Dinah Forever

by Claudia Mills

  After lunch, Dinah had study hall and then social studies, with a different teacher from last year, a dignified older man named Mr. McGowan, who wore a small, neat, polka-dot bow tie.

  The last period of the day, eighth period, was science. Dinah’s science teacher, Mr. Mubashir, was a small, slim man with smooth, dark skin and a slight foreign twist to his speech. He spoke quickly, too, so Dinah had to listen carefully to understand what he was saying.

  Mr. Mubashir was as enthusiastic about science as Ms. Dunne was about poetry. In seventh-grade science they were going to study astronomy for the first half of the year and earth science for the second half. Mr. Mubashir promised that seventh-grade science students would learn many astonishing and amazing things.

  “How many of you think that the earth revolves around the sun?” Mr. Mubashir asked the class.

  Everyone put up a hand.

  “How many of you could prove it to someone who insisted that the sun revolved around the earth?”

  No one put up a hand. Mr. Mubashir looked pleased.

  “How many of you know why we have seasons here on earth?”

  Dinah thought a moment. Because the earth revolves around the sun? Because the earth is round? Because it would be too boring not to have seasons and to have life always be the same?

  The class fidgeted. Dinah wished that Mr. Mubashir would just tell them the answer.

  Then the quietest boy that Dinah had ever met, Todd Burstyn, gave the smallest possible signal with his hand. “Because the earth tilts on its axis,” he said in a low voice.

  Mr. Mubashir chuckled with satisfaction. “Quite right! Quite right! And we will explain it to all of you this fall so that you, too, will know why we have seasons on earth, and why we will continue to have them for a good while yet.” Mr. Mubashir paused for effect. “But not forever, my friends. Not forever. And why is that?”

  Dinah found herself getting interested in the question, even though she didn’t generally think of herself as a science person. Maybe the answer had to do with global warming. Dinah had gotten involved with environmental issues back in sixth grade, and she knew that people were actually causing the climate to change by making so much air pollution.

  She raised her hand. “Because of global warming?”

  “Ahh,” Mr. Mubashir said. “The effects of our human actions on our climate—a fascinating question. We will explore it together next spring. Yes, you might say that our seasons will end because of global warming. But this warming will not be caused by anything we humans do. The ultimate energy crisis is coming, my friends. Our sun is a star, like all other stars, and no star can live forever. Someday—not too soon!—but in another five billion years, our sun is going to run out of hydrogen. This will cause chemical changes that will make our sun swell up into a red giant a hundred times its present size. Here on earth, the continents will melt, the oceans will boil away, the entire planet will be vaporized. Then our sun will contract into a white dwarf, give up the last of its heat, and die.”

  Dinah’s hand was in the air again. “But what will we do? What will happen to us?”

  “We will not be here. No life will be here. Life on earth will no longer be possible. But we will learn more about these things this fall. And we will have trips, yes? We will visit the National Air and Space Museum. And we will go out together in the nighttime to see the stars.”

  Mr. Mubashir began passing out the science textbooks. Dinah took hers automatically. Mr. Mubashir kept on talking, but Dinah couldn’t listen. She felt cold inside, cold beyond shivering, as if the dying sun had already surrendered the last of its heat into the vastness of space.

  Dinah was an environmentalist. In sixth grade she had helped start their school recycling program. But what was the point of recycling paper to save trees if all the trees were just going to be consumed anyway in an all-consuming fire?

  Dinah was an actress. She loved to be in plays. Someday she would be in movies. But what was the point of making a movie if there would be no one left on earth to see it?

  Birth—Dawn—Spring. Dinah would have to write a new poem: Death—Night—Winter. But what was the point of poetry if there would be no one left on the charred, lifeless earth to read it?

  Footprints on the sands of time. Why should Dinah care if she left any, if in another five billion years—only five!—no one would know or care whether she had left any or not?

  Four

  After the final bell, Dinah walked numbly to her locker. She loaded her new textbooks into her backpack, hardly seeing the crowds of students who raced past her.

