The Gravity of Us (20 page)
Authors: Phil Stamper
Dad stayed at NASA, so I take advantage of the calm that’s come over me. One thing about driving that I actually like, when there’s no traffic, is how automatic it feels. It’s almost therapeutic as I process all that’s happened to me. All that’s to come.
I pull over near a picturesque cattle farm to host a live video from the middle of the street, telling all my followers to tune in at nine central time for an hour-long special on saving the Orpheus V mission. After I end the stream, I resume my drive and take in the scenery. In the daylight, there’s something really beautiful about Texas. It’s slower, quieter, and has more room to breathe than Brooklyn.
And god, how I miss Brooklyn, but I feel okay here. And okay is so much better than I thought it would be. My gut clenches when I think of Leon. About how his lips taste and the way his body makes me feel so perfectly safe and relaxed when I’m curled up against it.
Despite my plans, my endless organizing of outlines in my head, I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I don’t know what the rest of the year will look like. Will I be here in the open sun or hiding on my fire escape in the shadow of my building? Will I be in his arms again, or will I find someone else … eventually? An unsettled feeling bubbles up, and I squeeze the steering wheel hard to keep myself in check.
I need to know how to be okay all the time. I need to be able to see the fifty ways my life can go and be perfectly content with each one. But there’s only one path right now that looks good to me. The one that keeps me here, with Leon. And Kat, and the other astronauts, and the Orpheus V mission.
When I open the door to the house, Mom looks up to me from the couch.
“Oh, honey. Kat told me what you were doing. Sit down.”
I do. “It’s all I could do to help. I think it’ll help.”
She puts her arm on my back, and I tense up. I shake my head, still thinking of all the directions my life could go, and it makes me feel nervous and frantic. Breathing is a challenge, and I clench my teeth together so tightly my jaw starts to ache.
“I want everything to be better,” I say. “I know I can’t fix people. Even if I try really hard, I know I can’t do it. And I think that’s okay—but this, I might be able to really fix. I have the following; they care so much about the mission, I think. I just—”
“Calvin, stop. It’s not your responsibility to worry about the mission, or Dad’s job, or the people in your life who need fixing, as you say. No one’s broken. Nothing is broken.”
But that’s not true: I’m broken. I’m here in pieces on this couch and everything is so hard.
“Don’t aim to fix people. Fixing seems so permanent, so absolute. Like there’s no room for error. Aim to make things better. Your videos might not change America’s opinion of the mission, but it’ll make it better. People will know the real story behind Orpheus V, whether or not it ever gets off the ground.” She leans over to look into my eyes. “Celebrate that.”
“Thanks,” I say.
Her words stick in my mind, and the tension in my chest starts to ease. I don’t know if that’s really what matters, or how futile this will seem tomorrow if no one cares. But I take her sentiment to heart. It’ll matter to me. It’ll matter to a lot of people at NASA.
At least I’ll have that.
When I stand, I notice a box of new gardening supplies open on the kitchen table.
“What’s this?” I ask. “You’re … gardening?”
“Don’t laugh,” she says, “but I’ve been going to the park with the gardens. The one we worked at after we first moved here.”
Without thinking, I groan, remembering that sweaty mess of a day. “I hate that place.”
“It’s nice. The bushes aren’t as twisted and strange as the ones Aunt Tori planted, but they still need some pruning.” She wipes away a rogue tear. “Anyway, I met up with the lady who runs the food kitchen that uses the garden, and she said no one’s taken over for Mara. So I volunteered.”
“And that means …”
“You’re going to be doing a lot of harvesting this fall. Your peppers are coming in nicely, by the way.”
I finally make it to my room, and on my deck, I see a new cassette:
Heart
, by … Heart. I don’t really know who this is, or why this is in my room, so I put it in and press play. When I hear “If Looks Could Kill,” the powerful eighties rock voice pierces through my headphones, overtop power guitar chords and synthesizer. She’s incredible. I turn it up louder, until the wailing guitar starts to hurt my head.
I open my eyes and see Mom leaning in my door. I pull off my headphones.
“Where’d you get this?” I ask.
