Clues to the Universe

by Christina Li

  I rushed up to my door, but the door was locked. Mom was out. I fumbled with the key, my fingers shaking. I heard the screen door snap shut behind me. I raced to my room. I threw my rocket into the closet and then sank to the carpet, against my bed.

  The Container of Dad’s Things sat in my sock drawer, untouched. I’d never told Benji about it, I suddenly realized. I’d been so caught up in building the rocket itself that Benji never knew that I didn’t just want to launch a rocket—I wanted to launch a rocket that would clear the sky and the stratosphere and go out there, into space and stars, carrying the picture of Mom and Dad. I wanted another Voyager. I wanted to build satellites and space shuttles.

  How could I build anything close to that if I couldn’t even get a homemade model rocket to launch right?

  I glanced over to the corner of my living room, where the poster board lay against the wall, half-completed. The results section was still empty, waiting for our numbers.

  Benji was right. This would never be more than some school project. We were running out of time.

  I was supposed to have Dad’s Levi’s genes. His science genes. I saw the world the way he saw it: through numbers and reason. For every unknown there was supposed to be a perfect explanation. For every problem to be solved, there was supposed to be an exact solution, if only you did the steps right. Two chemicals put together in the right quantities always yielded the same reaction. Numbers weren’t supposed to fail.

  I had a Plan that I thought was foolproof. But I couldn’t even reach anywhere near the predicted height.

  I could never make a Voyager. And I wasn’t a scientist: I was a failure.

  I pushed through Mom’s potted plants to get to the VCR. I took the recorded VHS tape of the Columbia carefully out of its sleeve, and then popped it in. Then I went to the fridge and took out some milk and made myself a bowl of Cocoa Puffs.

  The cereal was stale, and I’d accidentally poured too much milk, but the familiar chocolate sweetness comforted me, and so I ate it anyway.

  I watched the Columbia rumble and tear into the atmosphere, like the very air itself had crackled and burst into a thousand tiny pieces.

  I watched it ten more times, rewinding almost to the point of ruining the tape, and put my head in my knees.

  I was supposed to be a scientist.

  I reached into my backpack, pulled out my drawings and my diagrams and all the calculations I’d done. I wanted to rip them all to shreds, or stuff them in the closet. But that wasn’t rational, so I stuffed them under the copy of the New York Times that Mom had.

  I almost turned back to my Cocoa Puffs, but then something from the newspaper caught my eye.

  Specifically, the entertainment section.

  I scanned it quickly. And then I read it over three more times, not believing what I’d seen.

  I sat straight up, and suddenly I couldn’t move fast enough. I threw on my windbreaker and clutched the newspaper to my chest. Racing out, I barely remembered locking the door behind me before I was pedaling, fast and hard, to Hogan’s.

  It was there, right in the Sacramento Bee. I reached for another newspaper on the rack just to confirm. I stared at words and the times and locations, rubbing my eyes to make sure I wasn’t reading it wrong. And then I felt it again. The moment the cards turned and I figured it exactly out, and it wasn’t like I was trying to guess or deduce anymore, because the answer was right in front of me, and I knew.

  I knew where Benji’s dad was going to be.

  And I knew exactly how to find him.

  Chapter Twenty

  Benji

  SOMEONE KNOCKED ON our door about a million times.

  “Coming!” I shouted. What kind of mailman—

  Ro stood on my front porch, out of breath and clutching a bunch of newspapers to her chest.

  I definitely was not expecting this.

  “Um, Ro?” I’d known better than to bother her after the rocket launch this afternoon, but here she was, turning up on my doorstep.

  Her face was flushed as she pushed past me and came in. “We have to talk.”

  “Is everything okay?” I asked, following her to the living room. “Because I know you’re still upset about your—”

  She dropped the newspapers and turned around to face me. “I know how to find your dad.”

  My heart crashed into my rib cage.

  She really was going nuts.

  “Like”—I swallowed—“in New York?”

