Dangerous (2 page)

“It’s a marketing survey,” I said, “but listen to these ques-

tions: ‘How would you rate your memorization ability? How

many languages do you speak at home?’ Here’s my favorite:

‘What would you do if you were in an elevator on the fiftieth

floor of a building, the brakes broke, and you began to plum-

met?’”

Dad put down the journal. “What
would
you do?”

“I’d climb through the hatch in the elevator’s ceiling, take

off my pants, wrap them around one of the cables and tighten

until I slowed my fall, and then I’d swing onto a ledge and wait

for rescue.”

“And put your pants back on, of course.”

I frowned at him. “I just escaped a runaway elevator, and

you’re worried that someone will see me without pants?”

“Are you kidding? My baby girl is a teenager—I worry about

everything.
Cariña
!” he shouted toward Mom in their bedroom,

6

Dangerous

which doubled as her office. “Can we hire someone to guard

Maisie for the next several years? Maybe a Navy SEAL?”

“
Adelante
!” she shouted back. Mom was Paraguayan. Even

though she’d been living in the States since she was eighteen,

she still had an awesome accent. “Get a cute one with a full

head of hair.”

“Hey!” he said, and she giggled at her own joke.

I thought my plan would work—that is, if I had two hands

to grab the pants. In my mom’s uterus, amniotic bands had

wrapped around my forearm, and I was born without a right

hand.

It was my right arm’s fault I was into space. When I was old

enough to dress myself, Dad replaced buttons on my clothes with

Velcro, saying, “Velcro—just like the astronauts.” I’d wanted to

know more, and a few library books later, I was a space geek.

“Howell Astronaut Boot Camp?” he said, reading over my

shoulder. “I didn’t know Bonnie Howell ran a summer camp.”

Bonnie Howell was, of course, the billionaire who built

the Beanstalk—the world’s only space elevator. Library books

published less than ten years ago still called a space elevator

“decades away.” But the Beanstalk’s very real ribbon of carbon

nanotubes connected an ocean platform to an asteroid in geo-

stationary orbit, thirty-six-thousand kilometers up. (That’s twen-

ty-two-thousand miles, but I was raised on the metric system. A

side effect of having scientist parents.)

“She said she started the boot camp to ‘ignite the love of

science in the teenage mind,’” I said, scanning a Wikipedia ar-

ticle. “Hey, did you know she has a full space station on the

Beanstalk’s anchoring asteroid? She uses the station for mining

operations and unspecified research.”

7

Shannon Hale

Dad perked up. To him, “research” meant “hours of non-

stop fun, and all in the comfort of a white lab coat!” He went off

to call his science buddies for more details.

There was a single knock at the door, and Luther let him-

self in.

“
Buenas tardes
,” he said.

“
Buenas, mijo
,” Mom greeted him from her room. “Get

something to eat!”

Luther shuffled to the kitchen and returned with graham

crackers smeared with chocolate hazelnut spread. He was wear-

ing his typical white button-down shirt, khaki pants, and black

dress shoes. He sat in Dad’s vacated spot on the couch, setting

his plate on the threadbare armrest.

“Did you finish Accursed Geometry so we can talk science

project?” Luther scowled at me, but he didn’t mean it. He just

needed glasses but refused to succumb to another stereotype of

the nerd.

“Yeah, hang on a sec . . .” I answered the last question on

the marketing survey and clicked Submit. “Okay, your turn.”

I grabbed Luther’s arm and pulled him into the computer

chair.

“Maisie, what are—”

“Wow, you’re all muscly.” My hand was on his upper arm,

and when he’d tried to fight me off, he flexed his biceps. We’d

been home-schooling together for five years. When had he

gone and grown muscles?

I squeezed again. “Seriously, you’re not scrawny anymore.”

He pulled away, his face turning red. I pretended not to

notice, filling him in on the sweepstakes. He laughed when I

told him my answer to the elevator question.

8

Dangerous

“That only works in the movies. Never mind. Think science

project. Could a lightweight car function as a kind of electro-

magnet, repelling the earth’s magnetic force so it could hover—”

“Reducing friction, and therefore using less energy to pro-

pel itself? Definitely!”

Luther started sketching out ideas. I smiled and pretended

enthusiasm, as I had been for the past year. Pretending.

My world felt like it was shrinking—my tiny house, my tiny

life. Mom and Dad. Luther. Riding my bike in the neighbor-

hood. Studying space but going nowhere. Why did everyone

else seem fine but I felt as if I were living in a cage I’d outgrown

two shoe sizes ago?

Luther had a big extended family with reunions and camp-

ing trips and dinners. They went to church, joined homeschool

clubs, played sports.

My parents believed in staying home.

I told myself I could survive without change. Things

weren’t
that
bad. College wasn’t so far away. Then astronaut

boot camp taunted me. It could be a fascinating experiment:

take Maisie out of her natural habitat, put her in a new place

with astronomical possibilities (some pun intended), and see

what happens.

You could say I regularly checked the website for updates,

if regularly means twenty times a day. For weeks and weeks.

“Dad and I were talking,” Mom said one day, “and when—
if

you don’t win, maybe we can save up to send you next summer.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said, but I knew there was no way they

could afford it.

I had to win. The degree of my wanting alarmed me. I’d

9

Shannon Hale

always been certain of four things:

1. I wanted to be an astronaut.

2. Space programs recruited the “able-bodied” types.

3. I had to be so good at science my limb lack wouldn’t

matter.

4. Science requires objectivity, and emotions create errors.

To be the best scientist, I needed to rid myself of cumbersome

human emotions.

