And believe it or not, the excitement of the evening didn’t stop there. A few minutes later, while Jaz and I were scrubbing the floor with paper towels—tomato sauce dries like glue—there was a knock on the door. Turned out to be one of the park workers—a guy with sort of squinty eyes and a baseball cap he kept adjusting, who let us know that somebody had called the office to report a smoke alarm going off in an RV. He said it kind of hard and studied us as if waiting for a confession, but Jaz shot him one of her sunrise smiles and explained that we’d let some food burn because of—and I quote—“inattentiveness caused by unforeseen circumstances.” She could let the vocabulary words roll when she wanted to.
He made his eyes squintier than ever, like he wasn’t sure if she was tricking him, but then he just told us to be more careful and to observe the quiet-hours policy and stuff like that. Jaz nodded and smiled in the right places. Apparently diplomacy, like vocabulary, was another of her hidden skillsets.
I sort of wanted her to mention the lizard just so I could see the guy’s reaction, but it’s probably best she didn’t.
The aftermath of all that excitement kept spiraling around in the RV, as if our collective pulse were taking a long time to slow down to normal. And it was probably nothing more than the leftover adrenaline, but I dreamed that night. Dreamed the desert dream, the same scene from The Horse and His Boy, but this time, the sand was rougher and hotter. Hot enough to scorch the soles of my feet. And the mountains looked different, somehow. Smaller.
I kept running in my dream, faster, faster, my feet kicking up the burning sand. But the mountains still looked strange, and suddenly I realized why. The longer I ran, the farther away the mountains drew, sinking over the horizon and leaving nothing but the sizzling sand.
I woke with a jerk, sitting up so fast I almost banged my head on the low ceiling.
“You awake?”
I blinked and glanced down. Adam was sitting on the couch, fooling with his box. The box that I now knew held his lizard. Or whatever he’d called the creature.
I released a deep breath. “Yeah.” I was sweating so much that my skin was stuck to the slick cushions of the bunk. I lifted my hair off the back of my neck and swung my legs over the foldaway ladder.
“Blake says it’s gonna be a long drive today.” Adam wasn’t looking at me. Instead he was poking some kind of food inside a little flap in the box. “Sacramento doesn’t like long drives.”
Why in the name of sense would anyone bring a reptile on a road trip? “Did you really think no one would find out you had him?”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
Probably he hadn’t thought it through at all. Which sort of seemed to be his specialty. “Is Blake still mad?”
“Probably.” He didn’t seem very bothered by the idea. He closed the flap on the box and settled it next to him on the couch. “Sacramento is all ready for travel.”
My legs still felt unsteady as I descended the ladder. “Why’s he named Sacramento?” I was trying to shove the dream somewhere behind the everyday things. I didn’t want to look too hard at it. I was afraid if I did, I might know what it meant.
Adam bent his head so his hair flopped over his eyes. “I didn’t name him.”
There was something different in his tone, and I waited, wondering if more was coming, but just then the door opened and Blake glanced in—still with a less-than-friendly expression. “Guys, I’m gonna unhook the utilities. We’re leaving in ten minutes.”
The drive that day was, in fact, a long one. We slogged across the rest of Oklahoma, which became progressively emptier the farther west we traveled. And as the land flattened, the mood seemed to as well. Brooklyn and Adam spent most of the time on their phones. Kason, of course, was buried in his astronomy book. He was wearing that #INEEDSPACE shirt—again. If you’re keeping count, that’s four straight days.
Even Jaz wasn’t very talkative. She was working on another of her hand-and-arm drawings and humming snatches of song under her breath.
I stared out the window, watching the land blur by. Miles and miles of vacant pasture, stitched by the seams of roadside fences and punctuated by fading billboards for truck stops and casinos and restaurants. Some of the fields hosted the black seesaws of oil pumpjacks, nodding their slow heads.
The RV smelled stale and hot today, like leftover afternoon. The kind of smell that, if I thought about it too closely, would remind me of my dream.
“What’s wrong?”
Jaz’s question made me blink. How did she always have a radar on my emotions? “Nothing.”
“Okay, but you just sighed.”
I had? “Uh—I guess I’m just tired.”
Jaz flicked me an appraising glance. Then she clicked her pen shut, blew lightly on the purple design now rampaging across her forearm, and tucked the pen into one of her braids. “We need some fun in here. Let’s play a road trip game.” She reached across the table and tapped Kason, who didn’t seem to breathe or blink when he read. “Kason. Road trip game time.”
