Clues to the Universe

by Christina Li

  “Positive,” I said. There was no chance of that. Ze-ro. I’d been around Drew enough to know that going out in middle school just meant obnoxious note passing for weeks at a time. Or, worse yet, bad spin-the-bottle games. Plus, a solid perk of being his friend was that no girl ever even glanced my way. “We don’t make kissy faces like you and Chelsea do.”

  “We do not,” Danny said, his cheeks turning pink.

  “Do too.”

  “We just like hanging out with each other. That’s all.” His eyes flickered up. “But I miss hanging out with you, too.”

  “It’s not like we live in the same house or something,” I said.

  Danny smiled a little bit. “Anyway,” he said. He cleared his throat. “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. I thought you might want this.” He handed over a sheet of paper.

  Mission to Reunite Benji with His Long-Lost Father.

  I sat straight up and snatched it. “You took this from my room?”

  “I found it at the dinner table, okay? You’re lucky I got to it before Mom did.” He paused. His voice was sharp. “You’re trying to find Dad?”

  “Danny, Dad wrote these comics,” I said. “He’s out there somewhere.”

  Danny said, “I know.”

  “You knew?”

  “I’ve known for a while now. I found one of his drawings with my old report cards. I didn’t really think much about it until I started shelving those comics for Hogan’s. And then I kind of put two and two together.”

  He had got to be kidding me. Danny knew?

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me? Amir was the one who told me!”

  Danny looked down. “It wouldn’t have changed anything.”

  “It would have changed everything!”

  My brother narrowed his eyes. “Are you actually tracking him down?”

  “So what if I am?” I threw back. “Did you know that Dad put clues in his comics to tell us where he is? Ro and I figured it all out. Dad lives in New York, Danny. New York! Don’t you want to see him? We could go together.” I rushed on. “And I know that this probably won’t make Mom happy, but—”

  “It’s not just that,” Danny said flatly.

  “Then what?”

  Danny shrugged. “Believe me, Bo. I tried. But there’s just no point to finding him.”

  I felt sick. I practically knew where Dad was, probably, and my brother didn’t care. Anger rose. I couldn’t help snapping, “You don’t even care, do you? Of course you wouldn’t.”

  “What do you mean?” Danny’s voice was sharp.

  “I mean, it’s not like you’d need Dad around, anyway.” I shot back. “Come on, Danny. Mom loves you. Jeez, Chelsea and all your friends and your entire school are all in love with you. Your life is perfect as is. Why would you even care about Dad?”

  “Of course I care!” Danny retorted. “You don’t think I care that when it’s my senior night at my baseball game and everyone’s mom and dad walks their kid out, only my mom is going to walk me down? You don’t think I have to listen to Mom worry about everything from whether she’s working enough hours to her taxes to whether she should start dating again, not just whether I clean my room or not? You don’t think I have to hold down a job on top of baseball on top of knowing that the only way I’m going to college is through a baseball scholarship, because there’s no other way we could afford it?” He paused. “You don’t think I miss him too? Come on, Benji. I used to cry myself to sleep when Dad left. I waited years for him to come back. But he’s been gone for so long that I don’t even know what he looks like anymore. He’s gone. And I’ve accepted that.”

  Danny looked at me like he was disappointed in me, which I hated. “Finding him is not a good idea,” he said softly. “Trust me. Him coming home isn’t gonna change anything.”

  My mouth hung open, and I didn’t know what to say for a few minutes. Finally, I said. “You’re wrong. He could pay for your college. We just have to find him.”

  “You’re gonna find Dad in one of the biggest cities in the world? Fat chance.” Danny shook his head and looked at me like he felt sorry for me or something. “Grow up, kid.”

  I felt like I’d just been sucker punched.

  “I’m sorry,” Danny said. “Look, I didn’t mean to sound so mean.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was too mad to speak, so I just looked at the ground. Danny waited. He didn’t seem like a powerful superhero anymore, like he did when he was out on the field. His shoulders deflated. I looked some more at the carpet, until Danny finally sighed and got up, his weight easing from the bed.

