INDOOR KIDS
BY ALEX LONDON
It happened somewhere over Canada, although it had probably been happening since Australia. No one even knew anything had gone wrong until the International Space Station was over the Atlantic, a tiny dot of light heading toward the west coast of Africa, not a single earthly eye on it, and we only found out at camp because Jackson Kimmel had an aunt who worked at NASA.
She was not an astronaut.
She was in human resources, so she didn’t actually do anything with the space program, but she texted her nephew, because space was his “thing,” and her nephew told me, because he knew space was also my “thing,” and that’s how summer camp works: find someone whose thing is your thing and geek out together.
It would’ve been nice if I’d had someone to geek out with who wasn’t a ten-year-old.
“They think it was an impact with space junk,” Jackson said, waving his arms around while he circled me. He was one of those kids in constant, exhausting motion. “Did you know that NASA tracks over half a million pieces of space debris that orbit the earth? It travels at seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour, so, like, that could cut through a space station. Usually they have all kinds of warnings and ways to maneuver around space junk. They call it the ‘pizza box’ because it’s an imaginary box that’s a mile deep and thirty miles wide around the vehicle, and if anything looks like it’s gonna get too close to the ‘box,’ they take steps to keep the astronauts and the equipment safe, but not all the debris is tracked, so maybe they missed something? My aunt doesn’t know; she just does paperwork for people’s travel to conferences. She got to meet Leland Melvin once. Do you know who he is? He’s spent over five hundred sixty-five hours in space during his career, but you probably know him as the astronaut who took his official NASA portrait with his dogs? You ever see it? The dogs’ names are Jack and Scout. Or Jake? I can’t remember. Do you have a dog? I named my dog Elon, after Elon Musk, but now I think that—”
“Okay, Jackson.” I interrupted his monologue. He had actually made air quotes with his fingers around the words “pizza box.” What ten-year-old makes air quotes? “Take a breath and change for basketball.”
His smile vanished, his face a crash landing, no survivors.
“Do I haaaave to?” he whined. I wanted to tell him, No, of course not! Who sends their ten-year-old space nerd to a sports camp when there is an actual place called Space Camp! Your parents should be punished for this! But sports were required at Camp Winatoo, and Jackson had to go play basketball before he could come back for afternoon science club in Craft Cabin.
It was my unfortunate duty to make him go play basketball, just as it had been some other seventeen-year-old counselor-in-training’s job to force me to go play basketball when I was a ten-year-old space nerd here. That’s the curse of the indoor kids. People are always trying to make us go outside and play. The bastards.
Now I was one of them.
“Yes, you have to,” I told him.
I would have much rather spent the morning talking about the merits of the Falcon 9 rocket in commercial applications, but that wasn’t an option, not if I wanted to keep my job. The silver lining of this job was that I, personally, did not have to go to basketball. I had the entire early afternoon to do what I pleased. I was extremely lucky today, because I didn’t even have to supervise the aftermath of basketball, which was one of the worst jobs you could have. Those kids smelled ripe. Old enough for BO, not quite old enough to have figured out deodorant. And the ones that had figured it out? Axe Body Spray might be the worst thing to have happened in the history of mankind. It’s chemical warfare marketed to tweens.
After Jackson skulked off in his too-big basketball jersey, I pulled out my phone, trying to see if there was any news about the space station. Nothing had hit the mainstream media yet, but @GeekHeadNebula on Twitter had posted about a possible catastrophic hull breach impacting all ISS life-support systems.
That seemed a bit dramatic, in the way of breaking news, and I knew the reality would end up more mundane. Not that the mundane couldn’t be deadly in the void of space. It was usually the mundane that turned deadly up there.
Kind of like my life on Earth.
The Deadly Mundane could’ve been the title of my autobiography. Nothing dramatic ever happened to me. I was a junior counselor at the same summer camp I’d gone to as a kid, where I’d known most of the other junior counselors since forever. Back home, I lived in the suburbs and went to the kind of school where teenagers on the Disney Channel would go: everything was well lit and oversaturated, every adult was caring and concerned and a bit clueless, and every family was more affluent than the national average, but not so affluent that we’d be the bad guys in a dystopian novel.
I’d had my bar mitzvah and come out of the closet the same year, and both went…fine. I almost cried when my voice cracked during the haftorah recitation, and I also almost cried when my dad told me he was proud I was “living my truth.” The bar mitzvah involved me getting envelopes with eighteen-dollar checks in them, and coming out involved my mom putting a pride flag on our car. Neither was earth-shattering.
