Every Soul a Star Read online

  I laugh. “You’ve said that every year since you came here!”

  “Well, I’m not as lucky as you to have this every day.”

  “You could put it on your home computer if you wanted.”

  Ryan shakes his head. “My father won’t let me. He’s all paranoid about running programs that send information back to the source.”

  In all the years Ryan has been coming here, I’ve never met his dad. He doesn’t sound like a nice person.

  “Plus,” he adds almost as an afterthought, “my friends would think I’m a geek if they knew I was interested in this kind of stuff.”

  “Really? Why are they your friends then?”

  “Never thought about it. They’ve just always been my friends. It’s not like I chose them exactly.”

  “People don’t choose their friends?”

  He shrugs. “Not really. It’s usually people you live near, or kids in your classes. You’re stuck with each other, so you become friends. You know, like we did.”

  “Oh.” I stare down at my hands.

  “That didn’t come out right,” he says quickly. “I just mean that I showed up here, and we were sort of put together by our grandfathers and so we became friends.”

  I pick my words carefully. “So we’re not friends because we like each other? Because we like hanging out together?”

  “Of course we are. But that comes after.”

  “Oh,” I say again. It feels different being with Ryan this year and I can’t pinpoint why. I wonder if he feels it too. We sit quietly and watch the waves of color cross the screen. It’s almost hypnotic. I’m startled out of my trance by a loud rumbling out front. A huge RV is turning the corner toward the cabin. They must have taken a wrong turn on their way to the RV park on the other side of the lake. We put all the RVs as far away from the main camp as possible so the noise and exhaust doesn’t bother other campers. It’s also closest to the playground, and a lot of the RVers have kids.

  “Be right back,” I tell Ryan. “Don’t find any aliens without me.” The screen door bangs behind me as I go out onto the dirt road to wave down the RV. The driver sees me and stops. A middle-aged guy with a Mets baseball cap gets out, clutching one of the paper maps he would have been given at check-in. He is followed by a tired-looking woman holding a cell phone. “Hello?” she says repeatedly into it. “Can you hear me now?”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “We don’t get cell phone signals up here.”

  She flips the phone closed. “I was just trying to call the front desk. We can’t find where we’re supposed to go.”

  “I’ll show you.” I walk over to the map the man is holding out, and start pointing out where we’re standing, and how to get to the RV park. As I trace the path with my finger, two little boys step out of the RV. They are pale with bright red hair. I’ve never seen identical twins before, and can’t help but stare. They are wearing the same outfit—blue jeans and yellow t-shirts with a cartoon character on them. It looks like a train with a face.

  Both look at me with interest, then one of them says, “Mommy, I’ve gotta go potty.”

  The mother smiles apologetically at me. “We’re still working on the whole toilet-training thing.”

  I smile weakly in response, not sure what else to do. I remember when my mom was toilet training Kenny, she just used to let him run around the campground without his diaper. It only took a few days. But that was back when no one else lived here. The woman takes her son back inside, and the other follows closely at her heels.

  “No one was at the office when we pulled in,” the man says, tucking the map into his pocket. “The guy at the gate checked us in, but I’m waiting on a fax from my business partner, and it’s supposed to come to the main office.”

  “I’ll check on it,” I tell him. “When it arrives I’ll be sure someone brings it out to you.”

  He nods, and climbs back in. I hold my breath as the exhaust wafts past me. Back in the cabin, I tell Ryan I have to go. “No one’s manning the office, so I have to —”

  He suddenly stands up, knocking over his chair and cutting off what I was saying. My first thought is that he’s seen the huge soul-eating bug that I found in the Art House last week. I immediately jump back and press myself against the wall. The bug must have snuck over to this side of the cabin, even though once glance tells me the door is still closed. I KNEW that thing had superpowers! But Ryan’s pointing wildly at the computer screen, not at the ground.

  “What is it? You’re freaking me out.” I hope people still say “freaking out.”

  “The pattern!” he yells. “It spiked! Look!” He jabs at the screen, sending little prisms in all directions.

  He’s right! The red section of the graph is spiking really high, then low, then high again, in a pattern I’ve never seen before. We turn to stare at each other, eyes wide.

  “Great Galileo’s Ghost!” I shout.

  “What do we do?” Ryan asks.

  “I’m not sure. We never thought we’d really find anything.” Alien Central is really Kenny’s domain. He should be here. Dad said he has walkie-talkies to give us so we can all find each other easily once things get crazy, but he didn’t hand them out yet. “Hey, you know what I just realized?”

  “That we could be the first people to discover life on another planet?”

  “No! I mean, yes, but something else. That signal came from the constellation Libra, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s where Glenn’s planet is!”

  “Huh?”

  “Glenn! From Gleise!”

  He recovers quickly. “Oh, right! Cool!”

  “Don’t you look for him anymore?”

  “Um, well, with all the light pollution it’s getting harder to see many stars in the suburbs.”

  “Oh.” I try not to show my disappointment. All this time I thought Ryan was looking up at Glenn, too.

  Then Ryan says, “But if our signal is The One, then EVERYBODY will be looking up at Glenn!”

  He’s right! I feel instantly better.

  The screen door bangs open and we both whirl around. “What’s going on?” Kenny asks. “I heard you three cabins away.”

  “Look!” I point to the screen. Kenny goes closer and then yells, “Great Galileo’s Ghost! We have to call them.”

  “Call who?” Ryan asks. “The aliens?”

  Kenny looks at Ryan like HE’S an alien. “The SETI people! We have to call them!” He looks at me expectantly. Kenny’s the idea man, and that makes me the one who actually DOES anything. I upright Ryan’s chair from the floor and move it in front of the desk. Hands shaking, I stick in a disk and save the portion of the work unit that has been processed so far. Then I click back to the results screen and onto the home page. “I can’t find a contact number.”

  Kenny starts pacing, rubbing his chin just like Dad does when he’s frustrated. “How about an e-mail?” he asks. I keep looking and finally find a way to contact volunteers through a live chat. I click on that and wait for someone to turn up. I’m a pretty patient person, but as the seconds tick by I’m starting to get agitated. Finally someone’s name pops up on the screen and the words “Can I help you?” appear in a little box on the left side.

  I type as fast as I can. “Yes! Hi! We think we’ve found a signal. What do we do?”

  The three of us beam at each other while we wait for a reply. A few seconds later: “You don’t do anything. We get a large number of errant signals a month. When your work unit is complete, it will upload automatically. If we find a signal that merits looking into, we will contact you with the information we have on record.”

  Our collective bubble bursts. “That’s it?” Kenny says, sagging into the other chair. Ryan nudges my shoulder. “Ask how long it takes.”

  I type the question, and the reply says, “Could be a few weeks.”

  “Okay,” I type, slower this time. “Thanks.”

  “Well that’s that,” I say, staring at the