Clues to the Universe

by Christina Li

  Nope. It was too light.

  She didn’t scribble. She didn’t have random spots of color or accidental spaghetti stains or enough messy fingerprinted smudges to drive an FBI agent up the wall. There were no drawings of planets or characters from Spacebound or random alien faces.

  There was just a bunch of numbers. And a list of what seemed like some weird household items in the corner of one page, like Popsicle sticks and a doorbell and D-cell batteries. There were neatly printed words and numbers paired with curves and scrawled drawings with arrows pointing everywhere and weird cursive letters that had to mean some complicated math thing. That much I knew, even after getting almost a D last year in math. Angle. Lift. Velocity.

  Huh.

  It looked like hieroglyphics.

  Maybe she’d taken my folder with her. Maybe she’d carried it home with her school stuff. Or maybe it was sitting forgotten on Toothpick’s desk. Or maybe it was sitting in the lost and found, with all those gross gym socks and lost lunch bags with moldy bananas.

  I turned back to the shelf, scouring for Spacebound.

  I really, really hoped it wasn’t sitting in the lost and found. It was gross to think of my drawings with the smell of dirty feet and rotting moldy banana all over—

  I shut the folder and leaned back with a sigh.

  Tomorrow’s science class couldn’t come fast enough.

  Switching the folders back took about thirty seconds.

  And then we didn’t say a word to each other for the rest of class.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t talk, really. It was just that out of all the people in Sacramento, I couldn’t talk to most of them without my palms feeling itchy and my voice coming out too soft. And then they would ask, “What’s that?” and then I would have to repeat the whole thing again. And whenever a teacher would say, “Let’s do a couple of icebreakers,” I’d start to sweat, because I really was fine if the ice didn’t break, not even a little bit. Honestly, I would rather go to the dentist than speak up in class.

  There wasn’t much to say in class at this point, either. Toothpick was going on and on about some science-fair thing that he seemed to be way too excited about. “Be creative,” he said, waving his arms around. “Students in the past years have done everything from looking at the growth of plants to measuring the amount of energy in Gatorade. No papier-mâché volcanoes allowed in here, all right?” He winked at us. “This is the big project that we’ll be working on until March. You’ll be working on it with one partner in this class. And who knows? Some teams in the past who have gone above and beyond have submitted their projects to the regional science fair in March for major extra credit points in this class.” He wiggled his fingers when he said extra credit, like it would mean anything to us.

  I went back to tuning him out. Even though I probably needed that extra credit real bad. Mom had been threatening to switch out my art class with extra study hall tutoring for a while now. But right now, I kind of just wanted to keep to myself and my sketchbook.

  I mean, I was totally fine talking with some people. Like Amir. And Mom, even if most of the time it was just us arguing about when I would clean my room. And Danny, once in a while, when he wasn’t away at a baseball game or at parties or at his friend’s house or hogging our family phone line and calling his girlfriend, Chelsea. Or Drew, back before the Prank Wars. Or Mr. Keanan, the art teacher. He had hairy arms and a wild mop of hair and refused to wear a tie. He played the radio while we worked in class, threatened to throw a block of wet clay at Drew’s head if he ever tried to pull something in his class, and let me eat lunch in the art room without having to say anything. He played the radio, and I drew and listened to the scratchy sound of my pencil against the paper. Mr. Keanan understood that it was way easier to think in color than in words. Like how it was easier to listen than talk. Plus, he’d started playing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the radio, and not gonna lie, I was really starting to get into the plot.

  But man, I missed Amir. He was the only person I could really talk to about comics. Or about my dad. Or both. If I had to point to the start of the search for my dad, really, it probably was the day I got to know Amir. Also known as the day of the chicken-wing incident.

  Or maybe it was the day I found the drawing. But that came later.

  I became friends with Amir Karimi in our sixth-grade science class when he fainted while slicing open raw chicken wings.