  I guess my brother was kind of right. He always was. There were things that I knew Dad coming home wouldn’t fix. Drew Balonik would never stop hating me. I would never stop being the last one picked for the softball team in gym class. Mom would never stop worrying about me.

  But maybe if Dad was back in my life, things would be easier to bear. I could spend weekends with him. He could take me on his trips. I could see him work on his comics. Work with him, even—I had some pretty sweet ideas about how Gemma could take the nuclear superconductor back from the Raiders. Maybe, just maybe, he could even get a house on the other side of Sacramento and I could see him every weekend, just like Holly Berger with her dad. I could introduce him to Mr. Keanan. Man, my art teacher would love him.

  What was he like, even? Maybe he imagined things in shades of colors like I did. Maybe he was also the kind of person who left colored pencils around and, you know, was okay with a little bit of a mess sometimes.

  Maybe if Dad was around, I wouldn’t be the oddball out anymore.

  I forgot I was still clutching the comics in my hands. I sighed and leaned back. I turned on the lamp by my bed and looked at the cover.

  When Gemma found her way to Planet X in Spacebound, she zoomed through the desert and flew through underground tunnels and barbed stalactites. Even when her spaceship was shot down, she still made her way to the cavern where her father was held.

  I’d read that scene a million billion times, enough to picture every detail now as I closed my eyes. Her father lifted his head; his face was thin and you could see his cheekbones. The room was dark, sketched in shades of rust and brown and black. Her father smiled. His twinkling eyes were the same as Gemma’s and the exact same as mine, green flecked with brown.

  “Gemma,” he said in relief. “I knew you’d come find me.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ro

  THE SATURDAY AFTER New Year’s, I biked up to the launch site, the Expedition II strapped carefully to my backpack. I ran over what I had in my backpack again: the ignition, the timer, my notebook. This time, I hadn’t just followed the steps. I’d tightened every bolt not once, but twice. I’d changed the shape of the fins to make the rocket more streamlined.

  By now Benji knew what to do. He helped me set it up on the launch rod and then stepped back and brushed dirt off his hands. “Come on, smarty-pants,” he said, grinning at me for encouragement. “You got this.”

  I hooked up the ignition wires with paper clips, and then pressed the button.

  Ten. Nine. Eight.

  I wouldn’t look away, not even for a single millisecond.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  I watched as the Expedition II launched, soaring up, up, up, and my nerves faded away to excitement, because this time, it would climb to 1,620 feet. I frantically aimed the tracking device at the air, while listening hard for the radio signals.

  This time, I didn’t miss it.

  I saw the moment it stopped accelerating in the sky, thirty seconds too soon, and careened off course. This time, I didn’t miss the dead silence of the radio signals. This time, I didn’t miss a second as the rocket teetered to the ground, a minute too soon and 800 feet short of the predictions. Better than last time. But still a failure.

  Mr. Voltz held the rocket in his hands gingerly. “What happened?”

  “I don’t kno
w,” I said miserably, looking down at the patterns on the tablecloth. Ellie padded over, her collar bell jingling. I gave her a belly rub, which made me feel better. I knew that things maybe weren’t supposed to go right the first time around, but we shouldn’t have been that far off the mark. “Everything went wrong. The rocket barely launched before it crashed. The radio transmitter didn’t work.”

  “Ah,” Mr. Voltz said. “The radio I can help with.” He took a long look, turning the circuit boards and wires delicately in his hands. He pressed the switches and leaned close to the walkie-talkie. I sat back and looked around the house. I found myself looking at the picture of Mr. and Mrs. Voltz again. And then at the framed pictures of what looked like his kids, from years ago. Or grandkids, maybe? I couldn’t tell. And to the far right, a worn baseball lay nestled in a plastic case, with a blue scribble on it.

  Mr. Voltz straightened up. “These circuits just have to be rewired like this, and then you should be getting a radio signal. I’m not sure about the rocket, though. Maybe it’s something with how it’s built.”

