She shrugs. “He never asked.” She reaches down to pick up her huge pocketbook from the ground. I offer to take it from her and she hands it over.
“Well, he’s going to be glad you’re found.”
“I always knew where I was.”
Even though I’m not too fond of the guy, I suddenly find myself taking his side. “He was worried. Maybe you should let people know if you’re going to go off, like, from now on.”
“Yes, Dad,” she says with a wink.
I redden. I guess I did sound like a dad. I’ve never had anyone to look out for before.
“Who’s your friend?” she asks as the three of us head back through the maze of hallways. We only have ten minutes left now.
“I’m Pete Goldberg,” he says proudly. “I’m six. I helped find you.”
“I wasn’t lost, I simply —”
I nudge her on the arm and she sighs and says, “Yes, you did, Pete. You found me.”
We head toward Stella’s room but run into her son pacing in the lobby. He doesn’t even thank me, just starts yelling that she shouldn’t wander off like that in a strange place. Now I feel like I should stand up for her, but honestly the guy scares me a little. Pete backs away, and I steer him to the check-in desk so I can get an extra key to my room. I hope I don’t have to pay for it because I didn’t bring my money.
The card turns out to be free, I just have to promise to return both copies later.
I almost trip over the licorice when I step into the room. Pete drops to his knees and grabs two pieces that had fallen onto the carpet when the box fell. Before I can stop him, he sticks them in his mouth. Now I’m an eat-off-the-floor type of guy, too, but who knows what has been on this floor? “Hey, don’t you know the two-second rule?”
He shakes his head, chewing happily. I take the second piece out of his other hand. “It means you have two seconds to eat something that has touched the floor before it gets all covered in germs. This has been here for a lot longer than that.”
“But I’m allowed to eat licorice, see?” he holds out his arm and pushes up the sleeve of his Disney World sweatshirt. A bracelet dangles from his wrist. I hadn’t noticed it before. He brings it up to my face. There are symbols of a peanut and a fish, each with a red line through it. “See? No peanuts, no fish. Nothing about no licorice.”
“Okay, well, it’d be really helpful if you threw the rest in the trash so I can finish packing.”
Pete dutifully tosses the licorice one by one into the trash, missing every other time. I run around the room making sure I don’t leave anything behind. Good thing it’s a small room.
When we get down to the bus, Pete’s mom is in the front, handing her last suitcase to the bus driver to store underneath. I toss mine in after, and see for the first time that the whole middle compartment is packed full with telescopes. At least I think that’s what they are since they’re all wrapped up, some in a silver foil-type material, others in blankets or long boxes.
“He wasn’t any trouble, was he?” Pete’s mom asks, putting her arm around his shoulders.
“I helped solve a mystery!” Pete says. “And I had some licorice!”
“Did you, now?” she says, amused. “Sounds like you had a busy fifteen minutes!” She thanks me for watching him, and they join David on the bus.
“There you are,” Mr. Silver says, waving me up the stairs. He makes a little check on his clipboard and then stashes it in his briefcase. I guess I’m the last one.
“I’d like to finish our conversation from yesterday,” he says, climbing up behind me. “Why don’t you come down to talk to me once we’re underway?”
“Okay.” I’m glad he didn’t ask me to sit up front with him. When I get halfway down the aisle I’m surprised to see Stella sitting next to her son, with the daughter-in-law across the aisle. She rolls her eyes at me and says loudly, “Gotta sit here so the warden can keep an eye on me. Goodness knows what kind of trouble I might get into in the back of the bus!”
“Very funny, Mother,” Mr. Daniels says, his lips drawn tight.
