“It makes me think of all the stories our parents have told us. Little magic things that we dismiss as their attempts to make us feel special. Lately, I’ve been thinking. What if we are special, and we just don’t know? What if the stories of things bigger and bolder reaching out to claim us are true? If you are favored, touched by the sun, what does that make me? Am I a creature, or favored by something big and magnificent, too?”
Yuki laughs, and the sound echoes in Grace’s ears. Her heart pounds, and her fingers tremble, and her skin pimples with gooseflesh. Meera squeezes her hand hard.
“God, I sound lovesick tonight, listeners. I met a girl, and when you meet a girl, you think too much, you know? But I hope she is listening. And I hope she knows next time is soon, and I have not forgotten that it is my turn.”
The show goes on, but Grace cuts it off. The room is dark and silent. Meera does not let go, but if she did, Grace thinks she might just float up to the ceiling. Raj sits up, and Grace feels his eyes on her: inquisitive and sharp.
“Don’t be mad,” she says. “It’s okay, it’s just—you can’t be mad.”
“It’s okay,” he repeats. “Who was that girl? She was talking about you. She was talking about you like she knew you, like she, I don’t fucking know, fell in love with you, Gracie.”
“Okay,” she cuts in, while Meera looks back and forth between them. “Stop. I—I met a girl in Vegas. We were drunk and silly and—” She taps her fingers against her arms. “She’s really nice, actually. And we got married.”
“Wow.” Raj rubs his face, and flecks of his mask fall on the bed. “What is okay about getting drunk-married in Las Vegas? This is like that movie. That American one. What’s the movie?”
“The Hangover,” Meera says.
“The Hangover,” Raj repeats. “This is like that. Only it’s you and not a white guy I’ve never heard of. What did Colonel say?”
“Didn’t tell him.”
“Wow,” he says again, falling back on the bed. He stares at the ceiling like it will provide him with answers. “Ximena and Agnes?”
“Surprisingly okay. Agnes asked me about tax benefits.”
Raj turns to look at her, and she fights hard to keep her face blank. “And you?” he asks. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” she says evenly. She looks at both of them, both of their concerned faces. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I’ve never even thought of marriage, much less to someone I don’t know. But, here I am. It’s—” Nice, is what she wants to say. I don’t want to worry about this like I have to worry about everything else. “Okay,” she says again.
“Divorce?”
“No,” Grace says. “So Colonel can find out? He’d probably have to pay for it. Absolutely not, no. I haven’t even told my mom.”
“Then, what? What’s next?”
It’s the question that’s been circling Grace’s head. It keeps her up. What’s next? She knows, but taking that first step is terrifying. Taking your millionth step is scary. She feels like she has been taking steps for a long time.
“I can handle it,” she says. She tries to smile, and Meera raises her eyebrows. “I’m a Porter. I’ll figure it out. Haven’t I always figured it out?”
Raj opens his mouth, but Meera cuts him off. “If you think you can handle it, then you can. We just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I won’t,” she says. “She’s still a complete stranger. Maybe I just needed to realize things don’t have to be as planned out and rigid as I thought. Isn’t that a good thing?”
“Okay,” Meera says. “We support you.”
“She supports you,” Raj corrects. “Come help me wash this stuff off my face. I can’t judge you properly while I’m peeling.”
It doesn’t have to be a big deal. It can just be a good thing for right now, the connection between two girls on opposite coasts. A siren and the one who stands ankle-deep at the shore.
It can just be a good thing, while it lasts, and then Grace will fold it up like the hotel stationery that still smells like sea-salt magic. She will gather it up and hide it in the deep cavity of her chest, camouflaged under her heartbeat. It will be a good thing, a good memory.
She has other things to worry about. Her future. Her job search. Her place in the vast, blue-black sky.
“Coming?” Meera calls from the door. “You know he only lets you touch his face.”
“Right behind you,” Grace says, and the echoes of Yuki’s words come with her. I think the sun saw something in you, something bright all on its own, and it picked you. She lets out a trembling breath and shuts the door firmly behind her.
Late at night, when everyone is asleep, Grace crouches on the metal balcony under the moonlight.
Yuki
11:58 p.m.
Goodnight grace porter, who i rmr
shines like the sun is reaching out from
the very core of her
Grace
12:00 a.m.
goodnight yuki yamamoto, who tells
stories like they were crafted within her,
spun with magic
and sea salt
Seven
The hallways that lead to the labs and Professor MacMillan’s office echo under Grace’s feet. There is history in these halls. There is a younger Grace Porter, wide-eyed and determined and desperate to find a place that she carved out for herself.
It is all in us, Professor MacMillan said of the bits and pieces collected in her office. These things, essentially small rocks and stones now, were once a part of the universe. I know many astronomers think I take a romantic approach to the science, but how can we not when presented with such grand facts? That something so small was once a part of something bigger than what our human brains can grasp?
