What Happens Next

by Claire Swinarski

  I froze. I hadn’t said a word about my sisters—either of them—to Leo or Simone. Maybe for once I didn’t want to be Blair McCourt’s little sister. Especially now, when everyone in town knew her as the girl who flipped out over a cupcake. Sophie and Lex had probably told every single one of our friends from school, even. Abby’s big sister lost her mind over dessert.

  “She told me Blair’s spending the summer in a treatment facility. That she has an eating disorder,” said Simone hesitantly. “You didn’t tell me that. Or that you even had another sister.”

  I scowled. “I barely know you.”

  “You know me well enough to help us out, stargazer.”

  “Because I need an introduction to Joanna Creech. Not because I’m nice.”

  That made Simone chuckle.

  “Yeah, well, he wants you to do more. He wants you to double-check that the spot we found is really where it’s buried. By asking that librarian. The big one?”

  “Her name is Harriet,” I mumbled.

  “Yeah. See if she knows anything. Leo’s paranoid. Starting to doubt himself.” She rubbed her hands on her arms. It was getting kind of chilly.

  “I just don’t get what a twelve-year-old needs to talk to a book editor for,” Simone continued.

  “I just don’t get how this treasured telescope wound up in a time capsule when Leo has never even been here before,” I said.

  “That’s not my story to tell,” said Simone.

  “Well, the editor isn’t mine,” I said.

  Simone glanced at me. “Your sister . . . she’s real sick, huh? Your mom said you guys were close.”

  I didn’t respond. I was tired; I was so tired of people trying to grab on to pieces of Blair. Aleksander and Father Peter Patrick and Miss Mae and Harrison and Joe at the hardware store. Everyone wanted to hold on to her and make her their own story. Well, she was my sister. Not some freak show of the week.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to bring her up. It’s just—I have a sister, too. We’re close. It must be hard.”

  I reached up and tightened my ponytail. “I see Leo.”

  We got to the clearing, where Leo stood with a telescope pointed toward the sky. Not the Star-Gazer Twelve, obviously, but his Tyler-Weimer, which was almost as good.

  “Sagittarius,” he said, pointing. “The archer. Easy to find for an astronomer like yourself, yes?”

  It was. It was a whole pile of stars, right there in the sky. When I tried to point out constellations to my mom or Jade, they would just squint their eyes and shake their heads. But to me, they seemed clear as day.

  “We wanted to go over the plan for Saturday,” said Leo. “I think it’s smart if you double-check with the librarian. See what she knows.”

  “And then it won’t be super obvious when the time capsule gets dug up?” I asked. “I thought that was the whole point of the metal detectors! I could have asked her right away!”

  “Why would you dig it up? You’re a kid, kids talk,” said Leo, waving his hand dismissively, ignoring my logic. “No one will jump to conclusions about you. The item missing is of no importance to a little girl.”

  “Little girl? I’m going to be in eighth grade,” I told him. “Besides, everyone knows I like the stars.”

  “Is there even a record of what’s in it? Maybe no one will notice it’s missing,” said Simone. “At any rate, would they dig it up again if they thought it had been dug up? I mean, it’s not like there’s ten thousand dollars hidden in there.”

  “Actually, the telescope is worth—well. Never mind that. The eclipse will only be a few minutes long. Obviously it will take us a bit longer than that to fully retrieve it, so every single moment is precious. We don’t have time for you to be running around willy-nilly with a shovel. We have to be sure,” said Leo.

  “We are sure. That spot was the only place the metal detectors picked anything up,” I said.

  Leo threw his hands in the air. “And perhaps it’s nothing! A faulty detector, a dropped quarter that got buried over the years, a pipe!” His eyes were blazing. This was serious business to him. Life or death.

  “I think Simone should be there, too,” Leo continued.

  “What?” Simone and I asked in unison.

  “This type of manual labor may require two people,” he argued.

  “No,” I insisted, “I can do it.”

  “Besides, you need me to help coordinate your interviews,” said Simone. “Last time you talked to a reporter without me, you went off on a tangent about whether or not Pluto was a planet.”