I tell Stella I’ll see her at the lunch stop and keep making my way back. I get more and more tired with each passing row. After the morning’s excitement, the lack of sleep is catching up to me. I settle into the window seat, close my eyes, and the next thing I know I’m on the floor in our den at home. I’m about to reach a new level in Super Mario Bros. 3 on my Game Boy when the lights on it start going all haywire. Instead of helping Mario to leap over a bottomless pit, every time I press a button a Madonna song starts playing. The fact that I don’t KNOW any Madonna songs, coupled with the fact that my game is malfunctioning in this crazy way, alerts me to the fact that I’m dreaming. I know I’m not really at home. I know I’m sleeping on a bus right now surrounded by cornfields and cows. But I’ve done this enough times that the realization doesn’t wake me right up, the way it used to.
Without hesitating, I turn the Game Boy into a hot dog with sauerkraut, ketchup, and mustard. Lucid dream food always tastes better than real food, in the same way that the colors are brighter. Once I scarf down the hot dog, I’m ready to take off. I bend my knees like Superman does before a takeoff, and sort of float up into the air, through the wall, and outside. When I was younger I used to get caught in the wall sometimes. SD3 explained it to me. He said part of my brain still wouldn’t accept the fact that a wall in a dream isn’t a real wall, and I’d get convinced that I couldn’t pass through it. I’ve had to learn to let go of that or else I get stuck and have to fight my way out, usually waking me.
But now I glide right through, feeling that same freedom and joy that I feel every time I do this. The grass is so much greener than real grass, and without any effort at all, I can make the blue sky orange. Sometimes I’ll pretend I’m in a football game and I’m the star player. But mostly I just fly around, watching the landscape change beneath me, and trying to hold onto lucidity. I can usually only make it last a few minutes. I feel it slipping away from me now, like the environment is getting harder to control. I feel the real dream world creeping back over me, so much duller than this.
When I wake up, I’m alone. How much time has passed? I turn toward the window and see we’re parked in front of a Burger King. The eclipse chasers are straggling out toward the bus. If this was lunch, I must have been out for hours.
Mr. Silver is the first one back. He heads down the aisle toward me and I remember we were supposed to talk once the bus left the motel. Oops!
He hands me a take-out bag and says, “I thought you might be hungry.”
My stomach growls in response. “I’m sorry I fell asleep. I didn’t sleep very well last night.”
“You looked so peaceful no one wanted to wake you.”
I’m thinking more likely no one noticed I was sleeping back here, but I don’t argue with him.
“Eat your lunch and then we’ll talk, okay?”
What I’d really rather do is eat and then sketch in my book. I nod though, one hand already reaching into the bag. Fries and a Whopper. No drink, but I still have a can of orange soda in my backpack. I eat the burger so quickly I barely taste it. It’s good, but pretty bland compared to the dream hot dog. If only dream hot dogs filled me up. I’d take up less space in this seat, that’s for sure.
The last fry disappears as the bus pulls out. I wouldn’t mind using the bathroom, but Pete broke it yesterday by sticking the toy from his Happy Meal down it. Nothing to do about it but wait till the next rest stop.
I make my way down to the front, wishing I hadn’t drank all that soda. Stella is knitting her red scarf again, and Pete is absorbed in a book. I don’t remember if I could even read at that age. Mr. Silver is on his cell phone and motions for me to sit in the empty seat across the aisle.
“We’ll need thirty-three pairs,” he says into the phone. “Yes, the ones with the alpha-screen.” He holds the phone away for a second and says to me, “Those are the ones that let you see sunspots as the moon is crossi
ng.”
I nod like I actually understand what he said. I’m getting good at that. Mike’s articles helped a little, but I have a hard time picturing anything I haven’t seen.
He says a few more things about tents and cabins and ends with, “We should arrive around five. Yes, wishing you clear skies too.”
After snapping the phone closed he turns to me with a grin. “Soon you’ll be ending your conversations by wishing the other person clear skies.”
“I doubt that,” I say, but I say it cheerfully so it doesn’t sound obnoxious. I figure there’s no use pretending I’m going to absorb all this stuff. Mr. Silver did have me in class for a whole year, after all. He knows better than that.
“You may want to take notes,” he says, handing me a notebook with a yellow cover and a pen that has moon shadow campground printed on it with their phone number. “In fact, throughout the trip you should write down your observations, and then details of the eclipse. For your paper at the end.”
