by Erin Teagan
Johanna and Meg and Charlotte swarmed over my sticker sheets.
“Should we put them on the front, like right here?” I pointed to the chest pocket. “Or on the back like here?”
“Wait. Stop.” Ella climbed off her top bunk. “This probably isn’t even allowed.”
Meg froze, a glitter letter M dangling from the tip of a finger. “Why not?”
“We’re at Space Camp, Meg. I’m just saying. It will look unprofessional.”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s probably not against the rules.” Although I wasn’t completely positive. “Also it will look nice and the good thing is nobody will forget us!”
The room got kind of silent and serious and Ella was giving all sorts of stern looks to Meg and Charlotte.
Johanna stuck a golden J onto her flight suit and held it up. “Das ist Spitze!” she bellowed, breaking the silence. And then she smiled. “I mean … uh, awesome!”
And then we all burst out laughing, everyone trying to say what Johanna had just said, but failing horribly.
I held out an orange glitter E for Ella, and for a moment, I thought she was going to take it and join my glitter letter party.
“Be nice,” Charlotte said to Ella under her breath.
But instead Ella shook her head and walked past me, folding up her flight suit neat and tidy and putting it in her locker.
Everyone was pretty much finished unpacking, except for Charlotte, who’d brought about a million things too many, when there was a knock.
I hopped off my bed, dodging Ella’s swinging legs, and opened the door. Something lit up in disco lights and rolled over my feet before I could move out of the way. It was a little white robot dog with long ears and a wagging stub of a tail.
“Aw!” Meg said, running over. “He is the cu-test!”
The dog barked and spun in a circle. “BARK. BARK.”
“What do you think of our mascot?” Mallory said from the doorway.
“Did you design him yourself?” Johanna asked, kneeling on the floor for a better look. The robot wheeled over to her. “Is that a touch sensor? Is he rechargeable?”
“Wow. I’ve never seen a dog like that or a robot like that and did you make that at camp?” Charlotte asked.
“I made him my first week as a Space Camp crew trainer,” Mallory said. “And, yes, I designed him myself. His name is Orion.”
Orion stood up on two legs. “BARK.”
“He’s telling you it’s time to meet the rest of Team Odyssey and perform our first mission training. An E-V-A practice.”
“An E-V-what?” Charlotte asked.
“An extravehicular activity,” Ella said.
“Otherwise known as a space walk,” Mallory said, leading Orion into the hallway.
With that, everyone put on their flight suits and straightened their beds, a Space Camp rule according to Ella, who had read the entire rules and regulations booklet we’d received in our orientation packets a few weeks ago. And maybe memorized them.
Everyone grabbed their Space Camp backpacks and followed Orion down the hallway. We went through the habitat common area where they were streaming news from the International Space Station, past a hall of artifacts and a Space Camp store, and out the front doors.
“Shortcut across the shuttle park,” Mallory called over her shoulder.
“Beeindruckend!” Johanna shouted. “I mean, wow!” Charlotte and Meg were way ahead, racing Orion down the sidewalk, Mallory and Ella hollering at them to slow down. “We’re going to walk right under the Pathfinder.”
But there was no stopping and staring this time around. Meg and Charlotte were already at the door on the other side, waiting impatiently for the rest of us to catch up. Orion zipped along beside us.
When we got inside, we walked past the dining hall and stopped at a sign that said, “MISSION CONTROL CENTER,” where the boys’ bunk—the other half of Team Odyssey—waited, everyone dressed in flight suits.
One boy thrust his hand out to me. He said, “My name is James and I’ll be your commander for this mission.” After looking at my glitter name, he added, “Luciana.”
Alex put his hand on James’s shoulder. “There are no commanders on this mission, trainee.”
James grinned and raised his eyebrows at him. “You sure? Because I happen to be the best at commanding things.” He was tall with his hair cut close to his head, almost like he was a real-life commander in the navy or something.
