What Stars Are Made Of

by Sarah Allen

  Scared Me knew that expression very, very well.

  I screamed for Mom.

  For the second time that day we loaded into the car.

  This time Nonny was with us. And Dad.

  This time everybody knew where we were going.

  Hospital

  Nonny called Thomas on the way to the hospital. He said he would be on the very next flight no matter what. She kept having to stop talking and clench her fist. She looked frightened and in pain.

  Would the baby have come now, weeks early, if I had convinced Mr. Hickman? If I hadn’t failed?

  Mom called the hospital on the drive in, so they were ready when we got there. They had a wheelchair ready for Nonny, and she and Mom went through swinging doors in the back. Dad and I waited in the waiting room.

  Waiting room.

  Suddenly, after the explosion of what had just happened, waiting was all we could do.

  Waiting

  I waited and thought about babies that come early.

  I waited and thought about babies that are hurt.

  I waited and thought about daddies who have to work far, far away trying to fix a financial black hole.

  I waited and thought about mothers who are in pain.

  I waited and thought about how this time it might be my fault.

  I waited, thinking every minute about how my plan had failed and how delivering a baby takes a long, long time.

  Big Doctor Words

  I learned a new Big Doctor Word.

  Cyanosis.

  It means that the baby’s nails and lips and skin are a bluish-gray color.

  It means that there is not enough oxygen in the baby’s blood.

  Doctor Who Was Wrong

  Maybe the Doctor was wrong.

  Maybe the bad things do ruin the good things.

  Maybe sometimes there are just too many bad things happening at once.

  Maybe it’s like your friend is swimming in grief and hard, hard work and you don’t know where the life vests are. And the textbook people won’t listen to you. And you figure out all the things you can’t do.

  And your sister has a baby too early.

  And you didn’t do anything to help.

  Septal Defect

  Here is the reason why the doctors took Nonny’s baby away:

  Think of your heart like a house. Two rooms on the bottom floor, two rooms on the top.

  Nonny’s baby has a hole in her house. A hole between the rooms on the top floor.

  That is called an atrial septal defect.

  And the doctors told us they had to open her up. Patch up the holey wall in her heart.

  The next morning we were in Nonny’s hospital room, waiting, frozen silent like the TV nobody had thought to turn on. Dad stood against the wall. We’d offered him a chair a long time ago but he’d refused. Couldn’t sit down, he said. Mom sat by the window, looking at her hands. Thomas arrived about three minutes before they took the baby away. He was lying next to Nonny in the bed, one arm around her shoulder and one across her chest like he was a seat belt and Captain America’s shield rolled into one. Nobody had moved in a while.

  I thought that when we got home I would take down my posters of the muscular system and the Milky Way. Muscles got tears and holes. Stars hadn’t heard my wishes. I’d tried to be a defender and my defenses had failed. I had failed. I couldn’t do enough.

  It had been one hour since they’d taken the baby away.

  Ten minutes ago, a nurse told us they’d started surgery.

  Sometimes you don’t need an X-ray or stethoscope to see a hole in a wall. Sometimes it’s right there in front of you, gaping. Sometimes you look at people in a room with you, and it’s not only a hole in a wall, but a sunken roof, a shattered window, crumbling bricks, and a foundation with a crack right down the middle.

  We will both have scars along our ribs, the baby and me. We will both have patched-up hearts.

  When I was thinking of things I wanted Nonny’s baby and me to have in common, this was not what I had in mind.

  Waiting Again

  I only got to see baby Cecilia for a few seconds, behind a glass window.

  Surgery on a tiny baby also takes a long, long time.

  A Glass Box

  Sometimes if you’re a brand-new baby who had to have heart surgery, you stay in a glass box for a few days.

  Sometimes if that brand-new baby is your new niece, and you have to go back to school anyway, there’s a kind of glass box around you, too.

  We weren’t allowed to hold baby Cecilia. Even Nonny couldn’t hold her yet. Every day that week when I came back to the hospital after school, Nonny’s hand was stretched through one of the arm-size circles into the glass box where her baby lay, and she was stroking the baby’s head and back. She never stopped stroking. Thomas stayed for as many days as he could, sitting with Nonny and their baby until he had to fly back to Florida.

  The baby’s glass box was called an incubator. It was actually made of a special kind of plastic, not really glass. (I looked up incubators on the internet.) It seemed terrible that she had to be boxed up inside it all the time, but actually it helped keep her extra safe while she was getting better from the heart surgery. It kept the germs away, and kept her nice and cozy warm, too.

  But it still looked terrible.

  I’m not sure what my glass box was made of. Whatever it was, it made the words my teachers said reach a few inches from my face and then bounce off again. It made everything in my head and everything I tried to say feel echoey and far away. It was like my private glass box had its own weather, its own ecosystem, and not a particularly sunny one.

  I sat in Ms. Trepky’s class trying to listen. One day she even played a song called “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and then we went through each person and event mentioned in the song and she told us about them and normally that would have been the Best Class Ever but not that week.