“Okay.” I open the first page and am pleasantly surprised to see there are no lines. Lined pages always make me think of school. And I don’t want to think of school.
“Let me begin by explaining the basis of the experiment you’ll be helping me with. As I mentioned, I’m part of a four-person team that works on verifying the existence of exoplanets. You know what those are, right? We talked about it last month in class?”
“Sure, they’re planets around stars other than the sun.” I say a silent thank-you to David, since I definitely didn’t learn it from class.
“Exactly,” Mr. Silver says. “I knew you paid more attention than you let on.”
I neither confirm nor deny that. He continues. “The rest of my teammates are amateur astronomers, too. We know a lot about astronomy, and we have ex-cellent equipment, but we don’t publish papers in scholarly journals, or get funding for our projects. We participate purely for the love of science and because we’ve proven we’re capable. Being chosen for this project is a big honor.”
He pauses here, and I wonder if I’m supposed to say anything. “Uh, congratulations?”
He laughs. “Don’t congratulate me yet. Save that for if we’re successful. What we have to do is very precise, and it’s going to be tricky. Using my fourteen-inch scope, which has a special camera attached to it called a charge-coupling device, or CCD, we’re going to be doing photometric observations. We’re going to measure the change in magnitude of one special star’s brightness. The star is over a hundred light-years away, and we’re going to detect if it dims by as little as two percent, and for how long. The other folks on my team will be doing the same thing, in different parts of the world. We’re all at different longitudes and all our data will be combined to get the full picture. I’ll be manning the scope, making sure we’ve got good tracking on the target star, while you keep track of the photometric measurements so that we can make a light curve. Sound good?”
“Uh-huh.” I’m pretty sure he’s still speaking English. But I can’t be 100 percent certain.
“If the amount of light from our star suddenly decreases,” he continues, his voice dropping like he’s sharing some big secret, “then we’ll know a planet, with an indeterminate mass, has just crossed in front of it. We can’t see planets directly because they’re incredibly dim in comparison to their parent star.”
My palms are starting to sweat a bit. I am so out of my element.
“But the experiment isn’t for ten days. So for other duties, just soak in the atmosphere of the Moon Shadow, learn all you can. If a tour member needs something and can’t find me, you’ll be the backup guy. I’ll give you a walkie-talkie when we arrive.” He looks pointedly down at my notebook and I realize I haven’t taken any notes. I try to scribble down what he said before I forget it, but I’m sure I didn’t get everything. Hopefully when we’re doing it for real, he’ll just tell me to look at a screen and read what it says. I’m pretty sure I can do that much without mess-ing up.
One of the older men is cautiously making his way down the aisle. He stops and holds tight to the back of Mr. Silver’s chair.
“Excuse me,” he says. “Some of the ladies were wondering if we were going to stop soon for a restroom break.”
He winks at me and I smile, grateful that he was asking instead of me.
After the break, I don’t try to go back to sleep. Instead I sketch the scene on the bus, with all the people talking and reading and laughing and sleeping. I give them all the heads of aliens instead of people. I feel slightly guilty about that, since everyone so far had been very nice (except maybe Stella’s son, who seems uptight in general.) But I don’t have any practice at drawing real people.
As the hours go by, the scenery becomes fewer fields and more forests. We finally pull through a carved wooden archway that says moon shadow campground with a carving of the moon crossing in front of the sun. Mr. Silver gets out to show some papers to the guy at the gate and then climbs back on. As the bus slowly winds down the road into the campground, he puts on his yellow sun hat and picks up the microphone.
“Welcome to the Moon Shadow!”
Everyone claps and a few let out whoops.
“We’ll be making two stops, first to the cabins for those of you who selected that option, and then at the campsite for those of you who aren’t afraid of some real camping! I’ll read out the names for the first stop.”
