Every Soul A Star

Every Soul a Star.

Wendy Ma.s.s.

For Steve, Kathy, and Judi Brawer, with love.

"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."

"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of."

-from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis "s.p.a.ce isn"t remote at all. It"s only an hour"s drive away if your car could go straight upwards."

-Fred Hoyle, British astronomer And when he [the author of the universe] had compounded the whole, he divided it up into as many souls as there are stars, and allotted each soul to a star. And mounting them on their stars, as if on chariots, he showed them the nature of the universe and told them the laws of their destiny.

-from "Timaeus" by Plato (427347 BCE).

Eclipse:.

from the ancient Greek word ekleipsis, meaning abandonment or omission.

ALLY.

1.

In Iceland, fairies live inside of rocks. Seriously. They have houses in there and schools and amus.e.m.e.nt parks and everything.

Besides me, not many people outside of Iceland know this. But you just have to read the right books and it"s all there. When you"re homeschooled, you have a lot of books. I also know how to find every constellation in the sky, and that the brightest star in any constellation is called the Alpha. I know all the constellations because my father taught them to me, and I know about the Alpha because it is also my name. But my family and friends call me Ally.

Okay, that"s not entirely true. I don"t really have any friends. Not within hundreds of miles, anyway. And it"s not because I am unlikable or smell bad or anything like that. In fact, I take a bath every single day in the hot spring outside our house, and everyone knows that the minerals in hot springs make you smell like fresh air all day long.

The fact that we live somewhere with a hot spring outside our house pretty much explains why I don"t have friends nearby. Basically, my house is as close to the middle of nowhere as a person can get and still be somewhere. Our town is not even on the map. It"s not even a town. It"s more of an area. There"s the Moon Shadow Campground that my family owns, where I know every tree and every rock and which foxes are friendly and which aren"t, and a tiny general store a mile away, where most everything expired in the last millennium. That"s it. The nearest real town is an hour away. Sure, maybe it gets lonely every now and then, but I love it here. I was only four when we moved, so I don"t really remember life in civilization, which is what my ten-year-old brother, Kenny, calls anywhere other than here.

It should be pointed out that Kenny"s only knowledge of civilization besides our books is based on what he can glean from the ancient black-and-white television at the general store, and since the only show that comes in is the soap opera Days of Our Lives, he thinks civilization is very dramatic. And until a few years ago, he thought it was in black-and-white.

Some people might think my parents are crazy for doing what they did-up and leaving their jobs to build a campground in the Middle of Nowhere, USA. But they had a plan. They knew that a decade later, hundreds, maybe thousands of people would travel to this exact spot to be a part of something that hasn"t happened in mainland America for over seventy-five years and won"t happen again for a hundred more. And this flock, this throng of people, would need a comfortable, safe place to stay, wouldn"t they? With hot springs and hot coffee and clean bathrooms and their choice of tents or cabins, and no televisions to remind them of anywhere other than here.

My parents knew that, for one day, our two-square-mile campground would be the only patch of land in the entire country to lie smack dab in the path of the Great Eclipse when it pa.s.ses overhead. In precisely twenty-two days and some hours from now, the sun will get erased from the sky, the planets will come out to greet us, the birds will stop singing, and a glowing halo of light will flutter like angels" wings above our heads.

Except, of course, if it rains.

BREE.

1.

I was switched at birth.

There"s no other explanation for how I wound up in this family. My physicist parents are certified geniuses with, like, a zillion IQ between them and all these grants to study things like dark matter and antimatter, which are apparently very different things. My eleven-year-old sister Melanie gets straight A"s, does cartwheels in public, and actually enjoys watching science doc.u.mentaries on PBS with my parents. I prefer MTV to PBS, and to me, dark matter and antimatter really means don"t matter. But as smart as they are, my family members are all rather plain-looking. Not ugly or anything even close, but just sort of plain. Average. Like soft-serve vanilla ice cream in a cup, not even a cone.

I am not plain or average or-G.o.d forbid-vanilla. I am peanut b.u.t.ter rocky road with multicolored sprinkles, hot fudge, and a cherry on top. Not that I would ever EAT such a thing, because it would go right to my thighs.

