With Nonny staying, I decided to try talking to some new people at school. If it didn’t go super great, like last time, Nonny and I always had Celtic Woman to cheer me up. And my new secret mission made me feel braver, somehow.
At lunch I brought my peanut butter sandwich to a table with some new girls. One girl had the NASA logo on her T-shirt, so they seemed like they would be fun to eat lunch with. They smiled when I sat down, which was good. I told them my name and they each told me theirs. The girl in the NASA shirt was named Charise.
We talked about classes and then I talked about my sister and her piano and how beautiful her wedding was and also about my mom’s bakery.
“She makes these special cupcakes with dark purple frosting and white sprinkles and it makes them look like constellations,” I said.
“Oh.”
“One time I was helping her make the cupcakes and my grandma had given us this big ceramic yellow bowl that we keep apples in and I was moving it to make room on the counter and then I dropped it and it totally broke.”
“Oh no,” they said.
“But you guys should come try those cupcakes sometime. They’re really good. You can get chocolate or vanilla flavored.”
“Okay.”
It seemed to me like everything was going great until they finished eating and picked up their lunches and left.
It was okay. I ate my sandwich by myself. I guess I ate even faster because without other people I wasn’t talking so much. Except to Cecilia Payne, in my head. If we can figure out the stars, then why are other people so confusing? I didn’t hear an answer, but a narrow square of sunlight coming in through the lunchroom blinds sat in the seat across from me.
When I got home from school, Nonny set a plate of marmalade toast on the coffee table in the front room, next to the papers she was reading for her new online college classes. (“Thank goodness for scholarships and supportive career counselors,” she’d said.) She was on the phone, holding it up against her ear with her shoulder, but she’d made toast especially for me. I wasn’t sick, but I sure needed some marmalade toast.
I got out my math book while Nonny was on the phone. I worked on my worksheet while Nonny said “hmm,” and “oh wow.” The other person was telling some kind of story. Sitting on the couch listening to her made me feel like I’d taken a time machine back to when she was in high school. She talked to people on the phone a lot back then, the same way she did now. Like dozens of people knew that she was the one to call when they had questions or problems, and after they talked to her everything was a little better.
Nonny didn’t say very much herself. Sometimes she asked a question. The words she did use always seemed to be exactly right, like they were some kind of magic healing spell.
How did she learn to say those perfect magic-spell words? Maybe it was the questions she asked? Or was there a special way she told the other person she was listening?
Nonny stayed quiet for a long time, and I thought maybe that was part of the spell. She did something in her mind when she was quiet, some special way of thinking or listening, and that made her know the right words to say when she finally said them. There had to be a way to learn her trick, whatever it was.
Most days I’m super-good at doing my homework right away, but today I listened to her instead of focusing on my math. After she said goodbye to the person on the phone, she put her cell in her back pocket, and came and sat by me on the couch.
“So how did the genius do at school today?” she asked.
Of course, I didn’t have the right words to answer, so instead I took a bite of toast. Nonny knows how to do toast perfectly, where the bread is the exact right level of crispiness, and the marmalade is spread thick over each crumb and corner.
Nonny waited for me to finish my bite and answer.
“It wasn’t my ultimate best day ever or anything,” I said.
She tucked her hair behind her ear and settled into the couch, looking at me. She waited again.
“I … I tried sitting by some new people at lunch today,” I said. “One girl was wearing a NASA shirt. She was cool. Her name was Charise.”
“Good for you!” Nonny said.
“I don’t know about that,” I said.
“Yeah?” she said.
“I think maybe they’re already friends together,” I said.
Nonny put her arm on the back of the couch and her long hair spread over her shoulder like a waterfall. She kept watching me, waiting for when I was ready with the right words. Sometimes it really was easier to sit with a square of sunlight or talk to the spirit of a great astronomer than people in real life. At least then I never said the wrong thing.
“Were you talking to a friend?” I said. “On the phone? I remember you had a lot of friends at school.”
“I like talking to people,” Nonny said. “Especially you.”