  I examined it again. “Maybe I didn’t screw on the nose cone tightly enough. Or the fins aren’t the right shape.”

  Mr. Voltz shrugged. “Maybe. To be frank, I don’t know much about rockets themselves.” After a pause, he said, “You really built all this by yourself?”

  “Well, the radio, yeah,” I said. “But I didn’t build the rocket all by myself. Benji helped me. And I had the fins and nose cone left over from a kit.”

  “Ah. I didn’t know he liked building rockets, too.”

  “Well, it was a part of a deal we made, actually,” I said. “Benji’s supposed to help me build my rocket.”

  “And you’re helping him look for his father.”

  I was surprised. “You know about that?”

  “Benji told me. I’ve known his mother for a while. She took care of my wife back when she was sick.” He sighed through his nose and looked down at the table. “I always knew that his father was . . . absent.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  He fixed me with his gaze. “Young lady, you know that’s none of my business.”

  My face suddenly felt hot. “Right. Sorry.”

  The silence stretched out between us. Mr. Voltz kept looking at the table. I was probably supposed to go, anyway. But before I left, I looked up, back at the mantel above the TV. “Who’s that baseball signed by?”

  He glanced up. “Willie Mac.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. “Willie McCovey? From the Giants? No way.”

  “It was a birthday gift.” I saw a hint of a smile. “You a Giants fan, too?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “My dad was. He went to high school and college in San Francisco. He used to take me to games all the time.”

  “Ah, I should have guessed. Your dad and I used to talk about them all the time.” He nodded, almost looking uncomfortable. A long moment passed. Finally, he said, “I’m real sorry, you know. About your father.”

  I nodded, looking down.

  “Does it ever get easier?” I blurted out. I looked back over at the picture of Mr. and Mrs. Voltz again. Mrs. Voltz looked happy. Like she’d forgotten there was a camera there because she was too busy looking up at him. “With missing someone?”

  He leaned back in his chair.

  “I thought it would,” I said. “But I’m not so sure anymore. Does it ever hurt to even walk through the house, because you see so much of their stuff?” I swallowed and took a deep breath. “And you think that they’ll come back, but then you realize it all over again that they’re never coming back and your stomach starts hurting and you don’t know how to make it stop?”

  Slowly, Mr. Voltz took off his glasses and rubbed his face. He let out a long, heavy sigh. When he looked back up, his expression had changed. His eyes had softened. “Yes,” he said. “Every day.”

  “He was supposed to work on this with me. We were supposed to build this rocket together,” I said. But it wasn’t just that; it was everything else we were supposed to do together. The birthdays and baseball games and drives at night. But I couldn’t say anything else because my throat was feeling so tight.

  Here’s something Dad once taught me: the moon looks smooth from the Earth, but it isn’t. Every time an asteroid or meteor collides with the moon, it leaves behind a permanent crater. There’s barely any atmosphere on the moon, so nothing is erased.

  I knew I could keep doing the Next Best Step. I knew that when my world was knocked wildly off balance, when things were so beyond my control that I could barely comprehend it, I had to do the next thing that would push things a little closer back to normal. I knew I could try to cope with things by organizing the dish towels by color and letting Mom take care of her plants and play music on her record player. But sometimes Mom would stare off into space when Dad’s favorite song would play, and I heard her crying in her room after Thanksgiving because she couldn’t carve a turkey like Dad could. Sometimes I would be looking at the pieces of the rocket and I would feel this crushing pressure in my chest and a horrible feeling in my stomach, like it was being squeezed ten ways. Sometimes I couldn’t help myself from wondering about That Night: how fast Dad had been going, what the force of the collision was, how much the other driver had accelerated. I could always do the Next Best Step, but sometimes I wondered if some people were meant to walk around with craters in their hearts for the rest of their lives.

  “We were supposed to take a road trip across the country for her fifty-fifth birthday,” Mr. Voltz said. “We were going to stop at every national park and ice cream parlor on the way.”