I don"t mean to sound stuck-up, but I happen to be very attractive. My whole life strangers have stopped my mom on the street to say what a beautiful daughter she has. And they aren"t talking about Melanie. Granted, you can"t help the looks you"re born with. I can"t help that I"m the tallest girl in my grade, or that I never get pimples, or that my eyes are as blue as Cameron Diaz"s. But I make sure to do everything I can to stay beautiful. Every morning I brush my dark brown hair a hundred times until it shines like silk, and if any nails are chipped I fix them with the manicure kit I bought last year at Things of Beauty in the mall. Every night before bed I do fifty sit-ups. I drink bottled water because you only look good on the outside if you"re healthy on the inside. My friends and I keep up with all the latest trends, and we share clothes and even shoes sometimes. I worked extremely hard to become one of the most popular girls in my grade, and I work hard at staying there.

Today is the last day of school, and I can"t wait for summer. Even though I"m only thirteen and a half, I"m going to be working at Let"s Make Up in the mall. I"m only allowed to work two hours a day until I"m fourteen, but that"s okay. My official t.i.tle is "junior consultant" and it"s a very important position. When you"re a teenager and shopping for a new eyeliner or lip gloss, you don"t want an old lady telling you what you need. You want someone you can identify with. And if a customer happens to think they can look like me just by buying our makeup, then so be it. They buy the makeup, they look better, I get a bonus, and I spend it next door at Hollister. Everybody wins!

My parents, of course, don"t see it that way, which harkens back to the whole switched-at-birth theory. They don"t understand that while I might not share their goal of discovering what kind of tiny invisible particles the universe is really made of, I still have goals. I plan to work at the mall, get discovered by one of the scouts looking for kids with modeling potential, be on the cover of Seventeen BEFORE I"m seventeen, and then make enough money as a supermodel to retire when I"m twenty-five and my beauty is fading. Melanie has accused me of being high-maintenance, but I don"t think that"s true. I just like things to be orderly and pretty, and I"m happy to give those less fortunate than me tips on how to improve themselves. I like to keep my life uncomplicated. Complicated people get wrinkles before their time.

We all have things to offer the world. My beauty is what I have to give.

And the best thing about being beautiful?

No one (except maybe my deluded parents who don"t understand that modeling is a perfectly respectable career choice) expects me to be anything else.

JACK.

1.

My father has no head.

Well, of course he HAS one, but I"ve never seen it. All I"ve seen is about a hundred photos of the rest of his body. A big, roundish guy in suits, shorts, and once even a bear costume. I found the pictures in a shoe box in the back of my mother"s closet when I was snooping for Christmas gifts a few years ago. I can just imagine her sitting on the floor of her bedroom, angrily snipping off the heads. I snooped some more in case there was another box with only the heads, but there wasn"t. She must have thrown them away.

My mother never talks about my father, who left before I was born. I stopped asking when I realized all it did was make her upset. She said that anyone who would leave his pregnant wife and four-year-old son to go "find himself" didn"t deserve another thought. It sure was a terrible thing to do. But it seems to me that my mother is better off alone than with a guy who has no head and ditched his whole family.

Still, I wonder about him. Even in the bear costume, I can tell I inherited his build. Big and wide, and good for one thing only-playing football. And if I was even REMOTELY good at playing football, I"d be all set. But I can"t run across the room without getting winded or a cramp in my side. My second-grade gym teacher told me I had two left feet. For a week after that I would only wear left-footed shoes because I thought he meant it literally. My brother Mike has two normal feet, and no problem running across a field. In fact, he"s the star first baseman on the high school baseball team. Luckily he"s four years older than me, so we won"t ever have to be in the same school again. No way can I compete with him in anything. I gave up trying a long time ago. I also gave up trying to pay attention in cla.s.s. And trying to get people to like me. It"s just too much effort. When they look at me, the other kids just see a big pudgy kid who sits in the back of every cla.s.s drawing in his art book, or on his desk if the teacher confiscated the book. I don"t belong to any clubs or after-school activities either. But not paying attention in cla.s.s came back to bite me on the b.u.t.t this year. Failing science cla.s.s gave me a one-way ticket to summer school. It"s humiliating. Having to sit in a stifling hot room with a bunch of my fellow rejects learning for the millionth time what the different types of rocks are called. What a total waste of time. All I want to do is be left alone so I can read (fantasy and SF), draw (aliens, monsters, and wizards), and conserve my energy so when everyone else is sleeping and dreaming their normal dreams, I can do something that most other people can"t.

I can fly.

ALLY.

