by Christina Li
But other than that, I love this place. It just snowed here, and so the roofs and bushes and sidewalks were all covered with snow when we woke up last Saturday. And in our neighborhood they say that during Christmas, everyone decorates their yards with holiday lights, just like how it was in England when we used to live there. I’d forgotten how much I missed it, honestly. We’re also just two hours away from New York City, so we’re planning to visit next weekend. Maman says we might even be able to visit Niagara Falls over winter break.
I smiled a little.
My new school is so much better. People still give me strange looks or have trouble pronouncing my name. But they don’t pick on me or pull pranks on me like Drew did. I also met these two guys in my class, Kenny Lin and the other’s Alex Freeman. They’re both really nice to me. They helped me out with my project in science class and then invited me to their robotics club that they started. We’re trying to build one of those robotic arms that can carry objects to you. Isn’t that cool? Anyway, Alex invites us over to his house a lot because he’s an only child and his parents are never home, so whenever I want some peace and quiet, I just walk over to his place. His parents let him watch as much TV as he wants, too. My baba won’t even let us watch thirty minutes.
Spacebound comics?
I wish I was able to get the latest issue, but I can’t read them anymore. Maman found my stash and threw them all away. She’s telling me that it’s about time I started reading real books. Of course I think she’s being too strict, but I can’t really do anything about it. But it’ll mostly be fine. I’m pretty busy anyway.
Anyway, I’m going to go and figure out how to make this robotic arm move. Please do tell me everything that’s occurred since I’ve left. Looking forward to the next letter.
I set the letter on my bed. The door opened behind me, and Mom came in with a pile of laundry.
“Amir wrote me,” I said.
“I saw.” She set my folded shorts on the bed. “He adjusting okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. More than okay, I thought, with a little funny feeling in my chest. He lived on the other side of the country. He got two new best friends. I mean, he didn’t even read comics anymore.
I tried to push aside that funny feeling. There was so much to tell him—about Ro and how we finally had put together a solid plan to find my dad. I fished a blank piece of paper from my backpack and started writing.
Chapter Nine
Ro
I SET A half-constructed rocket ignition system on our kitchen countertop. “Do you know anything about how to construct a closed circuit? I can’t seem to get this to work.”
After weeks of working on it, I’d finally hit a wall. I even tried asking Mom for help.
Mom peered quizzically at the wires for a good ten seconds. Finally, she sighed, looking up. “Baobao, I have no clue how to do this.” She stood up. “You know, I like the idea of your rocket, but is it really safe to be”—she gestured to the wires—“playing with this kind of stuff?”
“It’s just wires and stuff, Mom,” I said. “I can figure it out.”
“Maybe you can ask our neighbor about this.”
I looked up. “You mean Mr. Voltz?”
“Yeah,” she said. She adjusted her jade bracelet. “He was a radiotelephone operator for the army. He probably knows more about circuits than I do.” She lowered her voice and leaned in. “Ask nicely, though.”
That was how I ended up on Mr. Voltz’s porch. I brushed aside cobwebs and pressed the doorbell. And as I waited, I stared at the bright blue peeling paint on the walls. I heard one, two muffled barks from within. Ruff, ruff.
I realized that I’d never actually spoken to my next-door neighbor before. It was always Dad who’d gone over, to help paint his fence or help build something that Mr. Voltz absolutely couldn’t figure out. He’d go, and sometimes from my bedroom window I’d hear them talking and laughing over the voices of Mr. Voltz’s radio. Dad could talk to anybody. Mrs. Voltz was always the one I’d seen more of. Sometimes, she brought muffins to our house because she tried a bunch of recipes. She taught Mom how to make the perfect sourdough loaf. But after Mrs. Voltz got cancer, she came over less and less. Mom and Dad brought over meals to the hospital every week up until she passed away. Dad was the one who made the casseroles because Mom had never made a casserole in her life; she brought tofu soups instead.