The bar mitzvah money went into a savings account I couldn’t touch, and just because I was out and “living my truth” didn’t mean I could get a date. Four years later and I’d never had a boyfriend, and not because I was the only gay kid. That would’ve at least been a good reason, but there were, like, five other cis gay boys in my class by the time we got to junior year, and a trans gay boy, and three other genderqueer kids, all of whom might’ve been dating material, except not a single one of them had any interest in a science geek with acne, no muscle tone, no taste in music, and more than one T-shirt with Carl Sagan on it. None of them were mean about not dating me—my life wasn’t even that dramatic. They just didn’t express any interest. So I mostly hung out in my room, read, and fantasized about being trapped in a Mars simulator for six months with Troye Sivan.
In his Instastory, Troye teased a new video while standing shirtless in the rain—seriously, I didn’t think Jewish boys could look like that—and NASA had an update in their Insta with a video of Japanese flight engineer Isao Tatsuta and American flight commander Anne Frisch explaining that they had sealed off damaged sections of the structure and were working with their international partners to prepare for a space walk to assess the best course of action. They reassured everyone watching that they had protocols in place. Commander Frisch ended the story with a view down at Earth through the window and then back up to herself giving a thumbs-up.
When, in the history of thumbs, was that ever a comforting gesture?
I put my phone away and thought about hitting the showers while I might manage some actual privacy. Being at summer camp was a lot like being on the International Space Station: privacy was nearly impossible to find, and sometimes it meant putting on a space suit and walking into the void.
In this case, “the void” was the boys’ showers, and the danger was more about what you took off than what you put on. My younger years at camp had been spent largely in dread of the showers, less for fear of a wet towel whipping across my butt than for fear of being noticed by anyone or being caught noticing anyone.
My fellow campers and I had matured since middle school; the shower stalls themselves had gained privacy curtains, and my showering was no longer ruled by terror and shame, but I still wasn’t going to miss an opportunity for quiet and privacy.
“You ever think about the golem?”
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who’d been seduced by the idea of having the showers to myself.
Levi Klein-Behar was standing at the wide mirror in the changing area, wrapped in a towel and studying a bunch of symbols he’d written in the mirror mist. I recognized the symbols as Hebrew, but that’s as far as my Jewish knowledge went. After my bar mitzvah, my parents didn’t make me go to Hebrew school anymore, and I’d worked pretty hard to forget everything I’d learned.
“Uh” was the brilliant reply I mustered, as befuddled by the question as by his lean back and broad shoulders and the way that towel hung off his hips as if balanced on a breath. He was not one of the Winatoo Lifers and had only started this summer…which wasn’t to say I didn’t know anything about him.
I knew he was from Philadelphia by way of Havana, Kampala, Buenos Aires, and Yangon. I knew that he was the son of a pair of traveling rabbis who supported Jewish communities in far-flung corners of the Diaspora; that he wore clicking Buddhist prayer beads around his wrist, which definitely deserved the eye rolls they got; but also that he didn’t care about the eye rolls. He was one of the few kids at camp who wore a yarmulke; his was a small black knit one with a rainbow border he said he got from an LGBTQ synagogue in New York. He was also an “indoor kid,” but not like me. He too did his best to avoid sports, even though he looked like the kind of guy who would be good at them, but he worked with the artsy kids, doing drama and painting and music. He was especially good at music and could play at least three instruments.
Why did I know so much about Levi Klein-Behar? Did I mention the towel hanging off his hips? My romantic life might’ve been as empty as the vacuum of space, but you didn’t have to be an astronomer to admire Orion’s Belt.
“Like, really think about it?” Levi turned around to look at me, leaning back on the sink in a pose that could only be described as insouciant, forcing me to fix my face into an expression that could only be described as awkward.
I mean, I didn’t know rabbis’ sons could look like that.
He didn’t seem to notice my total lack of chill, because he just kept going. “Like, why hasn’t there been a superhero movie about the golem? Ferocious and holy, inhuman but lonely, called forth to protect the innocent?” He folded his arms across his chest, and my throat went dry. Also, I thought he’d been talking about Gollum from Lord of the Rings. That was not who he meant. I just nodded. This was the most we’d talked in three weeks. “He’s brought to life in times of need, activated by a word pressed into his forehead. Emet.” He pointed at the word behind him. I nodded like I knew that’s what it said. “I mean, how cool is that mythology? Someone at this camp has got to be related to a producer, right?”
“We do control the media,” I told him. “Or the banks? Or we’re all communists. I can never remember.”