2.

Now that the big day is within sight, we all have to step up our ch.o.r.es to get the campground in order. The eclipse chasers are going to start trickling in over the next few weeks, and Dad wants to be sure not a single tree root is sticking up. With all the looking up at the sky these people will be doing, someone has to make sure they don"t trip. That someone, according to my dad, is me. I may be small, but I"m strong. I have a reputation as the best dirt-smoother in the family. I don"t take much pride in that achievement. My dad could do it, but as the handyman and all-around-maintenance guy, he"s always busy fixing fences and drain pipes. Mom has her hands full as the office manager, taking reservations, placing ads for the campground. Kenny can"t do it because he gets too distracted whenever he spots a bug in the upturned soil. He stops and examines the bug from every angle. It takes him a whole day to do what I can do in an hour. So it falls to me.

I"m starting with the labyrinth, since that way I also get to daydream while I work. Yes, we have a labyrinth. We built it a few years ago, and it took all summer. Mom read in a book that if you"re going to open a campground in the middle of nowhere, you have to offer the guests unusual activities to keep them occupied. After all, there"s only so much swimming in the lake, fishing, hiking, playing on the playground, and roasting hot dogs and s"mores one can stand. Although I personally never get sick of s"mores.

At first I thought Mom was talking about building a maze, and I got all excited because I pictured these big green hedges and it being all sort of Victorian and fairy taleish. But she explained that a labyrinth and a maze are two very different things. A maze is like a game: you can"t see where you"re going and the entrance and exit are two different places. A labyrinth is an ancient series of spiraling circles created on the ground with stones that you walk through. You"re supposed to ponder some big question like what you should be when you grow up, or if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? (I say no, because a sound is only invisible waves in the air until it hits someone"s ear, but Kenny says yes because the resulting crash would still cause vibrations, and the earth itself would "hear" it.) Anyway, when you reach the middle, you"re supposed to get your answer. So far I haven"t had too many big questions to ponder, but I find that my daydreams are really vivid when I"m walking it. Almost like visions. It"s pretty cool. Kenny was really disappointed that it wasn"t going to be a maze. Every now and then I find a stuffed dinosaur or some mythological beast like a gryphon or a scary plastic minotaur in the center, and I have to bring it back to his room.

Besides the labyrinth, we created five other Unusuals. Campers can pan for gold (also known as gold-colored plastic nuggets) in a small stream that runs alongside the campground. They can paint whatever they want on the wall of the Art House, and when that gets filled up, we"ll start on the floor and the ceiling. The Art House is the only cabin we don"t rent out because Kenny swears it"s haunted, but I"ve never seen any ghosts. He claims it"s haunted by the ghost of the great Galileo himself (Galileo was our old cat who died when Kenny was four, not the famous scientist, although the cat was named after the scientist, obviously). When Kenny was five, he came running into the kitchen screaming and waving his arms, "Great Galileo"s Ghost, it"s hot out!" The phrase has become our family"s way of swearing without actually swearing.

In the back room of the Art House is Alien Central, where campers can monitor the computer that sweeps the sky for alien radio transmissions all day and all night. We"re part of an organization called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Our computer is one of millions that a.n.a.lyze radio signals as they come in from outer s.p.a.ce. It"s a very popular Unusual. Everyone wants to be the one in front of the computer when the first alien signal comes in.

Besides finding aliens, people can walk through the Sun Garden and tell the time by the shadow they cast on the ground. It took us one whole winter to make the giant sundial out of mosaic tile and concrete. Up the hill from the Pavilion with all the picnic tables and grills, we have the Star Garden, where guests can try out a bunch of different telescopes and binoculars that astronomers have donated to my parents over the years. Our campground is pretty famous within the astronomy community. We have Star Parties each year where people come from all over the country to stargaze together, since the skies up here are so dark and wide. My whole family is trained on how to use the equipment, but most of the guests request me. I know the difference between a reflective scope and a refractive scope, and the names of most of the craters on the moon. I can point the campers in the direction of newborn stars in the Orion Nebula or a dust storm on Mars as easily as telling them which way to the restrooms. And if we"re lucky enough to see the dancing lights of the Aurora Borealis, I"m out there with hot chocolate and warm blankets. If pressed, I can explain that the reds and oranges and greens that billow down from the sky are different types of gas atoms and molecules colliding with solar particles. But mostly I just like to enjoy the show.