After That Night, when we were still getting used to the fact that Dad was never coming back, Mr. Voltz showed up at our steps with a burnt casserole of his own. He could barely look us in the eye. “I’m sorry about Richard,” he said gruffly. He turned and left.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like Mr. Voltz. It just wasn’t easy to talk to him. Some people were scared of him. The only time I saw him come out of his house was on the night Drew Balonik set off those fireworks, when he came out and started shouting at the top of his lungs until the fire department calmed him down. It was the only time I heard him say anything more than a sentence, let alone raise his voice.
Mr. Voltz peered down, staring at me suspiciously. His dog bounded up to greet me. “Easy, Ellie,” he said to the dog. Then to me, he said, “Hey there, Rosalind.” He sounded out the syllables of my name slowly. “What do you want?”
I cleared my throat and held out the wires. “Ro’s just fine. Do you know anything about circuits?”
He frowned and stared at it for a while. A long while. And then finally he said, “What for?”
“A rocket,” I said.
He stared at me with an unreadable expression, and for a minute I almost thought he was going to laugh in my face or slam the door. But he just said, “A rocket.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got most of it worked out, but I just can’t figure out the ignition system,” I said, before his expression could change. “And I have to figure out how to put the parts together to close the circuit, so the electricity goes all the way around in a loop—”
“I know what a circuit is,” Mr. Voltz said curtly. “Come in. Let me take a look at this.”
Ellie nudged against me affectionately as Mr. Voltz sat at his kitchen table. I threaded my fingers through her soft fur. She stared up at me with big brown eyes.
At least his dog liked me.
We sat in silence, mostly, as Mr. Voltz put on his glasses and peered at the wires. Past the worn sofa, the small TV was broadcasting the 49ers game.
“It’s supposed to connect to the rocket,” I said. “The idea is that you press the doorbell, and then the circuit closes and then it turns on the motor. And then the rocket launches.” I mimicked a rocket taking flight with my hands.
Mr. Voltz didn’t say anything. He just scowled at the wires.
“I got these parts from your store,” I said.
“I know you did.”
A long silence passed. The clock ticked on the wall.
I watched the game.
I stood up. “You know, I’ll probably just figure it out by myself,” I said hurriedly. “Sorry for making you—”
“The wires are connected wrong,” Mr. Voltz said. He pointed to the battery. “You’re supposed to connect this to the positive and this to the negative, and you switched it.”
“But the Handbook of Model Rocketry said—”
“Trust me. I did this for ten years of my life,” Mr. Voltz said. “If you botch the circuit, nothing happens. Or worse, something happens, and it isn’t good.”
I sat back. “Oh.”
Ellie bounded up and put her paws on me, her tail wagging. Mr. Voltz looked over at us, and I could see him almost smile.
He didn’t look so scary anymore. Cheering erupted from the TV. I turned back to watch the game, and this time, I noticed the framed picture of Mr. Voltz with Mrs. Voltz on one of the bookshelves behind the TV, taken when they were younger. Mr. Voltz had his arm around her, and she looked up at him instead of at the camera. “That’s a nice picture,” I said.
Mr. Voltz saw what I was looking at. “
It is,” he said, his eyes softening. But he didn’t say anything more. His jaw trembled, and I wondered if I’d said something I shouldn’t have. After a moment, he cleared his throat and stood. “Anything else?”
I shook my head and gathered up the wires. “Not really.”
“Come back if you have any more questions,” he said, as I was about to push open his screen door. “Ellie seems to like you a whole lot.”
I grinned. At least I knew he didn’t hate me. “I will.”
It was nice to have someone to eat lunch with.
For someone who didn’t say anything to me at the science table for the first two weeks, Benji was surprisingly easy to sit with. Even if it took a whole month for us to start eating together. Eventually he figured out I was eating alone, and I figured out that he was sneaking off to eat lunch in the art room, and we decided to sit together one day after class. We’d occupied the corner table of the lunchroom ever since. It was quieter, and besides, if a food fight ever broke out, the odds were low we’d get caught in the crossfire.
