Every Soul a Star Read online

  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 title 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 associated 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 grass 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 aptitude 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 space 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 Cassini spacecraft.

  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,