Space Station Seventh Grade

Everybody else went to bed. I waited. Pus or no pus, I was going to do it.

  I snuck down to the kitchen and got the chicken. Some bone was showing. It was hard not to eat the meat. I squeezed a little blood bead onto my fingertip and rubbed it onto the bone. I wrapped it up good in the shirt and buried it in the yard, under the snowball plant.

  I kept thinking about how a conversation between me and Ham would go:

  Ham: Did you eat my chicken breast?

  Me: No.

  Ham: Did you take it?

  Me: Yes.

  Ham: But you didn’t eat it?

  Me: No.

  Ham: Then what, pray tell, did you do with it?

  Me: I buried it.

  Before I went to bed I took one last look at the pimple. I didn’t even have it twenty-four hours yet, but it seemed like a year. I knew that pimple better than I knew my nose. What would it be like in the morning? Better? Worse? A second one?

  I didn’t care. I was exhausted. I went to sleep.

  In the morning I woke up from a yell downstairs:

  “MY CHICKENNNNN!”

  GRANDMOTHERS

  WE WERE IN LUNCH LINE AND PETER KIM WAS LOOKING IN HIS wallet for his lunch card. There was a picture of an old lady in his wallet. That seemed a little strange.

  “Who’s that?” I asked him.

  “Who?”

  “That. That old lady.”

  “That’s my grandmother.”

  When we got to a table and sat down, I said, “Peter, is that something Koreans do a lot?”

  “What?” he said.

  “Carry their grandmothers’ pictures in their wallets?”

  Peter Kim never looks up when he eats. He really gets into his food. I thought of starving Chinese. I tried to picture him with chopsticks. So happens we were having this chicken stuff over rice.

  “I keep”—he swallowed—“telling you. I don’t know about Koreans.”

  That’s true, he is always telling me that. But for some reason I just can’t believe 100 percent of it. I look at his round tan face and those eyes that are spaced so far apart and almost flat with his forehead and as black as his hair and shaped like teardrops sideways, and I just can’t believe he doesn’t know any more about Koreans than me.

  So we went into this little thing we always say:

  “C’mon, you know you’re a Korean.”

  “I am not a Korean.”

  “So what are ya?”

  “I’m an American.”

  I said, “Okay now, serious. You gotta admit, most kids don’t carry pictures of their grandmothers around in their wallet. You gotta admit that.”

  “I do?”

  “Peter, come on. If I had a wallet, which I don’t—and that’s another thing: most guys don’t even have wallets. Or at least they don’t use them.”

  “Why not?” he goes.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “How do I know? Maybe because they don’t have grandmothers’ pictures to put in them. Anyway. What I’m saying is, like if I had a wallet, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “If I had a wallet, I wouldn’t have my grandmother’s picture in it.”

  “Why not?”

  Getting this guy to see things sometimes… “I don’t know. I just wouldn’t.”

  “Who would you have a picture of?” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I started thinking. My mother? Father? Ham? Timmy? “My bike, maybe,” I said. “Or my space station.”

  For the first time he looked up. “You got a space station?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m making it myself.”

  “Yeah? What’s it like?” He was all excited.

  I told him it was hard to describe. So why didn’t he come over to my house after school.

  He was impressed when he saw it. He wanted to know how big it was going to be. I told him I was just going to keep adding on to it, so it might be as big as my bed by the time it was finished. “Man!” he goes.

  “This is nothin’, what you see here,” I told him. “This is just mostly the foundation. I don’t even know what shape it’s gonna be.”

  He pointed. “That’s done, though. What is it? The solar antenna?”

  I was surprised he would know that. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s it. I made it out of clothes hanger wire and aluminum foil.”

  “Neato.”

  “Yeah. What it does is, it collects the sun’s rays to use them for heating water and to keep warm and stuff.”

  “Don’t it change some of the rays into electricity? Like for lights?”

  I said right, it does that too. “Listen,” I said, “I didn’t know you were all into space. When did you get interested?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “This okay?” He was turning the solar antenna.

  I told him okay, I made it to turn. So it would always face the sun.

  “I don’t know,” he said again. “I was just always interested in that stuff. The planets, y’know?”

  “Stars.”

  “Yeah, stars. Red giants especially.”

  “Oh man, yeah! Some of them get so big they almost take up a whole solar system!”

  “Black holes,” he goes.

  “Oh man! Peter, do you know”—I was really getting worked up now—“they’re so strong, they suck in everything. Nothing can escape.”

  “Not even light.”

  “Not even light! Peter, imagine!”

  We stared into each other’s eyes for a while, me sitting on the bed, Peter at the space station, his hand on the solar antenna, trying to imagine.

  A tiny grin slunk onto his face. “Quasars,” he said.

  “Aaiii!” I went and flopped backward onto the bed.

  “Pulsars.”

  “Ahhhh!”

  “Galaxies.”

  “Ouuuu!”

  He was standing over me now. I was squirming, like I was the Devil and he was the Exorcist throwing holy water on me.

