Clues to the Universe

by Christina Li

  “Do you have a cold?”

  He paused, like I was testing his patience. “It’s for my bad nerves,” he finally said.

  “What bad nerves?”

  His smile was gone. He fixed me with a stern look. “Quit asking so many questions.”

  “Sorry,” I said. We didn’t really say anything else. Maybe I was talking too much. Or maybe I shouldn’t have asked. I turned and went back to the comics shelves.

  “What does it mean to have bad nerves?” I asked at dinner.

  Danny was out having dinner at Chelsea’s house, so it was just Mom and me. She’d heated up some leftover SpaghettiOs, but Mom always overdid it with the microwave, so they were still burning hot.

  Mom looked up. “What?”

  “Mr. Voltz. He told me he has bad nerves. He takes pills for it, too.”

  “Oh, that.” Mom sighed. “It’s not bad nerves. Or that’s not what doctors call it anyway. Mr. Voltz has something called battle fatigue.”

  “Oh,” I said, but I still didn’t really know what that meant. I took a bite of my SpaghettiOs and practically breathed fire out my mouth. Ow, hot. “Is that why people say he gets fits?”

  “They’re not fits, Benji. It’s rude to call them that.”

  “Everyone says that!”

  “He just gets anxious sometimes, that’s all,” Mom said. Under the harsh light of the kitchen, I could see that her worry lines were back. She smoothed back her hair, and then it poufed up all around her again in a reddish mane. “A lot of men his age get that way. They went through some awful things when they were off fighting those wars in World War II and Korea. Sometimes the war stays with them. Mrs. Voltz told me he still gets nightmares about it from time to time. They get startled easily, too.” She looked pointedly at me. “Like when your friend had the brilliant idea to set off those fireworks, for example—”

  “He’s not my friend anymore,” I mumbled. “We haven’t hung out in months.”

  Mom paused. I knew she never really liked Drew; he never got a batch of her brownies. “Oh. I guess I knew. I wondered why he’d stopped coming around the house. Well, I’m glad. I don’t want you associating with troublemakers like that. Those fireworks sounded like machine guns, you know. They probably scared the living daylights out of Mr. Voltz.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Not a lot of people do. They don’t like talking about it, these veterans. It’s been years since they fought in a war, and people are still coming into the hospital for the first time for treatment because all these years they thought it was something an aspirin could fix. It’s good he’s taking pills for it at least. His wife made sure of that.”

  I’d known that he was a veteran, but he never talked about the war.

  Now I knew why. I looked down at my mushy SpaghettiOs. I thought of Drew and his friends calling him a spaz and felt sick to my stomach.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ro

  “WHAT IF THIS thing doesn’t stop flying and then escapes into the sky?” Benji said as I perched the rocket launcher carefully on the grass. “Like one of those big helium balloons that you accidentally let go of?”

  “Not possible,” I said. “We put a parachute in there, remember? Once the rocket starts coming down, the engine’s going to push out the parachute to slow down the descent. But hey, if this thing goes off to space on the first try, then I’d say it was a success.” I stacked the rocket on the launch rod and then stepped back.

  Benji just said, “Wow.”

  I looked it up and down. This was it. The first rocket launch. Well, technically, the first official rocket launch, since Drew had derailed our planned launch a couple of days ago. Benji and I had spent a whole afternoon fixing the fin that Drew had bent. I stared at the rocket, and the trail of wires coming out of it that would snap off as it took flight. In the back of my mind, I remembered the guy at the hobby store Dad and I visited telling me that this might take a couple of tries to get right. But still, I couldn’t help but stare at the rocket we’d spray-painted red and blue and gold and be hopeful. It wasn’t named Expedition after Gemma Harris’s spaceship for nothing. And for a second I pictured it hurtling off, far enough into space, far enough to cross galaxies and—

  “Hey,” Benji said, snapping his fingers. “Are we launching this thing, or are you just going to make googly eyes at it?”

  Right. We were launching.