He smiled and shook his head, and his braces caught the fluorescent light, and I wondered what it must be like to be a seventeen-year-old with braces and what it would feel like to kiss someone with braces.
“The golem is, like, a guaranteed hit! The Jews need our own Black Panther!”
“I think we’ve got Superman.”
“But imagine if it wasn’t some metaphor, but, like, an actual Jewish myth kicking ass on screen. It’s specific, but universal, right? Did you know that Fiddler on the Roof was one of the biggest international hit musicals ever made? They were worried it was ‘too Jewish,’ and it ended up being huge in India, and it is Jewish AF. We need the twenty-first century’s version, which would absolutely be a superhero franchise and— Sorry.” Levi stopped himself. His cheeks had flushed. The Hebrew words behind him on the mirror misted over. “I have this, like, mission to make Jewish stuff mainstream. Why do you keep looking at your phone?”
I hadn’t noticed that I was, but I was. It was something I did when I got nervous, which I also was. Easier to look down than up sometimes, especially when up meant Levi’s dark brown eyes with their Venus-flytrap lashes.
“Oh, well…I was just…uh…checking on the space station.” I glanced down and saw the updates. Space walk aborted. Egress not optimal. Possible ammonia leak. People were talking about the Challenger explosion and the Columbia explosion and the Apollo 1 fire. Warning of the worst space disaster in decades. Official statement from mission control to come.
“What’s going on with it?”
“Just, um, like…” I didn’t want to geek out too much. “Kind of a crisis? They got hit by space debris? It’s pretty serious? Four different countries have astronauts up there?” Why was everything coming out of my mouth like a question?
“Damn,” Levi said. “It’s like our own Tower of Babel. They keep falling, and we keep building them.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.” He fidgeted with his prayer beads. “I don’t mean to be all theological; I just get like that sometimes. I’ll let you take your shower.”
Now I had a problem. How could I take my shower with Levi, of all people, right there?
When astronauts are faced with a tough situation, they “work the problem” with a decision tree, spelling out each choice in a given scenario and its probable consequences. Right now, on the International Space Station, the multinational crew was likely working through their decision tree, solving one problem at a time until the crisis was over or until they ran out of oxygen.
I found the certainty of decision trees comforting. One formed in my head almost instantly.
No good outcomes, but waiting to wash was definitely the wiser choice.
“Oh man.” I furrowed my brow at my phone. “I forgot I have to get ready for D block science club. No shower for me!”
I was a terrible actor, but it didn’t matter. He’d already turned around to change into his shorts, and I risked one nervous glance as his towel dropped, and I stepped out in the sunlight, sweating more than when I’d gone in.
“Catastrophic failure!” Jackson wailed, or something like that, through his snotty tears. I handed him a Kleenex, told him we didn’t know what was happening and we shouldn’t assume the worst. Although assuming the worst was kind of a Jewish tradition. Assuming the worst was how we’d survived for millennia. I didn’t actually know why we shouldn’t assume the worst, but it felt like something someone wiser would say to a child, so I said it.
It did not comfort him.
“If their life-support system is suffering complete collapse, how is that not a catastrophic failure?” He sniffled. “They’ve sealed almost every section of the station! Can you check the news again? Is SpaceX preparing a rescue? What’s @RogueNASA saying?”
“I just checked,” I told him. “Why don’t we work on our rubber-band sonar?” I pointed at the cool science project I’d planned for that hour, but Jackson had no interest, and three other science kids who’d chosen to spend their afternoon inside with me had more interest in Jackson’s meltdown than my perfectly planned project.
“What if it crashes? What if radioactive compounds explode in the atmosphere?” Jackson’s voice was like a siren, and his tears started the other kids crying, and I wanted to shake the kid and yell at him to get it together. I was the closest thing to an adult in the room, and I needed to either calm him down or get one of the actual adult counselors to help.
“Do you want to call your moms?” I asked him.
“They’re lawyers! How can they help?” he yelled in my face, then collapsed back in his chair, weeping.
“Uh…” I needed to think of something. I hated the uncertainty as much as he did. I pictured Commander Frisch from her Instastory, betraying no worry. What did her face look like now, trapped in a tiny part of the International Space Station with her crew, knowing that millions of people were looking up from the planet below, counting down the minutes until the ISS became her tomb and one of the greatest feats of human engineering, scientific endeavor, and international cooperation died with her. It wasn’t the Tower of Babel; it was a statistically improbable catastrophe that was, nevertheless, not impossible. A problem of physics, not God. Why would Levi have even brought some Torah story into it? And why was I thinking about him right now?