  “Light-years. Comets. Asteroid belts. Space dust. Gamma rays. Alpha Centauri. The Big Bang.”

  Even Peter couldn’t stand it anymore. He collapsed on the bed and we just laughed our heads off for about a year. This was great. I never saw Peter Kim talk so much. Or act like this.

  Finally, when we were down to just sniffing and wiping our eyes, I said, “You forgot one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Pioneer.”

  He sort of swooned. “Ohhh yeahhh. Pioneer.”

  “Do you ever think about it?” I asked him.

  “Yeah,” he goes.

  “Out there?”

  “Yeah.”

  We both thought about Pioneer for a while. Out there. Sailing through space. Farther and farther from earth. Carrying its gold plaque on board with the drawings of the nude man and lady. And other drawings and numbers and stuff. Just in case.

  “Where’s it supposed to be now?” I said. “You know?”

  “I’m not sure. It passed Jupiter, didn’t it?”

  “Oh yeah. Long time ago.”

  “Saturn?”

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “What’s next?”

  “Uranus, ain’t it?”

  “Or Neptune.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “maybe it is Neptune. I always forget about Neptune.”

  Peter sat up. “Yeah! I always forget about Neptune too. It’s pretty big.”

  “I think so,” I said, not very sure. “Is it the one that’s all frozen ice?”

  “Like dry ice?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe that’s Uranus.”

  We tried to figure it out. We couldn’t.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll tell you one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Know what really gets to me?”

  “What?”

  I closed my eyes, said it slow. “When I think… of Pioneer… going . . out… past… Pluto. Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah. I know.”

&n
bsp; “It passes Pluto… and it’s out… of the Solar System. Out of it. Heading… heading…”

  I looked at my arm. “Peter, look! My arm! See?”

  They were there, all over my arm: goosebumps. “I toldja how I get. Do you get that way?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I never looked.”

  “But you feel funny inside, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Kinda like… fuzzy?”

  “Yeah. Sort of.”

  “Dizzy almost?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bubbles?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Tiny cool little dizzy bubbles all over?”

  “Yeah! Yeah!”

  “I’ll bet you get them too,” I told him. “Let’s see—what makes you feel the funniest?”

  He thought awhile. “Mmm. Speed of light?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Speed of light. Coming up. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. A second. Got that?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay. Close your eyes.”

  He closed them.

  “Okay, now. Speed of light.” I smacked my dresser with my hand. Then again right away. “Hear that?” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “That was a second. Right?”

  “Right.”

  I did it again. “One second.”

  “One second.”

  “One second. One measly little second. One sixtieth of a minute; and in that measly little second, light can travel a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles. That’s seven or eight times around the earth, man. Think about it.”

  I kept an eye on his arm. Nothing yet.

  “One second. Imagine a car going that fast. A plane. The fastest plane. The fastest rocket even.”

  No bumps yet.

  “Imagine. Imagine… getting on the rocket and going around the world seven times—seven times—and then getting off. And when you get off it’s only one second later: one… measly… second!”

  His arm was smooth as a baby’s butt. “You sure you’re trying?” I said. “Look.”

  He looked at the arm. “Yeah. I was thinking about it good.”

  “Didn’t you feel anything start to sort of pop a little under your skin?”

  He screwed his face up. “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.” He closed his eyes again and held his arm out. “Try distance this time.”

  We tried distance. I told him about how things are so far apart in the universe that even light, as fast as it goes, can take hundreds and thousands and even millions of years to get from one part of the universe to another.

  Still no bumps.

  We tried gamma rays, passing through steel like it was air.

  Nothing. He was disappointed.

  Time to bring in the heavy artillery.

  “Only one left that could do it,” I told him.

  “What’s that?”

  “Infinity.”

  He shook his head, sort of smiled. “Forget it.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “I know that one won’t do anything.”

  “You know? How can you know? D’jever try it?”

  “Sure. Just never bothered me.”

  I couldn’t believe it: infinity. “You talkin’ about the same infinity I am?” I asked him.

  “Yep.”

  “Doesn’t do anything to you?”

  “Nope.”

  “No bubbles?”

  “Nope.”

  “A little dizzy?”

  “Nope.”

  This I couldn’t believe. “You go out as far as you can, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Out past the last quasar, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Out past the last pulsar.”

  “Right.”

  “Past the last anything. Anything.”

  He nodded.

  My mind took a deep breath. “You’re going on and on… leave the galaxies behind… going at the speed of light… on and on… for years… thousands of light-years… millions…”

  I was walking around in circles. My thoughts were getting wispier and wispier, hard to hold on to, seeping out of my head, out through the cracks in my brain.

  “… billions of light-years. Sooner or later, sooner or later, you have to come to the end, right, Peter? You have to.”

  He just sat there.

  “But if you come to the end—if there is an end—what comes after the end? After the end? Nothin’? Ever think about nothin’, Peter? What’s nothin’? Space? That’s not nothin’, right? All kinds of stuff in space. So what can there be at the end of space? Huh?”

