Eight Days on Planet Earth

by Cat Jordan

  I polish off the sandwich and get up to make another. “Pretty much. I mean, I get the whole ‘it takes a village’ crap. That’s nothing new. And I understand people having conversations at the dinner table.” She opens her mouth to speak and I hold up my peanut butter knife to stop her. “I know. You don’t actually talk. You think at each other. Whatever. I’m pretty sure I saw that in an episode of Star Trek.” I slap some jelly on another slice of wheat bread. It’s too much, though, and squirts out the sides when I press the slices together.

  Ginger is immediately at my feet, as if she could hear the PB&J squishing on my plate. I take the sandwich off and set the plate down for her to clean up.

  “Do you have parents?” Priya asks me.

  “Yep.”

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  Brian is kind of like my brother, although Em is hardly a sister. That would be fucked up for sure. Like Game of Thrones fucked up. “No. But it’s okay. I like being an only child.”

  “Are you lonely?”

  I hesitate. For most of my life, I was never lonely. I had my dad and we did everything together. Brian and I might have ridden our bikes every day after school, but it was my dad who taught me how to ride. Brian and I watched marathons of Star Trek, but it was my dad who introduced me to the show. I know about stars and planets and history because of my dad. For a very long time, we were best buds.

  I shake my head. “I’ve got two good friends. Brian and Emily. They’re the best. You’ll meet them.”

  Her smile is wistful. “Perhaps.”

  “Oh right, you’ll be gone soon.” I don’t believe those words. Truly, I don’t. She’s not getting a lift to the sky at any point in my lifetime. It just ain’t gonna happen. But she believes it and that belief sinks into my stomach like a stone. “Well, you’ll just have to leave us your email and we’ll Skype with you.” I grin to show her I’m not completely serious, although I kind of am. Who knows?

  I feel sweat trickle down my back and face and into the itchy five-o’clock shadow I get by midafternoon.

  Midafternoon! Oh crap. I grab Priya’s hand and pull her out the door. “We have to get to Brian’s. Gotta feed Boo.” She looks at me quizzically. “More data collection.”

  4:47 P.M.

  I’ve opened all the doors and windows again, letting the fresh air blow out the cat smells and the humidity. I have no idea where Boo is, but I’m sure she’ll come slinking out as soon as I open the fridge.

  Priya wanders around the kitchen while I run cool water from the tap for the cat and clean out the food bowl. Over my shoulder I can see her studying photographs of Brian and Em with their parents, a happy foursome on vacation at Hersheypark and the Jersey Shore and Gettysburg. Were my parents ever that happy?

  “Did you take vacations like that when you were a kid?” I ask her.

  Priya runs a finger along a photo of the Aokis posing with the Phillies mascot, the tall green long-snouted Phanatic.

  “Vacations? I have never been on a vacation,” she says.

  “Really? No trips to the Grand Canyon or Yosemite?” I wipe out Boo’s water bowl before refilling it. Water is not enough to draw her from wherever she’s hiding.

  She shakes her head. “Would these be for data collection?”

  “Uh, yeah, if you’re collecting fun.” I take out the veggies and chicken, chop them, and blend them as I did yesterday. Like magic, Boo appears at my feet, wrapping herself around my legs in a figure eight.

  “Felicette!” Priya cries. As her outstretched arms reach for Boo, the cat suddenly notices the back door is open and bolts for it.

  “Wait! Boo! No!”

  Priya looks stricken. “Felicette?”

  I drop the food on the counter and hurry into the backyard, but I don’t see the cat anywhere. “Shit. She’s gone. Emily’s gonna kill me.”

  “Your friend will kill you?” Priya is horrified.

  “Quite possibly yes, if anything happens to that cat.”

  “Felicette will be fine. She’s a brave cat.”

  I turn to Priya, who is following me on her tiptoes through the long grass of the backyard. “Who is Felicette? This is Boo.”

  For a moment, Priya looks confused, and then she shakes her head with a light laugh. “Yes, yes, I know. Felicette was the first cat in outer space. She was trained by the French and sent up in a research rocket in the year you designated as 1963.”