“Huh?” He blinked and closed the book, returning to reality slowly. “Oh. Which game?”
“Let’s start with license plates.” Jaz rubbed her hands together. “Who can find the farthest state from here?” She glanced at Adam and Brooklyn. “You too, guys.”
“Uh—” Kind of a silly game, but I’d play along. I peered out the window, straining to see the plate on the SUV passing us. “I’ve got—Texas.”
Kason had turned his face to the glass too. “Oklahoma…Oklahoma…Texas…Oklahoma…”
“Lots of Oklahomans.” Jaz was leaning across me for a better view.
“Makes sense. We’re in their state.” Brooklyn rolled her eyes. “This is a kids’ game.”
Adam brushed his hair out of his eyes. “There’s Arizona! Hey, I’m winning!”
Brooklyn gave him a dark look. “Arizona’s not that far away.”
“It’s farther away than anything you’ve found.”
“Okay, fine.” She turned herself toward the other window with a huff.
“Oklahoma…Oklahoma…Arkansas…” Jaz was still chanting state names.
“How do you see these?” Kason adjusted his glasses. “They go by too fast.”
I was inclined to agree with him, but Jaz shook her head wisely. “The secret is to know the design of each plate. Then you don’t have to read the words.”
“Okay.” Kason leaned closer. “What’s the white one with the red lettering?”
“Probably Arkansas, or—”
“Hey, I just saw Florida!” Brooklyn’s voice rang out in startling surprise.
I blinked and turned toward her. The girl who’d loftily dismissed the whole thing was now bouncing and squealing like a little kid. “Florida! I win!”
“Not so fast.” Adam knelt on the couch for a better view. “I think that’s—yeah!” He pumped his fist. “Iowa!”
Brooklyn’s smile vanished. “Iowa is not farther away than Florida.”
“Is too. It’s farther north.”
“But it’s not as far east.”
Adam crossed his arms. “To get to Florida, you just have to go straight from here. To get to Iowa, you’d have to take the diagonal. That makes it longer.”
For just a moment, I actually thought Brooklyn might cry. And somehow, seeing her deflate wasn’t satisfying. It was—sad.
The next instant, she tossed her hair over her shoulder, her smelling-sour-laundry face back in place. “Whatever.” Her voice was back to its usual haughty huffiness. She slouched on the couch. “It doesn’t matter. This is a stupid game anyway.”
Awkward silence filled the spaces between us. Next to me, Jaz rubbed the tattoo on her temple. Kason glanced around the coach with one of his probing looks. I shrank back on the bench. When conflict started, the safe thing was to stay small. Mom had taught me that, if nothing else.
Jaz cleared her throat. Apparently she’d never had to learn the fine art of smallness. “Kason, what were you reading about earlier?”
“In here?” He hefted the New Complete Guide. “UFOs.”
“UFOs?” Adam’s expression slanted in disbelief. “Like Area 51? Flying saucers? Little green men?”
Kason appeared to ponder the questions seriously. Maybe, like Jaz, he didn’t notice sarcasm. “Well, not exactly. Those are just pop culture representations. Real UFOs take much more obscure forms.”
“Real UFOs?” Adam shook his head. “Bro, those two words don’t belong together.”
Jaz shot him a look. “You don’t believe in UFOs?”
“Naw. That’s sci-fi stuff.”
“Oh, so you don’t think we ever see objects in the sky and don’t know what they are?” Jaz crossed her arms. “U-F-O. Unidentified Flying Object. That’s all it stands for.”
“Well, okay.” Adam shifted. “I mean, yeah, I get that. But I think there’s always an explanation.”
“Oh, I do too.” Kason nodded fervently. “But sometimes the explanations don’t come from this world.”
“Oh my gosh.” Brooklyn rolled her eyes. “Other worlds? Really?”
“Why not?” Kason’s calm exterior was cracking, and underneath was a current of electric excitement I’d never seen from him. “We already know there are other worlds even on our own planet. Places we never see, never explore. Like the deepest reaches of the ocean, or the interiors of the Antarctic icebergs. Who’s to say what all is out there we don’t know about? And that’s just within the observable universe.”
Brooklyn crinkled her brow. “Observable universe?”