No other campground in America has six Unusuals. Most don"t even have one. They require a bit of upkeep, but we don"t mind.

"Make sure you pack the dirt down tight, Ally," Dad warns, as though this is my first time doing this. I know he"s just tense because in all the years we"ve been here, we"ve never had more than two hundred campers at once. And now we"ll have over a thousand. Pretty big difference.

"And after you"re done, please check on the other Unusuals, and no skipping the Art House like last time."

"But Dad, that spider was as big as my face. Bigger, even. It could have eaten me in one bite."

From behind me I hear Kenny laugh. But there"s no meanness in his laugh; there never is. Kenny is one of those rare people who are all goodness. That"s not to say he doesn"t do the typical annoying little brother stuff like grab the last buckwheat pancake off my plate or stick a wet finger in my ear. But he"s also really smart and pretty funny. If I had to pick anyone to grow up with in the middle of nowhere, he"d be the one.

Kenny joins us and says, "You can sleep outside half the night, but a little old spider freaks you out? All sorts of things could be crawling on you. A lot big-ger than that spider, I bet. I"ll show you my chart at lunch."

"First of all," I reply, "this was no little spider. It had a presence. It had a soul. A mean soul, intent on eating me. And second, I am not sleeping when I"m out there on my lawn chair. I am intently stargazing. And third, I don"t ever want to see that creepy chart of yours again. I had nightmares for weeks the last time you left it open on the kitchen table."

Kenny is determined to get his name in the history books by finding a bug that hasn"t been discovered before. He keeps a huge sketchpad with drawings of every creepy crawler he"s come across since he was five. He then compares the drawings to pictures of bugs in the encyclopedia-like volume The Complete Bug-Hunters" Guide to Insect Life in America, from Ants to Zarthopods. The t.i.tle alone is enough to curl my toes. I can deal fine with your regular garden variety bug. It"s just when one has an overabundance of legs, or is of a size more commonly a.s.sociated with a household pet, that I get freaked out.

I prefer looking up, rather than down, and have a different plan to secure my immortality.

I"m going to discover a comet.

According to the rules of comet-finding, my comet will be named after me. Even if I"d wanted to name it something else, I wouldn"t be allowed. Every time it circles around the sun and approaches Earth, excited onlookers will exclaim, "There goes Comet Summers, isn"t it bright? Isn"t it amazing?" My grandpa had hoped to find a comet or an asteroid but never did. His eyesight wasn"t so good, and even powerful binoculars didn"t help after a while. If I find an asteroid I"m going to name it after him, because you can"t name an asteroid after yourself. Don"t ask me why-that"s just the way it is.

"C"mon, Ally," Kenny says, picking up one of the long flat brooms. "I"ll help you."

"Don"t forget to fill out the logbooks," my father says over his shoulder as he walks away. "Things are going to get crazy soon, and you need to keep organized."

Kenny whispers, "You know he"s saying that because he and Mom were arguing last night and he wants to keep the peace. She"s the only one who checks those boring logbooks."

"Mom and Dad were arguing?" I"d heard them whispering loudly to each other, only to stop when I walked in the room, but I didn"t think much of it. I figure they don"t get much privacy and it"s not my business if they don"t want me to hear something. I bend down to snip at some roots while Kenny starts his slow smoothing process. It would go faster without his help, but he"s usually good company.

"I did hear one other thing," he says, even though I hadn"t asked. "But it didn"t really make sense. I probably heard it wrong."

I pick up a twig off the path and toss it into the woods that surround the labyrinth. "What did you hear?"

"I"m sure it doesn"t mean anything. Never mind." He begins smoothing faster, not even looking for bugs. Something is up. I reach out and put my hand on the broom to stop it. "Just tell me," I say firmly.

"Okay, okay. I heard Dad say, "But Ally wears a meteorite around her neck. The kids might not understand.""

My brows crinkle. "What kids? Why wouldn"t someone understand my necklace?"

He shrugs. "That"s it, that"s all he said." He goes back to brushing the dirt path. "I told you it didn"t mean anything. I probably heard him wrong anyway."

"I guess," I say, picking up my own broom and entering the first circle. I reach up with my other hand and clutch the pouch around my neck, feeling the familiar lump inside. As always, it makes me think of Grandpa. He is the reason the Moon Shadow Campground exists. He started my mom on her love of the stars, she got my dad hooked, and the rest is history. And it was all because of a rock.