  Suzanne seemed perfectly normal as she led the way to the bus. “Well, we survived the first day,” Suzanne said cheerfully. “Ms. Lewis is nice! Math isn’t going to be so bad. I didn’t get one single mean teacher. Isn’t Mr. Mubashir sweet? My poem in English class was just four lines long, though. But Ms. Dunne said they could be any length.”

  Dinah didn’t say anything. So they had survived one day. If Mr. Mubashir was right, one day down meant one day closer to the end—of everything.

  “Did you notice how little the sixth graders looked? And they run everywhere. I helped one of them find her homeroom this morning, and she was almost crying.”

  Dinah kept on walking.

  “Dinah!” Suzanne shook her arm. “What’s wrong? It’s not—you and Nick didn’t have another fight, did you?”

  Dinah shook her head. They boarded the bus and took seats together halfway back. Nick got on the bus after them. He touched Dinah’s shoulder lightly as he walked toward a seat in the rear.

  Dinah finally found her voice. “What Mr. Mubashir said, in science class—do you think it’s true?”

  “What did he say?” Suzanne asked. “He just gave us the books and explained about how he grades. Oh, that stuff at the beginning? I’m sure it’s true. Tom said that Mr. Mubashir is the smartest teacher in the school. He knows everything there is to know about science.”

  How could Suzanne sound so unconcerned if she had heard the same news Dinah had heard? Dinah tried one more time. “So you really think the sun is going to die?”

  “Well, I guess it has to,” Suzanne said. “Like Mr. Mubashir said, it has to run out of fuel someday. But it’s not going to happen for a long time. I bet life on earth will end way before that. A comet will hit the earth, or we’ll blow ourselves up with a nuclear bomb, or something.”

  This was Suzanne’s idea of a comforting remark?

  “Dinah,” Suzanne said. “You can’t worry about something that’s going to happen five billion years from now. And, anyway, it’s not like we can do anything about it. Do you want to cover books at your house or mine?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dinah said.

  Nothing did.

  * * *

  They went to Suzanne’s house. The snacks were always better at Suzanne’s house. After three large, soft homemade oatmeal raisin cookies washed down with a tall glass of milk, Dinah felt slightly better. Suzanne’s brother Tom sat down with them in the kitchen to listen to their first-day-of-school stories. Tom was one of Dinah’s biggest fans, almost as appreciative as Mrs. Briscoe. Today he understood Dinah’s feelings better than Suzanne did.

  “A solar system that’s had Dynamite Dinah in it isn’t just going to end,” Tom said. “It’ll find some way to keep on going.”

  “Like how?” Dinah asked.

  “They’ll think of something,” Tom said. “Five billion years from now, people are going to have some awesome technology.”

  “Maybe they can send a bunch of rocket ships to get some hydrogen from some other solar system,” Dinah said. Her mother always liked it when Dinah tried to come up with constructive ways to solve her problems. Perhaps she should forget about being an actress and think about being a rocket scientist instead.

  “That sounds good,” Tom said. “They’ll pump it in on the Dinah Seabrooke Memorial Transgalactic Pipeline.”

  Dinah felt better enough then to eat two more
cookies. She glanced out the window. The sun was still shining brightly. So far, so good.

  * * *

  Dinah’s parents weren’t worried about the end of the solar system.

  “I just wish it would end before my first biology exam,” her father said. “How anyone remembers the difference between meiosis and mitosis is beyond me.”

  Dinah’s mother said, “Well, everything ends sometime. This gives us one more reason to use our time wisely now.” She didn’t seem to see that that was the whole problem. Why do anything if everything was going to come to nothing?

  Nick came over after supper, just for half an hour, since it was a school night. Dinah waited to see if he would bring up the subject himself. He had been sitting right next to her as Mr. Mubashir had spoken. It was almost like a test. If Nick had the same reaction as Dinah to Mr. Mubashir’s announcement, it would mean that they were alike in the right kind of way. If he didn’t mind about the end of all life in the solar system, it would mean that they weren’t alike enough, and their romance was destined to burn out as surely as the sun, only a lot sooner.