“Right.” He was entering full-on nerd mode, hands waving, voice and eyes brimming with excitement. Like a passionate professor lecturing to a skeptical class. “Think of all we can’t see. Like ultraviolet light, or radiation, or even air. Right? All these things around us, completely invisible, and we take them for granted.” The sun flicked through the window suddenly, glanced off his glasses, touched the brown highlights in his black hair. “There are so many layers to this universe. So many worlds stacked close together. We see only a fraction of reality.”
I kept my face neutral, but my ears were listening, hard, and for just a moment I had that same shivery feeling I’d had when Kason had talked about looking for stars “on the fringes of things.” Like a gust of wind tugging at a door I’d rather leave shut.
Brooklyn wasn’t buying it. “Nobody believes in flying saucers.”
“Actually, a lot of people do. Haven’t you seen the Pentagon report? Even the government knows there’s something unexplainable happening. They think it might be a threat to national security.”
“Well, the government didn’t come right out and say anything about aliens.” Adam leaned forward. “Didn’t that report say that like sixty percent of those sightings or whatever that’s called—”
“Encounters—”
“—that sixty percent of those encounters were explainable?”
“Fifty-seven percent. And that leaves thirty-three percent that can’t be explained. That’s a significant margin when we’re talking about such a huge data set. Plus most of those sightings are the really wild ones, the ones that bend the laws of physics.”
“Such as?”
“Crafts performing stunts that aren’t possible with modern technology. Faster velocities, more aerodynamic maneuvering—and that’s the really telling part about these encounters. There are so many threads of similarity. The physics violations, the bright lights—these people are independently reporting really specific details that coincide. It might even tie in with stories like Bigfoot and—”
“Bigfoot?” Brooklyn made a sound just short of a snort. “Kason, all these things are legends. You realize that, right? People come up with crazy stories. There’s nothing more to it than that.”
“Okay, but every legend holds truth somewhere. Usually more than people think.” The conviction in his voice was almost magnetic. “With so many similar myths, you have to wonder. And that’s just within our own context. Did you know that the Andean people of South America have also reported UFO sightings? Even though they’re totally insulated from Western ideology, they describe them the same way we do. And they claim they’ve seen them disappear under the Andes—where, by the way, there’s rumored to be a massive tunnel system. The indigenous people have believed that for centuries.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Jaz muttered, seemingly to herself. “With the geology there—the tectonic plates—”
“So the little green men are going to kidnap us all and take over our government?” Brooklyn’s laugh was hard enough that I flinched. “Take me to your leader.”
Kason shrugged, still apparently unfazed. “Not everyone believes. But you should look at the evidence sometime. It’s fascinating.”
“Huh.” She rolled her eyes and scooped up her phone again. “I think I’ll stay in the real world, thank you very much.”
I rubbed my thumb over my meteorite. On one hand, Kason’s ideas did sound crazy. But were they any more unreal than whatever social media feed Brooklyn was scrolling?
“What do you think, Jenna?” Jaz waited, eyebrows raised expectantly.
I wasn’t ready for the meteorite to pull me into its world. I shrugged. “I—I’m not sure.” I glanced at Kason, but he was already submerged in his book. Once more the calm, studious nerd, but now I knew about the electric enthusiasm underneath.
“I wasn’t sure either, at first.” Jaz smiled. “But Kason made a believer out of me.”
I glanced out the window. Crop fields waiting empty. Stretching to a horizon that shimmered behind the heat. A sky big enough to hold anything.
I didn’t tell Jaz, but believing was what I was afraid of.
#
Around 3:30, we arrived in Amarillo, Texas. Amarillo, Jaz had informed me, was the Spanish word for yellow. I looked around at the hazy sky, the glaring sun, and the jaundiced prairie grass and knew exactly where that name had come from.
The RV park wasn’t the best—an oversized parking lot with dusty gravel roads and a fraying Texas flag snapping next to the weather-beaten camp store. Each site had a warped plastic picnic table and a spindly cottonwood sapling gasping within a wire support frame. As we pulled in, Brooklyn stiffened. “There’s some kind of animal under the picnic table!”
Jaz craned her neck. “Hey! A jackrabbit!”
“Lots of jackrabbits.” Kason pointed. “There’s one under that bush—and over there—and right there—”
Sure enough, the park seemed to be all but swarming with jackrabbits—squatting in the meager shade patches, hopping along the park roads, watching us from under the picnic tables. I’d seen rabbits back home, of course, but those were the familiar domestic creatures that sat demurely in backyards and occasionally nibbled the tips off Gran’s tomato plants. These rabbits were wilder, rangier, twitchier creatures, all big feet and lean body and oversized ears.