  “Nineteen sixty-three? That cat is long gone by now.” I wonder how far the Aokis’ property goes. Could Boo have run to a neighbor’s house? To the street? To the DQ? “Boo is not an outdoor cat,” I say. “She’s been inside her whole life. Emily never lets her out.”

  Behind me, Priya steps delicately as if she were avoiding treading on individual blades of grass. “Felicette parachuted back to Earth,” she tells me. “I wonder what she thought as she was floating.”

  “Get me down!” I say in a high-pitched voice.

  “I think she enjoyed it. If you were a cat, wouldn’t you like to fly?”

  “I guess. It would certainly make it easier to chase birds.”

  We’re at the edge of the Aokis’ yard. Beyond this are dense woods. If Boo is in here, it will be nearly impossible to find her. I can feel myself sigh. Only two days into their vacation and I’m going to have to tell Emily I lost her cat.

  I feel Priya’s hand on my shoulder. Her fingers press into my back and rest there. “This sucks,” I tell her. “Emily already hated me. Now she’ll never speak to me again.”

  “She doesn’t hate you. She would not ask someone she hates to watch her cat.”

  “You don’t know Em.”

  “I don’t know Em, but that behavior would not make sense.”

  “Boo! Where are you? Boo!”

  “You are doing this wrong. She will not come to you.”

  “How do you know? Boo! Come here, Boo!” But I know she’s right. Boo isn’t a dog; she’s not like Ginger, who responds the exact same way all the time. I know that when I clap my hands and whistle, Ginger will come to me. I know that if I shake a box of biscuits, she’ll sit up and beg. I know that she loves to chase balls and birds and that she barks when she’s excited. I know what to expect from her every single day. And I like that. I don’t like . . . change. I don’t like . . . unpredictability. I don’t like . . . risks.

  Asking Emily out was a no-brainer. I mean, we’d known each other for years. We hooked up. She knew I crushed on her—she knew. Didn’t she? It shouldn’t have been a risk at all. It should have been an easy “yes.”

  I feel Priya’s hand slide down my back and her fingers intertwine with mine. Why exactly am I thinking about Emily?

  She gently tugs me back toward the house.

  “But Boo—”

  “The cat is not out here.”

  Even as I allow her to lead me through the yard, I shake my head. “How do you know that?”

  Priya taps her finger at her temple. “Because I am thinking like a cat. That’s what you must do.”

  “Think like a cat? You mean, Oh boy, I’m gonna climb this tree and eat that mouse?”

  “Your cat has been inside for all of her life, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why would she run away?”

  “Because it’s new and different? I don’t know. I’m not a cat.”

  Priya touches the side of my face now. “Think like a cat.”

  We’re back at the house and the door is still wide open, but there is no sign of Boo. “I’m telling you, she’s gone.”

  Priya positions herself at the back door and looks right, then left, then right again. Still holding my hand, she pulls me along the side of the house, past the cellar stairs and the grill, over the stone patio, and around the table and chairs.

  We get to the side porch and Priya pauses by the stairs. “Think like a cat,” she says again, and drops to her knees. She ducks her head under the stairs and I hear a muffled “Aha!”

  I foll
ow her gaze to a pair of glow-in-the-dark eyes peeking at us from the other end of the deck. There is barely enough room for my head and shoulders under here; no way could I crawl to the cat to get her out. “Boo!”

  Priya’s fingers pinch my wrist. “Do not scare her.”

  “But how will we—”

  “We wait. We keep thinking.”

  We crawl out from under the porch and sit in reverent silence, but as the minutes tick by, Boo makes no move to come out.

  “Are you sure that’s a cat and not a raccoon?”

  Priya smiles slyly at me. “We are now just waiting for Felicette’s parachute to open and for her to float back to Earth.”

  I grin and feel relief spread through my body. “How did you know she was going to be under the porch and not a mile from here?”

  “She doesn’t want to run away.”

  “Did you mind-meld with the cat?”