The younger Grace Porter tilted her head up. Up there, you see, where the stars drew a path and the comet fire lit the way? That was where she found her purpose. She fell in love with the stars, and she was going to follow where they led.
Now, she’s twenty-eight years old and she’s reached the comet’s end. There is just Grace with a piece of paper to prove her academic merit and uncertainty eating at her insides like a black hole.
No one told her astronomers, the ones that publish research every few months and get tenured at universities and navigate programs at NASA, that those astronomers don’t have sun-gold hair. They don’t have sun-browned skin. Those astronomers don’t have ancestors that looked at the stars as a means of escape and not in awe.
“The prodigal student returns,” she hears, and the office door opens. “Grace Porter, in the flesh. It’s been months. Come in.”
Professor MacMillan’s office is still the same. Same posters on the wall. Same plaques. Same bookshelves and encased pieces of the universe she’s used in her research. She is still the same: dark blue cat-eye glasses, the way she stares at Grace as if she can see through her.
Grace is the one who has changed in the time since she’s been away. She felt victorious and proud standing in front of a panel of her professors after defending her thesis. She’d worked and climbed and fought, and she made it. There was nothing, no one, that could hold her back. Not her fear, not her uncertainty and especially not thin-lipped smiles that questioned her worth.
Do you ever wonder how things fall apart? Perhaps it is here, like this, unsure of how to climb over barriers and walls and wondering, suddenly, if you should even try.
“To be honest,” Professor MacMillan says, “I was wondering when I’d hear from you. I heard the interview in Seattle with Kunakin, Incorporated didn’t—” her lips twist “—go well.”
Grace shrugs. She spent so many hours in this room, in this chair, going over the intricacies of the observable and unobservable world. Being here shouldn’t make her heart pound, her hands tremble, but it does.
&nbs
p; “That’s one way to put it,” Grace says. “What did they tell you?”
Professor MacMillan tilts her head in thought. “You weren’t the right fit,” she says, and Grace feels a brief flare of spiteful satisfaction. “They also informed me this was in part because you walked out of the interview.” She crosses her arms and stares across her desk. “I told them that didn’t sound like you. What happened?”
Grace has always admired Professor MacMillan. She is one of the few women that make up this department and the astronomers that constitute the Northwest Coast. She showed Grace the stars as if she could pluck them from the sky and hold them in her hand and said, See? You could do this, too. It was never said that Grace would have to climb farther, higher, but Grace knew. Grace knows. Still, it hurts.
It hurts that Professor MacMillan thought she could get that job. It hurts that despite the anger that pushed her to leave the interview, she still wanted to get it, just to prove she could.
“I wasn’t the right fit,” Grace says. “They made that clear, so I left. I don’t—” She stops herself because despite her frustrations, this is her mentor, her advisor. This is a person who opened her professional network to Grace, even if some of them are rotten. “I don’t want to work with anyone that makes me feel small. I’m a good astronomer with good qualifications.”
Professor MacMillan frowns. “You are,” she agrees. “I know that. And you already know you have a place here in my lab.”
“I know,” Grace says, cutting her off. She slumps in the chair. “I appreciate that, really. I just need to take a step back and figure out where I want to go. Where I want to be. I need to be the best and doing the best.”
“Then take a step back,” her professor says. “When you knew you wanted to be an astronomer, what did you see that made you think this was the right choice for you?” Behind her are all the plaques she’s received for her work. Prestige hangs in each frame. This could be you one day, she told Grace once. You could do this, too.
“It’s hard to remember,” Grace says. She was young and rebelling against someone else’s dream for her. Medicine was for someone else. “I saw me here,” she says. “I saw me becoming you one day. My own version.”
“And what do you see now?” her professor asks.
Closed doors, Grace thinks. Another mountain, another fence, another endless staircase to climb. The desire to be the best and prove it to herself and Colonel and anyone who thinks she should be hindered by things she cannot and will not let them control.
“My first astronomy class,” she says instead, “do you remember what you told us?”
“No,” Professor MacMillan says immediately. “But I’m assuming it’s the same spiel I give every year I teach that intro class. Remind me.”
“You said you had romantic notions about this field,” Grace says abruptly, sitting up. “You said that the universe was old, and made up of many things. You said we were old, and that the universe made us up, too.” To her horror she feels her throat start to get tight. “If it is made up of me, and I am made up of it, I want my fair shot to see myself in it.” To stand beside its chaotic, hungry voids and fill them with her rage and her joy. Her fear and her hard-won courage. “I want the chance to be Dr. Porter, the right fit. The best fit.”
Grace takes a trembling breath and presses her lips together. She will not let her discouragement break her spirit in this office. She will keep her dignity and save that for home. Her fingers clench in her lap, and she struggles to look at Professor MacMillan with an even gaze. It’s not fair, she wants to say. I worked my ass off to be the best. I am the best you have.