  “No! I mean. I don’t know. The thing is, I don’t know where he lives, but that doesn’t matter.” She flipped to the entertainment section of the San Francisco Chronicle. “I know where he’s going to be in a month.”

  I saw the part that was circled in Ro’s bright blue Sharpie.

  SPACEBOUND: COMING TO FILM SOON!

  Captain Gemma Harris from the hit comic series is coming to life on the silver screen! Follow as she and her crew find their way home after a disastrous expedition, encounter friends and foes across galaxies, and get caught up in a mission that could save the fate of their home, planet Earth. Directed by Lawrence Fisher and written by the creator of the series, David Allen.

  “Look at the premiere date,” Ro said breathlessly. My eyes traveled down.

  Premiering March 16 at the El Capitan Theatre, Los Angeles.

  My mouth went dry. I read my dad’s name, over and over again.

  David Allen.

  It couldn’t be. I looked up. “Is this for real?”

  Ro pushed the rest of the newspapers at me, the sections circled with blue Sharpie. Some had paragraphs. Other newspapers only had one sentence. But they all confirmed the same thing: The Spacebound movie was coming. To Los Angeles.

  My dad was going to be in Los Angeles.

  It couldn’t be this easy. We’d practically scoured the atlas and phone books. I’d written him letter after letter. We’d hunted down and circled every single clue in his comics.

  And yet none of it mattered in the end, because he’d be coming to Los Angeles.

  In Southern California.

  He was going to be in the same state as I was.

  It would only take a day to get to him. Half a day, even.

  “We could go see him,” Ro said. “It’s the day before the regional science fair. We can go early and catch him right before the premiere. And then we can be back by nighttime.”

  I looked up to meet Ro’s eyes, and I swear, I could start imagining it.

  Movie screens and billboards and glittering city lights. The lights dimming; the screen lighting up and becoming my world. The universe hurtling through the viewfinder of Gemma’s spaceship. The first burst of color; the whoosh of Gemma’s spacesuit; the KAPOW of explosions as each sound bubble and splash of color came to life. The roar of a spacecraft in my ears throwing me back, so loud I could feel the sound racing past my ears.

  And my dad.

  “Ro,” I said. “You absolute genius.”

  And then I started laughing and I couldn’t stop. Ro looked at me like I was crazy or something, but she couldn’t help smiling a little bit, until that smile turned into a full-on grin. And then she was laughing, too, mostly in relief and sheer giddiness, until we couldn’t stop and our stomachs hurt and our cheeks were sore.

  We probably looked a little bit hysterical, to be honest.

  But I didn’t care a single bit, because we’d done it. We’d solved this puzzle. This impossible mystery quest. We’d succeeded in our mission. Against all odds, in this world of millions and billions of people, we’d finally found him.

  I’d forgotten that after Captain Gemma Harris discovered where her father was, she actually had to find a way to get to where he was.

  It wasn’t easy. Not only did she have to escape captivity by the villains, but she had to resort to stealing one of their ships from the junkyard. And the ship’s brakes blew out halfway through landing; luckily, though, she landed on a sand dune and got to her father’s planet in one piece, maybe with some
sand in her eye.

  I didn’t really have to steal a contraband spaceship and travel across the galaxy with bad brakes. But I had to get past Mom. And I didn’t even know where to start with that.

  How exactly does one convince their mom to drive six hours from the outskirts of Sacramento to Los Angeles so her son can see his long-absent dad? How does that kind of conversation go?

  Hey, Mom. I know that you haven’t seen Dad in a while, but he’s going to be in LA premiering his Hollywood blockbuster, so it would be really cool if we got to see him.

  Or

  Hey, Mom. It would be cool if you could give me a ride to LA. It’s slightly farther than Danny’s baseball practices, but I’m sure the view’s gonna be great.

  It would probably be easier to convince Mom to eat a spider. It didn’t help that I wasn’t that great at dropping hints, either.

  “You know,” I said as I toyed with my peas at dinner, “we could go to Los Angeles sometime. For a trip or something.”