  The teacher hadn’t told us about the dissection until the week before. I didn’t know what “die-section” was, really, until someone raised their hand and Mr. Martin explained that, yes, this “die-section” thing did involve raw chicken wings but that no, there wasn’t supposed to be blood and guts everywhere because the chicken wings would be cleaned. But I didn’t hear most of this because I’d been doodling plants and vines in the corner of my notebook.

  “Okay, everybody, partner up.”

  I snuck glances at Drew goofing off with his new friend Eddie in the corner of the room. I thought we’d be friends again—it had been two weeks since the Prank Wars had ended—but he hadn’t said a word to me, and the sight of him making fun of the teacher with that trademark smile of his made me sick. It was kind of weird to be replaced, to be honest. But at that moment, I realized that it would actually be kind of okay if he never talked to me again.

  Which meant that on the morning of the dissection, I was paired with Amir, a small, skinny kid who’d looked shaky at the sight of a tiny, rubber-like chicken wing. He flinched when I prodded the wing with a small scalpel, and when it was his turn to handle the tools, he accidentally hit a vein in the chicken wing and promptly collapsed on my shoulder.

  While the class flipped out about someone fainting, I practically carried him to the nurse’s office. Amir woke up twenty minutes later, and we got to skip all of science class.

  After that incident, we started sitting together at lunch every day. I learned that Amir lived with his parents and three sisters but had to leave behind his grandparents and friends when he left Iran. When I was still friends with Drew he’d make fun of Amir’s accent, but I learned that Amir was one of the smartest people I’d ever met and was fluent in Farsi and English and a little bit of French, and only said the word garage funny because he’d lived in England for a year before moving here. I learned that Amir’s maman and baba had both taught in a city called Tehran, until the government changed and got scary and they had to move away. I told Amir about how my mom was hardly ever home because she worked twelve-hour shifts at the hospital and how my dad was really never home because, well, he and my mom divorced a long time ago and I hadn’t seen him since I was four. I told him about how my mom stress-cleaned the house and always called home between work shifts to make sure I was doing okay, and how every teacher I’d ever had had told me how much they loved my brother.

  Sure, there were some differences between us. Amir’s favorite American candy was Good & Plenty; I liked Red Vines. He separated his foods when he ate because he couldn’t stand them mixed together; I loved combining things like pretzels and grape jelly to see what it was like. If I were to draw Amir, there wouldn’t be a line out of place; his green checkered shirt collars were always neatly folded down, his hair combed, his pants the right length. He was always making fun of how my brother’s hand-me-down baseball-tournament shirts were too big on me. But other than all that, I swear, sometimes I thought we were the same person. And the best part? He read comics too. I didn’t have to explain why I loved them so much, like I’d had to explain to Drew.

  See, the thing was, life was a lot more exciting with the possibility of getting superpowers someday and getting sent on some epic mission to save the world. Or, at least, school became a lot more bearable.

  Amir and I caught up on all the latest issues of The Flash and Batman. He mostly read his comics when he came over to my house, though, because his maman said that comics were a waste of time. One of those times, when I was looking for extra sketchbooks that M
om had stored in some bins in the garage, I found a drawing that’d gotten stuck to one of the covers.

  “Whoa,” I said. “Dude, look at this.”

  I thought it was a page that had accidentally been torn out of some comic book at first, but I took another look and saw splotches of water stains on the page and blurred colored-pencil lines.

  It was definitely an original work of art. But I couldn’t tell which comic it was from, which was weird.

  Amir peered over.

  “Oh, I didn’t know you liked Spacebound,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That.” Amir pointed to the drawing. “You drew that really well. It looks exactly like Spacebound.”

  “But I didn’t draw it,” I said. I barely made out the name scrawled in the corner. David Allen Burns.

  “Wait,” I said. “That’s my dad.” I hadn’t seen his name in so long that I almost didn’t recognize it. Truth be told, I knew less about my dad than I knew about my neighbor Mrs. Simmons. At least I knew what she looked like. And that she had three mean cats.