He didn’t talk much, and most of the time he spaced out in class, but once we started talking during lunch, I forgot that he’d ever been quiet. He was always putting together weird combinations of his lunch food (our conclusions: cheese went great with peanut butter, but combining Oreos with orange juice was awful). His brother was the baseball star of the high school team, but Benji couldn’t care less about sports, even if he did go around wearing the kind of T-shirts you get for free at baseball tournaments because they were his brother’s hand-me-downs. His brother had clearly handed down his baggy shorts too, which made Benji’s legs look extra skinny. His alien and Russian space conspiracy stories sounded a little too scientifically impossible and ridiculous, but they were fun to try to disprove.
Really, he was just a floppy-haired goofball who could probably subsist on Red Vines until the end of time. He was actually a really good artist, too. Sometimes, when I looked over and saw him sketching, I saw how his expression changed and how his eyebrows knitted together. My notebook was covered with perfect notes; his was a mess of sketches that connected to one another. He drew faces on his sketches of plants and chemicals and gave them funny expressions. I almost laughed out loud in class a couple of times. But when he was truly concentrating, it was almost like magic. He could lean over and, with a few confident strokes of his pencil, he could bring something to life.
I saw him sketching when I came into the lunchroom today, but when he saw me his face lit up and he immediately shut his book. He offered a bag of Bugles. “Want some?”
I surveyed his lunch. Other than the Bugles, he had a ziplock baggie of cereal and some yogurt. “Is this all?”
He shrugged. “Hey, this is a balanced meal.” He gestured to the ziplock bags. “Grains. Dairy.” He pointed to the Bugles. “Vegetables. Because, you know. They’re made of corn.”
I offered him my carrots and he took one. “Come on,” I said. “Take more.”
“Can’t. That’s already too much,” he said. “Plus, did you know that that if you eat too many carrots, you turn orange?”
“That’s probably not true.”
“Is too,” he said. “Learned it in sixth-grade science class.”
“You actually paid attention?”
Benji shrugged. “It happens.”
“Not today, it didn’t,” I retorted. “I think Mr. Devlin actually caught you napping this time.”
“Okay, I stayed up reading the latest issue of The New Mutants last night.”
“You’re hopeless.”
“Hey, I’m not changing anytime soon.” His expression shifted. “Anyway, I have to ask you a serious question.”
“What?”
“How do you feel about cereal mixed with yogurt?”
Chapter Ten
Benji
I’D BEEN TO so many baseball games that I knew a good hit when I heard one.
Danny was cranking them out when Mom and I pulled up to the batting cages after she took me to my dentist appointment. Usually, Mom would have rushed up to the fence and called him over to leave, but today, she just sat down at a nearby picnic table and watched.
I scooted onto the bench, running my tongue over my teeth. I could still taste the weird lumpy mint fluoride. I thought about my emergency stash of Red Vines sitting back in my room.
It was like rewinding a tape. The machine would shoot out the ball. Danny would wind up. Swing. And his bat would connect with the hurtling pitch, hitting it with a perfect, sweet, hollow ping.
Pitch. Wind-up.
Ping.
“You know he’s getting recruited, right?”
I looked at Mom, who was freeing her hair from a tight bun, her lips pursed in her usual worried look. She was still wearing her lavender-patterned scrubs from the hospital, and they looked a size too big on her. She kind of looked out of place, right next to a batting cage and a skate park where the older teenagers usually hung out. I said, “By colleges?”
She nodded.
“But Danny’s only a junior.”
Mom looked at me. “That’s when they start looking.” Mom smoothed her frizzy hair back and secured it with a clip. She popped in an Altoid mint. She was obsessed with those. “They’re going to start showing up to some games when the season starts. Maybe he can land a scholarship, even, if he keeps his grades up. College isn’t getting cheaper these days.”