“We’re sure,” Ella said, barging into the conversation. She crossed her arms, refusing to shake his hand.
Charlotte tugged on Ella’s flight suit. “Be nice.”
“Oh! Oh!” Meg said, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Can I be commander?”
Ella rolled her eyes.
Mallory and Alex pushed through the swingy hatch doors into the mission control area and led us inside. “No commanders for this mission,” Alex repeated.
Johanna stopped in front of me and I ran into her. And then I saw what made basically the entire group, boys and girls, commanders and noncommanders, stop in their tracks.
“Welcome to the mission floor,” Mallory said.
There were spacecrafts and space habitats and greenhouses growing leafy plants in hydroponic gardens, not to mention a black sky ceiling with twinkling star lights. It was like all of a sudden something was in my eyes and I had to blink fast to stop them from overflowing. I held my star necklace and made a wish on the biggest star I saw. Please let me be a real astronaut one day. Please let me be the first girl on Mars.
“Wow,” Meg whispered. “Are we, like, really in space or something?”
Johanna grinned. “Cool.”
“This way,” Mallory said, motioning to a rack lined with space suits. “Suit up!”
I walked up to the nearest space suit, just hanging there, waiting for an astronaut to step inside. An astronaut like me, maybe.
“Lower torso assembly goes on first,” Alex explained, holding up a pair of overalls that looked a lot like snow pants. “Then boots, then upper torso assembly.” He pointed to a jacket that looked more like football pads. “And then, the helmet and gloves.”
I helped Johanna balance herself while she pulled on her astronaut pants and stepped into her boots.
“In the logbook, it says these suits in real life can weigh almost three hundred pounds or something,” Ella lectured. Of course, in space they weigh nothing at all.
The Space Camp logbook had been in our bags with our flight suits. Mine was zipped into one of my suit pockets and I was happy to see that there were a bunch of pages at the back to make observations. Or drawings.
“How did you read that already?” I asked.
Ella glared at me. “Maybe reading the logbook would have been a better use of your time than putting sparkly stickers all over the place,” she said disapprovingly.
“Oh,” I said, backing up in surprise. Because she was making it very hard to be friends with her. And it was practically camp law to be friends with your bunkmates.
“Ella,” Charlotte said, pulling her pants tighter. “Stop it.”
“And anyway these suits aren’t completely accurate because we’d have to wear a layer of cooling clothing so we didn’t burn up in the heat of the heavy suits,” Ella continued like she hadn’t just been so mean. I patted down my glitter letter L on my flight suit, which was already starting to peel up.
Johanna lurched forward, nearly fully assembled, and Charlotte and I caught her. Mallory handed me a lower torso assembly and I put it on, hiking my suspenders up and sliding into a pair of moon boots. Lunar overshoes, according to the logbook, or at least according to Ella.
James flipped his visor up, already in his astronaut gear. “In case you didn’t know, it’s not even hot in space all the time.”
Ella turned to him, also all the way dressed, and it was like an astronaut face-off. “I was going to say that. Or they could have a layer to protect them from cold.”
Orion circled Jo
hanna and me, and then Meg stomped by like a zombie abominable snowman with her arms out for balance. Except it didn’t work and she tumbled onto the floor, losing a glove that was obviously too big, and a boot too.
Ella broke her standoff with James and rushed over to help her up.
“Meg is just like my little sister,” Johanna said to me, pausing while she put a glove on. “She’s eight and she dreams of coming here too.”
“I don’t have a little sister, but I’m getting one soon.” I grabbed a helmet from a stack of cubes on the wall. “Is it hard being a big sister?”
“Sometimes,” she said, struggling with her other glove. “Like if she steals your favorite shirt and puts paint all over it.” She smiled at me. “But your sister probably won’t do that.”
