill to go into space someday. Far enough out to look back and see our whole planet. It would shift your whole way of looking at everything.”
Hailey pushed her elbow into me, and I knew she wanted me to say something, but I couldn’t. My mind was going in a million different directions at once, and it couldn’t figure out where to land. My heart vibrated hard inside my chest.
I had never told anyone, not even Hailey, how much I wanted to see Earth from space. How much it hurt to know I would never be able to. What did it mean? How was I supposed to respond?
Max looked away. When he spoke again, his voice had returned to a slight stiffness. “Stupid, right?”
“No,” I said quickly, “it isn’t stupid at all.” Not for him. Not for a healthy, able-bodied guy who loved the stars. In that moment I felt sure that he would find a way.
As I opened my mouth to tell him that, a bright flash of headlights whipped across us, and a car horn sounded, three quick blasts in a row.
Josh grinned. “Sounds like the girls have arrived.”
14
Hailey
Like a trail of zombies, the dudes went shuffling out to meet Lindsey and her gang in the driveway. Clara leaned toward Juanita and said quietly, “We can totally go home, okay? I’ll make up an excuse.”
Clara was ridiculous. She was impossible. How could she not see how wrong a move that would be?
“What, because of Lindsey?” Juanita said. “No, I don’t care. I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not gonna run from her.”
“Good,” I said, “because I think poor Max would be heartbroken if Clara were to leave.” Not to mention the fact that it would give Lindsey more of an opportunity to sink her claws into him.
“Hailey, you’re such a—”
“No,” I said sharply. “Just shut it, all right? I am so sick of hearing that it’s impossible. He likes you. I know he does. Juanita, will you tell her?”
Juanita looked at Clara. She seemed to be thinking it over. Unbelievable.
“See?” Clara said. “Juanita knows you’re crazy, Hailey. Just because I like astronomy and he likes astronomy, it doesn’t follow that he likes me.”
“I don’t know if he does or he doesn’t,” Juanita said. “But there is one thing I can tell you for sure. If we leave, he’s going to think you don’t like him.”
“But that’s good!” Clara said. “Don’t you—”
“Sssshhhh!” Juanita waved her hands frantically in front of her, palms out. “They’re coming!”
Max slid open the glass doors that opened from the living room out to the deck.
And moments later Lindsey, Vanessa, and Jasmine stood in front of us, staring down at us in our deck chairs, while the three guys stood by, all attention, like they were waiting for the mud wrestling to get started.
Lindsey stood right in front of me. She wore skintight jeans and a low-necked, clingy sweater, topped with a puffy red ski jacket that she’d left unzipped. Her hair, highlighted and flat-ironed to within an inch of its life, skimmed past her shoulders and onto the creamy skin of her throat and chest. For a moment, as I looked straight into her brown eyes, I could see her struggling with what to do.
And then her whole body sprang into a frenzy of excitement. “Hailey!” she cried out, sounding like I had just handed her a winning lottery ticket. “Clara! Juanita! I didn’t even know you were all going to be here. What a great surprise! This is so awesome!”
She actually leaned down and started hugging us. I held my arms stiffly, torn between hugging her back and wriggling away.
Vanessa and Jasmine kicked it into gear quickly enough, with the same unnatural excitement and hugs.
Lindsey turned to Max and swatted his upper arm. “Max, you were holding out on us! You didn’t even mention that our good friends were going to be here.”
Max looked confused. “Um, I guess it was just lucky that it worked out.”
“You know that Clara and Hailey and Juanita and I go way back, right?” Lindsey said to Max, still in that high, bouncy voice. “We’ve all known each other since the sixth grade.”
This was true. Sixth grade had been quite a year, what with moving from a tiny little elementary school where everyone had known us since preschool, to a middle school with four times as many kids, many of whom had probably heard rumors about us but had never actually seen us, or anything like us, ever in their entire lives.
But to be fair, it’s also true that until we reached middle school, Clara and I had never encountered the likes of Lindsey Baker.
The kids at our elementary school had gotten to know us when we were little. Our mom had even arranged a series of playgroups, where she’d encouraged the kids and parents to ask questions and get it all out of
their systems. And yeah, okay, a couple of them had at some point asked us how it worked when we went to the bathroom, which was embarrassing, but we’d just brushed it off, and they’d eventually dropped it.
Then, in the second week of sixth grade—in a new school, with dozens of new classmates—the old question returned. We were sitting in math class, watching the teacher write something on the board, and Lindsey was staring at me and Clara in the same dumbfounded way she’d been doing every day, with her mouth literally half-open. Then she blurted out, “But how do you go to the bathroom?”
And I looked right at her and said, making sure it was loud enough for the whole class to hear, “Lindsey, you’re in sixth grade and you don’t know how to go to the bathroom?”
And Lindsey’s whole face just transformed into this animal fury. Back then she wasn’t too attractive to begin with; her awkward stage was in full force. Her braces and frizzy hair didn’t help. Scowling at us, she looked like some kind of wild beast.
But the next day, I guess she decided to investigate. Except she didn’t just come into the bathroom and have a peek for herself. She brought in a whole platoon. She used a quarter to unlock the stall door, and there they all were, staring at us.
We sat at a diagonal to the toilet seat. I was facing forward, my pants down around my ankles, my shirt coming just to my waist. Clara faced backward, still exposed, though not quite as badly. And the area on our back—the spot where we’re attached? I think they could see the whole thing.
I covered myself with my hands, but to pull up my pants would have meant standing up, not to mention taking my hands away from their job of covering me.
By then I’d had a few nightmares about being naked at school. Yeah, I know I’m supposed to be the tough one, but come on. I was eleven years old. Anyway, the reality turned out to be way worse.
I was half-aware of Clara behind me, shaking and crying, while I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t humiliated, just pissed off. I tried, with limited success, to focus on how I was going to kick Lindsey’s ass. Later. When my pants were on.
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