Even though it wasn’t my birthday or anything, on the day of my Cecilia Payne presentation, Mom made me chocolate Malt-O-Meal for breakfast. Dad put a doodle in my lunch bag, a sketch of me and Cecilia Payne swinging from the two long arms of a star.
I knew my PowerPoint rocked. I had worked and worked on it until it was worthy of its subject. I was ready.
“She was born in 1900 on May tenth,” I told my class. I showed them pictures of Cecilia with her flapper curls and dresses. She was smart and stylish. Dustin didn’t even have anything to make fun of.
“She studied astronomy. She was the first female department chair at Harvard. She figured out that stars are made up mostly of hydrogen. So essentially, yes, Pumbaa in The Lion King was right, stars are big balls of gas.”
I heard giggles, which made me happy.
I told them about how Cecilia studied the structure of the Milky Way. I told them about how she was the first person to earn a doctorate degree from Radcliffe College.
“A while ago I actually tried to get her into our textbook,” I said. “I know that wasn’t part of the assignment, but I mean, she discovered so much about stars so I thought she should be in it. It didn’t go so well, though.”
Then Dustin did raise his hand.
Even though I was scared he would make fun of me, I called on him.
“Why don’t you write a book about her?” he asked.
Ms. Trepky’s grin reached clear up to her dark hair and I’d never seen her look so proud. “That,” she said, looking between Dustin and me, “is an excellent idea.”
I finished my presentation, and I was glad that I’d practiced it a lot and worked hard on my slides because part of my brain kept thinking about Dustin’s idea. I knew I’d need a lot more time to think about it. Could twelve-year-olds write books?
Later in class, Talia recited a poem she’d written about Ala Tamasese, one of the leaders of the Women’s Mau: Female Peace Warriors in the movement for Samoan independence. Talia wore a navy-blue lavalava with a white stripe and said that’s what the Female Peace Warriors of Western Samoa wore. Nobody else did anything quite as memorable as that. Then Dustin showed a video he made about James Naismith, who invented basketball, and even though a lot of the video was mostly Dustin showing off his free throws, he still told us about how early players used peach baskets as hoops.
Every student worked hard on their presentation. Even Dustin tried his best on his movie, and it made me think that he liked this class, even if he’d never admit it. Ms. Trepky must have secret powers to put that spark in someone like Dustin.
I imagined having lunch with Talia and Ms. Trepky for years and years, until Talia and I were grown-ups. I wondered if it was weird imagining having lunch with your teacher, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care, because I knew how good a person she was to talk to, just like Cecilia and Rosalind and Eleanor Roosevelt. Thinking about having lunch with Ms. Trepky and Talia forever and ever made my insides start to swell like I was going to need heart surgery again. Everything in the classroom, every little pencil and every scuff mark on the floor, poured meaning and happiness into me until it was almost too much for a body to hold. And that was only the stuff inside the classroom. There were also the stars. There were my parents and my sister. There was Cecilia and baby Cecilia. Especially there was baby Cecilia.
Looking around at all that world, I think being born with a heart three sizes too big is worth the scars.