“Nah.”
She looks at me now, her eyes dull. That bright, vibrant green now a faded sage, like old paint in a doctor’s office.
“I don’t want to go,” she says.
“What if I … snuck Drew in? So you guys can be together for a little bit. Would that help?”
I will break a rule. This is how desperate I am.
She looks at me. Through me. “I don’t want to see him.”
I cross the room and sit beside her. “You broke up?”
She leans her head against the wall, closes her eyes. “He can do better.”
I snort. “You’re kidding, right? He’s a drug dealer. I know you’re feeling bad, but—”
Her eyes snap open, and the first bit of light I’ve seen in them for a while flares. “He’s wonderful.”
I flinch under that stare. Drew called me out on my observational weaknesses, and maybe those don’t only extend to my sister. Maybe I’ve spent so much time with books and telescopes that I don’t see people anymore. Don’t see them right.
“Okay. Then why don’t you want to be with him?” I say.
I am trying to know her. To ask questions. But she makes it so hard.
Nah closes her eyes. Doesn’t answer.
I squeeze her hand. “Listen. I’ve been thinking. After graduation, let’s get an apartment. In Cambridge. Ben said he could get you a job at Castaways, and there’s a really cool yoga studio nearby where I do meditation. They have a teacher training course. You’d love that. We can paint every wall a different color, like Mom always said she wanted to, but Dad said would be like putting the boardwalk in our house. What do you think?”
Her brow furrows. “You’ll be at Plebe Summer. In Annapolis.”
You know what always got me, at the end of The Little Prince? How he went back for her. For the rose. He spent all this time traveling the universe, discovering its secrets, but he wanted to go back to this rose who told him off, lied to him, was never willing to accept his help—so stubborn: Let the tigers come with their claws! Still, he was willing to be bitten by a poisonous snake, which was the only way he could return to Asteroid B-612, to their planet, so that he could be with the rose again.
I don’t know if that’s beautiful or demented. He chains himself to that little asteroid, with that rose who is going to be pricking him with her thorns for the rest of his life. But she’s all he’s got. And he’s all she’s got.
And so he goes back.
But he has to die to get to her. I think. Or at least be really, really hurt. He has to sacrifice himself.
Love is the hardest thing to understand. But also the simplest. It defies all logic.
I swallow. “I’m going to MIT. I mean, if I get in. It’s obviously really hard. I have backups—Harvard. Well, Harvard’s not a backup, but you know what I mean.”
She stares at me. “What the hell are you talking about, Mae? I told you to reschedule the interview. I thought you—are you actually being serious right now?”
I’m not a great liar, but I try anyway. To make her think I am okay with this.
“Yes. Ben goes to MIT. So … you know. If I stay here, he and I can be—”
“You are not staying in Boston for me,” she growls. “And you would never stay for some person you were dating. Not even Ben.”
“Ben’s a bonus. He’s not the reason. Seeing Nate in the astronautical program has shown me how great their—”
She grabs my arm so hard I can feel the bruise form. “I am not your fucking responsibility.”
But she is. We are taming her, and now we are responsible. Forever.
“You’re my sister,” I say, “and I love you and I think it would be really cool to have an apartment together and live near my boyfriend and Nate, too, and … MIT is amazing. I can still get into NASA this way and—”
“I don’t want to live in your stupid apartment, okay?”
Mom, a little help. Please.
“But what will you do? School’s done in six months. Are you going to stay here, live with Aunt Nora and Uncle Tony by yourself? You’d be so bored! And lonely.” And maybe still on drugs. I rest a hand on her knee. “I know everything is so bad right now. But we need a plan. What do you want?”
She lets go of my arm. Stares into the street.
“Nothing,” she says, soft.
She’s like George Clooney’s character in Gravity, floating off into space. Farther and farther into the darkness, with nothing but a country song to sing him to sleep.
Work the problem. I have to work the problem.
“Then I’ll want for the both of us until you decide on something,” I say. “And I want you to be happy. And healthy. And alive. You deserve good things, Nah. A good life.”
She just looks at me.
“Starting with a brownie.” You have to start somewhere. “I’m bringing you a brownie. And then you can teach me some yoga. The stuff you and Mom did. Will you? Downward cat? Or whatever it’s called?”
I haven’t seen her do yoga since the wave. Her mat is always out in her room, like she’s waiting for the right moment.
“I’m tired.” She closes her eyes and leans her head against the window seat wall.
“Then I’ll bring coffee, too,” I say. She’s not the only Winters that gets to be stubborn.
She doesn’t move. A statue.
“Okay. I’ll be back soon. Coffee, brownie, yoga. Uncle Tony said he was gonna get a tree today, too. We could decorate later, if you want. We have some of the ornaments from LA. The egg from when we all went to Prague, remember? The one you love.”
I pick up the afghan, settle it around her. She doesn’t move.
I’m halfway out the door when she says, “Mae?”
“Yes?”
Nah opens her eyes long enough to look at me. “When you get to space, will you name a star after me?”
“Of course.” I know she’s trying to reassure me that I will still be an astronaut no matter what. I don’t know how she can keep her eye on my prize and not have one of her own. “What made you think of that?”
“I was thinking. You know, in The Little Prince. That line: ‘In one of those stars I shall be living…’”
When the Little Prince leaves Earth, he tells the pilot that when he looks up at the sky at night, the prince will be in one of those stars, laughing. “I shall not leave you,” he assures the pilot.
And then a poisonous snake bites him. And he leaves Earth forever.
“Will you?” Her voice is insistent. “Name one for me?”
“Sure. We’ll name it together. When I’m up there. I’ll send you a Hubble image of it,” I say. “After you see it, you can decide if you want it to be called Nah or Hannah or maybe—”
“You’ll pick the right thing,” she says, closing her eyes again. “You always do.”
The sunlight moves across her, leaving my sister in shadows.
I stand in the doorway, watching her. “I’ll be back soon, okay?”
She doesn’t open her eyes. Already gone to the places I can’t follow. A country song, playing in the dark.