Smiles to Go (4 page)

“What did she do now?” said my mother.

“She messed with my trophy.”

“Tabby? Did you?”

She looked up, like she didn’t know what was going on. She’s the world’s worst actress.

“Huh?” she said.

“Did you—” My mother looked at me.

“What exactly did she do?”

“Turned it around.”

Tabby quick clamped her lips shut, but not before she giggle-snorted into her potato snowman.

“See?” I said.

“Did you turn his trophy around?”

“No,” she said. She would say no if I had
her on film. Unlike her hero, BT, she lies.

“Confess, pest,” I said.

“Don’t call her that,” said my mother.

Tabby snarled, stabbing her screwdriver at me. “Yeah. Don’t call me that.”

There was a faint noise at the front door. We all turned to see a scrap of paper slipping onto the threshold. It was Korbet Finn, our next-door neighbor. Korbet is five. He’s in love with Tabby. About once a week he delivers a love note to her this way.

Tabby ran for the note. She always hopes it will be from somebody else, anybody else, but it never is. She glanced at it, crumpled it, threw it to the floor, yanked open the door and yelled toward next door: “In yer dreams, lugnut!”

My father laughed. My mother looked at him. “Where does she get these words?”

“BT reads to her,” I said. “Adult books.”

Tabby slammed the door shut, kicked the note-ball into the dining room and stomped back to the table.

We needed to get back to the subject. “Just don’t go near my trophy,” I said.

Now Tabby was eating string beans with
her red pliers. Humming. Tuning me out.

I looked at my father for support.

He took a sip of coffee. “Leave Will’s trophy alone, Tabby,” he said. Reasonable. Gentle. Nonthreatening.

Tabby crushed a string bean with her pliers, then smashed the snowman. “I didn’t do it!”

“Fine,” said my father, calm, soft-spoken, forking into his meat loaf. “Just don’t not-do it again.”

Tabby exploded. “I didn’t do it! I’m innocent!”

I snickered. “Yeah, right.”

Tabby picked up a string bean and flung it in my face. “I hate you!” she screamed, and ran from the table, my mother snapping, “Tabby!” me hooting.

“Enough,” said my mother.

My father said, “She’s in rare form tonight.”

After a while my mother said, “Here’s my question. How could two such different children have come from the same parents?”

Sometimes I wonder that myself. I wonder why they had us so far apart. When I first heard that I was going to have a little brother or sister,
I wished for a brother. When they told me it would be a sister, I thought, OK, I can deal with that. I pictured myself giving her rides on my shoulders, teaching her to ride a bike.

Never happened.

Aunt Nancy says Tabby is just doing her job. That’s what little sisters do: they pester. She says someday Tabby and I will be best friends. I say don’t hold your breath.

I’m not saying I hate her. I don’t. (Even though I do
feel
that way sometimes.) It’s just that all we have are differences (age, gender, personality, etc.), nothing in common. Maybe when we’re both adults we will get along. But for now, we lead mostly separate lives. If she didn’t go out of her way to bug me, I’d hardly know she was around.

No one answered my mother’s question. We ate in silence. Somehow the room seemed to be slowly revolving around the crumpled note-ball on the floor. In a dark crevice of a crumple I thought I saw a tiny sparkle.

PD29

T
abby made her daily phone call to Aunt Nancy. “I’m going to a star party!”

I still couldn’t believe it. My parents were going to a play at Hedgerow. They had assumed I’d be playing Monopoly tonight. They assumed whether we played at Mi-Su’s house or mine, I would babysit my sister. “No way,” I said. “We’re going to a star party at French Creek. Mi-Su’s mother’s driving us.”

“Fine,” she said, “Tabby goes with you.”

“No way,” I said.

“Tabby goes with you,” she said.

Tabby gushed to Aunt Nancy, “I’m making a star shirt!”

She did. She got glitter and stars and pasted them all over a T-shirt. She thought it was a
party
party.

She called Aunt Nancy again. “It’s for big people! There’s gonna be appetizers! And kissing games! I’m gonna have coffee!”

The tires crunched on the gravelly road.

“How do I know where it is?” said Mrs.
Kelly. “It’s so dark.”

“Look for the red lights,” said Mi-Su.

“Where’s BT?” said Mrs. Kelly.

“He doesn’t care about stars,” I said.

Up ahead—spots of red.

“Lights out,” said Mi-Su.

The headlights went out.