“They’re working the problem like they’ve been trained,” I told Jackson. “If there’s a solution, they’ll find it.”
He looked up at me with big, wet eyes and offered this nugget of tween nihilism: “The astronauts are all going to die!”
“Uh…,” I said again. I was really not great at this, but what did I know about counseling a ten-year-old through the possible death of his heroes?
“Isn’t it great?” A too-cheery voice cut through the room, surprising Jackson out of his meltdown. All our heads snapped to the doorway, where Levi Klein-Behar stood in sunlit silhouette, a six-foot shadow bursting into full color as he charged into the room. His metal smile beamed at us. “Everyone is going to die! You! Me! Our parents! The astronauts!”
“Levi?” I wanted to stop him from making this situation worse. Also, to ask him what he was doing in the Craft Cabin.
“Death is one thing that everyone on Earth has in common,” he said. “It is nothing to be afraid of. It happens to every single person in the world, and no one’s ever come back to complain about it, right? We all do it sometime, and how lucky would these astronauts be if they got to die doing what they loved? If it was my time, I’d want to die while dancing naked in the desert!” The kids giggled nervously, their eyes puffy, but they were curious about this sudden change in the mood of the room. I still gaped at him. He turned to me and winked. “How ’bout you, Josh? How would you want to die?”
“I…um…” They all looked at me, expectant. Jackson’s lip was still quivering, but he was breathing normally again, sniffling and waiting for my answer. Levi wore a smirk now, and I had to meet it. I forced a smile and drenched my voice in cheer, trying to think of something kids liked. “I guess I’d want to die in an explosion at my cotton-candy factory on Mars?”
“How about you, Jackson?” Levi asked, leaning toward him like a co-conspirator.
“I’d want to—” Jackson wiped his nose on his arm, his brow furrowed in thought. Then his face lit up. “I’d want to die because I ate all the pizza in the world and then farted so much it opened a black hole and I fell in!”
The other kids cackled.
“I’d poop a nuclear explosion!” Marie, a quiet eleven-year-old girl, added. “And blow up my sisters, too!”
More laughter. More fart and poop deaths. Levi pulled out some chart paper and decided we’d rank our ways to die, coolest to dullest, and no one brought up the disaster on the ISS again, and pretty soon the hour was over, and it was time for them to go to free swim. They groaned because they wanted to stay and learn about embalming, which Levi promised they could do another day, and when we were alone in the room, I collapsed into a too-small chair, relieved and exhausted and in absolute awe of Levi Klein-Behar.
“That was amazing.”
He shrugged. “Distracting ten-year-olds is my one talent.”
“Oh, you have more talents than that,” I blurted way too quickly and way too loudly. “I mean, like, music and stuff, right?”
Why did I sound like such an idiot when I talked to him? I had fives in AP Physics and Bio, was going to get a five in Chemistry, too. I was so much smarter than “music and stuff.”
“I guess,” he said, which was an understatement. The first Friday night of camp, he had played an original acoustic “The Room Where It Happens” parody—“The Shul Where It Happens”—that had every Hamilton fan at camp, which was basically everyone, rolling in the dirt laughing so hard. An eighth-grade girl peed herself from laughing, and she wasn’t even embarrassed.
“So was Jackson right?” he asked me. “Is it bad up there?” He looked at the ceiling, but he meant “in space.”
“It’s not good,” I said. He waited for me to go on, and I went…and went…and went…“The outside of the space station is covered in pipes to keep the solar panels cool, and they’re filled with ammonia gas, which, if it leaks into space, is harmless, but if the leak is inside the space station, high concentrations of ammonia gas can kill everyone on board in just a few minutes. It seems like some space debris flying at seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour made multiple impacts with the hull of the station, breaching it and the coolant pipes, which forced the crew to seal most of the ship. Normally, they’d put on the space suits and perform a depressurization for controlled breach egress into a shuttle or pod, but they’ve been cut off from their space suits by the breaches, and the atmospheric ammonia levels are rising. SpaceX is prepping Falcon rockets for a rescue, but the mission window isn’t for at least twelve hours, and the crew might not survive that long. Hull breaches and ammonia leaks are two of the ‘big three’ scenarios that are considered the most catastrophic in space. The third is fire, and, because of the system damage, they can’t confirm there isn’t a fire burning somewhere on the station. Fire on Earth is predictable, but combustion events in space burn in every direction. They can’t even place smoke detectors with one hundred percent accuracy. The air could literally catch fire anywhere and burn up and down and sideways. Also, the CO2 levels in the pod where they’re sealed are going up fast, and they’re trying to fix that system, too, while the NH3 levels are rising, and their venting process risks cutting short their breathable air supply. Managing the chemical composition of the crew environment is one of the most challenging aspects of life in space under optimal circumstances, but in the event of catastrophic system failure, managing O2, CO2, and about a dozen other potential hazards under a severe time limit is the kind of challenge that— Sorry.”