  His round face never moved.

  “So I mean, if you can’t imagine it coming to an end, maybe it doesn’t end, huh? Maybe it just goes on forever and ever.” I threw up my hands. “Great… swell… never ends. So how you supposed to imagine that either? So you don’t even know how to think. You can’t imagine it ending. And you can’t imagine it not ending. Great.”

  I was sweating. Peter looked calm as the moon. “You gonna tell me that don’t fuzz you up a little bit?” I said.

  He shook his head sheepishly. He was right: not a bump in sight.

  “Man!” I went. “My brain feels like somebody sprayed it with fizz just listening to myself. You mean you can think about all that and it doesn’t bother you any more than a… a banana?”

  He sighed. “I guess not.”

  “You don’t feel anything.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Aha! “So what do you feel?”

  “Water,” he said.

  “Water? Whattaya mean? Drinking it? Swimming in it?”

  “I don’t know. Just water.”

  “Fishing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “W-A-T-E-R water?”

  “Yep.”

  Water. This kid was more complicated than I ever thought. I didn’t used to think he talked much. He does. Or can. I didn’t know he was interested in space. He is. I didn’t know he could get excited about things. He can. But nothing gives him goosebumps. Not even infinity. Which reminds him of water.

  Oh yeah—and he carries a wallet. With a picture of his grandmother in it.

  Well, if I couldn’t get him to break out in goosebumps, at least I could find out a little more about the grandmother business. It turns out that his grandmother didn’t want to leave Korea with the rest of her family. This was when Peter’s parents were just little. So she stayed behind. When Peter was born she wrote and said her only regret in staying over there was not being able to see him. Then she got real sick, when Peter was still a baby, but before she died, she got these envelopes and inside each one she put a little dried flower. Then she sealed the envelopes up and wrote a different year on each one. Then she sent them to Peter and died.

  So now there’s a stack of envelopes in Peter’s room, and every year he opens one up.

  I asked him where he puts the flowers.

  “In a box,” he said.

  “Like a special box?”

  He shook his head yes.

  “How many envelopes did she send you, Peter?” I asked him.

  “A hundred,” he said.

  I couldn’t get Peter Kim and his grandmother out of my head. I felt guilty. There I was with six grandparents: two from my mother, two from my father, and two from Ham. (I count them in because I know how much old people love to have grandkids—and Ham’s their only kid. Besides, imagine saying “stepgrandmother.”) But Peter—all he had was a picture. Not even a memory.

  Then I got an idea. I thought about it and I worked on it and I made it. I called it the Freeze-Dried Grandmother Launch Pad.

  It all has to do with this stuff I read about and asked my science teacher and Ham about. Speed and space and time aren’t just separate things. They have something to do with each other. For instance, the faster you go, the slower time goes. Which means, if you can go really fast, like around the speed of light (which we can
’t actually; not yet, anyway), you can get older slower. In other words, you can stay young a long time. But here’s the really mind-blowing part: if you can go faster than the speed of light, you might even start going backward in time. You could get younger and younger—till you’re a baby again!

  So here’s what they do. First, as soon as a grandmother dies, they freeze-dry her. Sort of like coffee. Then they just wait around till there’s a grandkid born. Okay. They launch him off. But not too fast. They don’t want him to stop growing, or even slow down much. The idea is to get him out there real far. Say out around Alpha Centauri, the nearest star. He just goes into orbit around it. Waiting. Growing.

  Okay. Now. The grandmother. They put her into the Freeze-Dried Grandmother Launch Pad and send her off. Now this one is really fast. Out it goes, faster and faster, and pretty soon that grandmother is going as fast as light. Then faster than light. She’s the fastest thing in the whole universe. And so her time is different from everything else’s time. Her time starts to go backward. It goes back to the day she died. And then she un-dies, and it’s the day before she died, and then a week before, and she’s going faster and faster and getting younger and younger, and by the time she reaches Alpha Centauri she’s only about fifty years old. Or maybe even forty.

  And there waiting for her is her grandchild. The one who was born after she died. Now’s the tricky part, because what she has to do is slow down. And that means she’ll start getting old again and die. She locates her grandson’s ship and throttles down and slips into his orbit, and pretty soon their ships are side by side. They go to the portals and look out at each other and talk to each other by shortwave and laugh and say anything they want. But mostly they just look. She’s getting old again real fast now, and there’s only time for one trip around the star. But it’s better than nothing. It’s better than just a picture in a wallet.

  When I got the Freeze-Dried Grandmother Launch Pad finished, I took it to school and told Peter to come over to my locker and gave it to him. I told him it was to help him get his own space station started. I told him how it worked.

  He just kept looking down at it. He didn’t say anything, but his arm was full of goosebumps.

  SNOW

  SNOW! FIRST OF THE YEAR.

  It started in the morning during math class. Not everybody agreed at first. Some people said it was snow. Others said it was just ashes from a fire. It was hard to tell.