  “Should I make this more realistic?” Benji said. He mimicked holding a microphone. “Reporting live from NASA . . .”

  I laughed. “Just stand back.”

  I looked around. Everything was clear. I double-checked that we had everything. The rocket, with the parachute and the radio transmitter inside, was propped up on the launch rod. The ignition system was wired to the engine. All I had to do was press the doorbell button, and the circuit would be closed and the timer would start counting down. My walkie-talkie was clutched in my hand so I could receive signals from the transmitter. “Two things to watch for,” I said. “Rocket should reach about sixteen hundred feet high at its apogee. I’ll pay attention to the walkie-talkie to see if we can hear any signals. If both things happen . . .”

  “It’ll be a smashing success.” Benji nodded. “Copy that.”

  “The countdown is ten seconds,” I said. “We press the button, count to ten, and then . . .”

  “Pffssshhhh.” Benji mimicked a rocket taking off.

  “Exactly,” I said. I looked at him and felt a thrill of excitement. “Ready?”

  He nodded.

  I leaned forward and pushed down.

  Ten.

  Nine.

  Eight.

  Seven.

  My palms were starting to feel clammy. I looked over the plans, at the drawings and calculations, seeing the familiar numbers again and again.

  Did NASA astronauts feel like this, too?

  Dad would love this.

  Four.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  There wasn’t a deafening boom. There wasn’t a huge supersonic clap of sound. But there was a pop, a SHHHHHH, and—

  My rocket was off.

  I, Rosalind Ling Geraghty, had just launched a rocket.

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi—

  It was still going.

  I snapped pictures, my fingers shaking in disbelief. Frantically, I lowered the camera and hurriedly measured the current height with my homemade optical tracker. Two hundred feet and counting.

  Ecstatic, I set the tracker device down and turned away from the rocket to see Benji’s reaction. His mouth was hanging open. He whistled. “Well, genius.”

  And then it was as if some spell were broken. I grabbed his shoulders. “We did it! We really did it! Okay. Now we just wait ten more seconds for the rocket to reach coasting altitude! And then after it deploys the parachute and lands, we’ll record the height and time and compare them to our predict—”

  Benji’s expression changed. “Uh, Ro?”

  He pointed behind me.

  The rocket wasn’t coasting. It was already falling, fast, wobbling in the air. My heart plummeted into my gut. A mess of static blared out from the walkie-talkie, instead of clear radio signals.

  No, no, no—

  Expedition hurtled toward the ground. The nose cone flew off, and there was a fwwp as the parachute billowed out, catching the rocket midflight to break the fall.

  I sprinted all the way over to where the rocket had landed. It was supposed to land all the way across the field, and it only got halfway. The nose cone was missing, the parachute a tangle of plastic and string. The transmitter had tumbled out. One of the fins was almost falling off.

  This couldn’t be right. It should have taken longer. Way longer. I grabbed a piece of paper from my legal pad and quickly jotted down some numbers.

  How were we so, so off?

  Here’s what should have happened: the rocket was supposed to launch straight up a
nd reach maximum speed within seconds. It was supposed to reach an altitude of 1,620 feet, give or take 20 feet, at its apogee, or its highest point. It was supposed to stay airborne for twenty-six seconds before the recovery mechanism deployed. That was the Plan.

  Dad always said to have a Plan for everything.

  Here’s what happened: the rocket stayed airborne for twenty seconds. It reached a maximum height of barely 400 feet.

  “Well,” Benji said. I could tell he was trying to keep his voice upbeat. “Not bad for our first attempt.”

  I looked down at the rocket. I swallowed and my throat felt tight. I nodded, not looking up. “Not bad,” I repeated numbly.

  But I hadn’t been going for not bad.

  I had been going for perfect.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Benji

  UPDATE ON THE Mission to Reunite Benji with His Long-Lost Father: we were stuck.

  Really, really stuck.