Pitch.
Ping.
Mom’s eyes were still on Danny as she said, “Speaking of grades, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. I chatted with your old science teacher the other day.”
“From last year?”
She nodded, her earrings dangling. “We were just continuing our conversation from, well, last June. She really wanted to recommend you for some extra help this year.”
Not this again. Just when I thought she’d forgotten. I mumbled, “I don’t need extra study hall.”
She turned to me. “Come on, Benji. We’ve talked about this. Your math grades haven’t been so great this quarter. And you got that C in science last year.”
“Well . . .” It wasn’t my fault that Mr. Martin took points off every time he saw me drawing in class.
Mom said, “Benji, I’m not one to fret, but we have to do something about this.”
Danny took a break; the pings stopped for a while. “I’m fine now,” I said. “I’m getting better at things. Plus, my lab partner is really smart. I’m doing the science fair with her this year, and Mr. Devlin said he’d give extra credit for that.”
The look on Mom’s face was priceless. “You’re doing a science fair project?”
I nodded. “Yup.”
“Since when? And on what?”
“Since September. And we’re building rockets.”
Her eyebrows shot up another inch. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“I’m not! I swear. My lab partner’s practically a genius. She’s even drawn up all these complicated math equations and those diagram things.” I shrugged. “I trust her.”
“Oh, that’s great.” Mom started smiling, for real this time. The extra Benji-sponsored wrinkles faded. She sighed. “You know I want the best for you. I just—”
“I know.” I knew what she was going to say. She just wanted to not worry about me like she didn’t have to worry about Danny. Danny, the star shortstop who could hit a line drive with his eyes closed. Danny, with his near-perfect grades and his girlfriend, Chelsea, and his probably-most-likely fancy college scholarship. Danny, who was probably going to drive off into the sunset in his beat-up blue Ford, like Superman on his Supermobile.
Here’s something Mr. Keanan taught me during his drawing unit in art class: details bring things to life. During lunch breaks, I’d be reading my comics and he’d be sketching different things, like a drawing of his guitar, or his dog, or his two kids. He’d start out with rough brush strokes and hone in. And suddenly, he’d lean over and with a few confident strokes of his pencil, he co
uld add in a sly expression, or a twinkle in the eye, and bring someone to life.
Turns out, when you draw someone, you happen to notice things about them that other people don’t. Like how when Mom was really, really happy, her eyes crinkled at the corners. Or how her left eye twitched if she was about to blow her top over something. Or how Drew Balonik twirled his pencil when he was about to pull a prank. Or how Amir cracked his knuckles when he had to speak in public, because talking in front of people made him super nervous. For Ro, it was easy to draw the blue-and-white windbreaker, or the clunky watch she wore on her right hand because she wrote with her left, or how she always pulled her wavy hair up in a half bun with her white hair tie. But it was harder to capture how she scrunched her face and stuck her tongue out a little when she was concentrating. Or how she brightened when she figured out how to get her radio to broadcast the Giants game.
Details like these matter in comic books. Characteristics are exaggerated. Even the slightest expressions are magnified. But sometimes you have to be picky about which details to draw, or whether to include them at all. Because how detailed a character is drawn depends on how important they are, really.
Like how in every action scene Captain Gemma Harris was in—whether she was bounding off of the hood of a spaceship or landing a powerful kick midspace—I could see the exact detail of her space suit down to the belt hooks and wrist cuffs and the beads of sweat on her face. Plumes of fires and stars whirled around her. Meanwhile, her crew members Asher and Falcon stared on, roughly drawn, with the only detail being the shocked expressions on their faces. The more important someone was, the more colorfully and detailed they were drawn.
Danny started swinging again. As I watched him wind up over and over, I couldn’t stop thinking about what things would be like if that were true in real life. What if some people were lit up brightly, while others slipped by in the background?
