Taking Off (5 page)

Christa glanced at me like she might ask a question about that, but Lea leaned over me and asked, “What was your wedding like?”

I thought Christa would be tired of the questions, but perhaps all the press conferences and interviews had prepared her for people like Lea.

“I wore daisies in my hair,” she said.

“Aww,” said Lea.

“The reception was in my parents’ backyard.” Christa laughed. “The Trolls played while we danced until dusk.”

“The Trolls?” I asked, smiling.

“A local rock band. After it was over, Steve and I drove away in our orange VW bug with a trailer attached to it. Tin cans were tied to the bumper, clanging behind us.”

Lea sighed. I laughed at her. “What?” she asked me. “Leave me alone. I
love
this stuff.”

“So, was flying in space,” I asked Christa, “just a wild dream you had all these years?”

“Any dream can come true if you have the courage to work at it.”

“Well, you have to be a good student too,” said Serious Eyes. “School’s important in helping us realize our dreams.”

Christa looked at him directly. “I would never tell a student, ‘Well, you’re only a C student in English, so you’ll never be a poet.’ You have to dream. We all have to dream. Dreaming’s okay.”

I stared at her for a moment. I knew there was no way she could know I wanted to be a poet. I hadn’t told anyone that. I felt like she’d read my mind, or I was getting another cosmic message, Earth to Annie. Snap, snap. I took a sip of my coffee and thought about poetry and me.

The dinner was over too soon. Christa pulled me aside right before she left. “I enjoyed meeting you, Annie.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Listen,” she said. “Would you like to come play volleyball at the space center?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “What?”

She laughed too. “I’m playing at the recreation center at JSC on Tuesday night with some engineers. I thought you and Lea might want to come.”

“Can we get on-site?”

“Oh, sure. Use one of Lea’s parents’ cars. They have an on-site sticker.”

This was probably not a good idea. I didn’t know much about volleyball—I’d only played the few times in PE when they’d forced me to. But I knew I shouldn’t turn down invitations from Christa McAuliffe.

So I did a very un-Annie-like thing and said, “We’ll come. Sure we’ll come.”

The room seemed to sag a little once Christa was gone, but a little of her excitement was left behind. I could sense it in the Taylors, who were smiling and laughing as they cleaned the kitchen together, talking about Christa and her upcoming flight.

Christa’s students must love her.

CHAPTER 9

T
he next morning, Mark picked me up from Lea’s. I wanted so much to tell him about meeting Christa. I was still spilling over with excitement about the evening. But I hesitated. I knew he wouldn’t be interested. And that would make me feel disappointed. And I didn’t want to feel disappointed.

Dad’s words nagged at me, but he was wrong. Mark and I had things in common. We did.

“You want to go home?” Mark asked.

I shook my head. “I want to go over the drawbridge.”

Mark grinned. “That’s my Annie.”

As we drove across the bridge, I looked out at the bay. Seagulls swooped down on the many boats coming back in from an early Sunday morning hauling in shrimp. Sailboats lined up on the lake side, waiting to get out.

We drove and drove.

I loved this place. So many Northerners came down and complained about the heat and the hurricanes, and especially the lack of hills. But there was something peaceful and open about seeing the horizon in front of you, like you were on the edge of the Earth and the world began and ended right here.

I couldn’t compare it to anywhere else because I’d never been anyplace else, except for the occasional weekend camping trip. I wanted to travel, but I hadn’t had the opportunity to, not like Lea, whose family went skiing every winter. What I really wanted to do was see the shuttle launch, Christa’s shuttle launch, in January. But it was impossible. I had no money, no ride, and no time off from school.

We drove out to the island of Galveston, about thirty miles south of Clear Lake. We ended up at the beach house of a surfing friend of Mark’s.

I went out to the water’s edge and watched the waves while the guys pulled on wet suits. Mark looked good, all slick in black. The wet suit clung to his body, outlining all his muscles. One would think he was always at the gym, although he never was. He just played and worked.

He waved one wet suit–black arm toward the ocean. “Hey, Annie, look at those swells.”

I glanced at the brown waves spitting up white as they hit the sandy shore. “Kind of mushy, Mark.” I grinned at him.

He laughed. “I’ll find my wave. You watch me, babe.” He leaned forward, giving me a peck. “We won’t be in long.”

“Go,” I said.

I settled in the sand, wrapped in my winter coat, watching them paddle out.

Mark was the first one up. I loved to watch him surf. His body looked loose, but in control, joyful in the turns. He rode the wave not quite all the way out, then jerked his board toward the crest, and dove into the wave. He came up laughing. He was so happy here.