I noticed his eyes had glazed over. That happened to people when I got excited about atmospheric chemical management. “I—I know…it’s nerdy. I just—it’s really important, actually. Or, like, I think it is? Most people think it’s just weird….”
“No.” He shook his head. “People with passions are cool.”
“Literally no one thinks this stuff is cool.”
“You do.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure “cool” was how I’d describe it.
“Anyway, cool is overrated,” he added.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Yeah, neither would I.” He leaned on the edge of the wooden table in the middle of the room, one leg crossed over his knee, and I saw his thigh vanish into the shadow of his shorts, which made my eyes dart up to his face like nervous carp avoiding a predator.
“We move around so much, I’m always the new kid,” he said. “And this doesn’t help.” He pointed to his rainbow yarmulke. “I’m not Jewish enough for the Jewish kids, too religious for the other queer kids, and too Jewish for everyone else. Also, I genuinely like spending time with my parents.”
The other queer kids, he’d said. There was a combustion event in my heart. It burned in every direction, sideways and up and down. And down farther. I suddenly hated the treasonous shorts I was wearing.
“So what are you doing here?” I blurted as I adjusted my legs and leaned forward.
“Beatrice sent me over,” he said. “Told me she didn’t need me at play rehearsal, and I could either help out in the science club or senior-camper flag football.”
“Oof, anything to avoid football, right?”
“Something like that.” He flashed his metal-mouth grin, and until then I never thought braces could glimmer. That was the only word I could think of, though. When his lips parted, his mouth glimmered.
“What?” I asked, because he was just staring at me.
“I’m thinking.” He stood and went to the chart paper, tapped my martian-cotton-candy-explosion answer at the absolute bottom of the “cool” list. “What’s your real answer?”
“About death?” Why did he want to talk about death? Was he some kind of undercover goth? “I don’t know. I try not to think about it. What’s yours?”
“This was mine,” he said, tapping his answer just below David Sussman’s crushed inside my mecha by the falling corpse of a Kaiju. “I’d want to die dancing naked in the desert.”
“Why the desert?” I really wanted to ask Why naked? but if I said the word “naked” to him, I felt like I would die then and there in probably the least cool way possible.
“When my parents were living in Uganda, where there are, like, only a few hundred Jews in this cluster of tiny coffee-farmer towns, we needed a break from all that small-town life, and we went over to Kenya to go on a safari. One night, I had to pee, and I slipped out of the tent and wandered off. The guides had told us to stay close to camp because of lions and stuff, but I wandered farther off anyway—I was fifteen and figured nothing could hurt me—and when I got far enough away, there was nothing but me and the noises of the desert and endless stars.”
I was tempted to correct him that he was probably in a savanna, not a desert, but I didn’t want to ruin the story.
“The stars were everywhere, all around me from horizon to horizon. It was like I was bathing in them! So I decided to strip down, like I was in the bath. I stood there, in the desert, totally naked, dancing in circles and waving my arms like I was splashing the stars all around me, and I’d never felt happier in my life. I thought I finally understood what my parents talked about when they talked about God. I even said the Shehecheyanu! You know it?”
“It’s, like, a prayer…uh…for saying thanks?”
“Especially whenever we do something amazing for the first time,” he said, then laughed at himself. “Yeah, so I’m saying the Shehecheyanu, and then there’s this noise in the brush right in front of me. I froze. I couldn’t see anything. It could’ve been a lion. I didn’t know what to do, but the stars were still there and so was I, and if it was a lion, there was no way I could escape…so I just started dancing and singing the Shehecheyanu again. I just danced and chanted until the tiny bird that was in the tall grass flew away. Then I put my clothes on and ran back to camp, laughing the whole way.”
“You could’ve gotten eaten!”
“But I didn’t! And that moment of not knowing was the most in touch with God I’ve ever felt. I think that’s what faith is, you know? Living with the tension of not knowing what happens next. I’d be totally happy to die dancing in that tension, because I think God is actually in that tension. It’s like dancing with God. Like, God is in a lion as much as he’s in the stars, you know?”