  Danny shoved salmon into his mouth and gave me a weird look. Mom didn’t even look up as she vigorously mashed up her peas with her fork. “I told you. We’re going to Disneyland after Danny’s graduation next year.”

  “But I was thinking that we could go . . . sooner. Like . . .” My throat was dry. “In two weeks?”

  Mom finally looked up. “Do you know how much I make an hour?”

  That shut me up real quick.

  Meanwhile, we were done launching rockets. We’d used up the rocket motors, and we’d run out of time. But still, we had to put together our science presentation, even if we’d never gotten a perfect trial like Ro had wanted. As I added finishing touches to the poster board, she asked me, “Have you convinced her yet?”

  In lunch: “Have you convinced her yet?”

  At Hogan’s: “Have you convinced her yet?”

  “No,” I said, once and then twice and then too many times to count. Each time, Ro’s face fell a little bit.

  She finally said, “I could come over and help talk to her, you know.”

  “Probably shouldn’t,” I mumbled.

  “Fine,” she said. “Look, I know it’s hard. But think of how cool it would be to finally see your dad.”

  One night, when Mom was baking cookies, I finally cornered her. “I know where Dad is.”

  She didn’t move. A long silence stretched before us.

  Still bent over the pan, she said, “So?”

  My heart dropped. I said softly, “I want to see him. He’s going to be in Los Angeles in less than two weeks. He has a movie. He’s famous, Mom.”

  She straightened up. Her expression contorted to a deepened frown. She looked like she was in pain. “No.”

  “No? What—”

  “I’m not taking you to see him. He walked out of our life nine years ago, and I don’t want him to come back. Don’t bring this up again.”

  “Mom. Come on.”

  “Benjamin.” She closed her eyes.

  “Okay.”

  Ro and I were finishing up our poster board in our science classroom when I told her. As she carefully glued down her diagrams and I drew tiny, intricate stars in the background to mimic a galaxy, I said, “So, Mom’s not going to drive me to LA.”

  Ro paused, chewing on her lip. She was frustrated. She finally said, her voice sharp, “Do you want to see your dad or not? If I were you—”

  “It’s not that easy, okay?” I burst out. “You don’t understand. Look, your parents actually liked each other. My mom hates my dad, and she’s never, ever going to drive me there.”

  Ro didn’t speak. It occurred to me that my voice had come out way harsher than I’d intended. “Sorry,” I said.

  “I was going to suggest,” Ro said softly, looking hurt and playing with the sleeve of her shirt, “that we just go on our own.”

  I lifted my eyes up. “What?”

  She looked steadily at me. She pulled a timetable from her folder. “We could take a bus, you and me. We would go down to Los Angeles and try to see him before the premiere starts. I can plan everything. We’d be back that night.”

  “Ro, that’s ridiculous.”

  “Fine, I guess it is,” she said curtly. “Never mind that. Then we go back to Plan A. We have to convince your mom to drive us down. There has to be a way. Right? Okay, let’s talk through what you’re going to say to her this time.”

  “Stop.” I was tired of being bugged about this. I puffed my cheeks and blew air out between my lips, sinking down in my seat. “I just don’t want to think about this right now. Okay?”

  Ro slammed her pencils down. She didn’t say anything.

  I looked up. “What, are you mad at me or something?”

  She looked up, too, her eyes flashing. “I thought you wanted this.” She jabbed at the newspapers next to us—the ones with any snippet of information about the Spacebound premiere. “I helped you get all this way to find him. But it seems like you don’t care at all!”

  “That’s not true!” I shouted. Ro and I glared at each other for a minute, until I finally stood up and gathered up my pencils. “I have to go.”

  Why did it seem easier to escape as a hostage, steal an enemy spaceship, and fly across the galaxy? As I made my way to the art room, fuming, I tried to swallow the bitterness, but there was still that squeezing feeling around my stomach.

