We Dream of Space
Page 16
As she walked into her bedroom and sat on her floor: family is the most predictable machine of all.
Cash was right. Or Ms. Salonga. Whoever.
We’re all just grains of sand.
The mental gymnastics had exhausted Bird and lulled her to a deep, deep sleep. She dreamed that she was sitting with Judith on a beach. Judith was wearing her NASA coveralls.
“Good night, Bird,” Judith said. She smiled. She had a dimple, just like Bird.
“It’s not dark yet,” Bird replied.
“I know,” Judith said.
They stared out at the water, but there wasn’t any water. Just sand, as far as the eye could see. A light wind blew and tickled Bird’s cheek.
“Bird?” Judith said, even though her mouth wasn’t moving.
Bird didn’t answer.
“Bird?” Judith said again.
Bird tried to brush the sand away, but it kept tickling her.
“Bird?”
Bird’s eyes fluttered. They felt so heavy.
“Bird?”
No, it wasn’t Judith.
It was Fitch.
And it wasn’t sand.
It was a strand of her hair, brushing her cheek.
Bird opened her eyes.
She’d fallen asleep on her bedroom floor, still in her school clothes, and Fitch was kneeling next to her. His face looked strangely soft.
Was she still dreaming?
“Dinner’s ready,” Fitch said. He had her winter coat slung over his arm. “Come on.”
Was she dreaming?
Bird blinked and blinked and blinked.
She sat up. She felt like she’d been asleep for a hundred years. The dream had been so real, she could practically feel the sand.
But, no. She wasn’t on a beach with Judith Resnik.
She was at her house.
Same old house. Same old day. Same old family.
“Dad ordered pizza,” Fitch said. He held up her coat. He was wearing his already. “Put this on.”
“Why?”
“Just put it on.”
She slipped into her jacket and followed him, yawning, her head and spirit heavy. She wasn’t even hungry, really. She didn’t want pizza, but there it was, in the kitchen.
Mr. Thomas was in the living room, eating and watching Knight Rider.
Mrs. Thomas was at the kitchen island, picking at a salad and reading.
Neither of them looked up.
Cash was standing between the table and the sliding glass doors. He was wearing his coat, too, with a roll of paper towels tucked under one arm and a binder under the other.
Fitch closed the pizza box and lifted it.
“What’s going on?” asked Bird. Her shoulders hurt from sleeping on the floor.
“We’re gonna eat in the backyard,” Fitch said to Bird, then louder, to their parents. Cash slid open the door.
Cold air rushed into the warm house.
“Why?” Mrs. Thomas said.
“Because,” Cash answered.
Bird followed her brothers outside and closed the door behind her.
NOT TODAY
Cash: So how does this work?
Fitch: How does what work?
Cash: Eating dinner together.
Fitch: I don’t know. Bird’s the expert.
Bird: This isn’t exactly a table. We’re sitting on a blanket outside in the cold.
Cash: Think of it as a grass table.
Fitch: Aren’t you gonna eat, Bird?
Bird: I don’t know. I’m not hungry. . . . What’s that black binder?
Cash: This? Oh. Here, take it. I don’t want to get grease on the cover.
Bird: . . .
Cash: What do you think of it?
Bird: Why did you do this?
Cash: I couldn’t put them back in the trash. It just felt wrong. Some of them are stained, but most of them are okay. Some of the pages are crinkled, but—you want to keep them, don’t you?
Bird: I guess.
Fitch: You guess?
Bird: Well. I’ve been thinking that maybe being a shuttle commander is a stupid idea.
Cash: What makes you think that? Because of what happened? You can’t let that scare you.
Bird: I’m not scared. It just seems pointless. I mean. I don’t know. I’m just a girl from Park, Delaware.
Cash: Everyone is from somewhere.
Fitch: Judith Resnik’s hometown is Akron, Ohio. That’s not a big fancy place. At least I don’t think it is.
Bird: How do you know where Judith Resnik’s from?
Fitch: The news, I guess. I must have picked it up somewhere and remembered it.
Bird: Why are you two doing all this, anyway? Putting my schematics in binders and having a winter picnic outside—it’s, I don’t know. Is this because you feel sorry for me or something?