As soon as we parked, Jaz was off to see the jackrabbits, dragging the others with her—except Blake, who was preparing to hook up the utilities. Leaving the RV felt like stepping into an oven, and I lingered under the narrow strip of shade cast by the coach’s shadow. I wouldn’t have minded seeing the rabbits, but it was way too hot to go chasing the creatures all over the RV park the way I knew Jaz would.
“Hey, Jenna?”
Blake was talking to me. Blake was talking to me! I spun so fast that I almost bumped into the picnic table. “Yeah?”
He was still rummaging in the utility compartment. “Would you mind holding this for a moment?”
“Sure.” He could have asked me to do somersaults across the desert, and my response would have been the same.
“Thanks.” He handed me the looped coils of our water hose. “If you can just keep that in place, I need to screw in this adapter.”
“Okay.” I shifted the hose. It wasn’t heavy, but it didn’t fit well in my arms either. I bit my lip, reaching desperately for something, anything, to say. “So, um, where do we go tomorrow?”
“Staying here, actually.” He swiped the back of his arm over his forehead. He still hadn’t made eye contact. “I thought a day off the road would be good for all of us. Plus, there’s amazing hiking not far from here.”
“Cool.” Why did I never have more than one syllable at my disposal when Blake spoke to me?
“So we’ll be here all day Saturday, then Sunday we’ll go on to Albuquerque.”
Albuquerque.
I could feel the heat from the asphalt rising through my shoes. I tried not to think of the scorching sand in my dream. “Gotcha.”
Silence again.
I searched for another loose end of conversation. “Uh, so, how was shopping?”
“Shopping?”
“In Branson. With Brooklyn.” Oh gosh. What was I doing? Here I had Blake Ellis to myself for once, and the first topic I brought up was his girlfriend.
“Oh—” His words drifted with distraction. “All right, I guess.”
“Oh. Good.”
A jackrabbit was squatting under a pathetic-looking bush on the other side of the road, motionless except for twitching ears. I concentrated on watching it instead of wondering why I could ride a rollercoaster and not talk to Blake.
“We went in a lot of stores she wanted to go to. Got some ice cream afterwards.”
“Sounds fun.” The hose was getting heavier. I kept my eyes on the jackrabbit.
“Well, yeah, it was okay, but—” He straightened and sighed. “Sometimes I’m not sure, honestly.”
The jackrabbit’s ears were so big. What was he waiting to hear? “Not sure about—”
“About—” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Sometimes I don’t really know how to take her, you know?”
And suddenly I understood the way the jackrabbits waited. Frozen but quivering to the depths of their beings with the listening, aching to catch the word that would set them in motion again. “Uh—what do you mean?”
“I thought she would be happy to go shopping, but she seemed down the whole time, almost like—” He sighed again, a heavy sound, and for the first time, he looked right at me, his expression almost apologetic. “I don’t know about—about us.”
He was handing me a confidence I had no idea how to hold, gazing at me with those gorgeous eyes. Earnest eyes. Pleading eyes. Eyes that were, maybe, finally starting to see.
I swallowed. “Blake—” His name tasted different, somehow, this time. Like hope I hadn’t had before. I paused, waiting for the right words. No missteps. Not this time.
“So—” His smile was shyer now, like a little boy’s. “I actually had a question for you.”
The whole sky lifted up like a balloon, rising on the helium hope of the question. “Yes?” My heart was quivering like the rabbit’s ears. Hanging onto whatever would come next with a breath-snatching eagerness.
“Any suggestions on how to reconnect with her?”
The world crumpled back to itself. Just heavy, hot sky sagging over a land too flat to have any expectations. I worked to keep the gravity from tugging my shoulders down too. “Um—” I wasn’t going to cry. Crying would be ridiculous. “Just—maybe talk to her?”
“About—”
“About how you feel like, you know, something’s off between you two. Talk to her and see what she says about it.”
“You think that would work?” So much hope in his eyes, his voice. So much eagerness that had nothing to do with me.
“I think—” It was all I could do not to choke over my own advice. “That’s always a good first step.”
He nodded. “I’ll try that.”
All I could do was hope it didn’t work.
“And, uh—if you had a chance to put in a word for me with her—d’ya think you could? I mean, don’t bring it up, but if she says something—you know—”
“I know. Yes. Sure.” I nodded. And then I kept nodding. If I stopped nodding, I might really, truly cry.