  Mr. Keanan looked up when I barged in. He was surrounded by Coke bottle caps, arranging them on a canvas. I didn’t say a word as I made my way to my usual corner and sat down.

  He cleared his throat. “Everything okay?”

  I shook my head.

  A pause. “You want to talk about it?”

  I shook my head again.

  He shrugged and went back to his bottle caps. “I got new felt-tipped markers today. Feel free to mess around.”

  That’s why he was my favorite teacher. I hadn’t been here for lunch in months, but he didn’t ask any further questions. It was like the time when Drew and I stopped being friends and I started eating in the art room to avoid seeing him at lunch. Or like those weeks after Amir moved away, when I sat in the art room and Mr. Keanan let me mess around with his chalk pastels. All those times he never bugged me about anything I didn’t want to talk about. He just let me sit and draw. And think.

  The thing was, what Ro had said actually kind of made sense. She made lists in life and then she went down the list. Wasn’t it just a set of tasks I had to do?

  Convince Mom.

  Drive to LA.

  Surprise Dad.

  Step 1 was taking longer than I thought.

  But Ro didn’t understand the silence in my house, the quiet dinners. I looked at Ro and her mom, and I felt jealous, to be honest. I envied the way Ro’s mom reached out to her and hugged her and ruffled her hair. I was jealous of the way she gave out smiles like a PEZ dispenser that would never run out.

  I had been so close. Cripes, the movie premiere was less than two weeks away, and I knew where he was. But as I sat through another silent dinner with Mom and Danny that night, he might as well have been on Pluto.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Ro

  AS BENJI AND I stood in front of our class, our presentation board between us, it was just like the first day of school again. As if there were a line that split down the table.

  We’d barely talked in the past week, since Benji had walked out of the science room after our fight. We still sat at lunch together, and he still shared his Red Vines with me, but we mostly ate in silence. I didn’t go over to his house. He didn’t come to mine. Even Mom asked if things were okay between us.

  I guessed our deal was over. He’d helped me with my rocket; even if it failed and didn’t launch as high as it was supposed to, we still got enough to scrape together a science fair presentation. Between the fin designs and the radio transmitter, there was plenty to talk about. I’d found a way to track down his dad. But still, it was weird to go home and have all this time to myself. I sat in front
of my TV and watched Doctor Who with my bowl of Cocoa Puffs, but I couldn’t sit still. I reorganized Mom’s spice rack. I put the books in alphabetical order, again. I practiced my lines for the presentation and hoped Benji at least looked over his.

  The thing was, we had been so close. We had found him. We had circled the exact location of the theater on the atlas, and I’d mapped out the roads and bus routes to take. Never mind that it was the day before the regional science fair—I was ready to help Benji meet his dad no matter what. But his mom wouldn’t let him. And I wasn’t particularly good at reading expressions, but even I knew, from the look on his face, that he didn’t want to.

  He’d chickened out.

  If that were my dad—

  I couldn’t think of it like that.

  “All right!” Mr. Devlin said brightly. “Scientists, the floor is yours. Remember: the regional science fair is this weekend, so I hope these practice presentations will help you get ready.”

  I held my index cards, which were getting constantly smudged from me shuffling them. As Benji opened up the project board, I felt a jumble of nerves at the pit of my stomach. This wasn’t just my secret project anymore. I was going to tell the whole class about the rocket. My rocket.

  Thirty faces stared back at me.

  “The objective of our experiment was to test which rocket design would achieve optimal flight,” I said.

  I started going through lines I’d practically memorized. But when I looked out at the class, they weren’t listening. A couple of students leaned over and whispered at each other.

  They were laughing and pointing. At me—no, not at me. At my project.

  I looked over at Benji. He didn’t say his lines. He just stared at our presentation board, his mouth open. I followed his line of sight, and my heart dropped into my gut.

  Splashes of green paint—no, slime—were thrown all over the sides of the poster, over what used to be neatly printed diagrams. The bright green mess oozed down Benji’s intricate drawings of stars and galaxies, down my carefully written steps and explanations.