“Hey, it wasn’t me. Someone came over today to drop it off. He wasn’t sure if it was good or anything. I told him Heart was fantastic, and he shouldn’t forget it. But he apparently found it in his basement, and they don’t have a deck.” She smiles and starts to lean back out of the door. “He had a lot of excuses for why he was bringing it over, but I think there was only one reason: he wanted to make you feel a little better.”
I listen to the rest of the album. And by the end of it, Mom’s right—I’m not fixed, but I’m a little better. I feel recharged, and excited, and I’ve really been putting off the thought that he was here at my house, expecting to see me and give me a gift. Which means, maybe he’s starting to really trust me, and trust what we have.
I still haven’t texted him, because I don’t know what to say other than “Thanks!” which just feels cheap. I have to see him.
I can do that. I’m going to see him tonight.
At eight fifty, I ring the doorbell to the Tucker residence. After careful consideration, I’m wearing a simple V-neck shirt, acid wash jeans with tan slip-on shoes, and the hat. The John Mayer oversized safari hat that Houston is still not remotely ready for.
But I’m ready for it.
Kat opens the door and breaks into a giggle as she sees me.
“Stop,” I say. “No hat jokes. This is fashion.”
“I’m so happy you finally brought it out. I thought you might’ve left it in Brooklyn—it’s in so many of your videos.” She pauses. “Oh, and did your mom add the code to your app?”
“She did, and it looks perfect. I played around with it all afternoon—it’s so easy to use.”
She shrugs. “I just wanted to help.”
“So … can I talk to Leon? That is, if he wants to see me.”
“Cal.” She puts her hands on my shoulders. “He made me stop at a garage sale to go cassette shopping. He wants to see you.”
“I thought he found it in your basement.”
“That was a lie, because saying he went garage sale shopping for you sounds a little pathetic.”
I pull Kat in for a hug, and she leans away from my hat as I do it. With her thumb, she points behind her, at the sliding
door I slid through when I first got to really talk to Leon alone. Perfect.
The grass crunches under my feet as I walk around to the side of the house. Leon’s looking up at the stars and the sliver of moon that’s viewable from the side. I reach into my bag and retrieve the bottle of champagne I swiped from the dozen or so my parents have on hand. When the bottle pops, his gaze meets mine.
“What are we celebrating?” he asks.
“Us,” I reply with a smile. “Wait, that was way too cheesy. How about … the fact that I was able to cobble together a full hour of content with no notice in one day and lived to tell the tale?”
“Kat told me your plan.” He gives me a half smile, and I take the seat next to him. “It’s … really great. It’s worth celebrating.”
“Well, then. Cheers.”
I pull the bottle to my mouth and take a sip of bitter foam.
“Oh, and thank you for the cassette,” I say. “I had no idea your mom had such good taste in music.”
He chuckles nervously. “Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. I think she likes it, but she probably didn’t even know we still had it. In the basement, that is.”
I let his lie slide, for now. The moon’s glow mixes with the porch light, and I feel momentarily blinded. I take a sip and pass the bottle to him.
“I think Kat’s going to run interference for us,” I say. “But I have something to show you.”
After pulling out my phone, I open the app to find five hundred thousand people waiting for me to start. Literally half a million people staring at a blank screen. It’s a good sign, but we’ll see if they stay.
“Do you want to be in this?” I ask, and he almost falls out of his chair because he jerks away so quickly. “I was joking.”
I turn the camera on me, and adrenaline floods my veins. I’m in control. If I’m not in control of anything else, I am in control of this. I suck in a breath and tap the LIVE button.
“I’m Cal, and I can’t believe so many of you are on right now. If we keep this up, we’ll probably beat the entire viewership of that StarWatch episode. Speaking of StarWatch, I wanted to start with an apology.” I reposition myself in the chair so I can see Leon over my phone screen. “I’m really torn. My whole life was in Brooklyn, and I thought my whole future was in New York. I still want to come back, but I really love it here too. And one day, when I do get an internship or job or whatever, I’m not going to stop using FlashFame. I will never post ads. Some of you have been around from the very beginning, and I hope you won’t let one mistake, in one out-of-context quote from an episode of
Shooting Stars
ruin that. I really am sorry.