“Thanks, Jenna.” He screwed the end of the hose in, then took the coils from my arms and flashed me that smile that ripped the breath from my lungs. “You’re the best.”
Second best was what he meant. I stepped back, away from the blast radius of the disappointment. “No problem.” It was all I could get out. Something was twisting tightly in my chest, cutting off my breath and my words.
Across the road, the jackrabbit twitched his nose and hopped out from under his tree.
He must have decided that whatever he was waiting for wasn’t coming.
#
The sun inched toward the western horizon, then blurred itself into a dazzling streak of fiercely brilliant flame. And then the fire banked itself and dusk, like ashes, sifted down over everything. The sky turned cobalt, then navy, then black—a deep, rich black like a velvet gown.
As the sky went to sleep, the RV park seemed to come awake. Fire rings all around us came to life with flickering light, and the air was thick and spicy with the smells of campfire smoke and cooking food. As we walked around the RV park, stretching our legs after the long day of driving, I watched the little snippets of campground life all around us: children squealing with laughter, dogs barking with tail-wagging joy, people laughing and talking as they unloaded lawn chairs or tended grills or carried coolers.
Jaz also kept looking around with a decidedly thoughtful expression. So it probably shouldn’t have been a surprise when she planted her hands on her hips the way she did when she was preparing to make an announcement. “Guys, we need a campfire.”
Brooklyn wrinkled her nose. “Smoke and mosquitoes? Count me out.”
Blake frowned at her. “There are no mosquitoes here.”
Jaz carried on as if she hadn’t noticed the tension between them. “It’s not camping without a real campfire, right? So let’s do this! Let’s make a fire and toast some marshmallows and sing campfire songs and—”
“Sounds good.” Blake was ignoring the disdain on Brooklyn’s face. “I have my guitar with us too.”
Of course he played the guitar. Of course he did. He was perfect. And perfectly uninterested in me.
“Then it’s decided.” Jaz gave a nod firm enough to make her braids bounce.
Brooklyn crossed her arms. “We don’t have marshmallows.”
“Easy fix. The camp store will surely have something as basic for survival as marshmallows.” Jaz hooked her arm through mine. “Come on, Jenna. Let’s go check.”
“Blake and I can get the fire started.” Even Adam looked excited. “I was a Boy Scout. I know all about starting fires.”
Brooklyn sniffed. “I still think that—”
Jaz glanced at her watch. “Jenna, the camp store closes in ten minutes. Run!”
And run she did, flashing like one of the jackrabbits right across the uneven gravel roads, toward the yellow glow of the squatty little camp store building. Not being a fearless track star who evidently also had night vision, I was left behind. But still I ran, stretching out legs cramped from RV riding. It was weirdly exhilarating, feet feeling my way forward, pulling the smoky night air into myself. I smiled in the dark and looked up. No moon. Just the darkening expanse of blankness that I knew was the desert sky.
I forced myself faster before I could think about my dream again.
The parking lot of the camp store and the swimming pool next to it were washed by glowing floodlights. Even this late, the pool was alive with shouting, splashing people. The gravel turned to asphalt under my feet as I ran out of the shadows to where Jaz was waiting for me, staring up at the floodlights. “Nighthawks,” she offered when I arrived. I looked up just in time to see some kind of triangular creatures, more bat than bird, swooping around the arc of the lamps.
“They hang out in places like this. Catching bugs.” The light was raining down on her face. She stepped in front of me and opened the door, which had a peeling sticker that said WE ARE HAPPY CAMPERS. “Four minutes left. Let’s grab the goods.”
The woman on duty did not look like a happy camper when Jaz and I came skidding through the door four minutes before closing. We loaded up on all the basic cookout supplies—marshmallows, chocolate, graham crackers—in record time, but as soon as we hit the pavement, the woman made a show of locking the door behind us and flipping the sign to CLOSED.
“All right.” Jaz was balancing five jumbo bags of marshmallows, like a pirate carrying loot. “Let’s start some s’mores.”
Back at the RV site, Blake and Adam were occupying two of four lawn chairs circling the fire ring. Kason was sitting on the picnic table bench, his back against the table part, and Brooklyn had positioned herself on the RV steps—trying to avoid the smoke, probably. Or maybe Blake, based on what he’d said today. Even in the unsteady firelight, her expression reminded me of the look on her face earlier. When she’d lost the license plate game.
