The Weight of the Stars

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  This book is for all of us who looked up at the sky in wonder, and then cried when we learned how much calculus separated us from the stars.

  Ten million light-years from now

  bathed in the radiation of a time without time

  are the bones of a girl who loved Ryann Bird.

  ≠

  In the dust left over from our supernova

  atoms spread farther and wider than hope

  are pieces of the heart of the girl who

  loved Alexandria the Great.

  DAWN

  She woke up to the sound of screaming.

  She always woke up to the sound of screaming. Ryann scrunched her eyes against it for a minute and then rubbed her face in exhaustion. Eventually, she heaved herself from bed and lumbered into the living room.

  “Hey, heyheyhey,” she whispered. “It’s okay.”

  She picked up Charlie and put him in his rocker on the floor, tipping it gently back and forth with her foot as she opened the fridge.

  Her younger brother, James, was still snoring loudly a couple of rooms over, but she waited until Charlie was clean and fed to pop her head in and wake him up.

  “Get up, it’s six forty-five.”

  James just sighed and flopped over.

  “Seriously, James.” Ryann pushed herself into James’s room, kicking dirty clothes and magazines out of the way. She yanked his dresser open and pulled out a pair of torn jeans and a black T-shirt and tossed them on James’s bed.

  “I’m leaving in ten minutes.” She slammed the door shut behind her.

  15 MINUTES

  Ryann wiped Charlie’s face clean and buttoned him up into his cold-weather onesie. She packed the baby some food and then dropped him off with their neighbor Ms. Worthing.

  By the time she got back, James was awake, dressed, and smoking on the front stairs.

  “Did you eat yet?” she asked.

  He stared at Ryann blankly, eyes bleary with exhaustion. His purple hair was a tangled nest. Ryann sighed in exasperation and went back inside so that she could grab some granola bars and her leather jacket.

  She tossed one bar into his lap on her way out and hopped onto her motorcycle. Ryann waited patiently until she felt James sluggishly climb on behind her and put his arms loosely around her waist. Then she took off up the highway to the next town over.

  30 MINUTES

  The Bird siblings had had many good things snatched from them.

  Their father had been a handyman with a small business and loyal clients. He’d had a big red beard and large hands and a laugh that echoed over fields and hills. Their mother had been a mathematician working for NASA. They loved their wild tall girl and small round boy as best they could. But, one bright morning, they died. Sometimes, people just die.

  A little while afterward, James stopped talking altogether. Then, a year later he brought a baby home. A baby with red hair, owlish eyes, and a laugh that echoed. Ryann had questions, but James never answered them. And like on that terrible bright morning a year before, she swallowed hard, tightened her shoelaces, and stood up to meet it.

  So there they were:

  Sitting in the ruins of the best that they could build.

  And it would always have to be enough.

  45 MINUTES

  There was a larger town near the one Ryann Bird lived in. Ryann drove them miles to get there every morning.

  It didn’t have a trailer park where girls could live, snug with their little brother and his baby. Or a Laundromat where most of the machines were broken. Or a big parking lot that was supposed to become a grocery store, but didn’t.

  This town had a school and a mall and the sort of families who made sure both kids ate their breakfast before they left the house. Who drove them to school in luxury cars and made sure they had school supplies.

  It was the best in the district. They were lucky it was that close.

  Ryann tucked her bike behind the school in the lot where teachers liked to park. James hopped off, smacked her on the shoulder in thanks, and ran to class. Ryann swung her bookbag over her shoulder and walked slowly into the building.

  10 MINUTES

  Ryann was always late, so she didn’t bother to hurry. She used to run to get to her seat, but none of the teachers ever gave her a break so she just figured, why even bother?

  She knew what she looked like, and she looked like trouble. So she was nearly always in it regardless of the circumstances.

  Ryann had been trimming her wild black hair herself since junior year and it showed. After the bright morning accident, she had a deep scar on one cheekbone, and no matter how much concealer she used, nothing ever quite hid it. Then, to make things worse, she’d become so exhausted and red-eyed since Charlie arrived that she kept getting accused of being high even though she didn’t even smoke. She looked meaner and harder than she had any business looking at this nice rich school in this nice rich neighborhood. So she just became what she looked like. It was easier than fighting it.

  Ryann slammed the door open and walked in, passing right in front of the room, obscuring the light of the projector.

  “Always a pleasure, Ryann,” Mrs. Marsh, their history teacher, drawled sarcastically.

  Ryann trudged to a chair in the back of the room. She dropped her bookbag on the floor, then tapped the kid in front of her on the back to ask for a pencil. Jefferson, who sat in front of her most of the time and generally had loads of pencils, waved his empty pencil case. He reached forward and tapped the girl in front of him on the shoulder.

  “Hey. Ryann Bird needs a pencil.”

  The girl didn’t even turn around. She just sat ramrod straight in her chair and said very quietly. “Ryann can bring her own pencils to school. Just like everyone else.”

