Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

  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.”

  Ben—if that’s even his name—flips off Nate before he takes my hand in his and this causes a medical emergency. I feel all melty and … weird.

  “Mae,” I say, but it’s more a croak, so I have to clear my throat and say it again. “Mae. Is my name.”

  CODE RED, NASA, CODE RED. I grasp at the first thing that comes to mind—Dad always said, First thought, best thought.

  “Nate brought you in on his project because your geophysics can help him determine the relative impact his plane would have if crashing on different topographies, right?”

  Ben laughs, and it’s a very nice sound, and something about it makes him real and not Ichigo. It’s not the kind of laugh you give before you use a katana to banish a ghost monster from the world of the living.

  “I think your cousin’s just desperate,” Ben says. “Besides, at the speed he’s going, that plane’s a goner whether it hits low-elevation desert or sedimentary rock.”

  And just like that, my flat spin is over.

  At space camp one year, an air force test pilot came to speak and he said that when your plane’s in a flat spin, the best way to know whether it’s recoverable or not is if the nose is pitching down to Earth. And what’s more down-to-earth than a geophysicist?

  “The plane is not crashing!” Nat
e says. “Now both of you sit down and tell me everything you know about aerodynamics so I don’t fail my midterm.”

  As we start toward the couch, Ben gives my vintage overalls a once-over. “Are those pineapples?” He leans in a little to study the pattern, and I catch a faint whiff of coffee.

  “Yes. Pineapples make me happy.” I glance at Nate. “Hannah says they’re too much.”

  “Nothing can ever be too much.” Nate gestures to the sequined headband he’s wearing. “Case in point.”

  It is one of the strangest nights of my life. I’m both in my body and entirely out of it. Maybe it’s like going through the atmosphere—you’re not on Earth anymore, but you’re not totally in space, either. I see me and Ben and Nate on the couch, working on equations, and then I feel every centimeter of Ben’s thigh touching mine. And then I’m hovering above us all again, watching.

  When we finally make sure the hypothetical plane my cousin is building isn’t going to crash, Ben turns to me. “I thought Nate was exaggerating about the genius part. You’re intimidating as hell, Mae.”

  My cousin grins. “Believe the hype. We got a future Nobel winner here.”

  The words make me feel suddenly, utterly hopeless. How many times had I heard Dad say them? It’s not like I forgot he died, but all this work hit the PAUSE button on my memory. Now it’s on PLAY again.

  “I still haven’t done my Annapolis interview, so…” I wave my hand, like everything else—my entire life—is beside the point.

  Nate stands. “Gravity’s a bitch, Mae.”

  I should never have told him I cancelled my interview in LA. Or that I haven’t rescheduled here in Boston. I should never have said, I can’t do this without him. It was out of character for me. The thought of sitting in that interview and then not being able to talk about it afterward with Dad … No one but Nate knows. And I will reschedule. Of course I will. For him—Dad. And me. I didn’t mean I can’t ever do this without him. I just can’t do it without him right now. I’m interviewing for a naval military academy. If something they say triggers my emotions, I could risk losing my place there. I need more time. I need more chances to practice telling people they’re gone in a voice that can also say things like, The nukes on our submarine are ready for launch, sir.

  I sigh. “I’m not an inert object. I told you, I just need time.”

  Ben leans his head back on the couch. “Okay, you two have just teleported into the spacetime continuum and I’m stuck on this rock. I’m a simple man of the land. Translation, please?”

  I glare at Nate before turning to Ben. “My cousin is making a rookie mistake, conflating a Newtonian description of gravity with general relativity, attempting to use physics as a psychoanalytic tool to suggest I’m struggling with inertia—which I’m not, by the way. Gravity is not a force, it’s a consequence of the curvature of space and time. Everyone confuses that, but I would have thought an MIT student wouldn’t.” I give Nate a look, he gives me a look.

  Ben doesn’t give me a look, he just looks at me. Which is a little disconcerting, but also nice.

  “So Nate’s suggesting gravity is going to catch up to you and force you into forward motion.”

  “Correct,” Nate says. “Basic physics.”

  “Basic obnoxiousness,” I snap.

  Nate reaches over and squeezes my shoulder. “Make the call, Buzz.”

  My cousin shuffles off to the kitchen to grab us some chips, and Ben glances at me, his lips turning up in a smile.

  “If it makes you feel any better, he micromanages my life, too.”

  “A little.”

  Ben rubs his eyes. “He’s usually right, though. Bastard. A word of advice: If you ever become a barista and your best friend tells you not to agree to the opening shift, listen to him.”

  “So that’s why you smell like coffee.”

  “One of the perks. Ha. No pun intended.”

  We’re quiet for a minute, and then he turns to me and I can’t help but think how good he would look fighting crime with that bleached hair and those dark eyes.

  Observations like this are evidence that I’m running on fumes. I must maintain my focus. It’s the only way I know I have a chance at Annapolis, at NASA. It’s inconvenient, to meet the first person I’ve been genuinely attracted to since Riley at this particular stage of my life. It would have been nice to meet him in college or much, much later.

