It makes me want to vomit.
Dark silhouettes of skinny palm trees greet me as I turn into our cul-de-sac and park the car behind my dad’s Corvette in the narrow driveway next to our building. The clinic is dark, so no one’s working late. Hesitantly, I hike the steps of the connecting house and warily open the front door of our apartment.
A ball of white fur pads across the open living area to greet me. Andromeda is getting old, but she’s still sweet and pretty. No one can resist her dual-colored brown and blue husky eyes. I stick my fingers under her collar and give her a good scratch while kissing the top of her head.
“Hey, sweet thing,” my mom says. She’s stretched out on the couch under a blanket, reading a magazine under a dim lamp while the mute TV flashes a commercial in background. “How was astronomy club?”
“Fine.” I hand her the car keys. “Where’s Dad?”
She nods toward the balcony off the kitchen, where I spot a dark shape. “On the phone.”
My gut twists when I hear his voice, too low for me to make out what he’s saying. He’s always on the phone, and those phone calls usually are taken behind closed doors after he steps away. I assumed he was just being polite; my mom is old-school about people talking on cell phones in public.
Now I wonder who’s on the other end of the line.
Hoping she doesn’t notice my anxiety, I briefly tell Mom about Dr. Viramontes’s invitation to the star party while she’s flipping magazine pages. She’s mmm-hmm-ing me, completely distracted. I see her glance toward the balcony door, and a little line appears in the middle of her forehead.
Or maybe that’s my imagination.
All I know is that I can’t fake a convincing smile around my father, so after feigning weariness, I kiss Joy good night and make an escape upstairs, Andromeda at my heels.
My bedroom is in a converted attic space. My parents’ master bedroom is downstairs, so I have the entire upstairs to myself. Just me, an ancient bathroom without a shower, and a storage room filled with overflow supplies from the clinic.
Embarrassingly, my room hasn’t changed a lot since I was a kid. The ceiling is still covered with glow-in-the-dark stars—the “glow” ran out years ago—painstakingly arranged to match constellations. Pegasus lost the stars that make up his leg during a minor earthquake. The only decorative room additions from the last couple of years are my oversize handmade wall calendars, or “blueprints”—I have one for each season of the year, and they are all systematically color-coded—and my galaxy photos. I’ve had my best ones printed and framed. My Orion Nebula is particularly beautiful. I took it at the observatory with a special equatorial mount borrowed from Dr. Viramontes, and tweaked its purple luminance with stacking software.
After locking my door, I move past framed star charts and duck beneath a mobile of the solar system that hangs over my desk. I stashed the photo book in a deep desk drawer earlier, and when I double-check, it’s still there, under a neat stack of graph-lined planning journals and a rainbow bin of highlighters, gel pens, and rolls of washi tape. My parents don’t touch my stuff—it’s all carefully organized—so I’m not sure why I’m so worried. I guess I just feel guilty.
Best not to think about it. “Until I can figure out what to do, it’s our little secret,” I tell Andromeda. She jumps up on my bed and curls into a ball. She’s an excellent secret keeper.
The only window in my room has a Juliet balcony that overlooks the cul-de-sac. There’s not room enough for me to stand outside, but it’s wide enough for my telescope, Nancy Grace Roman—named after the first woman to hold an executive position at NASA. I open the balcony doors and take the telescope from its black carrying case to set it up. I actually have two telescopes—this one, and a smaller portable model. I haven’t really used the portable one much, but now I’m daydreaming about taking it to that star party on Condor Peak.
I wonder if I can really do the camping and the meteor shower.
It would take a lot of planning.
I dash off a quick text to Reagan: So, about this glamping trip. Who’s going? Are you driving? What day are you leaving?
She responds almost immediately: Slow your roll. I’m in bed. Super tired. Want to go pick up camping gear with me tomorrow afternoon? We can talk about it then.
I’m both relieved and disappointed. Relieved, because I guess it’s cool with her that I tag along. And disappointed, because though I need to plan things well in advance, Reagan does everything by the seat of her pants. She’s always telling me I need to lighten up and embrace spontaneity.
Spontaneity gives me hives.
Literally.
I have chronic urticaria. That’s a fancy name for chronic hives. They’re idiopathic, which means doctors can’t pinpoint an exact cause for why, when, and how long they flare. Sometimes when I eat certain foods, touch an allergen, or—especially—get super anxious, itchy pale-red bumps appear on the inside of my elbows and on my stomach. If I don’t calm down and take an antihistamine, they’ll spread into huge welts off and on for days, or even weeks. It’s been several months since I’ve had a breakout, but between Reagan and this thing with my dad, I can already feel the itch coming on.
I answer Reagan’s text, asking for details about meeting her tomorrow. Then I assemble my telescope and set up the tripod in the middle of the balcony’s open doors.
As I’m adjusting the mount, I look over the balcony railing to scan the cul-de-sac. Viewed from up here, our street looks like a fat raindrop, its center filled with a dozen public parking spaces. At night, they’re mostly empty, so I have a pretty clear view of the other side of the street, where I spot Lennon’s car. It’s hard to miss. He drives this hulking black 1950s Chevy that looks like a hearse, with pointy tailfins cradling a hatchback door that lifts up to carry the coffins, or whatever dastardly thing he hauls back there. And right now, it’s parked in front of a pale blue duplex house directly across the street from us: the Mackenzies’ apartment unit.
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment Lennon morphed from the boy-next-door comic geek to the boy-in-black horrorphile, but I guess he’s always been a little odd. Some of that may be due to how he grew up. His biological dad—Adam Ahmed, who used to date Mac—is the former guitarist for a radical San Francisco punk band that was popular during the Bay Area’s ’90s punk revival explosion. His moms took three-year-old Lennon on tour when his dad’s band opened for Green Day.
So yeah, he hasn’t always led a so-called normal life, but he always seemed normal.
Until junior year, that is. After the night of the homecoming dance, we didn’t speak for days. No more hiking down to the Jitterbug to get coffee after school. No more night walks. Weeks passed. I’d see him occasionally at school, but our brief interactions were tense. He started hanging around other people.
Golden light shines from a window on the corner of the Mackenzies’ house. Lennon’s room. I know it well. We used to signal each other from our windows before sneaking out late at night to meet up for walks around the neighborhood with Andromeda.
We made a game of creating and naming detailed routes. Lennon would draw them all out, streets labeled with his neat handwriting and tiny sketches. He’s drawn maps since we were kids. Some were fantasy maps based on books he read; he redrew Middle Earth about twenty times. And some were of Melita Hills. That’s how our friendship started, actually. I’d just moved to Melita Hills and didn’t know my way around, so he made me a neighborhood map of the Mission Street area. He gave me a larger, updated one for my birthday last year—one that included our favorite late-night walking route, which extended out along a bicycling path curving around the Bay. It had funny little drawings, all the points of interest we considered important, and a legend of symbols he’d made up.