Stargazing for Beginners Page 16

  Dawn clearly isn’t expecting this. ‘Well … She wanted to speak to her today.’

  ‘Sorry, Mum’s got an appointment at the hospital.’

  ‘Well, that’s great!’ says Dawn, and her smile is firmly back in place and so is mine. ‘So pleased she’s back on her feet.’

  ‘Me too,’ I say, and I give Elsa a wave and walk down the path.

  Knowing Mum’s coming back today makes it hard to concentrate at school and during lunchtime in the library I get totally confused by light and atoms and Beer–Lambert, or, to be precise, how I can calculate absorbance from the equation A = 2 − log10 %T. I work at it for twenty minutes, but in the end I give up and go and get some food.

  I’m walking out of the canteen with my cheese baguette when I see Ed sitting with Bella and Raj and the rest of their friends. The thought crosses my mind that I could ask him to help me with the equation and then, before I really know what I’m doing, I’m winding my way through the crowded tables until I’m standing behind him.

  Bella looks up and sees me standing there. ‘It’s Meg!’ she announces, loudly, and everyone stops talking and turns to look at me, including Ed.

  Quickly, I say, ‘Ed, can I ask you something?’

  Bella’s eyes grow wide. ‘Oh, wow …’

  ‘About Beer–Lambert,’ I add, then I thrust my notebook at Ed.

  He studies the equation. ‘It’s hard,’ he says, raising his eyebrows, ‘but obviously not too hard for me!’

  Bella groans, ‘God, you’re an idiot.’ Then she shuffles along the bench until there’s a small gap between the two of them. ‘If Ed is about to impart his wisdom, you’d better sit down. It’ll take a long time.’ Because everyone is still staring at me, I feel I have no choice but to squeeze in between them.

  Ed says, ‘So, this equation lets you calculate absorbance from transmittance data, right?’

  I nod.

  ‘Then I think I get it.’ He takes a pen out of his top pocket and starts to scribble down figures. After watching him for a few seconds, I unwrap my baguette and take a small bite. His friends get bored of watching me and start talking again. Only Bella keeps her eyes glued on me.

  ‘Do you like this dress?’ she asks, showing me her phone.

  I look at the short lacy dress. I have absolutely no opinion about it except that the hexagonal lace looks like a diagram of a molecule. Usually I’d say, ‘It’s nice,’ or something equally vague in the hope that she’d lose interest in me, but I’m sitting in the canteen eating lunch with Ed and Bella, the king and queen of Year Ten, the Jupiter and Saturn of the solar system! If I was brave enough to walk over and talk to Ed, then surely I’m brave enough to tell Bella what I think about a dress?

  ‘I have absolutely no opinion about it,’ I say with a shrug, ‘except that the hexagonal lace looks like the diagram of a molecule.’

  She grins. ‘I love the stuff that comes out of your mouth, Megara. It’s priceless.’

  I sit up tall. ‘Thank you,’ I say, then I take another bite out of my baguette.

  ‘I’m wearing this molecule dress to the dance,’ she says, then she gives me a nudge. ‘Got anyone to go with yet?’

  ‘Shut up, Bella,’ says Ed, his pen still scribbling across my notebook.

  ‘The thing is,’ I say, ‘I don’t like dances. I don’t like discos. I don’t even like dresses. I like stars and planets and sums. That’s why – with or without anyone – I’m definitely not going to the dance.’

  She blinks at me. ‘Seriously? You don’t like dresses?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Huh,’ she says, then she pushes a packet of Quavers towards me. ‘Crisp?’

  ‘OK,’ I say, and because I want to do something to celebrate the amazing moment when I found the courage to show Bella Lofthouse just who I am, I don’t take one, I take two! Still holding my head high, I turn back to Ed, but he’s stopped working on the equation and is staring at the TV screen in the corner of the canteen. I follow his eyes and the triumph I’m feeling drains away from me.

  A music video is playing, but Ed’s watching the live news feed that’s scrolling along the bottom of the screen: Breaking news: massive earthquake strikes Myanmar. Thousands feared dead. The words loop round and round, never ending.

  ‘What’s the matter with you two?’ says Bella.