Even though I’m not afraid of real camping, I’m hoping he says my name. Two weeks in a tent doesn’t sound like much fun. I needn’t have worried, Mr. Silver calls my name first. I hear Stella’s family and Pete’s family called. I count twenty-five others. It seems like most of us went for the cabin option. On the drive we pass wooden signs that announce things like THE PAVILION, THE ART HOUSE, AND MINE FOR GOLD HERE. This sure isn’t like any campground I’ve ever been to.
The bus pulls up in front of a large circle of cabins. I can see more rows of cabins behind it, too. As the bus empties out, only five guys in their twenties remain. They are all wearing the same blue t-shirt that says eclipse-chasers do it better.
I’m not sure what it is they do better, but they seem to be having fun laughing and joking with each other. Usually when I see a group of friends like that I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it. I see Mike with his friends and it’s, like, someone is always mad at someone else, leaving someone out of something, or stealing someone’s girlfriend. Seems like a big hassle to me. But today for some reason it doesn’t seem like it would be so bad.
Mr. Silver plops my duffel at my feet and hands me a white plastic box with first aid splashed across the front. Then he digs around his own bag and pulls out a walkie-talkie and a charging device. “Keep the first-aid kit with you in your backpack,” he instructs me. “And clip the walkie-talkie onto your waist. We’ll use frequency number one, and if that doesn’t work, try number two. Keep it charged overnight. Here’s the key to your cabin. It’s right next to mine if you need anything.”
I nod, trying to remember everything.
“See you all at dinner!” he calls out before climbing back on the bus. “Barbecue at the Pavilion!”
I stuff the kit and the walkie-talkie into my backpack and sling my duffel over the other shoulder. A guy in a moon shadow t-shirt shows us which cabins are ours. Mine is one of the first few. As I walk up the stairs I start to feel excited. Besides the motel room last night, I’ve never had a whole place to myself before. I push open the door to find two cots with thin blue blankets, a wooden dresser, a small writing table, and a tiny bathroom with a toilet and sink, but no shower or tub. I’m feeling pretty stinky after being in the bus all day so I go outside to find the showers. I only get a few feet when a guy about my age comes out of the cabin next to me.
“Hey,” he says. “You just checking in?”
I nod. “You know where the showers are?”
He points to a gray building a few yards away. “It’s right over there. Hey, I’m about to lift some weights. Wanna spot me??
??
I don’t know what possesses me, maybe the fact that guys who look like him—clothes with logos, good-looking, at ease in the world—don’t usually ask me to do anything with them, but I say, “Okay,” and follow him back into his cabin.
His cabin is identical to mine, except strewn with exercise equipment and inside-out clothes. He pushes some hand weights toward me with his toe and says, “You can get started with these while I get set up.”
So I do some bicep curls like I’ve seen guys do in gym class. I must be doing it right because he doesn’t comment. He tells me his name is Ryan and that he’s here with his grandfather. He says there’s a really hot girl here who he wants to impress, so he’s stepping up his workouts. He asks if I’ve got a girlfriend. I laugh.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Who’s going to go out with me?” I jiggle the pudge around my belly.
He shrugs. “Girls dig confidence. They don’t care if you’ve got rock-hard abs.”
“Then why do you bother working out?”
“Hey, it never hurts to have both.”
Well, since I don’t have any confidence, maybe I really should look into this working-out stuff. I bend down and pick up heavier weights.
“That’s the spirit,” Ryan says.
After a shower that gets cold too quickly, I throw on jeans and a long-sleeve t-shirt because Ryan told me to cover up from the skeeters at night. Something falls to the floor when I’m going through my bag. I bend down and pick up two pieces of plastic—the keys from the motel. Figures.
I don’t even bother locking the door in my haste to get to the Pavilion for dinner. I don’t want to miss the food. Working out makes you really hungry! Who knew? I feel good though, and Ryan said I can come back in the morning and we’ll work on different muscle groups.
Ryan sees me and waves me over. I feel bad cutting in line, but no one seems to mind. He points to two girls sitting at the farthest picnic table. I can’t see them too well from here but they both look pretty. “There she is,” he says.