  “Well, that’s actually a fascinating—”

  “The interview was about a meteor shower, Leo!” she said, exasperated. “You need to focus. See what I mean?” Sometimes, I couldn’t believe how Simone talked to Leo. It was like she was his mom instead of his employee. I wasn’t sure who needed who more.

  “I can handle getting the telescope,” I assured him again. “I’ve got this.”

  Leo fidgeted, crossing his arms. “The eclipse will begin at 2:12 p.m. on the dot,” he said. “We’ll be at the viewing party. Your town board has actually asked me to deliver a brief talk beforehand. Someone caught wind I was an astronomer. CNN will be there, too; I’m doing an interview. It’s the perfect alibi. While I’m speaking, you’ll be digging. Thirty minutes should be plenty of time for you to complete the task, if you’re that confident about your strength. We’ll meet directly after the eclipse back at Eagle’s Nest. You give me the telescope, I give you the previously determined payment of an introduction to Joanna. We part ways, both satisfied.”

  Except I was missing the greatest astronomical event of my lifetime, and my dad would be having a heart attack.

  Blair, I reminded myself. This was for my sister. Mom and Jade thought they could save Blair by looking at old pictures and buying a fresh coat of paint. I was actually doing something about it. Maybe she wouldn’t be a famous dancer, but we could show the world Captain Moonbeard. It wasn’t ballet, but it would have to do.

  Leo stepped away from the telescope and motioned for me to have a look.

  Those stars, that light—so far away. Already dead. But I couldn’t stop looking.

  “It’s weird,” I said. “That they’re already dead.”

  “What?” asked Leo, sounding confused.

  “The stars,” I said. “They’re dead. We’re seeing them how they used to be.”

  He shook his head. “No. Not always.”

  “What?”

  He waved a hand. “One of those Twitter facts. Who told you stars were dead? Tell me it wasn’t someone who actually calls themselves an educator.”

  “We don’t do astronomy in school,” I said.

  He snorted. “Of course you don’t. It’s too important. Honestly, the American school systems . . .”

  Simone rolled her eyes. Leo had a handful of rants, from the American School System to People Who Let Their Dogs Off Their Leash to Why Would Anyone Watch Football When Cricket Is So Much More Dignified.

  “You are seeing light how it used to be,” he said. “And stars do die. But their life spans are long—a million years or so, oftentimes. It only takes light a few years to get from here to there—and that’s for stars that are far away. Most of the ones you’re seeing right now are still in the sky, happily burning.”

  I looked back through the telescope, taking in the still-shining stars. When I pulled away, Leo was standing with his arms crossed, just staring up at the sky.

  “After all these years, this is still my favorite way to look at them,” he said. “With my own two eyes.”

  I tipped my head back. It was mine, too.

  “They feel so close in the telescope. It’s freaky,” said Simone. “It’s like if we yell loud enough, the aliens living on them can hear us.”

  “There couldn’t be aliens on stars,” I said. “They’re burning balls of gas.”

  Leo smiled at me. “Don’t mind her. She studies Shakespeare.”


  “You do? I thought you were, like, a teaching assistant,” I said, surprised.

  “Please. I’m his personal assistant; I schedule his speaking gigs and stuff. Answer his emails. All of this science talk? Nah. Shakespeare, now, that’s worth your time,” said Simone. “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. The man had a way with words. Astronomy . . . it’s math. It’s dull.”

  “Dull,” said Leo, chortling. I read that word in a book once—chortling—and wasn’t sure what it meant. But when I heard the sound Leo made, there was no other word to describe it. That was a chortle. “Dull! As if the entirety of the universe was dull. As if human existence could possibly be dull. The study of our galaxy is the most passionate study there is.”

  I didn’t know who to agree with. I liked the stars because they were dependable and set in stone. But now, maybe, they weren’t.

  “One day,” Simone said to Leo, “I’m going to quit working for you, and you’re not even going to be able to find your shoes—”

  “That’s true,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t last an afternoon.”

  “And I’m going to teach,” she told me. “Macbeth, King Lear . . .”

  “Maybe I’ll take one of your classes,” I said with a grin.

