The idea was mine, to begin with, even though Jaz keeps insisting it was hers. Probably because even now, none of us can believe that I—the girl who’d never gotten a speeding ticket or cut a class or kissed a boy—actually concocted the scheme of driving across America in a beat-up RV with five friends, an outdated road map, and twenty-five bags of marshmallows for s’mores.
Oh, and a really ginormous telescope. That’s important.
Looking back, I honestly don’t know what gave me the notion. Maybe it was what Mr. Francis, my dust-dry psychology teacher, called “a quarter-life crisis” during his lecture on identity formation. Maybe it was one of the seventeen weird spices on those jalapeño nachos Jaz brought that night—I expected them to upset my stomach, not my thinking, but it’s as good a guess as any. Or maybe it was, as Kason might say, the moon phase. Decisions made in the gibbous phase are characterized by stability and logic, but decisions made near the full moon tend toward sweeping changes and impulsivity.
Impulsivity. An emotion with which I’d never shaken hands. At least, not until that summer.
Regardless, it was three days before the full moon when the idea came. Kason thought that was important. I do too, now. At the time, I didn’t know to be looking out the narrow windows and marking the glow on the horizon where the moon was about to be born. That was before I knew about the patterns, the lines between the stars that crossed the heavens like roads on a map and linked people too.
Maybe you don’t know about that either. If so, you’re probably looking at me right now the way Gran looks at the ads in Reader’s Digest that promise thirty pounds of weight loss in a week, and impossible stuff like that. I get it. I was that way, once. But just—just listen. Because this is the story that broke all my expectations wide open. And maybe it will do the same for you.
Where did it all start? Gosh, who knows now? What I think now is that it started long before I realized it. Back before the road trip or even the idea of it, before Jaz and I were friends or Kason had ever invited me to look through the tunnel of his telescope at a sky so much bigger than I could imagine. It was definitely before I was a student at Cedar Wood High, most likely even before the terrible night when I was nine, the night with the cops and the crying and my unfamiliar new bedroom at Gran’s house. Now I think it started, probably, even before I did. That this crazy story—this belonging—was woven into my very being, like the shape of the stars on the night I was born.
So it’s not so much a matter of when the story started, but when I finally woke up and realized I was living it. And if I have to drop a pin on that moment, then I picture the study hall that moonlit May night, twelve sleeps before graduation. Me and Jaz and Blake and Adam, holding books with that dusty, musty library smell, sitting on the slick vinyl furniture under that stupid painting of a very disproportionate lighthouse.
Weird place for a story to start, I know. But guess what I’ve figured out? If a story starts in a weird place, you know it’s gonna be good.
So—are you ready? Let me tell you about that summer. That summer of running through the flame-painted Utah deserts and spinning in surprising snow on the spine of the Rockies and finally, finally, standing in the place where the tide comes home to the shore. It was a summer of losing things and finding others, of following a compass needle into a love like the highway, and of standing alone in a delicious dark and drinking in a sky full of stars that are all known by name.
It happened this way…