Something oddly like sympathy needled at me. I looked away quickly, before I could think too much.
“We found some firewood.” Adam pointed at the fire ring, where three dusty-looking logs snapped with sparks. “And we got the fire going. I used my Boy Scout training.”
I could smell the suspicious sharpness of lighter fluid, which I didn’t think was in any Boy Scout’s knapsack, but I just nodded. “Looks good.”
“For sure.” Jaz dumped the bags of marshmallows onto the table. “All right. Let’s roast these babies.”
It wasn’t that simple. In fact, we learned several things about roasting marshmallows that night.
1. You need sticks to roast them on. The unfolded wire clothes hangers with which Jaz improvised were functional, but barely.
2. Marshmallows burn unbelievably fast.
3. Burned marshmallows taste like caramelized hair.
4. It is possible to scald the inside of your mouth to the third degree with a a marshmallow straight off the fire.
5. Brooklyn is the only person on earth who would rather watch other people burn marshmallows than burn one herself. Did I say burn? I mean toast.
After we’d all scorched our fingers and tongues more than once, and after Jaz had explained to anyone who would listen and everyone who would not the science of a perfect marshmallow (“crunchy on the outside, stretchy in the middle”), Blake rubbed his sticky fingers on his shorts and reached for the guitar leaning against his camp chair. “Ready for some songs?”
“Yes!” Jaz was working on another s’more. Probably her fourth or fifth one. The girl had already plowed through almost an entire bag of marshmallows singlehandedly.
“All right.” Blake cradled the guitar on his lap and shook back his hair. As if he were auditioning for the leading role in a teen movie. Perfect enough to make my eyes sting. The light shimmered along the guitar strings as he strummed the first chord.
Sour. Very sour.
I flinched slightly. So did Blake. “Uh—” He tried to laugh. He let go of the guitar neck and wiped his hand on his shorts. “Let’s try again. This is ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads.’”
Five more painful chords in, Jaz leaned over and muttered in my ear. “I’m glad he told us the song name. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known.”
I hated to admit it, but I had to agree. His guitar playing was all looks and no skill. But if he wasn’t good at playing, why did he volunteer to perform?
Blake is driving too fast…he’s running out of choices.
Jaz’s words gave me the same prickly feeling I’d had the other night. What was she seeing, exactly?
I glanced at Brooklyn, still huddled on the steps. Did she see it too?
Ridiculous. I forced the thoughts from my mind. Regardless of Jaz’s gloomy predictions or Brooklyn’s angst, Blake was a good guy. Achingly good.
On the sagging end of my coat hanger, my marshmallow drooped toward the fire. I pulled it out of the flames and waved it in the air for a minute before biting into it. Hollow, crunchy exterior as delicate as an eggshell. Inside, stretchy, sugary goodness. Like Jaz had said. Perfect.
I was watching the sparks whirl wildly into the blankness above us and listening to Blake limp his way through the chorus of “American Pie,” and suddenly I realized that Kason was gone. When had he left the picnic bench? I glanced at Jaz, but she was singing and clapping with more enthusiasm than the music deserved. I touched her shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”
I popped the rest of the marshmallow into my mouth and slipped into the shadows. Away from the fire, it took a moment for my eyes to adjust. I followed the empty gravel road, heading toward the edge of the park, and then I saw him. The darker shadow of his silhouette was shaped in his typical pose. Hands in pockets, head tilted with all the concentration of listening. He must have heard the gravel crunching under my feet, because he turned. “Hey.”
“Hey.” The darkness was still heavy, but the longer I was away from the fire, the more the shadows and shapes separated themselves. I glanced down and blinked. “Your telescope.”
“Yep.” He stroked the instrument lovingly. “Thought it would be a good night to break her out. It’s the new moon. The best night for stargazing each month, because the skies are darkest.”
“Oh.” Who kept up with when the new moon was? How did he even know all this stuff?
He bent over the telescope, adjusting something, then squinted through it. “Libra is clear tonight. And I can really see Arcturus in Böotes.”
I glanced up. The sky was sprinkled with stars like a field of desert wildflowers, but I couldn’t find the patterns Kason could.
“I wish we could see Gemini, but it’s the wrong season for that.”
“Gemini?”
“The twins.” He shifted one of the legs of the tripod.
“Like you and Jaz?”
His laugh was soft as an evening breeze. “Yeah.”