I nodded, but I didn’t know. I just didn’t want him to stop talking. I had fallen in love with Levi Klein-Behar at some point while he was talking about how he wanted to die.
“Maybe those astronauts are feeling the same,” he said. “Maybe they’re up there, doing what they love, bathing in the stars, and knowing that they’ve never been closer to God than they are right now, whether they survive or not.”
Someone who was slicker than me might’ve told him that he didn’t believe in God, but did believe in the laws of attraction. Someone who was more clever than me might’ve come up with a poetic story about death of his own. Someone who was braver might’ve stood up and kissed him right then.
But I am who I am, so instead, I said, “I have to get ready for tabletop games,” and stood up so fast I nearly passed out.
“E block doesn’t start for another five minutes,” Levi told me with a puzzled glance at the old-fashioned wall clock.
I leaned on the table while the blood came back to my head. “I need to make sure all the Settlers pieces are sorted. A few of the kids freak out if they’re not.” I started pulling out random boxes, even though none of them were the Settlers of Catan box, just to avoid making eye contact with Levi.
“Got it.” His voice was kind of quiet, and I knew I’d done something wrong, but I didn’t know what. Was saying “freak out” about the gamer kids ableist? Did I offend him? Or did he think I was running away from his God talk? Was I afraid of God or afraid of him?
“I guess I could hang out a minute longer,” I tried. “Those kids can live within the tension of a few missing Settlers pieces, right?” I laughed in what I thought was a polite chortle, but which came out more like a snort and which got no reaction from him. I’d totally ruined our thing, and now he thought I was making fun of him. Crap.
Why couldn’t we just go back to talking about death?
“I should get to the music hut,” he declared, and I felt like an air lock had just closed between us. “It’s free drumming time, which is exactly as horrific as it sounds.”
As he brushed past me through the screen door without looking, I felt all the air rush from my lungs. Should I stop him? Should I say something? Decision-tree time.
No good outcomes.
I stood frozen on the inside of the screen door, staring after him as I tried to work the problem another way, but he turned back and shouted up the steps, “Hey, find me at the dining hall at dinner? I need to know what happens with the astronauts.”
“Oh, okay, yeah.” I tried not to cheer like mission control after a successful splashdown. When he’d gone, I sat in the tiny plastic chair again and dropped my head into my hands, wondering what had just happened. Maybe I hadn’t ruined everything by not being spiritual enough for him. Or maybe he was just being polite? Was he curious about the crisis on the International Space Station…or had I just been asked on my first-ever date? Could it be a date if you had to go to the camp dining hall anyway, whether he asked you there or not?
I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. I would’ve made a decision tree, but the kids burst in for gaming, and I had to scramble to get everything out for them. The hour and a half was a blur. Two of my regulars got in an argument over how many wheats one of them needed to trade in if she didn’t have a dedicated wheat port, and two boys whose names I didn’t remember nearly got into a fistfight over a contentious round of Uno. I was so distracted I completely failed to help a group of kids learn a new game where you tried to grow a forest, and they ended up just playing checkers until the dinner bugle sounded.
Yes, Camp Winatoo has a dinner bugle.
The moment the kids left, I sprinted to the dining hall, then realized I hadn’t checked my phone, so I didn’t actually know anything new to tell Levi when I saw him. I pulled it out of my shorts, and sure enough, the battery had died.
Oh no. Decision-tree time.
Okay, so going back to the bunk was not an option, but I couldn’t stand there outside the dining hall, muttering through a catastrophic decision tree while kids streamed in, all red-faced and loudmouthed from their afternoon activities.
My salvation appeared in Jackson Kimmel, like a rescue launched from Kennedy Space Center. He scuttled up from the lake, mysteriously dry, and I wondered for a moment what deceit he’d come up with to avoid swimming. (I’d always used the journeyman lie “My stomach hurts.”)
“Jackson!” I called him over. “Any news?”
He shook his head. Campers weren’t allowed to use their phones during activities, so of course he didn’t have any news, which meant I didn’t have any news, which left me exactly where I’d been. But I was a counselor! Sort of! I could give him permission to use his phone!
“Sorry,” he said. “I left it in my bunk when I changed for swimming. I was gonna ask you for news.”
“But—” I realized it was as stupid to point out that he hadn’t actually gone swimming as it was to argue with a ten-year-old about how he should have information about a catastrophe unfolding in low Earth orbit so I could flirt with another counselor, who may or may not actually care about said catastrophe or know that when I said depressurization for controlled breach egress, I was actually saying Please let me taste the ChapStick on your lips.