  “Ice cream?”

  “Before doctors would tell us we were too old and couldn’t have any,” Mr. Voltz said. Finally, there it was. A small smile. His eyes twinkled. “She always liked to have fun.” He sighed. “Feels like a piece of you is missing, doesn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  We were silent for a while, but it was the kind of silence where no one needed to say anything. It was a relief to be understood.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Benji

  I DIDN’T GET a letter from Amir this time. Instead I got a postcard, with a picture of Niagara Falls on the front. On the back, Amir had hastily scrawled:

  Happy holidays! I’m sorry I haven’t had the time to write lately, but I thought I’d send something over anyway. Hope your family is doing well.

  I shoved the postcard under my pillow and didn’t bother to write a reply.

  “Ro invited you over for Chinese New Year dinner?” Mom had said dubiously when I first brought it up. She stirred the pasta in the pot and pushed her poufy bangs out of her face. “I didn’t know your friend was Chinese.”

  “Half.”

  Mom stared at me like she didn’t understand. “What?”

  “Like, her mom is Chinese and her dad is . . . you know. Not.”

  She took a minute to process that. “Oh,” she said, stirring the pasta some more. “Huh. That’s interesting.” She covered the pot and wiped her hands. “So, what do people eat at Chinese New Year dinner? You should bring something, right?”

  “No clue,” I said. “I’m probably just going over to her house and eating some food.” But as I walked up to Ro’s house, with a plate of chocolate chip cookies that Mom had made from a bucket of cookie dough, I saw the warm light spilling out from the windows and voices chattering words I couldn’t understand.

  This wasn’t just a dinner; it was a big dinner party.

  But before I could change my mind, the door opened and Ro’s mom practically waltzed out, with a spatula in hand. “Benji!” she said brightly, and then swept me up in a fierce hug. “Our very special guest.”

  I held out the plate as she shepherded me inside. “I brought cookies,” I said. “Should I set them in the kitchen or—”

  I stumbled into the dining room full of people, where promptly, three women turned and stared at me curiously.

  Ro’s mom didn
’t seem to notice. “I’ll take them,” she said, taking the plate from my hands. “Why don’t you make yourself comfortable and I can introduce you to some of the—”

  “I’ve got it, Mom,” Ro said, coming down the stairs. I exhaled in relief.

  “Hi, Aunties,” she said, grinning brightly at the three women who, to be honest, looked like they’d never lost a staring contest in their lives. She turned me away. “Come on, let’s go to the kitchen.”

  “So this is your family?” I whispered to her.

  “Sure is,” she said. “Those were my great-aunts. Laolao and Wai-Gong—my grandparents—are probably in the kitchen or something.”

  “They’re all from around here?”

  “Well, most of my mom’s side of the family—the Lings—live in San Francisco. But everyone switches off hosting the dinner every year.” She leaned in, lowering her voice. “Don’t mind them staring. It’s because you’re the only white person in this room.” She paused. “Well, one and a half, if you count me.”

  I realized that I couldn’t see her dad anywhere.

  Where was he?

  Something sizzled and spat in the kitchen as it got dropped in the large round pan. A large plume of steam and smoke engulfed the pan.

  Whoa. The aroma alone made my mouth water.

  “Here.” Ro pushed a plate at me. “We can start you off easy before we move on to the chicken feet.”

  Chicken feet?

  “Kidding,” Ro said, seeing the look on my face. “I wouldn’t make you do that.”

  We found a quiet corner of the living room. Ro pointed to the things piled high on my plate. “Do you know what any of this is?”

  I poked it with my fork. “Is this like bread or something?”

  “You’ve never had Chinese food before, have you?” Catching the look on my face, she grinned. “I’ll get to see you have your first char siu bao.”

  “The what?”

  “This,” Ro said, pointing to a round bun. “It’s stuffed with barbecued pork. It’s kind of sweet and smoky? Here, try it.”

  I bit into the hot bun, and my eyes widened. “Dis,” I said with my mouth full, “isshogood.”