“The brothers in The Horse and His Boy are twins.” I don’t know why I blurted that except that the conversation was somehow throwing me off balance.
Kason kept fiddling with the telescope as if I’d just made a perfectly normal statement. “Yeah. Shasta and Corin.”
I blinked. “You’ve read the book?”
“Only about a hundred times. C. S. Lewis was a genius.”
“I love that book.” I scraped one shoe through the gravel. “It’s my favorite of his.”
“It’s a great one.” He straightened, turned to me. I couldn’t see his face in the dark, but I could feel his eyes on me. “But my favorites are the Space Trilogy.”
“I’ve never read those.”
“Oh, you should. He wrote the series in response to a challenge from Tolkien. It’s all predicated on Biblical history and medieval cosmology, and it’s simply stunning.” He made some motion that even in the dark I could recognize as his signature glasses-adjusting move. “Actually, I have the whole trilogy with us. I could lend you Out of the Silent Planet.”
“You left your books behind.”
Again, the soft surprise of his laugh. “No way.”
“But Blake told you—you came back with only one bag—”
“Right. I had one bag of clothes and one of books.” A smile shaped his words. “I left my clothes.”
“You brought books over clothes?” No wonder he’d been wearing the same shirt since Ohio. Crazy, but somehow it made me smile.
“Of course. Anyway, I went by the camp store this evening. Bought a couple new shirts, some shorts, socks.” He turned back to the telescope. “I’ll be fine.”
The night settled between us, the strumming of the cicadas filling in the gaps in the conversation. I could still faintly hear the tuneless singing from our RV. I waited, but Kason didn’t turn away from his scope again.
“Okay, well—” I stepped back. Why did the moment feel incomplete? What had I even come out here to say? “I guess I’ll head back to the RV.”
“You sure?” He turned to me again. His glasses caught light from somewhere, and for just an instant, I could see the shadows of the trees against the lenses. “Do you want to see a constellation?”
“I—” The truth was easier to say in the comforting dark. “I don’t know where they are. I’ve never looked for them.”
“I’ll show you. Come see.”
I shrugged in the dark. “Okay.”
“I’m going to show you Ursa Minor. Hold on.” He peered through the telescope, painstakingly tilting, adjusting, turning, all with hands clearly used to finding their own way in the dark. “All right. Now you look.”
You know, people think the stars are tiny. Tame. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, and all that. But when I looked into Kason’s telescope, I realized that I’d never seen the stars. Not for what they really were.
Where were those familiar tired glows in the rafters of space? These were living lights, pulsing with a power I’d never imagined. Leaping from the depths of the darkness into the end of the telescope right in front of me. Yanking all the solid ground of expectations right from under me.
“Pherkad and Kochab are the two on that edge. The end there is Polaris, the North Star.” Kason was bending over me. His arm brushed mine. “Do you see?”
The stars were too bright. Too close. Too shimmeringly other. I backed away from the telescope so fast I almost bumped into Kason. “Yes. I see.” I just never had before.
“There’s this idea in the Space Trilogy that the whole universe is in hierarchy. That God appointed spiritual beings to rule every planet.”
Spiritual beings? “Is that why you’re so into UFOs?” I cringed, longing to retract the dumb question, but again, Kason didn’t react.
“Maybe. Not totally, though. There are a lot of reasons I like studying UFOs. They’re sort of—just part of the picture for me.”
“Part of the picture?”
“Think about it.” The passion was curling around the edges of his words again. “So many worlds, don’t you see? So much that’s too far past us.” He paused. “There’s this line in Out of the Silent Planet that says that light is the edge between worlds. That it’s the fastest thing we can see, even imperfectly, and after that, everything blurs into the next dimension. So when we look at light—we’re on the edge of a great mystery. That’s what I think, anyway.”
And suddenly I did have that feeling. That the stars that I now knew were far bigger than I had realized were reaching for me, trying to pull me past the safe borders of my refusal into the fathomless depths of that mystery. I stepped back. I did not need any more mysteries. I did not need to cross any more lines that couldn’t be redrawn. “Thanks, Kason. I’m heading back to the fire.”
“You’re welcome.” He stroked the telescope, looked up as if drinking in the night sky. The stars were again soft and subtle lights, like normal, but now I knew better. “I’ll stay out here awhile.”
I turned away and found the familiar paths. When I came back to the RV, the others had gone inside. The fire was banked. And the streetlights were washing out the stars.
Maybe it was safer that way.