The sound of the surf filled my ears. I wondered how I’d feel if I didn’t live close to water, particularly the ocean. The birds squawked at me, but I had nothing to feed them. I watched Mark and wondered if he could really be in love with me if he wasn’t interested in what I liked or what I thought. I scooped up sand into hills of doubt.

CHAPTER 10

I
mailed the scary white envelope the next day.

My own little launch.

CHAPTER 11

C
hrista had a training session before the volleyball game. Lea’s mother suggested we come over to JSC early so we could peek in on the session. Lea wasn’t too interested, but I talked her into it.

Lea’s mother explained that the astronauts prepared for their flight by being trained in simulations. Instructors would set up scenarios where the crew would go through their normal checklists but be surprised by failures along the way. The goal was to get the crew working well as a team so they could confidently handle a real in-flight emergency.

I went home with Lea after school, and then we drove over to the space center about five o’clock. Her neighborhood was about five minutes from the front gate of the center, just across the very busy four-lane NASA Road One.

Many NASA employees were on their way out. This cool uniformed guard was on duty at the front. He did these wild gesticulations, waving people in and out of the center. He’d drop down on one knee and circle his arm around with exaggerated motions, pointing us in the right direction. He motioned us to a parking lot across from the guard station so we could get a badge.

We waited outside for Lea’s mom, watching the guard while Lea harassed me.

“Oh, come on, Annie. You know you and Mark are getting married.”

“I don’t think so, Lea.”

“Every day I wonder if I’m going to wake up to a phone call from you saying, ‘We’re in Vegas and we eloped!’ ”

I hit her arm, smiling. “Stop.”

“You’re right. You wouldn’t leave Texas. So you’ll call from just up the road in the little town of Cut and Shoot.”

I laughed. “I’m not getting married at eighteen.”

“Why not? Elizabeth Taylor—”

“Your twin,” I interjected.

“—married Nicky Hilton at eighteen. And, oh, oh, look at Loretta Lynn and her husband Mooney. She was thirteen. I know because I saw
Coal Miner’s Daughter
.”

“Yeah, Jerry Lee Lewis’s wife was thirteen too,” I said.

“Whoever he is.”

And she was a distant cousin.

“Not to mention Edgar Allan Poe’s wife was also thirteen and his
first
cousin.”

“No! Ew.”

“It’s true,” I said. “And Percy Shelley married sixteen-year-old Harriet.”

“Bo-ring, Annie. Have no idea who that is and don’t want to.”

“Yeah, you do. He’s a poet.”

“Bo-ring,” she repeated.

“Then he left Harriet for sixteen-year-old Mary, who he later married and then she wrote
Frankenstein
.”

“Harriet wrote
Frankenstein
?” Lea asked.

“No! Mary Shelley wrote
Frankenstein
. Harriet drowned herself.”

“Still boring.”

“Why is it my literary references are boring and your 1950s movie actresses are not?”

“It
is
an intriguing question.” She sighed. “I guess we’ve proven we are old maids at eighteen.”

“Maybe I
should
marry Mark.”

“It would make him happy,” she said.

“But on the other hand, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was forty when she married Robert Browning,” I said. “And Emily Dickinson never made it to the altar.”

“And such a cheery gal Emily was.”

“She did need to get out more,” I said.

“Like you.”

When Mrs. Taylor got there, we went into the small building and filled out paperwork and got temporary black-and-white badges to wear.

We were back in the car, driving past the long Saturn V rocket lying on the ground to the left of us, many 1960s-era buildings, and shady oak trees. Johnson Space Center felt a little like a college campus. Mrs. Taylor said most of the buildings surrounded three man-made ponds, where many birds—including a blue heron—liked to hang out. We were headed to a building a little off from the ponds that housed the Shuttle Mission Simulators, or SMS.

Mrs. Taylor inserted her NASA badge into a card reader and punched in some numbers. Once we were through the door, a guard at a duty desk checked our badges and waved us through.

Inside and out, Building 5 looked very much like a standard government office building, with linoleum floors and drab yellowish walls. But patches from each shuttle flight and photos of the astronauts hung in the hallway. I already knew that a patch was designed for each mission and that the symbols selected for it had meaning for the crew. It was neat to see the patches all lined up, taking us through the history of shuttle flight.

We entered a fairly small room on our left. Along one side of the wall, there were men and women sitting at a row of consoles, keyboards at their fingertips, looking up at monitors above them. They had headsets on.

“Those are the instructors,” Mrs. Taylor whispered over the hum of computer noise.

“What are they doing?” asked Lea, a little too loudly. One of the instructors glanced around to look at us, but then went back to what she was doing.