I sighed a little too loudly and promised Jackson I’d find out for him, and decided I had to risk going back to charge my phone, regardless of the probable outcomes. It was the only possible choice that might give me something to say to Levi Klein-Behar. This would be my Hail Mary pass, which was a terrible metaphor for the moment, being so overtly Catholic and so aggressively sportsy. But desperate times called for desperate metaphors.
No one was in the bunk when I got there, thankfully, so no one saw my mad scramble for the one outlet. I plugged the phone in and sat on the edge of Jeff’s bed, which was next to the outlet. Jeff was a college junior, which made him the senior counselor in this bunk, and he hated when campers sat on his bed while they charged their phones, and he considered me nothing more than a glorified camper. He also coached tennis and liked to make snarky comments about me and my “indoor kids,” so I didn’t really care about ruffling his sheets.
It took forever before I had enough power to restart and then a second forever until I got onto Twitter. @GeekHeadNebula had the same message that everyone else seemed to have: media blackout.
No one was allowed to talk to the press, which meant either they didn’t know what was happening, or the worst had happened and they were preparing a grim press conference.
@RogueNASA’s last tweet confirmed that all combustion events were safely contained, but there was no news about the ammonia situation. For all anyone knew, the ISS could be orbiting the globe at 17,150 miles per hour with five dead bodies on board.
“Shit,” I said, and I looked at the crew’s Instagram account again. The most recent post was a still from their last story, Commander Frisch giving the thumbs-up. What if they were already dead? What if they were in the process of dying while I looked at their picture? I hated not knowing. I hated this tension! This wasn’t some beautiful moment of connection to God! This was a bunch of disasters cascading on top of each other, and why did Levi care anyway, and why’d he have to act so interested and screw up my totally mundane day?
I threw the phone down onto Jeff’s bed and cursed again. “Shit shit shit.”
I knew it made no sense to be mad at Levi, but I didn’t know where else to hurl my anger. I didn’t want to go back to the dining hall to eat too-dry mashed potatoes and too-wet mac ’n’ cheese while the astronauts might be dying and killing my chances of kissing Levi with them—and what kind of jerk conflates those two things anyway?—so I just sat there on the edge of Jeff’s bed, listening to the crickets start their chirping while I ground my teeth, hated myself, and regretted that I’d let my first maybe sort-of date hinge on the worst tragedy in modern spaceflight.
I’m not sure how long I sat there bathed in self-loathing. The bunk was my own sealed capsule, hurtling through my own void of a life, where the odds of anything ever happening were even less than the odds of a catastrophic impact with space debris. Nothing ever leaked in or broke out. I was a lonely astronaut, but as long as I stayed in my capsule, I was safe.
“You didn’t come to dinner.”
I sat bolt upright on Jeff’s bed, and there was Levi, clicking his stupid beads while he leaned against the doorframe. He loved leaning on things. He looked so damn good leaning on things. Somehow, night had fallen. Gnats buzzed around him in the puddle of light in the doorway.
I held up my phone on the end of its cord and wiggled it. “Charging,” I said.
“You shouldn’t nourish your technology before you nourish yourself,” he told me, like he was quoting something. Most of what he said sounded like he was quoting something. It was cute before. Now it annoyed me.
“Not sure how nourishing canned green bean casserole is,” I replied. I was proud of myself for how cool I was playing it.
He came into the bunk and bent down in front of me. “You okay?”
“Yeah? What? Why?” I said too fast, and realized by his expression that my eyes were puffy. I’d been crying. So…not playing it that cool.
“Worried about the astronauts?” he asked, and I was ashamed to tell him that that wasn’t exactly it. That I was worried about myself and about how badly I wanted to kiss him and how not badly he wanted to kiss me and how every time I spoke, I’d just make it even less likely. So I just nodded.
He put his hand on my shoulder, and the heat of it nearly ignited me.
“There’s a new plan,” he said, and before he could go further, Jackson burst into the bunk, shouting, a horde of kids following him like a comet’s tail, kids who didn’t normally pay any attention to him.
“They’re coming down!” he yelled. “They’re coming down! They’re coming down!” He repeated it, bouncing, and the quiet bunk was transformed into absolute mayhem as boys shouted over each other. Jackson, in his element for probably the first time in his life, shushed them all, and they actually, shockingly, shushed. “Camp Director Cheryl made an announcement. NASA said that they rigged the crew’s module into a kind of ILV—improvised landing vehicle—and they are going to use that piece of the space station to attempt reentry and splashdown. They think it’ll hold, but they have never tested this scenario. They could suffer complete hull collapse or burn up in the atmosphere, but they decided the risk was worth it because they had no other choices. Their air levels were at critical—”
“Okay, okay, slow down,” I told Jackson. “Breathe.”
