At Al-Anon, where the parents go to bitch about us losers, I heard they have this saying, this fucked-up joke: How do you know an addict is lying?… Because she’s talking.
So maybe it doesn’t matter, the trying. No one’s gonna believe me anyway.
13
Mae
ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit
Earth Date: 2 October
Earth Time (EST): 21:30
It’s cold in Boston.
And beautiful.
The leaves on the trees are russet, scarlet, gold. People wear scarves and wool coats now that it’s getting colder, and they walk quickly, with a lot of purpose. They have stiff upper lips.
In Boston, sprinkles are jimmies and milkshakes are frappes. We don’t take the train to Harvard Station, we take it to Hah-vahd Station. Every few blocks we pass a beautiful stone church. The graveyards here are so old the stones are crumbling, and the graves are filled with soldiers from the Revolutionary War. This place has roots.
I’ve always liked Boston more than LA. Maybe that’s because, thanks to Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics, there are more physicists here than anywhere else in the United States—except for NASA, of course. There’s MIT, too.
People here read a lot. On the train, on benches, in cafes. Everyone looks like they’ve pulled an all-nighter, because they probably have. It’s a town of universities, of smaht people. I really love it a lot. For the first time, I don’t feel like the strangest person in the room. I hope Annapolis is like this, too. And NASA.
Nah hates it. Hates it. You take her anywhere below seventy degrees and she’s miserable. She doesn’t like wearing socks. She is suspicious of places without palm trees or green juice or sun all the time. She was already wilting in LA—even before the wave. One of those roses that needs very special fertilizer and gardeners who sing to them and the perfect balance of shadow and light. I am afraid she is going to shrivel up in Boston.
Aunt Nora lives in a two-story brick house in Brookline, on a quiet street lined with other big, old houses. I thought I’d miss the sound of the ocean, of skateboarders rolling by, and people cooking out all the time, Micah’s surfboard propped up next to the front door, but I don’t. I like the quiet here, how it wraps around you like a soft blanket. Sometimes in the morning I look out the window and see wild turkeys in the backyard. Actual turkeys. There is frost, and the air smells like autumn: crispy and smoky.
Sometimes Earth is an excellent place to be, if you can’t orbit it.
We’ve been here countless times before—with our parents, on vacation. I can still see Dad holed up in a corner of the living room, reading in the leather wingback chair. Mom would always be in the kitchen, cooking while Aunt Nora worked on legal briefs at the table and kept refilling their wineglasses. Uncle Tony might kick them out to make his famous meatballs or lasagna if he wasn’t working on his car. Nate would be showing me something insanely cool that he built for class. Hannah would be on the phone with Micah.
It’s not like that now.
For one, it’s been very, very quiet. Just me, Nah, and our aunt and uncle, all of us tiptoeing around, speaking in whispers. We’ve only been here a few days, so I’m sure that will change. I don’t feel like a guest, exactly, but I don’t feel like it’s my home, either. They keep saying it is, but it’s not. So far, Nah refuses to eat much of anything, so I end up alone with my aunt and uncle for meals. We don’t know what to say, so we end up watching TV, which would have driven both of my parents mad.
My room is on the second floor, down the hall from Hannah’s. It overlooks the tiny backyard while hers looks out onto the front yard, just like our setup in Venice. There’s a huge sycamore tree taking up most of the backyard. Nate, Nah, and I named it Elvis when we were all really little. I like Elvis. He’s here to stay, and it’s nice to know that something isn’t going to change.
All I have from home right now is a large suitcase and my telescope. I put my telescope beside the window, but I don’t have the heart to look through it tonight. Instead, I drag the desk chair to my bed, and then—very carefully so I don’t fall and break my neck—I tack my poster with the image of the Helix Nebula on the ceiling above my pillow.
But that only takes five minutes.
I wish I had homework to do. Calculus. Physics. But we don’t start school for two more days.
I don’t mind being far from friends at school. We all would have had to say goodbye in June, anyway, if I got into Annapolis. Plebe Summer begins on the first of July—navy hazing, my dad calls it. Called it. I do mind being far from Dad and Mom and Hannah, though. I didn’t realize how much time we were all together until they were gone. Hannah’s only technically here. We share oxygen. On occasion. It’s been thirty-six hours since I took her pills, and every time I try to talk to her, she walks away. So.
I think my dad was my best friend.
Why did it take this long for me to figure that out?
This is not a line of thinking that is conducive to becoming an astronaut, so I lie down, put in my earbuds, and hit PLAY on my phone: “Starman.”
When I wake up, the room is dark. I haven’t taken a nap since kindergarten. Perhaps it’s jet lag. Nate has texted me three times, and when I take out my earbuds, I can hear him laughing downstairs. Home from MIT for the weekend.
I think he might be my mission control now. The person who will answer if I say, Houston, we have a problem.
When I reach the bottom of the staircase, a boy I’ve never seen before is sprawled on the couch next to Nate, staring intently at a laptop on the coffee table.
“Yeah, but the aerodynamics are all off,” Nate’s saying. “There’s no way I’m getting that past Paulson.”
The boy next to him looks up, and I think I maybe gasp a little because MY FAVORITE MANGA CHARACTER IS IN MY NEW HOUSE.
It’s as if Ichigo Kurosaki from Bleach decided to come over for dinner. This boy specimen even has the same messy orange hair.
“You, I don’t know,” he says.
“That’s my genius cousin,” Nate says. “Be nice to her and maybe she’ll give you a shout-out on Twitter when she’s up on the International Space Station.”
The boy stands up. Dear god, he’s moving closer to me and I have yet to introduce myself or vet his respectability as my cousin’s study partner in any way, but I can’t because I HAVE LOST THE CAPACITY FOR SPEECH. It’s possible I’m having a lucid dream. This would explain any and all cognitive malfunctions on my part.
“I’m Ben,” he says when he reaches the bottom of the stairs.
Something very strange is going on in spacetime. As in, I no longer know when I am or how long I have been staring at this Ben person and I should stop but I am becoming increasingly confused.
He looks exactly like Sôta Fukushi, who plays Ichigo in the live-action movie. If I saw him on the street and had no self-respect, I would ask him for an autograph. On my bare chest. I am losing my mind.
Maybe he is Sôta Fukushi, but is incognito and using the alias Ben. So he can study abroad in peace.
IS SÔTA FUKUSHI IN MY LIVING ROOM?
“Tamura’s my roommate,” Nate says. “I’m building a plane, and he’s calculating the probability of it crashing.” He leans toward me. “But he’s a geophysicist, not an astronautics engineer like—ahem—some of us, so his calculus isn’t up to snuff.”