“What do they talk to you about?” I said. “I mean, you’re so smart about it. It’s like talking to you is magic and then they’re happy again.”
Nonny laughed. “I don’t know about magic,” she said.
I was already feeling better simply being with her, so I knew Nonny had some kind of magic no matter what she said. “Oh, come on, tell me the secret spell.”
“No spell, but I guess there’s something I do in my head. Kind of a trick maybe?”
“A trick?”
“It’s sort of a trick for having lunch with new people, but it works for people you already know, too.”
I took a sip of tea and put the mug down. I wanted to pay attention to this. “And this is why people are always calling you? Like your friends always calling and asking you for advice?”
Nonny did a quiet smile. It’s easier for me when I think of quiet smiles or loud smiles. It makes it easier to know what the smile means.
“Maybe,” she said.
I crossed my legs and faced her. “Tell me the trick!”
“Well,” she said. “You know how sometimes you want to get to know somebody, and it’s hard to know what to ask them? And maybe it’s easier to talk about things you know, because they might know about those things, too?”
I almost choked on my toast. That was exactly what had happened with Lunch Table Girls.
“That happens for you, too?” I asked.
“Then there’s times when someone is telling you about something really difficult they’re going through and you’re not quite sure what to say? When you’re pretty positive nothing you say will help or make anything any better?”
I realized I was twisting the hem of my pants without noticing. This wasn’t something I’d talked a lot about before, not even with Nonny. “Even when they’re not saying hard things it’s sometimes like I always say the wrong thing back.”
“Oh Libby,” Nonny said. She put a hand on my knee. “Sometimes it’s hard to know what to say, or sometimes there are too many things to say. I know you always have fifty questions for everyone, and everything, and maybe it’s hard to know what to say because there’s so much.”
I nodded.
“When that happens, the trick is sort of asking them the question in my mind. I ask one or maybe even all fifty of the questions that you probably have, but I only ask them silently, in my head, to the other person.”
So it was like talking to my scientist friends in my head! Talking to them silently and so never saying the wrong thing because the stars and the universe helped you know the right words. This was exactly the same but with real-life people.
“So it’s asking the exactly right question because it’s only in your head!” I said. “A Silent Question!”
“Silent Question. I like that,” Nonny said, laughing. “That’s perfect. And after I ask a Silent Question then yes, exactly, it’s almost like the universe itself picks the very best of all the things I’m silently asking or saying in my head, and then the other person keeps talking like I’ve said or asked just the right thing. Like I’m really hearing them, really listening. My staying silent lets the other person say only the things they want to.”
It was like the last puzzle piece in a super-hard thousand-piece Eiffel Tower puzzle clicked into place in my brain. There were silent conversations going on everywhere, between two people, between a person and the universe. And those conversations went two ways. I knew they did, because it had happened to me before. I’ve made deals with the universe, and with my scientist friends. I talked to them and the universe answered back.
A couple of years ago my mom came back from the doctor looking pale and scared. She and Dad talked for a long time and then brought Nonny and me out to the couch.
Here’s a big doctor word for you: melanoma.
“They found skin cancer,” Mom said. “I’m not going to … to lie to you guys, it’s a pretty rare kind. They think we caught it in time, though. They said they’re ninety-percent sure it’s going to be fine.”
When it comes to your mom, the only percent fine you want to hear is one-hundred.
They took a long, football-shaped chunk of skin off my mom’s shoulder, then sewed it up into a long scar. They also took a few of her lymph nodes.
When Mom went in for surgery, you can bet I talked to the universe.
I talked to the universe for hours and hours. To Rosalind Franklin, specifically, because she was the one I thought could help. She knew about genetics, about cells. So I made a deal with Rosalind Franklin, and you know what? A month later, Mom was dancing around the bakery, covered in flour.
Silent Questions with people. Silent Deals with the universe. How do people without good teachers and big sisters learn this stuff?
“That is the smartest thing I’ve heard all day,” I said. “And that’s saying a lot because we talked about Albert Einstein in school today.”
Nonny laughed.
It’s my favorite thing, making Nonny laugh.