  “So I finally read the part where she finds out where her dad is,” Ro said. She started looking through the comics again. She handed me a stack of comics, except now the pages were littered with sticky notes everywhere. “And I took some notes.”

  I stared at what seemed like a million Post-it edges peeking between the pages. “Are you doing this for a grade or something?”

  “I wanted to be thorough,” Ro said. “You’re welcome, too.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled. “You did this a lot better than I would have.” I probably would have flipped through the comics to look for clues and then gotten distracted by the story. And before I knew it, I’d be rereading all of volume 2 with a flashlight at night.

  “I caught up with everything because I couldn’t take you spoiling the story anymore.”

  “And you wanted to find out how Gemma escaped that trap,” I said. “Imagine waiting an entire four months after that cliffhanger. Amir and I even made up a list of possible ways Gemma could have escaped, just to make the wait more bearable.” Some ideas were more realistic, like finding some way to call for backup from the raiders. Other ideas involved inventing some kind of gamma-ray explosion that would shatter the cave walls and paralyze the bad guys.

  Needless to say, neither of us got anywhere close.

  “Have you told your friend about this?” Ro waved to our haphazard pile of atlases, comic books, and candy wrappers.

  “Yeah, I wrote about it in my last letter,” I said.

  “What’d he think?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Hasn’t replied yet. He’ll probably write when he has time.” I didn’t know when he ever would. I imagined him biking up a street, with each house decked with holiday lights. At this moment, he was probably working on making robot arms or whatever else he was doing with his new friends. He didn’t even read comics anymore.

  “You could call him,” Ro pointed out.

  “He’s in Connecticut.” I sighed, pushing a breath out between my lips. “Can you imagine how much it’d cost to make a long-distance call across the country? My mom would never let me call out of state.”

  I wondered what it was like to have a normal dad who wasn’t impossible to contact. A dad who showed up. I wondered what Ro was like with her dad. Come to think of it, she didn’t mention him much, but I’m sure they at least ate dinners together.

  “Yeah, I guess I really never thought about it,” Ro said, carefully tearing a PayDay wrapper. “Everyone I know is from California at least. I can’t imagine ever leaving the state.”

  “Says the girl who wants to go to Mars,” I muttered.

  Ro grinned. “Okay, I’ll probably have to leave the state sometime.” She turned back to the June issue of Spacebound and flipped through the pages. “By the way, you know they’re making a movie out of this, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, pulling out my carton of Red Vines. I opened the atlas and flipped through it. “They announced it on the back cover of the last issue, right? But I don’t know when it’s coming out.”

  “It will be incredible, though, when it does,” Ro said, reaching for a Red Vine. “But anyway, I looked at all the scenes on Earth and compared them to the cities on our list.” She shook her head. “It’s just impossible to narrow down. I looked at all the pictures on the atlas, too. The desert parts look like Arizona, but they could also be New Mexico. The cities on Earth? There’s no way to tell. It could be New York or Chicago or Los Angeles.” She sighed and then reached for the atlas. “I think we’ve hit a wall.”

  Like I said, stuck.

  “Well.” I stared at pictures of the New York skyline. I said, half-jokingly, “We could just sit here eating Red Vines until we figure something out.”

  Ro stared at the wall for a while. “The rest of the book just takes place in outer space,” she muttered to herself. She looked at me. “Do you think she’ll return to Earth anytime soon?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I mean, we know her origin story now, right? She discovered that she’s actually from the planet Scion but was brought to Earth by accident, and then adopted and raised there. So wouldn’t Scion technically be her home planet?”

  And then—

  Boom. There it was.

  The idea practically crashed into me.

  “What if—” I paused. “What if we’re looking in the wrong place?”

  Ro frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “If Earth isn’t her home planet, and Scion is . . .”

  Ro’s eyes lit up. “Then we should be looking at Scion, not Earth!”

  I flipped to the part where Gemma arrived on the planet. The skyline looked familiar for some reason, but I couldn’t tell . . .

  Ro said, “It’s New York.”