  They sat together on Dinah’s front porch, side by side on the porch swing. Dinah beamed her thoughts toward Nick, willing him to pass the test, to say the right thing.

  “We have some pretty wild teachers this year,” Nick said. “Did you see Artie’s face when Dunne told him about his gift for poetry? And Mubashir—he’s something else. If you tell your class on the first day that the whole solar system is going to end, what do you tell them on the second day?”

  “I guess he could tell us that the whole universe is going to end.” Dinah tried to keep her voice steady. Nick had noticed Mr. Mubashir’s announcement, and he had mentioned it all by himself, without Dinah’s prompting. That earned him, say, fifty points out of a hundred on Dinah’s quiz. But now what would Nick say? Would he go on to tell Dinah that the news had left him shaken to the core of his being?

  “How was your social studies guy?” Nick asked then. “I got Dixon again. He sure got himself all revved up over the summer.”

  So Nick was not shaken to the core of his being. He had passed the test—but just barely, without a point to spare. Dinah gave him a D minus.

  Dinah couldn’t let the subject drop, just like that. “Doesn’t it make you feel strange at all to know that life on earth is going to end?”

  “Sure,” Nick said. “But maybe it won’t end. Maybe we’ll all pick up and move to some other solar system, one with a really young, energetic sun. That could be cool. When I moved to Maryland last year from California, it turned out to be cool. You meet crazy people when you move. Sometimes you like some of them.”

  Nick reached over and took Dinah’s hand. Dinah felt suddenly shy. She decided to take back Nick’s D-minus grade. He deserved at least a C minus, maybe even a C plus. If everyone on earth did move to another solar system, maybe the end of this one wouldn’t be so terrible. Still, Dinah wouldn’t be one of the ones moving to the cool new solar system. Neither would Nick, or Suzanne, or Tom, or Dinah’s parents, or Benjamin, or Mrs. Briscoe.

  Suddenly Dinah had a new and even more wrenching thought. The sun was going to die in five billion years, but she, Dinah Seabrooke, was in all likelihood going to die a lot sooner than that. So whatever happened to the sun, she wasn’t going to be around to see it or to fix it or to mind it.

  The second realization seemed as stunning and unbelievable as the first. At one level, Dinah had always taken for granted that she would die. But it had never seemed real to her that someday there would be no more Dinah. Now, somehow, for the first time, it did. The sun would burn out. And Dinah would burn out. Everybody died.

  Dinah let Nick talk some more about the first day of school; then she managed to say good-bye. One day she, Dinah Marie Seabrooke, also known as Dynamite Dinah, was going to die. No transgalactic pipeline or relocation to another solar system could alter that one basic and irrevocable fact.

  * * *

  Dinah didn’t have a chance to tell Mrs. Briscoe about the end of the solar system until after school on Friday. By then she was used to Ms. Lewis’s tough-guy talk, Ms. Dunne’s passion for poetry, and Mr. Mubashir’s ability to come up daily with some astonishing new science fact. She felt as if she had been in seventh grade forever.

  It was interesting having Ms. Dunne in the morning and Mr. Mubashir in the afternoon. Mr. Mubashir’s science facts could practically be turned into poetry if you laid them out in a poetic way on the page. Dinah tried with one:

  The universe began

  As a teeny tiny pinprick

  Smaller than the nucleus

  Of a single atom

  And now it has a hundred billion galaxies

  Each containing a hundred billion stars.

  At Mrs. Briscoe’s house on Friday, Dinah curled up on the couch and tucked Mrs. Briscoe’s crocheted afghan around her. It had turned chilly that afternoon, and the soft yarn of the afghan felt comforting around Dinah’s bare knees.

  “Do you want to hear some poems?” Dinah asked Mrs. Briscoe.

  Mrs. Briscoe set the frog teapot next to a heap of old magazines on her small coffee table and poured out two cups of tea. “I certainly do,” Mrs. Briscoe said, “especially if they’re poems by you.”

  So Dinah read “Beginnings” and another new poem she was working on:

  “In a mere five billion years,

  The sun will burn out, like a light.