“As you can probably tell, I was appalled by the coverage. We are at such a critical time in the Orpheus V mission—interest is waning; we’ve had two major setbacks after losing one of our astronauts in a jet crash and losing a critical satellite. We need real information to be spread, now more than ever. We need awareness.
“Over the next hour, you’ll see interviews with a diverse selection of astronauts, scientists, engineers, and everyone in between. Talking about their jobs. Talking about why Orpheus V is so important. Why we can’t give up on it now. I hope you’ll listen, and I hope you’ll share.”
I take a full breath and blow out all the bad feelings. “Thank you for following,” I say, and I make my final plea to America.
“Hi, I’m Brendan. Y’all saw my last video on here when I talked about dirt. Actually, almost a million people have seen me talk about dirt. Now, it’s something that’s always been fascinating to me, but hey, I’m biased.
“I studied chemical engineering at the University of Dayton, and shortly after, I started working with NASA. And to me, it’s hard to really explain why all this is important. It’s like asking me, ‘Hey, why’s gravity important?’ Its roots are in the history of other planets. Theirs and ours. We don’t know what, if anything, lived on Mars, but we know liquid water flows on Mars as we speak. We know the planet is alive with organic matter. What did Mars do wrong; where and how did it turn into the wasteland it is now?
“I play a small piece in the overall puzzle. We have scientists here who have been studying the weather patterns on Mars, some who will figure out what plant life could grow in
the soil. Biochemists who will test the air, and explorers who will gather the materials and give us the best photographs we’ve ever seen of the place.”
“Anyway,” Brendan continues, “I hope you share this. I lucked out and got my dream job, and I don’t want to lose it. We have so much work to do.”
As he continues, I look to Leon. His eyes shimmer as he watches the video, and a small smile perks up at the corner of his lips.
“Think this will work?” he asks between swigs of champagne. “Like, really work?”
“How could it?” I say. “It can’t do much but give the people what they’ve been missing for so long, thanks to NASA and StarWatch.”
There’s a few minutes of dead time after the show, and I watch the follower count dip slightly. We’re at one-point-three million viewers live, thanks to a lot of early shares.
When Carmela fills the screen, I can’t help but smile.
“I’m kind of jealous Mom gets to work with her all day.”
“Same. I want her to have her own FlashFame show, I’m gonna be honest.”
The light of my phone glows on his face, and I want to lean over and kiss him. The urge in my chest weighs me down, makes my arms ache so bad it gets hard to hold up the phone. Without meaning to, my arm lowers. Leon takes the phone
from me and scoots his chair in closer, his eyes never leaving the screen.
I fold my hands in my lap, not knowing exactly what to do or how close I can get to him.
And then his shoulder touches mine. It’s so small and insignificant, but I shudder. Chills travel all over my body, originating in that light shoulder touch. I press into him just slightly and savor the moment.
When the video switches, he leans back and holds the phone with one hand. His other one slips behind my back, so I curl into him as much as my comically huge hat will allow me. Suddenly his scent is in my nose again, and I’m curled up with him in that hotel room, his lips on my neck and my hand on his cheek.
“She’s brilliant,” he says. “Mom’s always telling me about all the times she’s ended up killing the crew by throwing in her sadistic curveballs.”
“Well, she can’t stump my dad, apparently.” I roll my eyes and keep it light, but he looks at me.
“No, really. I heard Mom telling Dad she was worried NASA would consider swapping them—making your dad lead Orpheus V instead of Orpheus VI.”
“Wait,” I say, “Dad’s not leading any missions.”
“Cal, if we make it to Orpheus VI, your dad is going to Mars. There is no question about that.”
I lean back and look up to the sky. There’s a sliver of the moon showing, and I’m suddenly overwhelmed. Like pins are
poking all over my body. Breaths come hard, and I feel so small and Mars is really far away. Really, really far away.
Fifty years ago, when we landed on the moon, there were dozens of astronauts, wives, and Astrokids sitting on these same lawns. Looking up at the same sky. The moon must have seemed so much farther away. Literally impossible. But we did it then, and we’ll do it again.
“I, um, never thought about that. Are you worried about your mom going on the mission?”