  “No,” said Leo, grabbing his heart jokingly. “Don’t join the dark side!”

  I laughed. “I’m sorry, was that a very lame attempt at a Star Wars quote?”

  “Aliens!” yelled Simone, making me jump. “Are you out there?” She yelled across the lake, up to the sky. A dog barked.

  “We come in peace!” yelled Leo. Simone and I cracked up. The proper professor, in his British accent, howling to the moon.

  “Welcome to Earth!” I yelled as loud as I could.

  “Shut up!” someone shouted from a window at Paul Bunyan’s. We laughed, harder than Mom and Jade with the pictures. Simone was doubled over as Leo responded loudly with a word I wasn’t allowed to say, and she hissed “Leo!” through her laughter.

  “It feels good! It feels good to yell,” said Leo. “Mercy, sometimes you just want to . . . ,” and he let loose, a roar, a ripping thunder of sound across the lake. Even with voice raised he had an accent. Simone yelled, too, and before I knew it, I did the same. We were making so much noise, taking up space in this gigantic universe where we were just little dots, specks of dust floating around in a ginormous galaxy. And Leo discovered new planets and the galaxy grew and when it did, we shrank smaller and smaller. Just like Blair, shrinking into nothing, going from the shiniest star I knew to a thinner and thinner and thinner dash of light.

  I yelled and I yelled, as loud as I could get. I yelled all the way to the moon. I yelled all the way to the stars. And when Simone and Leo stopped and looked at me, I kept yelling.

  “Abby,” said Leo nervously, “maybe—”

  “Stop,” said Simone harshly, holding up a hand. “You let her yell.” She turned back to me. “Go ahead, girl. You tell that sky what’s what.”

  And so I did: I screamed, across the lake, across Wisconsin, all the way to Blair. Was this how she had felt on Memorial Day, yelling across Main Street, sending her voice to the sky? I yelled so loud I would scare Anna Rexia out of our house and out of our lives. Because after everything Blair had done, and after everything we’d been through, here I was: screaming for her to come back, and screaming for her to stay away.

  12

  SEPTEMBER, THREE YEARS AGO

  Nine years old

  Three years before I screamed across Fishtrap Lake, setting fire to my vocal cords and waking up the fireflies, Dr. Leo Lacamoire was an accomplished astronomer preparing for a TED Talk. He was something, that Dr. Lacamoire: traveling the world for speeches, writing books about stars, always searching for new planets. Something terrible would happen to him soon, but he did not know that yet. All he knew was his fame and his fortune and his fans, each of them clamoring for a piece of the greatest scientist in the US.

  It was September, which meant it was light out at 5:30 when we left to go see Blair’s opening-night performance of Coppélia. There were no stars to be seen, and it still felt like summer as we all hustled into the car and made the long drive to Milwaukee. Blair was Swanilda, the girl whose boyfriend falls in love with a doll. I mean, seriously? Spoiler alert, but they end up getting married anyway. I say if a guy starts liking a doll more than you, you better hightail it to the hills. Call the cops, cause that guy’s messed up. But I was only nine then. I wasn’t thinking of things like that. I was thinking of Blair, in one of the lead roles, and of the many extra lessons she’d had with Aleksander to perfect it. I was thinking of the fact that Mom said we couldn’t spend the whole weekend in Milwaukee at a hotel like we sometimes did because of all the money it had cost for Blair’s private lessons and tutu and shoes. But it was all for Blair, who had recently slid the latest chapter of Planet Pirates under my bedroom door and who French-braided my and Sophie’s hair for fun last weekend at our sleepover. I would drive a million miles there and back just to see her.

  The theater was crowded. It was one of those ritzy places with plush seats and little boxes in the corner that you imagine kings and queens sitting in. When we sat down, I pulled out the program Mom had bought. There was Blair, smiling in a picture, with too much makeup on.

  Last seen as an Arabian dancer in The Nutcracker, Blair McCourt trains at Aleksander Alekseev’s Milwaukee School for Classical Ballet. She is a freshman at Waukegan County High School. Much love to Mom, Dad, Jade, and Abby.