  ‘Nothing,’ says Ed, and at the same time he wraps his fingers round mine. ‘It’s nothing.’ He squeezes my hand as icy fear fills my body from my scalp to my toes.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I manage to say, then I wriggle out from between them and walk towards the exit.

  ‘Meg, you forgot your baguette!’ Bella shouts after me, but I keep going, shoving through the double doors.

  I’ve got to get out of here.

  I find Annie in the sensory room, lounging on a beanbag and staring at blobs of light floating across the ceiling. She raises her head. ‘What are you doing here?’

  I walk straight up to her. ‘I need you to write me another of your letters.’ I pull my pencil case out of my bag. ‘Make it about my teeth again, a follow-up appointment.’

  She sits up and I thrust my planner and a pen at her.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she says.

  ‘Nothing.’

  She stares at me. ‘Obviously something’s wrong, Meg. I get that you’ve got all sorts of secrets and you’re not into sharing, but you look like you’re going to puke. Why don’t you just go and see the nurse? She’ll ring your mum and you’ll be able to go straight home.’

  I feel my shoulders rising. Why can’t she just write me the note? I have to get round to Grandad’s and find out if he’s heard from Mum. I’ve already tried his phone but, of course, he’s not answering. ‘I can’t talk to the nurse …’ I pause and stare at the floor. ‘… Because if I do, I might …’ I press my fingers into my eyes.

  ‘Cry? Oh, God. Don’t do that. I don’t do crying.’ She pulls the lid off the pen. ‘I guess whatever it is, it’s bad.’

  I nod. ‘I’ll tell you if you like.’ I don’t think I can keep quiet about this any longer, and Annie has this strength about her. Maybe she can make it better.

  ‘OK, but only if it’s got nothing to do with boys, kissing, or girls being mean.’

  I shake my head. ‘It’s to do with my mum … and an earthquake.’

  Her eyes go wide and she puts down her pen. ‘Hot damn,’ she whispers.

  FORTY-SIX

  I tell Annie everything, about Mum leaving, how they’re getting suspicious at Elsa’s nursery … I even tell her about the competition on Saturday, although I feel like I shouldn’t be worrying about that now.

  Annie describes my situation as ‘bleak, but not without hope’, then she writes me a note to get me out of school.

  It works, and I spend the afternoon with Grandad, checking our phones, watching the news and trawling the internet for information on the earthquake. Grandad rings the embassy, but they say they’ll have no information for forty-eight hours. They take Mum’s details, though, and when I hear Grandad describing her two tattoos, I have to hug Pongo to me really tight. In the end, Grandad resorts to his homebrew to ‘take the edge off things’, and soon he’s lying flat on the sofa, snoring. He’d planned to come and get Elsa with me, but I can’t bring myself to wake him up – I’m pretty sure he won’t get much sleep tonight – so instead I write Gone to get Elsa. Come round for dinner on a Post-it note and stick it on his chest.

  After I’ve handed over twenty pounds for the lunches, Dawn gives me Elsa. It’s like a trade-off. ‘Remind your mum to come in tomorrow,’ she says as we set off for home.

  ‘I will,’ I say, hoping with everything inside me that Mum will be waiting for us at home.

  She isn’t. The flat is quiet and empty. I put Elsa down and drop our stuff by the door. Pongo bumps his head against my hand. He needs feeding and so does Elsa, but I just stand there, staring down the dark corridor feeling heavy inside. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so cl
ose to giving up before.

  Then Elsa pulls herself up my legs and stands there wobbling.

  ‘Hungry?’ I say. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got left.’

  I’m feeding Elsa scrambled eggs when I see the message Ed’s sent me on Facebook:

  Where did you go this afternoon? I looked for you.

  I know you’ll only want facts, so I’ve found some out for you:

  1)The epicentre of the earthquake was in the north of the Myanmar and missed the majority of the tourist areas.

  2)Even small earthquakes can disrupt all mobile phone and landline activity. It’s likely that your Mum has no way of contacting you.

  3)Myanmar has three international airports and one of them has closed because of damage to the runway. If your mum was planning to fly from this airport she would have had to travel the length of the country to a different one. Even if she has managed to change her flight, the flight itself takes over twenty hours, usually with two changes, so she would come back a day late. There have been reports of 180 fatalities. The country has a population of over fifty-three million people, and this doesn’t include tourists. Using this data, the probability of your mum being one of the fatalities is roughly 1 in 294,000. This is an estimate, but I think you’ll agree that the odds are reassuring.