  Talia passed me a note in class. It said: I heard what’s going on. I’m really sorry.

  I nodded.

  She started writing on another scrap of paper. It took her most of the class to write a few short lines. Five minutes before the bell rang she handed me one more note:

  The sun is a star, we know

  but there are too-bright days

  days when someone you love leaves you for good

  days when the tiniest bodies have the biggest hurt

  when the sun shines full

  and you want to ask

  how dare you.

  It wasn’t until Talia handed me a crumpled paper towel from her backpack that I realized I was crying.

  My Body Versus Me

  Sometimes I wonder if I would be a different person if my body were different. Sometimes I’m not sure what is my body and what is really, truly me. I mean, when you’re missing a chromosome, does that only change your body, or does it change who you really are? If I had a complete set of chromosomes, I know I would look a little different. Less odd, maybe. (No more FrankenChin.) I’d likely be able to have kids of my own one day. Would I still get obsessed about contests I’m not ready for? Probably. Would it be easier for me to talk to a friend whose grandma died, and would I be better at doing math homework in the hospital? Probably not.

  I don’t really know. I don’t have all my chromosomes. All I have is me.

  Home Is Where the Heart Is

  During class on a gray-blue day my mom texted me a picture.

  Usually I was a good student, and kept my phone off and put away like I was supposed to. But somehow, the week after baby Cecilia’s heart surgery, that didn’t seem to really matter.

  The picture mattered.

  It was a picture of Nonny, and she was holding the baby.

  For the first time.

  When I got to the hospital after school that day, she was still holding her. She was sitting in a chair by the window, the tiny little body pressed up against her shoulder, head resting against her neck. Exactly like the pictur
e. Like she hadn’t moved.

  I came into the room, and everyone was talking softly and moving slowly, like we were at church. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the baby.

  It was stunning how different she looked outside of that glass box.

  We sat there for a second, all of us looking down at that tiny person. She really was so tiny. Her fingers made tiny fists, and she kept scraping her nails along Nonny’s shoulder, but Nonny didn’t flinch. Normally baby Cecilia had little mittens over her hands so she wouldn’t scratch herself inside that box, but at the moment she was wrapped in a blanket, pressed close against her mom.

  Nonny looked at me, and said, “Would you like to hold her?”

  For a second I couldn’t answer. Should I hold her? I’d messed things up already. Who was to say I wouldn’t mess them up again, and even worse?

  Then I thought about what Ms. Trepky had said about courage. Nothing bad was going to happen. The whole room was full of adults who would make sure of that.

  So I gulped, nodded, and sat down in the chair by the window.

  And Nonny slowly, gently, settled baby Cecilia in my arms, like she was handing me the most important thing in the world. Which she was.

  There was so much perfect in this tiny person I had to take it in bits at a time. She was awake and looking up at me. She had wide brown eyes like her dad, flecked with gold. And she had Nonny’s delicate, perfectly arched lips. Those lips made a small pucker while she stared up into my face.

  “This is your aunt,” Nonny said, stroking the baby’s thick, curly hair. “The best aunt in the world.”

  Very slowly, I unwrapped the blanket from around baby Cecilia’s left side. There was the scar, wrapping under her arm. The skin was still swollen and pink. A tiny slash across the patched-up heart. The people who’d fixed her were heroes. They were scientists. They were magic.

  I remembered right then about one of my favorite words. It’s not a Hard Reading Word, but something I learned about on my own, in one of the documentaries I’d watched. It’s a Japanese word: kintsugi. In ancient Japan, the expert craftsmen and artists didn’t throw away their beautiful bowls and teapots when they got cracked. Instead, they melted down gold and filled in all the cracks, no matter how big. Filled in the cracks until the ceramic was traced and lined with shining gold, shimmering and even more beautiful than it had been before. The most beautiful thing they’d ever made. That’s kintsugi.

  And here was our new baby—filled and sealed and traced with the purest gold. I touched the scar.

  I realized that Cecilia Payne had given me just what I’d asked for.

  Baby Cecilia was here, breathing, alive in my arms.

  That’s what the scar meant.

  And the scar made her perfect.

  My People’s People

  That night, for the first time since baby Cecilia was born, I thought again about Mr. Trent Hickman.

  In my brain he’d lost his privilege to a normal name. Now he was Mr. Jerkface McJerkypants.

  I lay on my bed, my hands gripping my quilt, seeing him toss my letters into the trash over and over until my whole face started getting hot and I couldn’t lie down anymore. So I paced back and forth in front of my posters. (I had put them back up when I got back from holding baby Cecilia.)

  How could he do that? Who did Jerky McJerkypants think he was, ignoring me like that? Throwing away my letters? It was like the Worry Balloon that had taken up every inch of space in my brain and my heart was worn out, and had finally deflated after holding my beautiful, perfect niece, and now there was room for all this Mad to come storming in.

  She was beautiful and perfect. Did you hear that, Mr. Editor McJerkyJerk? She’s perfect. She didn’t need you.

  Then I thought about Cecilia Payne, PhD.