  There our names were, right there in print! I knew instantly that I would keep it, forever. We’d look back at it in fifty years when Blair was a professional dancer.

  We waited patiently for the show to start, and when it did—

  Well.

  She stole the show.

  That’s what everyone told us after. Blair stole the show, the other parents in the lobby said, giving Mom tight hugs. The write-up in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said the same thing, that although Kevin Krier danced beautifully as Franz and Dr. Coppélius was played by the exquisite Brandon Johansson, Blair McCourt as Swanilda was the one who stole the show.

  I asked Mom what that meant, and she said it meant that the audience’s attention went to Blair because she was the best. Mom said this so proudly, even though I thought it might be a little mean. After all, everyone had worked so hard. Was Blair blocking the light from all those other people, even the dancers who were mainly just in the background?

  But it was true. She did steal the show. What she did, the way she could move, was more than ballet. It was magic. I’d seen Blair dance a thousand times before, but this was different. She had switched from pretty good to amazing. To watch something like that happen—someone tell a story through turns and leaps and pirouettes—was like watching something transform. Blair wasn’t just talented, I realized, sitting in that theater. She wasn’t just good, the way I was good at spelling and Dad was good at fixing things. Blair was magnificent. Blair really did have a destiny.

  And yet. There was something else, too. Ballet suddenly seemed so beautiful. I knew that other people saw it that way—that dance was for pretty girls in pretty costumes with pretty lights. Ballet had always been so ugly in my eyes: the way it tore Blair’s feet to shreds, the way her shoulder blades stuck out when she stretched, the way sweat dripped from her forehead after practice. Blair, grimacing while Aleksander yanked her feet into a firmer arch—that was how I had thought ballet could make you feel. It was as glamorous as wrestling to me. But when Blair was on that stage, playing Swanilda, you couldn’t deny it: she was beautiful.

  The day before, I saw her standing in front of the mirror in her room, just looking at herself. Her face was less than an inch away from the glass, and her hands were pushed against it. She was staring so intensely, like she could burn a hole through the glass if she tried. Then she made a face—one of disgust. It was as if she had stepped in Obi’s poop. Her lip curled up, eyes glaring, totally horr
ified. Yes, she was beautiful, but no, she couldn’t see it. That much I knew. I had never seen Blair make that face before, but it was far from the last time.

  On the way home from her opening-night performance, we stopped for ice cream. Blair got two scoops of Moose Tracks, our favorite, which I still remember because I spilled some of mine in the back seat and she shared the rest of hers. Jade was in a good mood, too, even though she had just started seventh grade and kind of seemed to hate everybody and everything. She ordered Blue Moon, a flavor I wished I liked because of the cool name, but it actually tasted like stale Lucky Charms.

  “Magnificent,” Mom said, kissing her fingers and mimicking Aleksander. “This girl is a star!”

  “Better than I’ve seen, even in all my days in Russia,” Dad drawled. “A measly American!”

  “Stop,” Blair howled. “I’m gonna pee my pants.”

  “That man, Blair! He’s something else. How you spend so much time with him, I will never know. But he’s definitely taught you well. You were superb,” Mom said.

  “The best dancer by far,” Dad added.

  “I was not,” said Blair, blushing. She was. We all knew it, including her.

  “That guy you had to dance with looked like he needed to take the stick out of his butt, though,” said Jade.

  Dad and Blair cracked up, but Mom reached back and flicked Jade on the knee. “Jade Marie! Watch the language!”

  “I just said butt!” We were all sugar-drunk and exploded in laughter again.

  “Ooh, listen to what’s on! Our jam!” Mom cranked the radio.

  “Mom. Do not say jam. It’s not 1985,” said Jade. But she started wiggling with anticipation. It was our jam.

  “Not Dolly Parton,” groaned Dad, covering his ears.

  Mom loved Dolly Parton. This was her favorite song, about Dolly’s mom taking a bunch of rags and making her a coat in a bunch of different colors. I always found her humming it while she washed dishes or dusted the bookshelves, shaking her hips in a way that made Jade beg her to stop.

  “Back through the years I go wanderin’ once again . . . ,” sang Mom.