I pictured me and Isadora riding our bikes around the block, picking mulberries off the tree in our yard, and making sidewalk-chalk cities. I’d tell her my favorite folktale from Chile about the sun and moon. I’d let her borrow my digital microscope. I looked back up at the biggest star and made another wish. For a sister. For Isadora to come home.
“Let’s get you into a suit that fits,” Mallory said, taking Meg by the hand.
“The rest of you can follow me,” Alex said, bringing us all to the main part of the mission area. “For this simulation, you’re a team of astronauts on the ISS, otherwise known as the International Space Station.” He led us to the biggest module on the mission floor, an exact replica of the real ISS.
“Your mission is to replace various tiles on the outside of the ISS as part of a materials experiment.”
“The MISSE,” Ella added, something else she probably learned from her logbook reading.
James straightened. “Materials International Space Station Experiment.”
“I know that,” Ella retorted. “MISSE is the acronym.”
Charlotte was walking with Johanna and she rolled her eyes. “It’s going to be a long week with those two.”
Alex continued. “A real concern for astronauts doing an EVA …”
“That’s an extravehicular activity,” Ella announced, even though I’m pretty sure most of us knew that. Especially since Mallory had already told us girls back in our sleep station.
Alex shot her a warning look and started again. “The oxygen levels are built into your suits and are carefully controlled. A real concern during an EVA is getting a tear in your suit, or snagging your suit, which leaves a small hole. If this happens, the suit will lose pressurization. You’ll have approximately five minutes before your oxygen reaches dangerous levels and you will have to return to the spacecraft.”
Meg ran by again, catching up with Ella, this time managing to stay upright.
Mallory stopped us in front of the ISS and pointed to two metal trays embedded in the side of the spacecraft. “The purpose of the experiment is to test different materials to see how they perform in space with all the UV radiation and exposure to extreme temperatures. Your job is to take ten new material tiles”—she opened one of the metal-toolbox-looking containers on a tall table in between the two metal trays on the ISS—“and find each tile’s correct place on the tray.” She pulled out a metal tile with a bunch of switches on it and fit it into a rectangular spot on the metal tray. And then she pulled out a different tile, this one full of wires and shaped like a triangle, and measured it up against a few places on the tray until she found where it would go. “After you’re sure of the fit, secure each tile with this adhesive foam.” She held up a canister with a spray nozzle.
“It’s like a puzzle,” Meg said, nodding.
“Exactly,” Mallory said, smiling. “A space puzzle.”
“You’ll go two at a time,” Alex added. “And the two trainees who perform their EVA with the fewest errors in five minutes will get to captain a robotics team.”
I could see Ella and James at the front of the pack, both of their heads swinging to attention.
“My robotics team at home basically wins every competition every single year,” James declared.
Ella perked up. “My team went to state last year.”
“But you lost then, right, Ella?” Meg said. “I remember that. You were so mad, you cr—”
Ella gave her a look that could have melted a Mars glacier. “We would have won, actually,” she said through gritted teeth, “if it weren’t for a faulty charging station. Our robot ran out of juice right in the middle of the competition.”
“Rookie mistake,” James whispered to his bunkmates, and Ella looked like she was about to erupt.
My belly was starting to turn. I hadn’t expected there to be so many genius kids here. I patted my astronaut suit, feeling my star necklace underneath. Did they all want to be astronauts like I did?
Mallory shushed Ella and James’s bickering and led us to the International Space Station. I took a deep breath and climbed the three metal stairs to go inside.
As I looked around, my heart skipped a beat. The inside of the module looked and felt like how I’d imagined the real thing would be. Buttons and switches and screens flashing data. The walls were lined with cabinets in all different sizes, closed and latched tight. There were computer stations and places to run experiments. Everything was clean and white.
“There’s an astronaut toilet,” Noah from the boys’ bunk snorted.
We all sat in a circle in the node of the space station, and when we looked up, there was even a cupula, a giant window that gave a view of the night sky.