  I stopped pacing and curled my toes in the carpet, trying to hold on to the thoughts swirling around inside. When I thought of Cecilia Payne I couldn’t quite get a clear signal, like my Emotion GPS was telling me to go north and south both at once. I tried to hold still, tried to listen better to the signals, and for the first time, I tried to ask myself a Silent Question I didn’t have words for.

  I hadn’t talked to Cecilia Payne in my head ever since the baby had arrived, because I was afraid of what would happen when I did. I was afraid I would be mad at her. I was afraid I would lose a hero. Yes, baby Cecilia was here and recovering and perfect, but was that because Cecilia had helped? Or had she ignored me, too?

  But it was time to talk to her again.

  Still, trying to figure out the words I wanted to say to her was hard, even by myself in my own room. So I turned the Silent Questions toward her.

  After a silent minute, a clear signal finally came through the static. It sounded like Cecilia, but also like Nonny and Mom and even a little bit like Ms. Trepky, all in one.

  I knew she could make it, the signal said.

  She has the same people helping her as you’ve always had.

  She is strong, and when she can’t be strong she has Nonny, and Thomas, and Mom, and Dad.

  She will have friends, whether making friends is easy or hard.

  She has scientists and angels and scientist angels looking out for her.

  She has you.

  First Period

  The next day it finally felt like I was really back at school.

  I had a million pictures of baby Cecilia that I wanted to show Talia. And when I thought of Talia, I remembered I hadn’t ever asked her about how Poetry Out Loud went.

  Before the first bell rang I ran to her locker as fast as I could, hoping she would forgive me for being a terrible friend. She was standing at her locker packing up books.

  That’s when I saw her face close up. Her eyes and mouth were crumpled like she was going to puke.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  Her face looked a little ashy. She didn’t look fine to me. “You sure? You feeling all right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, just my stomach.”

  “Maybe you need to go home. Should we talk to the nurse?”

  “No, no.” She looked down at her shoes, now looking more embarrassed than sick. She twisted some of her curly, dark hair around her finger. She looked up and down the hall, then leaned in closer. “Actually, it’s … I woke up and … well, I started my first period this morning. That’s what.”

  “Oh.”

  She leaned back. “I’m really fine, it just feels weird right here.” She patted a hand low, low on her stomach. “My mom was acting so weird, like I’d won some freaking trophy or something. She was like, ‘Oh girl, my grown-up girl.’”

  I didn’t really know what to say, because I was worried that whatever I said would be the wrong thing. Besides, my brain kept saying mixed things to itself. I was glad that Talia had told me about it, because it’s the sort of thing that you only tell your best friends. But also I knew I would never have a period like that. At least not on my own, not for a long time. I would need special pills when I was older to make me have a period. For hormone regulation and bone density reasons, according to the doctor, although Mom says that’s still years away and she also said, “Man, it would have been nice to get you out of the whole stupid thing entirely.”

  So yeah, no normal getting my period for me, whatever that means.

  But actually I didn’t think about that for too long because I remembered that my mom was already proud of me, and then I started thinking about questions. Questions I’d never had to ask before. Like, did it hurt in a stomachache way or in a gut-punch way? How much blood was there? I’d heard that in a few years when I started taking the pills, I’d only have to get a period every three or four months and getting one each month seemed like it would be so draining and, well, a lot of blood. Did you have to wear a tampon right at the beginning? Did they make it hard to walk?

  Probably not great questions to ask in the middle of the school hallway.

  And there were other B
ig Girl things to talk about first.

  “You sure you’re okay?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I … Sorry I haven’t exactly been super fun lately. There’s been a lot going on.”

  “Me too,” I said. “And you don’t need to be sorry for being sad about your grandma or working really hard on the contest. Totally okay.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Sure thing,” I said. “And thank you for … for being my favorite poet.”

  She laughed. “Well, no rehearsing during lunch anymore, so you want to eat in the library?”

  I smiled. “Always,” I said, slapping my hands together. “And speaking of, I’m really, really sorry I haven’t even asked you about Poetry Out Loud yet. How’d it go?”

  “Nah, no worries,” she said. Then Talia smiled one of her rare, dimply smiles, and it was like we were right back where we left off. Maybe even better.

  “Well?” I said, bouncing. “How’d you do?”

  Talia grinned.

  “I got second place.”

  I jumped and clapped some more. “That’s amazing! You’re amazing! Phenomenal!”

  “I was sort of sad at first that I didn’t win. Okay, more like totally pissed. But actually then I thought of you talking to that stupid dumb editor guy on your own and I was like, when I tell Libby about this, what will she say? And I swear I could hear your voice in my head being all like, ‘Second place is just amazing and plus it means you’ll be ready to kick butt next year,’ and so that’s what I decided to do. Hang my certificate on my wall and get ready for next year.”

  Have you ever had moments where everything is so exciting and wonderful and you have a friend saying that she’s glad you’re her friend and you’re so effervescent (a Hard Reading Word that means vivacious and enthusiastic) that you can’t use words, only make happy squealing noises?