When my grandfather was ten years old, a rock fell from the sky and grazed his left ear. He was lying on the gra.s.s at the time, staring up at the stars. Convinced that a piece of the moon had broken off and landed on Earth, he ran inside to show his mother. She was more concerned with the trickle of blood that was sliding down his ear onto his neck. She wouldn"t even look at the shiny black rock until she had dabbed some whiskey on the cut.

At first his mother was convinced the rock had been thrown by a mischievous neighbor boy named Hank, but an investigation determined that Hank was "indisposed" at that time, which was the polite way of saying that Hank had eaten some bad carp that he had fished illegally from the river behind the glue factory and had been stuck on the toilet since dinner.

The next day my grandfather"s father brought the rock to work with him at the factory and on his way stopped at the local library, where apparently all the smartest people in town worked. The head librarian took one glance at it and announced that my grandfather had indeed been struck by an object that had been hurled out of the heavens-a meteorite. Now my grandfather"s father, he was a nice guy, played ball with his son, went to church on Sundays, but he never did have much apt.i.tude for science. Noticing his blank expression, the librarian explained that a meteorite was what happened when a meteoroid broke through the earth"s atmosphere, but didn"t burn up like it was supposed to. The meteorite, she explained, was made of iron, and was probably a tiny chunk of an asteroid. The librarian made some calls, and found out that as long as the meteorite wasn"t found on government land, like a national park or the White House lawn or something, the person whose property it lands on is the rightful owner.

That weekend my grandfather"s parents took him to the five and dime store, where my grandfather picked out a small blue pouch about the size of a deck of cards. His mother punched holes in it and looped a leather string through them. My grandfather dropped the meteorite in the pouch, tied it closed, and slipped it over his head, where it remained for the rest of his life. Well, he took it off for showers and swimming, of course. And when he slept. And anytime he had to wear a suit. Oh, and to wash the pouch occasionally. But other than that, it thumped on his chest in tune to the beating of his heart. Or so he claimed.

As a kid, he showed the rock (and the scar on his ear) to anyone who would listen, and explained that the odds of getting hit by a meteorite are a trillion to one. While I would have thought this would make him really popular, it didn"t. It did make him really interested in s.p.a.ce though, and in the way that all the planets and stars and galaxies are kept in a delicate balance. He worried that because a piece of an asteroid had landed on Earth, the balance of the universe was disrupted. He became obsessed with trying to even things out by bringing a part of the earth up to the sky. He figured spotting a new asteroid and having it named after him would even things out. But just in case he never found one, he had a backup plan. When I was one year old, he put a pen in my hand and guided me to sign my name on a piece of paper. I"m sure it wasn"t legible, but that signature was scanned into a computer and put on a disk along with Grandpa"s and my parents" and a half a million others, and that disk is a billion miles away, circling Saturn right now in the Ca.s.sini s.p.a.cecraft.

By the time he died, I had already inherited Grandpa"s love of the stars. Then I inherited the meteor-ite, too.

I haven"t noticed if it has negatively affected my popularity status or not.

But why would my parents be arguing about my necklace? I"m now standing in the center of the labyrinth, where everything is supposed to be clear. But it"s not. I can"t wait till tonight so I can talk this over with Eta and Glenn and Peggy, my three best friends. I just wish they could talk back.

But that"s what happens when you all live on different planets.

BREE.

2.

Melanie sticks her head in my room. "Are you ready, Bree?"

"Five more minutes." I squeeze past her and duck into the bathroom. She follows me and hops up onto the counter to watch me put on my makeup. I never mind when she does this. I figure as her older sister, it"s my job to educate her in the ways of the world. She"s only eleven and doesn"t wear makeup yet (although a little blush wouldn"t hurt), but our mother"s certainly not going to teach her. Mom loves to tell us how she hasn"t worn makeup since her wedding. I guess scientists don"t need to look good.

When I get to the part with the eyeliner, Melanie scrunches up her face as usual. "Doesn"t that hurt?" she asks.

I shake my head. "It doesn"t hurt today, it didn"t hurt yesterday-when you also asked me-and it won"t hurt tomorrow." I finish lining my eyes, smudge "em a little, and turn to her. "See how my eyes look even bigger now?"

She nods slowly, but then says, "And big eyes are good? Why?"