  In a mere five billion years,

  Our earth will lie in endless night.

  My friends don’t seem to understand

  Why this makes me want to cry.

  But isn’t it a tragedy

  That everything on earth will die?”

  Dinah waited for Mrs. Briscoe’s reaction. This time it wasn’t a test. She really wanted to hear what Mrs. Briscoe would say. Mrs. Briscoe’s own husband had died. If anyone would know about death, it was Mrs. Briscoe.

  Mrs. Briscoe took a long time before answering. “I’m not sure what I think about death,” she finally said. “Sometimes I feel like you do, that nothing should die, that everything should live forever.”

  “Well, maybe not everything,” Dinah said. She didn’t feel like drinking her tea yet, but she held her hands around her cup for the warmth. “I don’t mind if ants die, or mosquitoes. But the sun should go on forever. And I want to go on forever. I mean, I kind of always expected to. Or maybe not expected to. But I didn’t expect not to.”

  Mrs. Briscoe let Dinah’s words settle in the air. Then she said, “Other times I feel that everything should die. We need to have beginnings; maybe we need to have endings, too.”

  Dinah must have looked dubious, because Mrs. Briscoe went on. “But lately I’ve been thinking that nothing really does die, that somehow, in some form, we all live on.”

  “Like in heaven?” Dinah asked. Dinah’s family didn’t go to church, the way Suzanne’s did. Dinah didn’t think her parents believed in God or heaven. But if there was a heaven, then it wouldn’t be so bad leaving earth; it would be more like moving to a new and different solar system, the way Nick had suggested. Even so, Dinah still wanted earth to be there, the way it always had.

  “There might be a heaven,” Mrs. Briscoe said, “or maybe we just live on in the memories and lives of those who love us.”

  “But if the sun burns out, there won’t be any more memories. There won’t be any people to have memories.”

  “I see what you mean,” Mrs. Briscoe said.

  Dinah didn’t know if she should ask her next question or not. “Do you think—Mr. Briscoe—do you think he’s up in heaven?”

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Briscoe said, and Dinah could tell that it had been all right that she had asked. “I hope so. I know I don’t feel that Eddie is really gone. But maybe it’s because he’s still in me, in my memories.”

  “It’s hard, not knowing,” Dinah said.

  “I know,” Mrs. Briscoe said softly. “I know. But I guess I’ll fin
d out myself before too long.”

  Dinah stared at her, appalled. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I’m eighty-three,” Mrs. Briscoe said in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. “Eddie died when he was seventy-four.”

  “But—” Dinah didn’t know what to say. “Lots of people live until they’re ninety. Or a hundred. Or those people in Russia who eat all the yogurt—they live until they’re a hundred and ten.”

  “I don’t want to live until I’m a hundred and ten,” Mrs. Briscoe said.

  “I want you to,” Dinah said. Her voice came out choked with tears. The sun wasn’t going to die for a long time, and neither was Dinah, but Mrs. Briscoe was old. However you counted it, eighty-three was old. How could Mrs. Briscoe not want to live until she was a hundred and ten? Dinah wanted to live until she was a billion and ten.

  Mrs. Briscoe patted Dinah’s hand with her veiny gnarled fingers.

  “I don’t want you to die for a long, long time,” Dinah said. “I don’t want you to ever die.”

  She turned and hugged Mrs. Briscoe as tightly as she could. Mrs. Briscoe hugged her back. For a long moment, neither of them spoke, and then Mrs. Briscoe gently pulled herself away.

  Five

  Wednesday morning, during the second week of school, the PA system clicked on in Dinah’s homeroom, and Mr. Roemer cleared his throat. In sixth grade, all the students had learned to join him in a daily symphony of exaggerated phlegmy sounds. But by this year the joke had begun to wear thin. Dinah hoped that the new sixth graders in their homerooms were beginning the same tradition.

  “Petitions for class office are due here on my desk at the close of eighth period a week from today,” Mr. Roemer read. “There are four class officers: president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer.…”