Only the red spots were visible now. Some moving, some still.

The car pulled onto the grass, stopped. Three of us got out.

“Back at eleven,” said Mrs. Kelly. “Watch Tabby.” The car pulled away.

Tabby blurted, “Where’s the party?”

I pointed to the sky. “Up there.”

Tabby looked. “I don’t see nothin’.”

On the way Mi-Su tried to tell her that a star party is where people bring their telescopes to look at the night sky, but Tabby wasn’t buying it. “Where’s the pizza?” she whined.

“It’s up there,” I said. “Next to the Big Dipper. The constellation Pepperoni Pizza. The Greeks named it.”

Mi-Su smacked my arm. “Stop it.” She lifted Tabby to her shoulders and we headed for the party.

We could now make out shadowy figures behind the red spots, which were actually flashlights capped with red plastic. The Delaware Valley Astronomical Society has its star parties at French Creek because the light pollution is low there. This would be the last one until spring.

We wandered into the dark forest of telescopes. I’m always amazed at the size of the scopes.

Mi-Su and I split up. I told Tabby to go with Mi-Su, but she refused. She followed me. Not because she would rather be with me, but because she knew I didn’t want her to.

Shadows drifted. Dull red circles bobbed and hovered. Whispers, but mostly silence, as if we were afraid to disturb the night. This was a place for stars, not people. A show. No button to click, no ticket to buy. Lean in to an eyepiece. Or just look up. The sky! It’s been there all along! Someone pointed the light at himself: red floating face. Soft skitter of footsteps, excited whispers:

“What?
What
?”

“Saturn!
Rings!
”

“Where?”

“Over here! Come on!”

I was pumped. Mi-Su and I both want to be astronomers someday. I went from scope to scope, sampling, asking them what they’ve got.

“Moon. Great view of Sea of Tranquility.”

“Mars.”

“Jupiter. Four moons.”

Reminded me of a summer fair: “Hey, right here, get yer moon! Yer stars! Three planets fer a dollah!”

Tabby tagging along, her finger hooked in my back belt loop, pestering every time I bent to an eyepiece: “Let me see!” If I didn’t let her, she’d get loud. Sometimes I had to lift her, hold her while she squinted and whined, “I don’t see nothin’!”

I’m not much interested in moons—ours, Jupiter’s, whoever’s. Going to Mars doesn’t excite me. In fact, I’m pretty lukewarm about the whole solar system. For me, the farther away, the better. Stars. Galaxies. Quasars. That’s what makes me tingle.

One monster scope had a line. I asked the
man-shadow at the end, “What?”

“Mars,” he said. “You can see the polar cap.”

I moved on.

Tabby yanked my belt loop. “I want to see Mars!”

I swung around, whipping her off her feet with her finger caught in the loop. She wailed, “Owww!”

“Don’t be an infant,” I snapped.

She roared: “I’m
not
an infant!”

The stars flinched. Shadows stopped. Gasps. Shushes.

I shook her. Her knobby shoulders were like golf balls. “Keep your voice
down
! Whisper!”

She whispered, “Ow. You hurt my finger.”

To look at me, she had to tilt her head back as if she were looking at the sky. Sometimes I forget how tall I am to her. I saw moon gleam in both eyes. “You screamed like a baby. You want to be with grown-ups, act like one.”

I continued my telescope hopping. I viewed a couple of nice star clusters. Most of all I wanted to see a galaxy, and finally it happened. There was a line of five people at a
large scope. The lady at the end didn’t even wait for me to ask. “Spiral galaxy!” she gushed.

The line went slowly. Tabby paraded up and down. “Want to see my star shirt?” She held back her arms and puffed out her chest. The paste-on paper stars glimmered in the moonlight. The gazers cooed and patted her on the head and asked dumb questions.

At last I reached the eyepiece. I couldn’t see the target at first. Bright images swam by like fish. Then things steadied, and there it was. I could see the oval shape, the spiraling arms. It was the thrill of seeing it for real, the difference between seeing a fox in a zoo or a fox walking across a snow-covered field. But it was even more than that. It was the distance. The galaxy I was looking at, if it was anything like the Milky Way, contained at least a hundred billion (100,000,000,000) stars. “How far?” I said to the scope owner. “About two thousand.” He meant two thousand light-years. Light travels 186,000 miles
per second
. In the time it takes me to say “per second,” light zips around the world more than seven times.
So figure out how far light travels in a year (which has almost six
trillion
seconds), then multiply that by 2,000 for the distance to this spiral galaxy. How can something that big be so far away that it looks smaller than my little fingernail?