  She turned the atlas around.

  I scanned the picture of the skyline, where the Empire State Building looked exactly like . . .

  The Scion Central in Spacebound.

  “Okay,” I said. I swear, my heart was beating at supersonic speed. “We need more. Is there like a subway system or something—?”

  “There is, but it’s not just that,” Ro said breathlessly. She smacked her forehead with her palm. “How did I not realize to look here? It has to be New York.”

  “Huh?”

  “The Dignitary Statue!” Ro pointed to the edge of the drawing of Scion I’d missed when I first read it. Anyone could have missed it.

  But now that I saw it, it stared me in the face.

  “Just like the Statue of Liberty,” I said.

  It was a perfect match.

  We weren’t crazy. My dad had actually, genuinely been leaving clues for us all this time.

  I looked at Ro. Ro looked at me.

  “Well, partner,” she said. “We might have just figured it out.”

  I was still thinking about New York that night when Danny opened my door a crack. “Hey. Got a sec?”

  He sat at the foot of my bed. The springs creaked.

  I pulled my blankets up to my chin. Huh. Danny wasn’t the type to stop by for a nightly chat. Besides, he usually stayed up cramming in his homework after his Hogan’s shifts or his games. Or, since we were on winter break and didn’t have homework, he’d be hogging the phone calling his girlfriend or something. Or one of his friends. I couldn’t tell who he was talking to. I’d just heard him raising his voice in the next room over, as if in a heated argument.

  Why was he coming to talk? I tried to think of what I could possibly have done but came up blank. “Whatcha want?”

  “Nothing, Bo,” he said. I hadn’t heard my nickname in a while. “I’ve just been busy. We haven’t, you know, talked. Besides, you weren’t at the store today. Mr. Voltz told me to give you this.”

  He held out the new issue of Spacebound.

  I sat straight up in bed. “You bought it?”

  “Nah, he just gave it to me. Said it was paid for. Told me to wish you a merry Christmas.”

  My heart rose. I couldn’t keep from grinning. The front cover was smooth, the pages new and crisp and gloss
y. No creases or bent edges. I hugged it to my chest. Danny grinned at me. I looked up. “Who were you just calling?”

  “Chelsea.” He sighed. “We’ve been fighting some.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I’m sure it’ll be fine, though. We always figure it out.”

  “Oh,” I said. Danny never told me anything about his girlfriend, but I always saw her at his baseball games and he always went to her soccer games, and when they weren’t going to each other’s games they were going on ice cream dates to Vic’s. They were so nice to each other in front of me, I just assumed they never fought.

  Plus, Mom adored Chelsea, and Mom only actually likes probably fifteen people. Mom wasn’t the kind of person who baked cookies for everyone on the block, but when she liked you, she made sure you knew it.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been away so much,” Danny said, looking down the floor. “I’ve been training like crazy. And the coaches have been recruiting us, too.”

  “Schools are coming to see you?”

  “You bet,” Danny said. “It’s the most nerve-wracking thing, I swear. You know USC? The one in LA? I picked up one of their pamphlets the other day, and jeez, it’s just such a cool place. Sunny with palm trees and all that. But apparently it’s super hard to get recruited by them.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get it.”

  “I mean, it probably doesn’t matter,” Danny said. “I’ll take any college that gives me money.” He looked up with a hint of a smile. “Anyway. So Mom told me you’re in the science fair now. How’d you get caught up in that?”

  I laughed. “I did it to get out of that extra tutoring class.”

  Danny nodded. “Okay, I can take that. You doing okay without your friend?”

  Without Ro? Oh, he meant Amir. I nodded. “Wrote him a letter a while ago. He hasn’t responded, though.”

  “And who’s that new friend of yours? Ray?”

  “Ro,” I said.

  “Like the sport?”

  I rolled my eyes. “R-O,” I spelled out.

  Dan raised his eyebrows. “Are you two—”

  “No,” I cut in. “Gross.”

  “You sure?”