  Amir cocked an eyebrow. “Your dad drew . . . this?”

  I shrugged. “Probably. Looks like it.”

  He stared at me like I was telling him the earth was flat or something.

  “Then . . . you’ve read his comics, right?”

  I turned around in disbelief. “He writes comics?”

  And that was how I found out my dad wrote Spacebound.

  I was captivated by the comics from volume 1, issue 1. Maybe it was the story about Captain Gemma Harris, whose space crew accidentally ended up on a dusty planet billions of light-years from Earth after one of the radioactive experiments on their ship went horribly wrong. Maybe it was the characters they met in the alternate universes on their journey home—from bands of evil three-eyed aliens intent on finding and conquering Earth, to the Bardlebums, a troupe who traveled from universe to universe with wacky musical performances titled (wait for it) Space Operas, to Woz, the adorable abandoned spacepup that Gemma adopted.

  Or maybe it was the wacky jokes my dad made, or the way the artwork matched up exactly with the drawings I’d dug up from the depths of the storage bin.

  The point was:

  I was hooked on these comics.

  and

  I knew now that my dad was out there. Somewhere.

  And in volume 3, issue 2, Mission Unearthed, when Captain Gemma Harris found out that her dad wasn’t dead but missing somewhere in the universe, she went on a mission to track him down.

  I swear, the hair on my neck stood up.

  “Do you think I could maybe”—I cleared my throat over my peanut butter sandwich—“you know, find him?”

  Amir wiped his hands on a napkin. “Sure. You got his address?”

  “I mean, no.”

  “Phone number?”

  “Not really.”

  “I don’t know, then. He could live in New York, for all we know. Or maybe even Iowa.”

  He scooped some rice out of his thermos. “I read in a book that there are more cows in Iowa than people. How would you find him in a sea of cows?”

  After school at Hogan’s the next week, I was in the middle of re-creating a Spacebound drawing of Captain Gemma Harris in her space suit when I saw a familiar flash of blue and white.

  Wait a second.

  I peeked over the edge of the aisle.

  It was her. Ro Geraghty. The girl from my science class, with her baggy blue-and-white windbreaker and her hair half pulled up in a white hair tie, standing alone in line until Danny waved to her. She marched right up to the counter, her arms full. In the mound of objects she dumped in front of my brother, I saw scissors, a packet of paper clips, electrical tape, a bunch of glue bottles, Popsicle sticks, and nuts and bolts.

  As Danny rang her up, I realized that those were all things on that list I’d seen. The list in her purple folder, along with pages of all those mysterious numbers.

  Seriously, what on earth was she up to?

  Maybe this was some kind of arts-and-crafts project. I knew almost for sure it was related to the thing she kept scribbling on about in her secret notebook during science class. She did exactly what I did: she placed her secret notebook inside her green science notebook to pretend like she was taking notes.

  I caught glimpses of her secret notebook sometimes. I mean, I hadn’t meant to, and I knew it was kind of wrong to snoop on other people’s business. But I was curious, and I thought that maybe if I stared long enough the hieroglyphics would start to morph and make sense or something. Plus, she had to have looked inside my folder a little bit. I’d caught her peeking at my drawings a couple of times, but every time I glanced up, she looked away. I gotta say, we nailed this not-talking thing.

  Maybe it was a top-secret project.

  A top-secret government project.

  Spy Prodigy Infiltrates Middle School to Save It from a Lurking Danger! Can She—

  “Do you have any D-cell batteries?”

  I was getting carried away with this.

  Danny said, “Nah, I don’t think so. We have double-A, or the smaller triple-As?”

  “It’s way bigger. I guess a 12-volt could work, too, but I thought D-cell batteries would be easier to find.”

  What was she working on?

  “Huh,” Danny said, leaning on the counter. “Haven’t seen those around here. I can ask my manager, but he’s taking a break right now.”

  That was true. Mr. Voltz usually sat at his normal spot against the counter, with his back flat against the wall, but he’d gone out to get something from his car a while ago.