  It was deafeningly quiet. Mrs. Marsh cleared her throat meaningfully.

  “Any student who needs a pencil can get one from the pencil jar on the front of my desk.” she said, looking at Ryann pointedly.

  Ryann got up, went to the front of the room, and grabbed a few.

  As she walked back to her desk, she reached out and let her fingertips glide over the top of the desk of the girl who’d denied her. As gentle and silent as a promise.

  33 MINUTES

  Their town was small. New residents couldn’t escape scrutiny if they tried, but this was definitely the first time Ryann had seen this girl at her school. Even so, Ryann couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she was familiar somehow.

  She hadn’t been called on in class at all, so Ryann didn’t know her name. She was brand-new, so it wasn’t like Ryann could look her up on Facebook by looking up mutual friends from school and scouring their network for her name.

  And she looked different.

  She was at least half black—which was rare here. This town was unfortunately pretty homogenous.

  She had very short bleached-blond hair and severe, thunde
rous eyebrows. Her mouth had been tight and angry looking—which was rich because she was the one being rude.

  Ryann stared at the back of the girl’s head and tapped her pencil against the side of her desk.

  12 MINUTES

  The bell rang. Ryann shoved her things back into her bookbag and rushed toward the door.

  “Miss Bird, can I see you for a minute?”

  A wave of exhaustion and irritation swept over her, but Ryann turned around to face her history teacher.

  “Come wait by my desk.”

  Mrs. Marsh wiped off the projector and cleared the whiteboard while the rest of the students filed out. When the last person besides Ryann had gone, she closed the door.

  She settled back down at her desk and pushed a small stack of worksheets to the side. “I have a favor to ask you.”

  “Will I get extra credit?” Ryann crossed her arms and stared down at Mrs. Marsh.

  “Hmmm … maybe I’ll round up when we do a bell curve.”

  Ryann nodded. “Continue.”

  “As you noticed, we have a new student with us. Her name is Alexandria Macallough.”

  “Rude girl, won’t make direct eye contact?” Ryann asked.

  “Yes. Now, I know that normally a request like this wouldn’t come to someone like you naturally, but it would be a huge help if you could look after her a bit. She’s going to have some difficulty adjusting and making friends here, and from what I can see, you have a bit of a track record for reaching out to people like that. Plus with the circumstances—”

  “What circumstances?” Ryann interrupted.

  Mrs. Marsh explained further. Ryann nodded and relaxed a bit as she listened.

  “That’s different,” she said when Mrs. Marsh finished. “I thought you were going to ask me something else. But yeah, it’s no problem. I’ll see if I can get her to open up.”

  “I’m sorry. This is such a difficult circumstance for me. I’ve never had to assign someone to befriend someone else before,” Mrs. Marsh admitted. “But I just felt like you might be the only person who could reach out in a way that would work.”

  Ryann snorted. “Well, that’s flattering. Are you going to want to check in with me about it?”

  “Maybe every few weeks or so. It’s important, but not so important that we need to meet every day,” Mrs. Marsh said.

  “Hmm.” Ryann crossed her arms again and thought about it for a bit.

  “I would really appreciate it and I’m sure Alexandria would, too,” Mrs. Marsh said softly.

  Ryann’s phone buzzed in her pocket, so she whipped it out. Her best friend, Ahmed, had texted a bunch of question marks. She sent back a single exclamation point.

  “I’ve gotta go, but we’ve got a deal. If you don’t want to do regular meetings, I’ll just swing by after class if I have any questions or updates.” Ryann walked over to the door, but stopped right before stepping through it. “And thanks for the bell curve leniency.” She smirked.

  Mrs. Marsh rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, you’re welcome. Go to your next class before I have to write you a pass.”

  2 HOURS AND 15 MINUTES

  Ahmed Bateman, Ryann’s best friend, was ten times what anyone expected him to be. He was beautiful, with black eyes and black hair that he wound up tightly into his navy blue turban. His face was angular, but pretty, and he was a bit on the shorter side.

  He looked like his parents. Like all three of them. Two dads and one mom.

  They showed up to report-card pickups and school events shamelessly, all three, hand in hand. There were ghosts of them all over Ahmed, to the point where it was impossible to ask who fathered Ahmed without being savagely impolite and overly specific.

  Ryann liked Ahmed because weathering that had made him tough, but living it had made him sweet. A winning combination, which prompted Ahmed to decide it was a great idea to backhand Thompson when he called Ryann a dyke when they were in fifth grade—even though he and Ryann had never spoken to each other before.

  They’d been close ever since. No one but James knew her better.

  So when Ryann texted Ahmed that exclamation point, he knew to gather the others so they all could discuss something important.

  2 CLASS PERIODS

  A little past the baseball diamonds, behind the building, there was a huge hill. There were a lot of places to meet in the city, but this was the only one close enough to get to between classes without shirking the entire day.