  His eyes touch mine, then he looks away, throws his calculator into his backpack. “You should come by sometime. I’ll give you free coffee and regale you with fascinating tales about my customers and, if I’m feeling particularly loquacious, mineralogy.”

  “Typical geophysicist.”

  “Please. I prefer rock detective. We’re living on a mystery, you know.”

  I huff out a tiny laugh, and it feels good. “Please expand.”

  He rubs his hands. “Okay. We don’t know what Earth’s core is made up of—which means every minute of every day, we’re, well, living on a mystery.” He grips his hair a little, and I don’t think he knows he’s doing it, or how cute it is. “And we may never know! Like, we figure it’s maybe eighty percent iron—debatable number, but we’ll just go with it—but because of its lightness, that’s not the whole story. But it’s a third of our planet’s mass! So is there a shit-ton of xenon in there, or silicate … Who knows? Then when you consider the periodic reversals in Earth’s magnetic field, plate tectonics…” He throws up his hands. “It’s a mystery.”

  “Plate tectonics.” I never knew that term could become so personal. “So. You study earthquakes. Sometimes.”

  He hesitates before nodding, and in that moment, I know that he knows. Of course he does. Nate’s his best friend.

  “In regard to earthquakes … I’m sorry about your parents,” Ben says. His voice goes soft, different. “That’s really fucking heavy.”

  I bet they studied the wave in one of his classes. The underwater fault lines that sent it over my whole life. I bet he knows more about what killed my parents than I do.

  “Could you … tell me about the wave?”

  Ben looks at me for a long time, like I’m maybe under a microscope. “Will it help?”

  I always thought that the more data I had, the more sense I could make out of anything. But maybe there are just some questions that can never be answered.

  “I don’t know.”

  He nods. “My three favorite words.”

  “My least-favorite words.”

  He smiles. “So what are your favorites?”

  “Just one: Why. I even have a T-shirt that says WHY in huge orange letters. Ugly, but I love it. Hannah found it for me at a thrift shop in Venice.” I glance at him. “I hate not knowing. It’s why I science.”

  “I love it. It’s why I science.”

  For the past two hours and forty-two minutes, my heart has been doing things I am not accustomed to. Hannah things.

  It appears that Hannah feelings are not as enviable as I thought. They are questions and not answers.

  I wish Ben didn’t smell so good. Or look like Ichigo Kurosaki. Or wasn’t smart enough to do advanced physics at MIT.

  I am way out of orbit. I need to correct course somehow. I think that involves standing up and leaving the room, but I seem to be experiencing a gravitational malfunction.

  “What’s your favorite thing you don’t know?” he says.

  Suddenly I’m back in orbit. This I can do. I turn on my side, tuck my knees in.

  “Dark matter, dark energy. Ninety-five percent of the universe is made up of this stuff, and we don’t even know what it is,” I say. “We know what it’s not—a little, anyway. But most of the universe is dark matter, and it’s a total mystery. A dark force pulling galaxies apart, causing the entire universe to expand. It’s infuriating! And awesome.”

  He grins. “And you’re gonna find out.”

  “I don’t know. I want to be up there.” I point toward the sky. “Most astronomy- and cosmology-based resear
ch is done on Earth. You don’t need to get in a rocket to observe how dark matter affects the gravitational forces of distant galaxies.” I swallow. “My dad was a theoretical physicist—you probably know that.”

  Ben runs a finger over one of the pineapples on my knee, and I like that very much. “I do, yes.”

  He’s gone and I can feel it, like my space helmet’s been ripped right off my head. Someone at the funeral said Dad was dancing with neutrinos now. I think they were trying to help.

  “We had a plan,” I say. “He was going to do all the research down here—subatomic particle stuff, you know—and I would be up there and fill in the blanks. They’ve got an instrument on the International Space Station right now that’s hunting cosmic rays. It’s called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. It’s measuring the subatomic particles in space, but also studying the Big Bang, formation of the universe—all the good stuff. It hasn’t found anything my dad would consider significant yet, but it—or an instrument like it—might. Very few people have the ISS on their radar for dark matter research right now, but in ten years—who knows? If we could somehow get an axion magnetic detector on the ISS, that could really be something, but you need such a large magnetic field, and obviously that could endanger the ISS itself. So that might not be a viable option. Anyway, I figure that someone on the ISS has to make sure dark matter instruments are working properly and perhaps work with some of the data. Maybe by the time I apply they’ll need me. Or a pilot, anyway.”

  “A pilot.”

  “To fly whatever Nate builds me to get to the ISS.”

  He stares at me. “I’m trying really hard not to be intimidated right now. Did you just tell me you’re going to be studying the nature of the universe while also flying the rockets themselves?”

  I bite back a smile. “I have a better chance of being an astronaut candidate if I’ve got naval aviation experience.”

  “Like … a fighter pilot?”

  “Well, not just a fighter pilot. I’ll hopefully get to be a test pilot, and obviously I’ll do what Nate’s doing—astronautical engineering. Dad says … said … I can sneak in a PhD in physics, but I don’t know.”