“Shh, Lea,” said her mom. “Don’t interrupt. They’re following a preplanned script for the training session and need to listen to the crew’s reactions, and to talk to them.”

“Where’s the crew?” asked Lea, her voice only slightly lowered. “Is Christa with them?”

Mrs. Taylor led us back out into the hallway. “The astronauts are in the simulator, which is in an area behind the instructor rooms along this hallway.”

“Let’s go there,” said Lea.

Mrs. Taylor shook her head. “We can’t go back there.”

“What is a simulator?” I asked.

“It’s a mock-up of the crew cabin, with all the switches, controls, and displays of the orbiter, and also simulated out-the-window views. There are two simulators in a large open area: the fixed-base simulator, which doesn’t move, but is elevated, and the motion-base one, which can simulate the motions of all phases of flight, from launch to descent. For this particular sim,” she said, gesturing to the room, “the crew’s in the fixed-base trainer.”

I peeked back in. “What are the instructors doing?”

“They’re in control of the session. Right now, they’re running a post-insertion ops sim.”

“ ‘Ops’ is NASA talk for operations,” Lea said, nodding at me.

“Post-insertion operations?” I asked.

“Right,” Mrs. Taylor said. “The entire crew is needed for this sim. Christa doesn’t usually do many of these, but she needs to be here for this one. One of the objectives is to make sure the crew is working well together. Each has his own job to do, but it’s also important they manage anomalous situations well as a team.”

Lea looked at me. “ ‘Anomalous’ is NASA talk for things are going very wrong.”

“And so these instructors make sure things go very wrong?” I asked, pointing in the room.

“They put in malfunctions of different systems,” said Mrs. Taylor. “There are thousands of failures they can use. See, that instructor there, touching the light pen to the screen. She’s inserting a malfunction. The crew will see indications of the failure on their displays and will need to figure out how to respond.”

“But … what kind of failures?”

“For this training session, they won’t have any issues that would cause an abort or a major change to the mission. They want to take the crew through a complete launch sequence and the preparation for orbit operations. The training guys might fail a sensor of one of the orbiter systems or cause a minor leak that wouldn’t have a major impact.”

“Do they ever simulate really big failures,” I asked, “something that might go really wrong?”

Mrs. Taylor thought for a moment. “They train for things the astronauts can do something about.”

“How long does the training session last?” Lea asked, looking at her watch.

“About five hours.”

“Five hours!”

“Lower your voice, Lea,” said Mrs. Taylor. “They’re at the end of the session now.”

“Oh,” Lea said.

It wasn’t long before Christa came out.

“Hi, Christa,” I said.

“Hi, Annie,” she said. I was pleased she remembered my name. It’d only been a few days since I’d seen her, but I knew she’d met so many people in the last few months: newspaper reporters and photographers, NASA engineers and astronauts, and even President Reagan, whom she met at a White House dinner.

She gave us a tired smile and pushed her purse up farther on her shoulder. Her schedule must be draining. I wondered how she was going to play volleyball.

“Hi, Christa!” said Lea. “You’re wearing normal clothes.”

“What did you think she’d be wearing?” I asked.

“Those pretty sky blue flight suits.”

“Christa,” said Mrs. Taylor, ignoring Lea, “can you take the girls from here? I’ve got to get back to my office.”

“Sure. I’ve got them.”

“Thanks, Christa. Y’all have fun.”

On the way out to her car, Christa asked if either of us played on a volleyball team.

A team? How good were these people? I should have known: this team was probably made up of overachieving engineers who overachieved at volleyball too. A shot of nerves hit me. I should have told her I didn’t know how to play.

“Neither of us has been on a team,” Lea was saying, knowing full well I had a hard time telling the difference between a soccer ball and a volleyball.

Lea got in the backseat of the car, gesturing for me to get in the front with Christa. She knew how fascinated I was by her. I slid into the copilot seat, wondering if I should tell Christa about my lack of volleyball experience. Here she was bringing us to play with her friends and I didn’t even know how to play.

“I’m not that good at sports—,” I began.

“Yes, you are!” Lea said. “You’re really good at tennis, Annie.”

Christa glanced over at me as she pulled out of the parking lot. “Do you play tennis, Annie?”

“I just hit the ball around. I practice against the backboard a lot.” That sounded pretty sad, probably because it was pretty sad.

And it had been months since I’d done that, I realized. I used to love to be outside, under a blue bowl of a sky, loving the feel of the ball as it bounced against the strings of the racket.

“She could have made the school team if she’d tried out,” Lea said, leaning forward in between the seats. She kept talking about how I would have been this great tennis player if I’d only tried. She had me winning the Olympics by the time we pulled up to the Gilruth Center.