  “Mind-meld?”

  “It’s a Vulcan thing. Forget it.”

  “Yes, I know about Vulcans.” Her fingers squeeze mine. “You’re teasing me.”

  “I am.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Good, because I don’t plan to stop.” Our eyes meet and I try to send her a message. If you can read my mind, please don’t go. Please stay.

  “If you were a cat who had lived its whole life inside and you finally got a chance to go outside, you would not be grateful, you would be terrified,” Priya says. “Indoors is safety and security and food and love. It is your home. The outdoors is not your home.”

  I feel her leg against mine, her arm against mine, her shoulder and hip pressed into me very subtly, very gently, as if we are relaxing into each other, melting into each other.

  “We all just want to be home, don’t we?” she says without looking at me.

  Where is your home? Where is your family? I want to ask but Priya gasps and sits up sharply.

  “Felicette! You have returned to Earth.” Boo, covered in dirt and cobwebs, climbs on top of Priya’s lap and begins to lick her paws clean.

  “Thank god.” I start to take the cat from Priya but Boo holds fast, her nails digging into the fluffy layers of skirt. “Okay, okay, stay with her, I don’t care. I don’t even like cats.”

  I give Priya a hand as she clutches Boo and tries to stand up. Her wide eyes blink slowly. “You are more like this cat than you think,” she says.

  What does that mean? I wonder.

  8:39 P.M.

  It’s been forever since I’ve set this thing up, since my dad and I were side by side, each of us capturing a quadrant of the sky in our sights. Even so, my fingers know exactly where to go. Without a glance down, I unscrew the tripod legs and level it in a heartbeat, no second-guessing.

  My Celestron has an equatorial mount, which means it’s easy to track objects across the sky but more complex to use because there are two gears to unlock and adjust, the right ascension and the declination. You unlock the gears, swivel it close to your target, then use the fine-tuning knobs to center it in your finderscope.

  “Libra?” I ask Priya. “Is that what we’re looking for?”

  “Yes,” she says with a tilt of her head. I can feel her impatience. Ever since we came back from Brian’s, she’s been bugging me to set up the telescope. Finally it’s dark enough.

  “You’re sure it’s Libra, huh? It’s not Cassiopeia or something else?” I tease her, although maybe, just maybe, it’s a test. How committed to this is she, really?

  “Matthew, my planet is not in another constellation. It is in what you call Libra.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m just joking.”

  I glance up at the sky to orient myself and find the Big and Little Dippers with my naked eye. Then I look through the scope, sighting the same thing. Libra is a summer constellation for stargazers in the northern hemisphere; a triangle of stars forms the scales. To find it, first you face south and locate the bright red star Antares in Scorpius. If you follow the line of stars that forms the scorpion’s body to the right, the next-brightest stars are Zubeneschamali and Zubenelgenubi in Libra.

  Stardust swirls in front of my eye and I feel my breath inhale sharply. It’s as if I’ve been instantly transported back in time, back to the very first time my dad showed me how to find things in our vast Universe.

  “Check it out, Junior. Those dots of light are all stars, billions and billions of stars,” he said, his voice hushed as if anything louder than a whisper would blow them all away.

  “But where’s the moon?” I remember asking. “Is it gone?”

  He laughed. “It’s there but we can’t see it now.” He added, “And if it were there, we wouldn’t be able to see much at all. The light would block out everything else.” He was so happy to teach me what he knew. And when I was five, he knew everything.

  I find Antares but it’s too far away, so I swap out the eyepiece and refocus, and the sky explodes with stars. My breath catches in my throat; it feels like I’ve just dived into a pool of starlight.

  I feel Priya and Ginger behind me, both within arm’s reach.

  “Libra is an okay constellation but kind of boring.”

  “Boring?” Priya asks. “Stars do not have a personality.”

  “Sure they do. I think there are lots more interesting constellations,” I say. “Like Cassiopeia.”

  I feel Priya’s hands wave the air impatiently. “Your preference for constellations is unimportant.”