Pretty soon I knew all the scopes that were viewing galaxies, and so I just galaxy hopped. I was in heaven. I bumped into Mi-Su. “Ships passing in the night,” she said. I said to Tabby, “Why don’t you go with Mi-Su now?” “No,” she said, only to bug me. I knew what I was going to say next time: “Stay with me. Don’t go with Mi-Su.” And she would go.

But we never got to next time. Somewhere along the line I realized I was no longer feeling the finger tug in my belt loop. I turned. She was gone.
She’s off with Mi-Su,
I told myself and went on scoping.

But I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t enjoy myself. What if she
wasn’t
with Mi-Su? What if she was doing something stupid and getting herself hurt or whatever? I was the one who would get blamed. I was staring through an eyepiece at the Beehive Cluster, but all I could
see was my sister wandering off among the dark shadows of strangers just to tick me off. I snapped back from the scope and stomped off. I stopped. I looked over the dark field, the starry horizon, the silent, moving shadows, the jutting shapes of the scopes, the dull red floating spots. I didn’t know where to begin. I looked at my backlit watch: 10:30. Mrs. Kelly would be there soon, and I was missing wonders because I had to round up a stupid sister. I knew that one good call would do it. Just stand right there and rear back and bellow her name. But I couldn’t. It would be like screaming in church.

I wandered, looking, listening. She’s a chatterbox. Chances were I’d hear her before I saw her. But it was something else I heard. Two shadows and a bobbing red spot brushing past me, man and woman voices whispering excitedly. One word separated itself from the others: “Horsehead.” I stopped in my tracks. I went after them. I’m not usually bold with people, but I just barged in: “Did you say Horsehead?”

“Yes,” said the man. “It’s unbelievable. I can’t believe we saw it.”

“Incredible,” said the woman. “And I don’t
know a star from a moon.” She giggled. “He can die happy now.”

I was breathing fast. “Where?”

The man pointed the flashlight, but of course the beam just puddled behind the red cap. “That way. Straight ahead. On the right. You’ll see it. Big as a bathtub. On a trailer. Meade LX200.” He wagged his head. They walked on.

I turned, walked. The Horsehead Nebula. It’s, like, the Holy Grail. Mi-Su and I have been wanting to see it for years. I have a poster of it on my bedroom wall. We’d never seen it for real. It’s a huge cloud of cold hydrogen gas and dust, way bigger than the solar system. It’s visible because of starlit gases behind it, and it has the shape of a horse’s head.

I didn’t know what to do. Sister? Horsehead? Sister? Horsehead? My stomach felt like it was coming loose. And suddenly there it was, the monster scope, big as a bathtub, on a trailer behind an SUV—and the longest line I’d seen all night. Everybody wanted to see the Horsehead. It would take a half hour just to get to the head of the line, a half hour I’d gladly have spent, except for a missing sister….

I wanted to cry, scream. I stomped off, spit hissing into the night: “Tabby!
Tabby!
”

At last I heard her voice, chattering away. I found her. She was with someone wearing an Indiana Jones hat. An old lady. “Well, hello there,” she said. “You must be the big brother Tabby’s been talking about.” She held something out to me. “Like a snort of hot chocolate from my thermos here? We have an extra cup.”

“No, thank you,” I said. I was so mad I could hardly speak.

The old lady chuckled. “Your little sister had been hoping for coffee.”

“She thinks she’s twenty-one,” I said.

Tabby piped: “Will, she has seven cats!”

“That’s nice,” I said. “Thanks for looking after her.” I took the cup from Tabby’s hand and gave it to the old lady. “We have to go now. Somebody’s picking us up.” I grabbed her hand and pulled her away.

She had to run to keep up. She squealed, “Where are we going?”

“To find Mi-Su.”

She yanked on my arm. “I know where Mi-Su is!”

She wasn’t lying. “Where?”

She wrapped her hand around my finger and pulled. “Follow me.”

She wound among the dark shapes as if it were our own neighborhood. She led me out of the thicket of scopes and on toward a moonlit crest—and there she was.

No.

There
they
were.

It seemed to be one shape, one silhouette on the hill, but I knew it was two, and I knew who they were. Mi-Su and BT.