Fitch: You always talk about eating dinner together, so we thought, yeah, let’s do that.
Bird: I don’t always talk about it. And I don’t want some pity dinner, anyway.
Cash: He didn’t mean it like that.
Fitch: Aren’t you going to eat, Bird?
Bird: Besides, we’re not eating dinner as a family. Half the family is inside.
Cash: That’s the best part about the grass table, no matter how cold it is.
Fitch: They’d only ruin it.
Cash: Maybe we’ll invite them to dinner someday.
Fitch: But not today.
Cash: Not today.
Bird: Not today.
Saturday, February 1, 1986
MAGIC
Fitch had a found quarter and a new outlook. The world had shifted under his feet, and he wasn’t sure how or when. The tightened bolts were still there, but he could move with them, loosen them. He walked into the arcade on Main, intending to channel all this positive energy into defeating the Vaxxian Empire. And just his luck: the place was virtually empty.
The quarter even looked like magic. Shiny, new. The date stamp was 1985. He held it in the palm of his hand and studied it for a moment before reaching down to dunk the coin inside the slot. The quarter was almost down when Fitch’s eyes landed on a familiar face. Marsh. He was sitting at the Pop-A-Shot. He wasn’t playing, though. The game wasn’t running; all the balls were still in the carriage. He had a yo-yo that he couldn’t control. Fitch watched him drop it, roll it back up, drop it, roll it back up. After several failed attempts, he pushed his glasses up his nose and sat there, tossing the yo-yo absently from one small hand to the other.
You can’t even make one basket, and you think you can play this? Get serious, Marsha.
Fitch felt that descending fog again when he thought about what he’d said.
But he didn’t want to feel that way. Heavy. Tight.
He thought: Just play your game. Who cares about some stupid kid? If he can’t take it, that’s his fault. The Vaxxian Empire awaits.
His feet didn’t listen, though. They took one step in front of the other.
Marsh looked up when Fitch approached. His glasses had already slid halfway down his nose.
Fitch showed him the quarter.
“Have you ever played pinball?” Fitch asked.
BIRD’S ESSAY
One day, I will become NASA’s first female shuttle commander. The launch of the Challenger will be my first real experience as an astronaut.
I’m not an astronaut, of course. Not yet. But I’ve listened in every class, and I don’t think there’s anyone in the world who is more excited about the launch than me. Well, maybe Christa McAuliffe, Judith Resnik, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Michael J. Smith. (See, I even know all their names by heart!) I won’t be able to go into space with them to learn about Halley’s Comet, but the least I can do is cheer them along the way. I don’t want to miss anything.
Sometimes I look up at the sky and I see all those stars and my mind works overtime. There is so much up there to explore. Who knows what’s happening in all th
at space? Maybe there’s someone on the other side of the Milky Way, looking up the sky just like I am. Maybe they see a dot in the sky and they make a wish on it, and the dot in the sky is Earth, and they’re actually wishing on me.
The only way to find the answer is if we go out there. It might be scary. We might not find anything. And I know it costs a lot of money, but it’s worth it. We can’t just settle for what’s easy, or we would never discover anything.
When I stare up at the sky and see all that space, it feels like the universe is asking me to go up there. It’s sending me an astrogram, and the astrogram says: We’re waiting for you, Bird.
Can you imagine that? The universe is waiting. Even though I’m just a tiny grain of sand, it’s waiting for me.
I’m ready.
About the Challenger Disaster
The space shuttle Challenger disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean on January 28, 1986. The malfunction was caused by the failure of O-ring seals on one of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters (SRB). The O-rings were supposed to prevent pressurized burning gas from escaping the SRB, but they didn’t seal properly because of cold weather during the launch. As the shuttle ascended, a plume of exhaust leaked out, and the external fuel tank ruptured. Seventy-three seconds after liftoff, the Challenger was torn apart.
Relatively few people watched the launch live that day. Most adults were at work, social media didn’t exist, and cable news was a novelty. There was one unfortunate exception, however: American schoolchildren. NASA arranged satellite broadcasts onto TV sets in many U.S. schools so students could watch Christa McAuliffe become the first teacher in space.