  The fan whirred behind me. I put my pencil down. I could swear that when I was walking down the aisle today . . .

  “Well,” she said, “I’ll try somewhere else, I guess.”

  Danny handed her the receipt.

  Bingo.

  I had seen those big, bulky batteries in aisle E6. I knew because it was right across from the comic books and magazines.

  Ro was about to leave. Before I knew it, I was running after her. The bell clanged as the door closed behind me.

  “E6,” I blurted out.

  Ro turned around, her eyes wide.

  “That’s where it is. The thing. I mean, the battery. The battery thing you were looking for. Danny just missed it.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Danny?”

  “Oh, yeah. My brother.” Not helpful, Benji. “The cashier back there.” I cleared my throat. “The battery is in aisle E6, though. I promise.”

  She smiled. She had a nice smile, actually, when she didn’t have that kinda-spacey-kinda-freaked-out expression she’d had all of last week. “Thanks.”

  This is what I should have done: smiled back and said “You’re welcome” like a regular normal person.

  This is what I actually did: I blurted out, “Are you building a radio?”

  I, apparently, was not a regular normal person.

  She tilted her head. “What?”

  “I mean, what you’re working on. Is it a radio or something?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  I looked down at my shoes, my palms beginning to itch. At that moment, I really wished I were the Flash. Don my suit, and boom. I’d be outta there.

  “No—sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “I know you looked at my drawings.” She wasn’t even mad about it. She just said it, matter-of-fact. Maybe with even a little bit of a smile. “I was just wondering what made you think it was a radio.”

  “I mean, it was my best guess. I couldn’t really tell.” Those Popsicle sticks really threw me for a loop.

  She set her stuff down. “Guesses like?”

  I shrugged. “Robot, maybe. Clock. Time machine.”

  I’d tossed the last one out there mostly as a joke because I’d seen those sci-fi movies have time machines made out of radioactive boxes, but her eyes widened. “You think I’m building a time machine?”

  “I was just—”
/>   “I mean, could that be scientifically possible, do you think? Like a box that could travel space and time? Like—”

  “The TARDIS,” I said. Amir loved that show.

  “Exactly!” she said. “From Doctor Who.”

  Our eyes met. I smiled, just a little bit.

  “So, am I right?”

  “You’re in the ballpark,” she said, straightening up.

  “What, you’re actually building a time-traveling space machine?”

  “Minus the time-traveling part.”

  “A spaceship?”

  She raised her eyebrow.

  I stared at her. “You’re actually—”

  “A rocket,” she said with a grin, “to be exact.” She looked past me, toward the store. “Wanna show me where this battery is?”

  “Get brainstorming with your partners,” Toothpick said. He was on his second cup of coffee, so he was pacing around the tables, gesturing wildly with his hands as he announced that today was the day to get excited about, because we were building Rube Goldberg machines, those things that launched a ball from a cup to a lever to a chute, bouncing it from one contraption to another until it finally rang a bell or dropped into a bucket. “The best one gets a week of no homework.”

  People around us squealed and turned to their partners. Ro ripped a sheet of paper out of her notebook and turned to me. She rolled up the sleeves of her windbreaker. There was already a full sketch. “Here. It should work, as long as the bottom doesn’t collapse.”

  Of course she was already a million steps ahead. I got to work.

  Around us, everyone was talking, but Ro and I didn’t say another word to each other.

  Maybe I should have said something. I mean, we’d practically had a whole conversation a few days ago. But then I thought about my throat getting all funny and my face getting hot. It’s like those moments when you’re in an elevator with someone, or when you’re sitting next to someone in the nurse’s office. And you make eye contact and you know that you’re supposed to say something so your mom doesn’t say you’re being rude, even if it’s something dumb like what the weather is. But then too much time has passed, and it’s harder and harder to start a conversation, and so you sit in silence and stare at the wall or wait for the elevator to ding.