“Not really. It’ll be weird for her to be gone for two full years. Like, that’s not a normal amount of time to be away from your family, and when she gets back I’ll be … somewhere else, I guess. Doing something else.”
After a few minutes of dead time, the antenna designer Kyle takes over the show. He talks at length about designing the antenna that exploded.
“What you don’t hear much is that it was meant to be multiuse—it would’ve been helpful for the landing, as you know, but it also would’ve given us the clearest weather readouts to date. We would have had it join orbit with Mars about three to six months before the astronauts got there, and it would have given us a clearer view of the meteorological state of the planet.”
I look to the bottom-right corner of the phone and slap Leon’s arm when I see the number.
“Four million. And climbing.” The rule of thumb is that if you get more views than you have followers, you’re in a good place. Right now, I’m in a
really good place
.
The sliding door opens around the corner, so I hide the champagne under my seat. But it’s just Kat. Her phone echoes Kyle’s voice back to us, and her face beams an “oh my god” expression.
“
New York Times
shared your link on Facebook,” she says. “It looks like CNN and a few others have too, but I can’t even keep up with all the hits. Plus, the videos are so good.”
“I get why you think that,” Leon says. “And I get why Cal and I would think so, but why would the average American even care about this?”
“Dude, Leo—we’ve been in such a drought for real information that people are hungry for this.” She smiles. “StarWatch is entertaining, but no one ever liked NASA because it was entertaining. No one writes sci-fi stories for the gossip.”
“People who are like Josh Farrow? They don’t get it,” I say. “They never did. My videos have always been no-bullshit information. I got most of my followers by covering the election, and most of them weren’t old enough to vote. People care about this information, but it’s hard to find it through all the clickbait and fake news.” I take a second to look at Kat. “I just didn’t want NASA to collapse because of it.”
Kat takes a seat next to us. I hand her the bottle, and she takes an eager sip. She leans forward and wipes some of the champagne off her chin. We watch the rest of Kyle’s talk, then sit in complete silence as the rocket technician provides some
theories for the explosion and reasons why something like this couldn’t happen on a crewed launch.
“I hope this is enough,” I say after all the other videos play. No one responds, but they don’t have to. They lean in closer as my face takes over the screen.
My expression still has the light smile and confident persona, but there’s something more real about it. Less scripted—even if I never use a script. Less prepared, even.
Raw, emotional, and real.
“This is our plea,” I say. “NASA is a great organization with a sometimes rocky history, we all know that, but thanks to StarWatch and a few members of their communications team, they’ve turned us into a circus. Yeah, we have drama here. It’s competitive, it’s stressful, and there are so many types of people here, we’re bound to have arguments at parties. But to disregard everything good about this mission to focus on the bad is irresponsible, and honestly un-American.
“If you care about this mission, you need to show it now. There’s a link on my page with all the tools you need to make your voice heard. With the tap of a button, you can share these videos, contact NASA, or contact your representatives, all thanks to some brilliant and quick coding by Katherine Tucker. Speak up. Let anyone who will listen know that this mission cannot be defunded, and that you’re invested in getting us to Mars. We’re so close.
“Again, thanks for following, thanks for sharing, and have a good night.”
The video goes blank, and in its place are links to share or replay the video. I close my phone and look from Leon to Kat. Collectively, we take a deep breath in, and out. Kat grabs my hand, and I reach out for Leon’s.
It’s the last bit of peace we’ll be able to enjoy for a long time.
“I’m going to head back, I guess,” I say. “I’m too nervous to sit here anymore.”
Kat leans over to give me a big hug. “Either way, what you’re doing is really amazing. I’m going to share this with everyone I know. We’re not going out without a fight.”
Leon still doesn’t say anything, but gives me a small smile. There’s still so much between us we need to talk about. I’ve shown him all I can, but I need to give him time. I can’t force him to feel better; I can’t force him to make decisions about his life. I can’t keep trying to fix things, especially when he’s not broken.
But I lean in and press my lips to his, just lightly. He doesn’t pull away, but he doesn’t join in much. Our eyes close and I let them linger there. Long enough to bring back the fuzzy feeling in my chest, the flutter in my stomach.
And it gets a little better.