I winced my way through the spring, trying to become

Maisie Robot. I thought I’d prepared myself for the inevitable

disappointment when I came home from Luther’s one day to a

year’s supply of Blueberry Bonanza on our front porch. The ac-

companying letter left no doubts:

You won! You won you won you won you won!

It was happening. That huge, whooshing engine of antici-

pation wasn’t going to zoom past and leave me in the dust. I lay

back on the stoop, hugging one of those boxes of nasty cereal,

and stared up at the sky. At a glance, the blue seemed solid, but

the longer I stared, the more it revealed its true nature as a shift-

ing thing, not solid and barely real.

The sky seemed as artificial as the cereal in my arms. It

wasn’t a cage. I wasn’t really trapped. I was about to break free.

10

C h a p t e r 2

“You’ll be gone three weeks?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” Luther stared at his feet, tilting his shoe so his laces

slopped to one side and then the other. “That seems like a long

time.”

“Generally speaking, when your best friend wins a sweep-

stakes, you’re supposed to say congratulations.”

“Best friend . . .” He said it softly, and I realized that we’d

never used that term before.

After that, he avoided the topic of my departure till my

last day home.

We were working on a history project. Luther had thought

we could compare mortality rates with urban cleanliness: the

Poo Project. It had sounded more interesting before astronaut

boot camp had dangled so sparkly and enchanting in my

periphery.

Luther shut his notebook. “I guess I’ll go home.”

“Hey—we can chat during my free hours, Sundays and

Wednesdays at ten.” Cell phones weren’t allowed at astronaut

boot camp, and Luther despised talking on the phone anyway,

so my only option would be chatting online in the computer lab.

“Okay, so good-bye I guess,” he said.

He reached out, and I thought he wanted to give me a hug,

so I leaned in. It was only when I glimpsed the surprise in his

eyes that I realized he’d probably been about to pat my shoulder

or something. But stopping a hug almost enacted would be like

Shannon Hale

trying to stop a jump when your feet were already in the air.

So I leaned in the last ten percent.

“Take care,” I mumbled against his shoulder, patting his

back.

He hesitated, then his arms rose around me too. I still

thought of him as the short, pudgy kid I’d met riding bikes five

years ago. When had he grown taller than me? I could feel the

pulse in his neck beating against my head, his heart slamming

in his chest. I panicked, my entire middle from stomach to

throat turning icy, and I let go.

“Don’t you dare finish the Poo Project without me,” I said

casually.

“Okay,” he said.

That night I thought more about Luther than astronaut

boot camp.

My parents drove me to the Salt Lake City airport early

the next morning. We all got sniffly sad hugging by the security

line.

I was missing them even more when I had to take off Ms.

Pincher (as we called my prosthetic arm) to put it through the

x-ray machine. A little boy behind me howled with fright.

I knew I was too old to be so attached to my parents. But

as the plane took off, I imagined there was a string connecting

my heart to theirs that stretched and stretched. I used my rough

beverage napkin to blow my nose and kept my face turned to-

ward the window. I was in the false blue sky.

In Texas, a shuttle took me from the airport far beyond the

city. Howell Aeronautics Lab was completely walled in, guard

turrets at each corner. Why did it look more like a military com-

pound than a tech company? Inside the walls, the clean, white

12

Dangerous

buildings resembled a hospital. A creepy hospital in the middle

of nowhere.

For the first time, I wondered if this was an enormous

mistake.

In Girls Dorm B, my dorm-mates were changing into the

jumpsuits we got at registration, bras in pink and white flashing

around the room. I undressed in a bathroom stall. The jump-

suit had Velcro. I sighed relief.

I looked pale in the mirror. Just what would this girl in the

orange jumpsuit do?

I was entering the auditorium for the introductory session

when I heard a redheaded boy whisper, “Man, did you see her

arm?”

The jumpsuits had short sleeves. My arm was swollen from

the airplane ride, so I hadn’t put Ms. Pincher back on. I had

some regrets.

The redhead repeated the question before the dark-haired

guy beside him asked, “What about her arm?”

“It’s
gone
.”

“Then the answer is obvious—no, I didn’t see her arm.”

“Look at her, Wilder. She’s missing half her arm, man.”

The dark one looked back at me, his eyes flicking from my

naked stump to my eyes. He smiled and said, “Cool.”

Cool? Was that offensive or kind?

He wore a braided leather wristband, sturdy flip-flips, and

appeared to be comfortable even in an orange jumpsuit. I want-

ed more information.

After the session, he looked like he might be a while

chatting with some blond girls, so I picked up his folder from

his chair.

13

Shannon Hale

NAME: Jonathan Ingalls Wilder

ADDRESS: 21 Longhurt Park, Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania

FATHER: George Theodore Wilder OCCUPATION:

President, Wilder Enterprises

MOTHER: Alena Gusyeva-Wilder OCCUPATION:

Philanthropist

He cleared his throat dramatically. I noticed that the

blondes were gone.

“Just getting to know you,” I said, flipping to the next page.

“‘Hello, what’s your name?’ is customary.” He had an inter-

esting voice, kind of gravelly.

“Does philanthropist count as an occupation? Oh—” I said

as I realized. “You’re rich.” He wasn’t one of the sweepstakes

winners. His parents could afford this place.

He sighed melodramatically. “Poor me, burdened with bil-

lions, shackled to my father’s shadow.”

The room was empty but for us, everyone else headed for

dinner.

“Jonathan
Ingalls
Wilder?”

“My mom read the
Little House on the Prairie
books in Rus-

sian when she was a kid. I think she married my dad for his last

name.” He grabbed my folder and started to read. His eyebrows

went up.

“Yes, that’s my real middle name,” I said preemptively.

“Maisie Danger Brown. What’s the story there?”

I sighed. “My parents were going to name me after my