Alex appeared with a clipboard. “Johanna and Tanner. You’re up first.” A boy hopped up on the other side of James, and he joined Johanna at the door. They left with a wave and a thumbs-up and we were alone, all of us sitting in our hot space suits on the floor, waiting for our turns.
“There is a lot of waiting for astronauts in real life as well,” Mallory said, leaning against the far wall. “Patience is key. In fact, Japanese astronauts are required to fold one thousand paper cranes during their training. If I were you, I’d take this time to make notes and reread the section about this activity in the logbook.”
“Well, I’m not one for waiting,” Ella announced. “I’m more for doing.”
“Ella doesn’t like to lose at things,” Meg whispered to me. “In case you couldn’t tell.”
I didn’t like losing either. And if we were being honest, it was probably my least favorite thing if you didn’t count centipedes. The big hairy kind at least.
“Especially now since she doesn’t have any friends left,” Meg said.
“What?” I said.
Johanna and Tanner came back. “Just two errors,” Johanna said, spacesuit-less and grinning.
“You get to hang from the ceiling!” Tanner said.
“Meg and José. You’re up next,” Alex said.
Meg stood up so fast, she teetered in her moon boots for a moment before gaining her balance. And then she strode out of the room like she was the queen of space and I didn’t even get to ask her about the Ella-having-no-friends thing.
James and I were called last. Johanna and Charlotte smiled at me and I knew they felt a little bad that I got stuck with Mr. Know-It-All-King-of-Robotics. James sighed like all of this was everyday boring stuff, but when we left the space station and the entire mission floor came into view, I heard him gasp a little through the headset in my helmet. He squinted his eyes at me when he caught me looking at him.
“I’ve never seen an astronaut with purple hair before,” he said.
I pulled up my visor, sweating inside my suit. “Astronauts come with hair in all shapes and sizes and colors, James.”
He snorted. “That’s the kind of stuff your mom has to tell you. It’s like mom law.”
I ignored his comments and focused on Alex, who was standing next to two harnesses attached to the twinkly ceiling. The room was quiet and dark with blue lights illuminating the mission area. “Step on in,” he said.
James quickly grabbed his harness and just as quickly got his boots stuck in the
legholes. I took my time and slid each leg through the harness, and by the time James untangled himself, I was swinging midair above him. Smiling, because I couldn’t help it. Obviously, he didn’t think the girl with the purple stripe in her hair had the skills to be a good astronaut. I was going to have to show him.
Even though I was only a few feet from the ground, it felt like I was miles above the earth. Was this how it felt to be on a real space walk? Because if so, I wanted to go on a real space walk every day of my whole life.
But right now, I needed to concentrate on the challenge. In front of me was the metal materials tray, stuck to the side of the ISS. Next to me on the tall table sat two toolboxes, one for me and one for James, each with its own material tiles and a canister of adhesive foam. James zipped up to his materials tray and supplies across from me.
“Ready to begin?” Alex asked, looking at a stopwatch, and we nodded our heads through our astronaut helmets. “Okay, ten tiles, go!”
I threw open my box of tiles, taking them all out and laying them on my side of the table.
I eyed the tiles, looking for the right ones to fit the board. There were tiles made of plastic and metal in all different thicknesses, tiles with hooks on them, wires, or switches, even a tile that looked like glass but felt like clear, hard plastic.
“Don’t forget that you’re supposed to be in a microgravity environment now,” Alex warned from where he stood right under us. He reached up and grabbed one of my tiles.
“Hey,” I said. “I need that one.”
“Microgravity,” he repeated, grabbing two more tiles. “Don’t forget, nothing would stay in place.”
I rushed to collect the rest of my supply before Alex could take more, bumping into the ISS and sending one of James’s tiles back to the floor.
“Watch out!” James yelled.
With one hand holding me steady, I assessed my tiles again, way behind James who was working methodically through the challenge.
“Did you even read the directions in the logbook?” he said.
I ignored him. And no, I hadn’t, if we were being honest.
