Lost Stars by Lisa Selin Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

no cigarette, just this tidbit of information floating along the wires between us.
    â€œAnyway, I invited him over tomorrow night. Do you think your dad will let you come out? We miss you. And it’s Friday!”
    I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to get my father to relent. He had two modes: taciturn or screaming. It had been a long time since I’d seen anything in between.
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    When my father and Rosie came in the door, I was at the dining room table, writing in my park-issued notebook. I was not chronicling my adventures in nature—​at least not the way they wanted me to—​but I had taken up three pages with a few of my most cherished Vira memorabilia items, including a black-and-white postcard from 1890 that my mom had found in a flea market down in the Catskills, showing the Meeanee Observatory in New Zealand. In it, Vira was a fiery streak of light in the background, that same exact ball that was coming around now. Vira was trapped, doomed to repeat itself, its journey like that of Sisyphus, for millennia.
    I drew another elliptical orbit path. The comet at aphelion was almost four billion miles from the sun, the farthest distance it would go. But it had long passed that point and was now headed back again. Toward us. It was getting closer all the time.
    â€œWe got Kentucky Fried Chicken,” Rosie said, shoving a cardboard bucket in my face. “Here’s yours.”
    My mother had never, not once, let us have fast food, and my father had told us when we were little that it wasn’t actually chicken that they served. He’d called it “Kentucky Fried Rats.” But that was before. Now we had it once a week.
    I gently moved the greasy bucket off my papers and managed to push the word
Thanks
out of my mouth. Every time my father and I were in the same room, this terrible unease circled us.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” Rosie asked suspiciously. “Are these plans for a mail bomb?”
    I rolled my eyes at her. “Just trying to figure out when the comet will get past Jupiter’s orbit.”
    â€œIt’s closer than I thought,” my father said, putting one hand down on the table and leaning over me, forgetting for a minute that he normally reacted to me as if I were irradiated.
    â€œYeah, but there’s a giant bummer part of it, which is that it’s looking like it’s going to be close to the horizon, so not so easy to see.”
    â€œMaybe if it’s low, it’ll be easier for you, since you’re so short,” Rosie said, looming over me with her extra four inches—​she wasn’t even done growing yet, as she enjoyed pointing out during our brief periods of social interaction.
    My father studied my calculations, losing the veil of disapproval and becoming the man formerly known as Dad, hand curled around the black stubble on his chin in contemplation, finger tracing the figures.
    â€œNo, I think the best way to see it would be if we had the old telescope,” I said. Maybe I could take advantage of this moment of goodwill and my two weeks of hard work to get the one thing I really wanted back. That is, the one thing I wanted that I could actually have.
    But my father’s face went dark again, and he retreated back into himself, a switch turning off inside him. “Yes,” he said. “That would be great.”
    How cruel, I thought, to agree with me and still not return the telescope. He turned and walked away. Even Rosie’s eyebrows furrowed as she watched him leave, his shoulders now slumped.
    â€œYou missed something,” Rosie said, pointing to the top left corner of my sketch. “The perihelion is only 0.4 AUs. It’s only, like, thirty-nine million miles from the sun. It’s way closer to us than this.”
    â€œOh—​okay.” Usually I blamed my mistakes on too much pot and alcohol, but I’d been too busy pulling poisonous plants from the ground to