  See you tomorrow, Mega Knickers.

  Ed.

  After Elsa’s bath, I take her for a sleepy walk along the seafront, leaving Grandad at the flat making dinner for us: spaghetti bolognaise with baked beans. It sounds revolting, but I doubt I’ll be eating much. I wander along to the far end of the prom, well away from the pier, and scramble down the pebbly beach. While Elsa and I stare at the rolling, crashing waves, Pongo zooms around, stopping every now and then to sniff the air.

  ‘Can you see Orion?’ I ask Elsa, lifting my face to the sky and pointing. Elsa points too, copying as I trace the constellation. ‘That star is Rigel and it’s shining forty thousand times brighter than our sun.’ Her hands close like she’s trying to grab at the sky. ‘And there’s Betelgeuse. Get a good look at it because it’s going to supernova soon … Well, sometime in the next million years.’ Elsa’s hand falls down and I see that her eyes are closing.

  I start to rock from side to side. Ed’s message helped. His conclusion – that statistically, Mum should be fine – was something I knew already, but his words meant much more than that. I’d been on and off the internet all afternoon and hadn’t found out half the things he discovered. He must have spent a long time looking up those facts for me. And he wasn’t the only one who was thinking about me. Annie sent me a picture of a galaxy with Keep calm and look at the stars written across it. The fact that it wasn’t sarcastic, or a black hole joke, or a sarcastic black hole joke, meant a lot.

  So that’s why I’m out here staring up at the sky, waves crashing down around me. My mission isn’t over, it’s just changed and I’m not giving up yet. When I get home, I’m writing a letter to Christine at the nursery and I’m going to fill it with missing capital letters and ‘Namaste’s and smileys so she’ll be convinced it’s from mum. Then Grandad and I will carry on looking after Elsa until Mum comes home. Because she is coming home.

  ‘Come on, Pongo!’ I call, then I turn my back on the beautiful cosmos and walk up the beach, my feet slipping on the stones.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Christine herself comes to the door when I drop Elsa off at nursery.

  ‘Where’s your mum?’ she says, peering over my shoulder like I might have Mum hidden behind me.

  I shift Elsa to my other hip and make myself look directly at Christine’s red glasses. ‘She’s got that horrible bug Elsa had. She’s written you this.’ I pass over the letter. ‘Oh, and she said to say thank you so much for helping her out while she’s had the slipped disc.’ I pull a box of Ferrero Rocher out of my bag and hold them out. ‘She’s so grateful!’ These had better work, I think. They cost five pounds that we really don’t have.

  Christine takes the chocolates and her face softens slightly. ‘It’s been hard work for you too, I imagine.’

  ‘It’s been fine,’ I say with a shrug. ‘I’ve not had to do too much.’

  With this final lie, I give Elsa a kiss and hand her to Christine. I can hear Christine opening the letter and as I walk down the path I wonder if my sign off – with love and energy – was a bit much. ‘So she’ll be bringing Elsa in next week?’ she calls after me.

  ‘Definitely,’ I shout over my shoulder.

  I get through the morning by holding Ed’s figure of one in 294,000 in my head like a talisman. When I get to Biscuit Club, Rose and Annie are already there and so is Mr Curtis. For the first time, they’re sitting around a table and it’s covered in books.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I say. ‘Where’s Jackson?’

  ‘Over there.’ Mr Curtis points to the corner of the room where Jackson is sitting on his beanbag, playing on Annie’s iPad. ‘He’s promised not to talk so that we can concentrate.’

  Jackson waves at me, his lips clamped shut.

  ‘Concentrate on what?’ I sit with them at the table and notice that all the books are on maths, physics or astronomy.

  ‘On your competition,’ says Annie, not looking up from the book she’s reading. ‘Did you know that on the International Space Station they once tried to grow tomato plants on a pair of dirty pants?’

  ‘I don’t think Meg should mention that,’ says Rose to Annie. She turns to me. ‘Annie told us all about your problem.’