Christa McAuliffe, a social studies teacher in Concord, New Hampshire, had been selected from more than 11,000 applicants. She was one of seven people who died on the Challenger that day. The other crew members were Shuttle Commander Francis R. Scobee, a former fighter pilot who decorated his room with model airplanes as a boy; Pilot Michael J. Smith, who had never been to space before but already wanted to go again; Mission Specialist Ronald McNair, a physicist who played the saxophone; Mission Specialist Ellison Onizuka, an Eagle Scout who loved to share macadamia nuts from his home state of Hawaii; Payload Specialist Gregory Jarvis, an electrical engineer who had been bumped from two previous missions and, like Smith, was anxious for his first trip; and, of course, Mission Specialist Judith Resnik.
As a little girl, Judith Resnik was very close to her father, who had taught her how to repair electronics and build simple machines. Judith Resnik was smart and high-achieving from an early age, but she was also a typical tween. She had two best friends, Barbara and Pam. She read all the Nancy Drew books. And she often struggled with her curly hair.
In many ways, however, she was atypical. By the time she was a teenager, she’d become a skilled classical pianist and excelled in science and math. In the Akron, Ohio, Firestone High School 1966 yearbook, there is a photo of the math club—fourteen boys, and Judy. She was the school valedictorian and went on to earn her doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland.
Judith Resnik attracted some media attention early in her career because she was one of the first female astronauts at NASA. She didn’t enjoy being in the spotlight, but she was gracious.
In an April 1981 interview on the Today Show, journalist Tom Brokaw asked: “What’s the best thing about being an astronaut?”
“Everything,” she replied.
Brokaw also asked if people in her life—particularly men—were threatened by the fact that she was a female astronaut.
“If they are, they’re probably not my friends,” she said.
The Challenger mission would have been Judith Resnik’s second trip to space. She’d been a mission specialist on the maiden voyage of Discovery on August 30, 1984. Soon after Discovery entered orbit, her voice came through the shuttle radio.
“The Earth looks great,” she said.
She also held up a handwritten note for the closed-circuit cameras on board.
The note said: “Hi, Dad.”
Eileen Collins, a graduate of Stanford University and former Air Force colonel, became NASA’s first female shuttle commander in 1999. Like Bird, Eileen Collins knew she wanted to be an astronaut at an early age, but she didn’t tell anyone because it seemed impossible. NASA didn’t allow women into the program at that time. Even though she kept her dream a secret, that didn’t mean she gave up. She joined the Air Force and was one of the first women to go through pilot training. Of the 450 pilots on the base, only 4 were women.
Eileen Collins became an astronaut in 1991 and served as a pilot or commander on four spaceflights before she retired in 2006.
In an interview with Time, Collins said: “I advise others to take on challenges, even if you think they are too hard, even if you think you might fail. Give yourself challenges that are exciting, and be available to help others. There is no better feeling than helping someone else.”
Bird would have been twenty-five years old—earning an advanced degree in engineering, perhaps—when Eileen Collins became shuttle commander for Columbia in 1999.
To Learn More:
“Challenger: The Shuttle Disaster That Changed NASA,” Space.com
Challenger STS 51-L Accident January 28, 1986—NASA History, https://history.nasa.gov/sts_51l_challenger.html
Joanne Bernstein, Rose Blue, and Alan Jay Gerber, Judith Resnik: Challenger Astronaut (New York: Lodestar Books/Dutton, 1990)
NASA Astronauts, https://www.nasa.gov/astronauts
“Remembering Space Shuttle Challenger,” https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia
The Astronauts Memorial Foundation, www.amfcse.org
About the Author
ERIN ENTRADA KELLY was awarded the Newbery Medal for Hello, Universe. She grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and now lives in Delaware.
www.erinentradakelly.com
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
WE DREAM OF SPACE. Text copyright © 2020 by Erin Entrada Kelly. Schematic illustrations © 2020 by Erin Entrada Kelly; character art by Celia Krampien. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover art © 2020 by Celia Krampien
Cover design by Sylvie Le Floc’h
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Digital Edition MAY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-274732-7
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-274730-3 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-06-302670-4 (int’l.pbk ed.)
2021222324PC/LSCH10987654321
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