“Okay,” Professor MacMillan says, like she is talking to something scared and rabid. “Okay. You’re frustrated, and I get that.” She leans in, voice gentling. “It can be a hard field to thrive in. More often than not I am the only woman working on a project. I am questioned and undermined despite my fair number of achievements. It can be hard, but it’s rewarding work. I wouldn’t put my weight behind you if I didn’t think you could do it.”
Grace feels her eyes sting, and she blinks furiously. She wants the validation of her mentor, someone who has passed down her knowledge and expertise and contacts. She also wants to scream because the struggles Professor MacMillan faces in this field decades into her career are compounded threefold for Grace before she even begins. She grits her teeth until they hurt.
She waits until she can say, “I know,” and the words came out as words should, and not as if they had to fight a battle to get there. “I know I can do it. I just need time to figure out how. Where exactly it is I want to be.”
“It can be difficult,” Professor MacMillan says, “getting that first foot in the door. You’re not the first graduate to feel a little lost once they’re out in the real world. But—” She shrugs, leaning back in her chair. “If anyone was going to be the next me, I would be honored to share this mantle with you, Dr. Porter.”
“Thank you,” Grace says quietly. She forces herself to meet Professor’s MacMillan’s eyes, as a peer and not a student. “Do you have any advice?”
Professor MacMillan grimaces. Her gray hair and crow’s feet make her look tired. “Listen,” she says. “I’m a researcher first, and a professor and advisor second. I don’t have all the answers you might think I do.”
“But you said I’m not the first.”
“Of course, you’re not the first. You won’t be the last. I try to tell my students the same thing—be persistent, be dependable and don’t back down when you know you’re right. I know there are things that might make that harder for you. I wish I knew how to combat that.”
“Me, too.”
Professor MacMillan nods. “Listen, I’m not telling you anything groundbreaking, okay? You spent your undergrad, including your summers, knee-deep in astronomy. We saw kids come and go, but not you. You went straight into the master’s program and finished the PhD program faster than some people finish lunch. You’ve spent the past eleven years racing against all our expectations and your own. And now that you’ve met them, you’re sitting here in my office, wondering what the hell you’re supposed to do now.”
She pauses, and Grace waits, trying to find her conclusion.
“Grace Porter, you are one of the most hardworking people I have ever seen. Eleven years is a long time to prove yourself to anyone. If anyone asks, I’d say you’ve earned the right for a break. To take a step back, as you said, and figure out your next eleven.”
“I feel like if I stop,” Grace says, “I’ll miss my chance. I have to plan it all out now, or I’ll lose the opportunity I had. I won’t have a second chance at getting this right.”
Professor MacMillan looks at her, and Grace is certain she sees her insecurity and exhaustion and ragged determination that she feels wavering.
Maybe eleven years is a long time to focus all your energy and time on one pursuit. Maybe it is a long time proving you can reach the finish line. She is here now, and she does not feel that elation that engulfed her when she graduated. She does not feel like anyone special. She does not feel particularly favored by the sun.
“And maybe you won’t,” Professor MacMillan says. “If so, that doesn’t make it your own personal failing. It’s not yours to take on. We’ll be losing a damn good astronomer if they refuse to make room for you. But you want to know something I’ve learned?”
Grace nods.
Professor MacMillan crosses her arms. “You are made up of stars and the black glittering universe,” she says quietly. “It may be too romantic for most of the people in this field, but it’s true. But you are still just a human. Just a small thing that has to find its way like everyone else in this enormous world. It will not be simple, Grace Porter, and it will not be easy. You may have to make a lot of noise, and the universe’s silence can be oppressive and thick. But you want them to hear you, and they will. So do not, no
t even for one second, stop making noise.”
“And if they don’t listen?”
Professor MacMillan shrugs. “Don’t give them that choice.”
* * *
Grace
7:39 p.m.
having an existential crisis.
lol text it.
Yuki
7:45 p.m.
[fuckboi voice] wow...without me??
Grace
7:46 p.m.
lmao
i am tired and frustrated and anxious about work
and i have no one to take it out on
you married a real winner
Yuki
7:49 p.m.
i married the sun’s favorite girl. who else can say that?
Yuki
7:54 p.m.
weird question but are you okay
Grace
7:56 p.m.
i’m okay
i can handle it
Yuki
7:58 p.m.
totally believable. nailed it
Grace
8:03 p.m.
i have no choice but to handle it
do you ever feel like that?
sorry i know you have your show soon
Yuki
8:04 p.m.
um excuse me this is what wives are for.
in my gay fantasies growing up i always
wanted my wife to text me late at night
then we’d run away together and join like
a circus
Yuki
8:05 p.m.
is that what’s happening here
Grace
Honey Girl Page 6