“We’re going to be able to see it from the Northern Hemisphere!” he shouted.
“What? The reentry?”
“That’s what Cheryl said,” Levi clarified. “Everyone’s going to the Big Green to watch. We’ll be able to see the lights cross the sky in, like, twenty minutes.”
“If it burns up, it’ll be like the brightest shooting star ever.” Jackson bounced, then remembered he was talking about human beings who might die, and he looked down at his sneakers, ashamed he’d only been thinking about himself. I knew the feeling. “Not that I want that. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “I know what you meant. Let’s go out to the green, then?”
He nodded and bounded off. The other kids followed him, the sciencey ones in the lead for once.
“I hope I didn’t freak you out with all that God and death stuff,” Levi said when we had the bunk to ourselves again. “I can be…intense.”
What was he saying? Had he been worried about me judging him this whole time? “How would you have freaked me out? I’m the one who—”
“Hey! Sheldon!” Jeff crashed into the bunk like a meteor. “Get the hell off my bed or you can’t use my outlet anymore!”
Jeff always called me Sheldon, like from that TV show.
Jeff was a prick.
I grabbed my phone at thirty-eight percent and stood up. Levi and I rolled our eyes in unison.
“Follow me,” Levi said as he led me outside, where we slipped around to the back of the cabin. He grabbed the window frame and started to climb the wooden lattice to the cabin’s roof. “Come on. We won’t have to smell all the Axe on the Big Green.”
“But won’t they wonder where we are?” I kept both feet on the ground.
“We’re indoor kids at a sports camp,” Levi answered. “No one ever wonders where we are.”
He was right about that, but the cabin was not made for climbing, and he was already halfway up. I wanted to follow him, and I was terrified to follow him.
Time to work the problem.
Decision-tree ti—
“Come on!” He thrust his hand down to help me.
There was no decision to be made.
I climbed.
When I reached the top, I sat down on the sloped roof, my feet tingling even though we weren’t really that high up. I pressed my hands against the wooden shingles, as if my palms could hold me if I fell.
“Relax,” Levi said, standing with arms open. “Look up.”
“I am relaxed,” I told him, keeping my butt firmly against the shingles. “It’s just, sometimes relaxing means keeping a low center of gravity to keep myself from plummeting to my death and— Whoa.”
I’d looked up.
I loved looking at the stars and always had. That was nothing new. I could name the constellations and explain why the planets burned in different colors, and, if he wanted, I could tell Levi all about the Doppler effect and the expansion of space, the nature of black holes and the firewall paradox and on and on like a wannabe Carl Sagan. The stars were not why I’d whoa’d.
I’d whoa’d because I’d looked up at him. It really did look like he was bathing in the stars.
“Stand up,” he urged me, extending his hand one more time. I took it and let him help me to stand and keep me steady, and I looked at the stars surrounding us.
“I am not dancing up here,” I told him.
“We’re all dancing up here,” he said, which meant nothing, but he still hadn’t let go of my hand, and he was smiling and his braces glimmered like a mouthful of stars, so it didn’t matter that half of what he said was nonsense. It was beautiful nonsense. “Is that it?” He pointed at a dot of light moving fast toward the horizon.
“No, that’s a satellite,” I said.
“How about that?”
“That’s Venus,” I laughed. “It’s not moving.”
“Where is it, then?”
“Well…” I tried to focus on the sky, even though every part of my brain was in the space where our fingers had intertwined, and I was sure he could feel my pulse racing in my hand, but if he could, he didn’t seem to mind, because he hadn’t let go, and when my weight shifted, he held my hand tighter. “I don’t think we’ll be able to miss it.”
“How’ll we know if they’ll make it without burning up?”
“We won’t, I guess,” I said, scanning the night sky for movement. “We’ll just have to live within that tension.”
He squeezed my hand when I quoted him back at himself, and I don’t know if God lived in between the stars and the astronauts or the lion and its prey, like he said, but I felt like there was a supernova in the spot where our palms pressed together, and I’ll probably never know what a space station careening through the atmosphere looks like, because I wasn’t looking up anymore. I was looking at him and smiling, and he was smiling back at me, and his braces were gleaming like starlight, and he whispered, “Shehecheyanu,” and I leaned forward, and I pressed my lips against his stars.