  “You know the story of Cassiopeia, don’t you . . . Ginger?” I say, turning to my dog. “Cassiopeia was an Ethiopian queen who thought she was more beautiful than any of the Nereids, the sea nymphs. The god of the sea, Poseidon, got angry at her arrogance and demanded she sacrifice her daughter, Andromeda. Cassiopeia’s husband, the king, chained Andromeda to a rock and then Poseidon sent a sea monster to eat her.”

  Priya gasps, which makes me smile. I do some further fine-tuning and fill the scope with more and more of the star field.

  “Andromeda was very beautiful. Perseus offered to rescue her if he could marry her. Her parents agreed and she was saved.” I look at the dog again. “That’s a good ending, don’t you think, Ginger?”

  I hear Priya mumble something behind me.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That is not the ending of the story,” Priya says, coming closer to the telescope. “Poseidon wanted to humiliate Cassiopeia one final time for her hubris, so he placed her among the stars with her throne upside down. Half of every night, she hangs her head in shame.”

  I glance over my shoulder to Priya, who is now within a foot of me. I step back and allow her to look through the eyepiece, to find the planet she has been so eager and so desperate to see. “You know the story?”

  “I gathered that data earlier in my visit,” she tells me while she is bent down, both hands behind her back. Her stance tells me she’s done this before. The true amateur astronomer knows to avoid touching the scope once it’s in place; you don’t want to bump it and have to reset. “But of course we have no such myth ourselves. We don’t anthropomorphize the Universe.”

  She steps back from the telescope. “Will you increase the magnification for me, please?”

  She also knows you never change the settings on a scope that isn’t yours. Someone, somewhere, taught her manners about stargazing.

  I make the adjustment and let her return to the scope. But I don’t give her much room, so she has to squeeze her tiny frame between me and the telescope. Her body fits so perfectly. . . .

  “May I adjust this?”

  At first I think she’s talking about something else but then I realize she means the telescope. “Yeah sure.”

  “Thank you.” She makes the adjustments with one hand, like a pro. A moment later, I see her smile.

  “There it is,” she says breathlessly. “My planet.”

  I’m not sure what I expected to happen, but finding “her” planet was not one of them. I guess I was anticipating a frowny face and Priya’s defensiv
e insistence that my telescope was not powerful enough or that it was too far to see from here or some other bullshit, but actually finding something? “No . . . really?”

  “Yes, really. I don’t understand your incredulity.”

  “I believe you.”

  “No, you don’t. You remain skeptical. Look.”

  I lean over her—she doesn’t give me much room either, I notice—and peer through the eyepiece. She has focused the crosshairs on a speck that looks a shade brighter perhaps than the other stars in the sky. It’s got a slight reddish-orange tint to it, which could be the star’s distance from Earth or its temperature or even how our eyes see things at night. It’s impossible to know if that is a star or a dot of stardust, a planet with life or a dead rock hurtling through space.

  “I live there,” she says in my ear. Her voice trembles with excitement.

  “Priya—”

  “You don’t know if that’s really a planet, right? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  Sigh. “Yes.”

  “You want to tell me that it’s impossible to get from there to here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I’m telling you it isn’t.”

  “But—”

  “Why is your truth more accurate than mine? Why are you quick to dismiss my words as false?” Her tone is subtle, not accusatory, but I can tell she feels more confident than before. Finding the telescope, the constellation, the planet—have boosted her spirits.

  “Your father would believe me.”

  I keep my eye on the orange spot, as if squinting hard enough might make me see a thousand tiny hands waving at me across the galaxy. “And how would you know that?”

  “The star charts are your father’s,” she says quietly. “In the workshop. He believes there is more to the Universe than this planet. He believes this field is special.”

  Special. Startled, I back away from the telescope and bump into Priya. Turning, I find her face gazing up at me. The blanket of stars lights up her eyes and her lips and the ends of her hair. “He believes, yeah. But he changed. He . . .” I scowl and look away. “He’s an idiot.”

  “Why? Because he believes something you don’t?”