  ‘With the competition,’ Annie adds quickly.

  ‘So we’re going to help you,’ says Mr Curtis.

  ‘That’s kind,’ I say, and I know they’re trying to help, but just looking at this enormous pile of books overwhelms me, ‘but it’s happening this Saturday and I know my speech isn’t good enough. I think it might be too late to do anything about it.’

  ‘Too late, Meg?’ says Mr Curtis. ‘How can you ever hope to become an astronaut if that’s your attitude?’

  Annie looks up from her book and shrugs. ‘I might have told them about your whole astronaut-thing too.’

  ‘It’s so exciting!’ Rose clasps her hands together.

  ‘Rose, it isn’t happening. The likelihood of me going into space is so infinitely small it’s slightly embarrassing that I consider it a possibility.’ I glare at Annie. ‘That’s why I never tell anyone.’

  ‘But it might be a little more likely if you win the competition and go to Houston,’ says Mr Curtis. ‘Haven’t most astronauts worked towards their dream from a young age? Couldn’t going to the Space Centre and meeting a real astronaut create a connection that might one day help you in some way?’

  I blush when I hear him say this because the same thought has run through my head and it’s one of the reasons I want to win so much. ‘I suppose so,’ I say. ‘But where would we begin?’

  ‘What’s wrong with your speech at the moment?’ he asks.

  ‘What I’ve written is well researched and accurate, but it all falls apart when I try to say it out loud. I hate speaking in front of people: I talk too fast, and I get these red spots on my neck – see!’ I point at the marks I can feel blooming on my skin right now. ‘And even though I’ve crammed my speech full of incredible facts and statistics, my grandad says it lacks “passion and pizazz” – and he’s right. Oh, and there’s this muddled bit where I try, and fail, to change the subject of an equation by manipulating the fractional indices.’

  Meg and Rose stare at me blankly, but Mr Curtis isn’t about to be put off. ‘And I assume you have your speech on you?’

  ‘Always,’ I say, and I pull my cards out of my bag.

  Annie has picked up my card on rocky planets and their relationship with gas giants. ‘This is like seeing into the mind of a maniac. You actually understand all this?’

  I shrug. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Rose,’ says Mr Curtis, ‘you help Meg learn what’s on the cards because her speech will be much better if she’s memorised it
. Annie and I will –’

  Annie laughs. ‘Do nothing because we don’t understand a word of it?’

  ‘No. We will look at manipulating fractional …’

  ‘Indices,’ I say.

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Sir, this is definitely more useful than making origami elephants,’ says Annie.

  ‘Thank you,’ says Mr Curtis. ‘And in half an hour, all your hard work will be rewarded with some whole biscuits!’ He pulls a packet of chocolate Hobnobs from his briefcase.

  ‘Whoop!’ calls out Jackson from the corner of the room.

  ‘Quiet, you!’ snaps Annie.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  I manage to memorise more cards during Biscuit Club than I have in the past two weeks. Rose teaches me this amazing technique called ‘memory palace’ and I have to visualise a different room that I know for each of my cards. At first I think she’s making it up, but after I’ve imagined the Alpha Centauri B part of my speech in Grandad’s hamster room and the bit on Beer–Lambert in my bedroom, I’m amazed to discover it actually works. Also, Annie solves the equation problem by ringing a friend who’s some sort of mathematical genius. At the end, Rose highlights every word and phrase I get wrong and writes them up in a list headed ‘What Meg Doesn’t Know’, so I can work on those parts later.

  But the best thing is that for half an hour I’m forced to forget about Mum and the earthquake.

  At lunchtime, it’s too sunny to go to the library so instead I sit in a corner of the field, as far away from flying footballs as I can get, and I work through Rose’s list, rereading the sentences on the cards that I keep fluffing. Just as I’m trying to remember that the mass of Jupiter is double the mass of all the other planets combined, my phone buzzes, making me jump. As shouting and laughter drift across from the field, I stare at the little envelope on the screen. It’s a text from Grandad.

  ‘Meg!’ I look up to see Ed walking towards me. He nods at my phone. ‘Have you heard something?’ He must have been playing football because his hair is slightly dishevelled and his sleeves are rolled up. He drops down next to me.