Squishy Taylor in Zero Gravity (3 page)

‘Can we set up the telescope?’ Vee whispers to Jessie.

Jessie shakes her head. ‘I left it in the lounge room and it’s so heavy and clunky. They’d hear us for sure.’

The sparks fly again and Jessie grips my arm. Vee shuffles closer and I’m tingling like the sparks are inside me.

Weird stuff like this is the best.

I wake up with Baby on my head. Vee has put him on my pillow and is laughing at us both. Baby
baffs
my face and dribbles on my cheek. He’s got mushed food down his little T-shirt.

‘Ugh,’ I say. ‘You’re gross, Baby!’

Then I snuffle my nose in the soft skin under his ear. He giggles. Our Baby has the cutest giggle in the universe. I take him out into the kitchen and make us both breakfast.

I’m so hungry that I eat a bowl of yoghurt with banana wheels and honey, five pieces of vegemite toast and a choc-chip biscuit I find on the couch. Baby eats my vegemite crusts and smears most of a banana on his legs. I’m still in my pyjamas and so is Vee. I feel like last night’s excitement is still hanging in the air.

‘Mum?’ Vee asks. ‘Do any astronauts live in Melbourne?’

Alice is eating toast, packing her bag and checking her phone at the same time. ‘Um, probably.’

‘Is the space station really four hundred kilometres away?’ I ask.

Alice nods, with a mouthful of toast.

Jessie sits down at the table in her uniform. Her neat ponytail swings shinily. She does her
I-told-you-so face
.

Vee still isn’t convinced. ‘But Mum, that means the space station is closer than Sydney!’ she says.

Even Dad turns around from where he’s making school lunches. ‘Are you for real, Al?’

Alice laughs, swinging her bag onto her shoulder. ‘Yep. If there were a road, you could cycle there in a weekend.’

Dad smiles, kind of
blushing
. His other cycling friends are faster than him. ‘Maybe a
long
weekend.’

Alice is a lecturer of astrophysics. Mostly, that means she does maths. But it also means she brought home our telescope, when the university got better ones. And she knows things about astronauts.

‘But why would there be spacewoman on the roof?’ I ask.

‘What roof?’ Alice asks.

‘The one across the …’ I start to point and then Alice notices something.

‘Squishy Taylor, are you still in your pyjamas?’

I look around. ‘Vee is too,’ I say. Because being the bad one by yourself sucks.

‘It’s ten minutes till
blast-off
to school, kiddo!’ Alice says, ignoring Vee. ‘Get a wriggle on.’

She kisses Dad, grinning up at him. ‘Good luck getting them out of the house,’ she adds. ‘Have a good day, everyone.’ But she doesn’t smile at me.

Baby bounces on Dad’s hip, as we run to the tram stop. We just miss the tram and stand there, watching it go up the hill. It’s six minutes until the next one. We’ll miss the bell, but we won’t be
very
late.

Our tram stop is two buildings up from where we live. Across the road from us is where we saw the spacewoman. I lean against the tram-stop wall, looking up at the spacewoman’s building. It’s just apartments, with a car park in the basement. It looks a lot like where we live.

‘You know what?’ I whisper to Vee. ‘I reckon we could get up to that roof.’

In class, I try to do the maths because astronauts have to be good at maths, but the numbers don’t make sense. At recess, I do a flip off the monkey bars and land funny on my leg. It doesn’t even hurt that bad, but it reminds me about not being able to hug my mum. After lunch I fall asleep on my writing book and wake up in a
puddle of dribble
. I feel yucky and I’m mad at my friends for not waking me even though they’re nice about the drool.

On the tram, Jessie and Vee and I all sit together on one seat.

‘So,’ Vee says, ‘how would we get to the spacewoman’s roof?’

Jessie swishes her ponytail. ‘There
is
no spacewoman,’ she says.

‘What were those sparks, then?’ I ask.

Jessie shrugs. ‘Dunno, some kind of machinery, I guess.’

‘Yeah, like a
rocket
,’ I say.

Jessie snorts and gets out her book.

‘So we need to sneak in,’ I say.

‘We need to follow someone who has a swipe card for the front door,’ Vee says.

I nod. ‘Yeah, then race up the fire-escape stairs.’

We plan how to spy on the astronaut all the way home and Jessie ignores us.

As we arrive in our kitchen, Jessie says. ‘You’re being idiots. There
is no spacewoman
. It’s like Squishy thinking the moon can come in between the earth and a space station. It’s ridiculous.’

Usually I don’t really care that Jessie’s so annoying. But right now, all the crankiness of my day is hurting my chest.

‘Ugh,’ I growl. ‘Jessie, do you have to be so
sensible?
It’s like you
want
to miss out on all the good stuff. You want the world to be as boring as you are. Well, it’s not. There’s weird stuff happening, Jessie. We saw it. You’re just being horrible to make yourself look better.’

I drop my bag in the middle of the floor with a bang.

‘Who didn’t get enough sleep last night?’ Dad asks, with his most patronising smile. I hate it when I’m
furious
and grown-ups tell me it’s because I’m tired.

Dad makes us smoothies, which is good. But he decides to walk to the playground with us, which is bad. It means we can’t scope out the building across the road.

I try to get Dad to do astronaut training on the space station with us. But he can’t do that and hold Baby at the same time. He ends up with Jessie, turning the solar system around instead. They both talk seriously, as if there wasn’t meant to be fun in the universe
ever
. When there’s a mystery somewhere else, the playground is just stupid.

After dinner I skype Mum. I tell her all the
stupid-cranky-bad
things that happened in my day.

She says, ‘Oh Squishy-sweet, I wish I could give you a big cuddle.’

I remember what it used to be like, with my head under her chin and her arms all tight around me. We used to cuddle every single day of my life (except Dad weekends). But now she’s so far away.

I think of something. ‘Did you know that Geneva is further away from Melbourne than the space station?’

Mum grins. ‘You trying to make me feel guilty, Squisho?’ she asks.

‘No!’ I say. ‘It’s just cool.’

I glance out our bedroom window and gasp. The sparks are showering on the roof again.

I say, ‘Love you, Mum. Gotta go.’

Mum smiles. ‘Well, that was sudden. Love you too!’

I turn off Skype and sit up.

‘Vee! Jessie! Come in here!’ I call. ‘Jessie, bring the telescope.’

‘Bed in three minutes,’ Dad shouts.

Jessie and Vee run in and push their faces against the glass.

‘Again,’ Vee says.

Jessie pulls the telescope and tripod out. She’s good with putting things together. When Alice built our bunk-beds, Vee helped me carry everything up from the car. Then we got bored and played with Baby. But Jessie measured wood and marked screw-holes and did bolting with Alice for two entire days.

Jessie sets up the telescope super fast. But there’s not really anything to see. Our floor is too low. The sparks are clearer but that’s about it.

‘It’s just some kind of machinery,’ Jessie says.

‘Yeah, but if it’s not a rocket,
what is it
?’ Vee asks.

Jessie bites her lip and shakes her head, still watching the sparks. I can tell she’s interested.

‘We need to get out on the roof again,’ I say.

‘Well, Tom forgot to give the roof key back,’ Jessie says. ‘It’s still on the counter by the door.’

Nice work, Dad
, I think.