  Shannon, Blake, Tomas, and James were already waiting for Ahmed and Ryann at the top.

  Shannon was exceptionally popular, but Blake and Tomas were a year younger, juniors like James. They’d both opted to be a bit more alternative than was considered appropriate—Tomas, gangly and tall with his bright red Mohawk, and Blake who shaved his head and had been giving himself stick-and-poke tattoos since middle school. They didn’t have anyone else to be with, so Ryann had gathered them beneath her wing.

  “There’s a new kid!” Ahmed hollered up the hill.

  “Really?!” Tomas shouted back. “Are you sure someone didn’t just get a bad haircut?”

  “NO!” Ahmed yelled indignantly.

  When they finally reached the top, Ahmed collapsed to the grass, panting, and covered his eyes.

  “It’s a girl,” Ahmed explained. “She’s cute and stuff. She’s got history with Ryann, but that’s not—”

  Blake cut Ahmed off. “So what, who cares?”

  “I do,” Ryann said firmly. She slung her bookbag to the ground and lay down between Shannon and James. “She’s a celebrity. Well, kind of … Do any of you remember that project I did for Science Fair last year?”

  “No,” Shannon, Tomas, and Blake all said in unison.

  Ryann scowled. “Okay. Twenty years ago, after NASA was absorbed into the US military, a bunch of private space exploration companies got a ton of investments in, because a lot of people disapproved of the militarization of a public good like space exploration, which made space privatization seem a lot less sinister in comparison. Anyway, there was this company called SCOUT that was super focused on extended missions. They used their investment to gather a bunch of people to send off to the edge of space—”

  “Why?” Blake interrupted.

  Ryann shrugged. “It was a combination science and art thing. They wanted to have human beings experience the actual journey outside of our solar system. Kind of like the Golden Record, but instead of being there for observation, they’re supposed to send back their feelings about the experiences they’ll have. Plus, it was a privatized company so their regulations were a bit more flexible. Which leads me to my next point.

  “The reason I did my project on SCOUT was because it was super controversial. Privatized space companies have more flexibility, but they still have to follow general laws. For this mission, SCOUT seemed to be scraping the edge of every limit. Everyone who went had to be at least eighteen so they could personally make the choice to go legally, but young so they’d have around fifty years of mission time. And SCOUT picked only girls because they naturally have better longevity and also did consistently better in psych simulations for long-term travel in tight confines.”

  “Yikes,” Blake said.

  “All the candidates were chosen specifically to avoid family attachments,” Ryann continued. “But then a journalist uncovered that one of the girls got pregnant and had the kid right before she left. Apparently SCOUT suppressed information about that and waited to deliver the newborn to the family until the candidate left on the mission. Then they covered up their ethical fuckup to avoid bad press, at the expense of a whole family, but news about it wound up getting out anyway. The scandal was so dramatic that a bunch of regulations were passed immediately afterward to stop anything like it from happening again.”

  “Yiiiiikeessssssss,” Blake said, wincing even harder.

  “Why isn’t any of this more common knowledge?” Shannon asked curiously.

  “It happened when we were all maybe one or t
wo years old. It was common knowledge and extremely scandalous, but it was a long time ago,” Ryann explained. “The only reason I know so much about it is—”

  “Because you’re a turbo-nerd in love with space-trash. Or at least you used to be,” Tomas interrupted. He was texting and barely paying attention.

  “Wow.” Ahmed turned to scowl at Tomas. “What is wrong with you today?”

  “Anyway,” Ryann said louder. “The only reason I know about this is because my mom used to be really mad about it and talked about it with her coworkers a lot.”

  “So what does any of this have to do with anything?” Blake asked.

  “She’s the kid,” Ryann said.

  Tomas looked up from his phone. “What?”

  “The new girl is that kid,” Ahmed said. “The one whose teen mom went to die in space, Tomas.” He slapped Tomas’s phone out of his hands and onto the grass. “Did you even listen to any of that? Her name is Alexandria.”

  Shannon put her chin in her hands contemplatively. “Did she tell you all this herself?”

  “No. I … haven’t spoken to her directly yet. But for obvious reasons, Mrs. Marsh wants me to look after her,” Ryann said. She tapped her fingers against the ground anxiously, then turned to Tomas. “Alexandria seems really standoffish in a way that reminded me of you when I first met you, so she probably needs a tougher approach rather than anything straightforward.”

  “Great,” Tomas griped. “More strays.”

  “You say that like Ryann didn’t come to find you, too,” Blake said. He picked up Tomas’s phone and rubbed it clean with his shirt.

  2 HOURS LATER

  Ryann walked back to school from the hill to pick up James. He’d left earlier to go to woodshop, one of the after-school electives. James seemed happy to see her and showed her the chair he was building, which was nice. But she kept thinking about the girl from this morning and how rude she was. It was beginning to piss her off all over again.