“Cal, wait!” Leon shouts down the hall.
My muscles are tight; my entire body curls up to protect myself. To protect my chest, my heart right now.
He catches up to me as I’m about to call for an elevator. When he grabs my shoulder, I flip back toward him. The movement stuns him, and I observe his shocked face as he takes in my hurt.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t … I don’t know what happened.”
“We kissed. You thought it was a mistake. I panicked. Look, if you’re still figuring things out and kissing another boy is such a shattering hyper big deal to you, call me later. I wish you luck, but I can’t deal with that. Or, if you just don’t actually like me, and I’m not the person you’d like to be kissing, let me know. Preferably not right after a makeout session, but I’d love a heads-up.”
“Cal, no. I mean, it’s more complicated than that.”
“I don’t want someone who’s half in, half out. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t need a ring or a relationship or any commitment. But I can’t help you accept me. I can’t help you accept yourself.”
He grips both of my shoulders. “What’s wrong?”
And that shuts me up.
“Cal, I’m sorry. Talk to me.”
“I’ve done it before, and it broke me,” I said. “I dumped my ex-girlfriend because I kissed this guy I was really into. But I saw regret in his eyes every single time we kissed. I can’t deal with that again.”
He considers me for a moment. And he leans in and plants a kiss on my lips. Everything feels instantly better, and I hate myself and him for the reaction. I push him off me softly, gently, and ignore the tears coming to my eyes.
“If I don’t get to kiss you when you’re sad, you can’t do it to me.”
“I’m not kissing you because you’re sad. I’m kissing you to show you that I like you. See? No regret. It takes me a while to process my feelings, sure, but please, trust me.”
We kiss again, and I nearly push him into the wall. Even in Brooklyn, I’ve never been so public with my feelings. They’ve never been this intense.
My chest is raw with panic. And the reason I stormed out settles with me.
“You scare me.” I consider my words. “I scare myself, I mean. These feelings aren’t normal. It’s too fast. This is not normal for me.”
“You’re right. It’s so fast, it’s not normal. But there’s also a part of me that likes this new version of normal.”
I feel the same way. I don’t say it out loud, because I hate how the words feel, boiling in my stomach. My face is flushed. And I’m supposed to go back to normal now, to find some nerds to interview and cab home like everything is totally average, but I don’t know how.
We walk in silence to the elevator, down to the second floor, and through the halls to find our first interviewee. We follow Donna’s instructions—which came in the form of a rushed, typo-laden text—and approach Brendan, the guy who helped us move into our new house.
“Hey, man,” he says. “Nice to see you again. Are you all settled in the new place?”
“More or less. So, did Donna brief you on what I’m here to do?” I ask.
He chuckles. “Per usual, that scatterbrain barely gave me any info, so I had to look up your FlashFame. I watched some of your videos, and I think I get what you want. But … are you sure anyone will care?”
I’m not sure of anything, I think, but that’s never stopped me before.
“We won’t know until we try.”
I take some deep breaths to get the oxygen in my blood. I crack my neck, stretch my arms, and out of the corner of my eye, I see Leon’s smile widen. When I make eye contact, he clamps his mouth shut.
He bursts out in laughter. “You really have a process, don’t you?”
“Just … let me do my thing,” I say, rolling my eyes. “Brendan, get ready, I’m going live. Leon, I’ll hand the phone off to you after my intro. Ready? And … we’re go.”
Tagging the video as being hosted live from the NASA Johnson Space Center made the viewer count spike, counting up from three- to four- to five-digit numbers.
“Heya,” I say into the camera. “Today, we’re going to have a special interview with a scientist here at the space center, Brendan Stein. I’m passing my phone off to the very famous Leon Tucker.” I reverse the phone’s camera. “Say hi!”
He ducks out of the frame immediately, causing Brendan to laugh. As I hand over my phone to a bitter Leon, I whisper, “That’s what you get for making fun of my process.”
He smirks, and sizes us up in the frame. We’re both sitting on stools, with the bright white of the NASA research lab at our backs.
“So, we spoke earlier,” I say, “and you were saying you play in the dirt for a living?”
“Ha, you could say that,” he says with a shrug. “If all goes to plan, one day we’ll be running tests on different types of Martian soil, right here in the room behind me. Actually, here.” He jumps up, and I follow him to a table with a thin, sealed glass cylinder. “Okay, Leon, can you zoom in on this? So you see here, one of our geoscientists is working on a sample from Earth. This tube of sediment was drilled and taken from six to six and a half feet underground. As you can see, the bedrock is a marbled red color all the way through, except for this inch-long solid gray line that runs right through it.”
As the camera focuses on the sediment, I lean back to see how many people are watching live. I blink hard, just to make sure I’m reading it right—but it’s right there, over seventy-five thousand people are watching Brendan talk, and that number’s only growing.
And he thought no one cared about dirt?
“This is a layer of ash from a volcanic eruption about seven thousand years ago, and where the sediment gets darker and more compact, this line down here, implies there was some sort of extended flooding. If we can get a few samples from Mars, there’s so much more we can learn about the planet’s past, present, and future.”
His eyes brighten at the camera, and a feeling stirs inside me. The same sort of passion that swept through me during Mark Bannon’s speech. It’s what drives me, and it’s why I want to be—why I am—a journalist.
I join Brendan again. “And all these tests are in preparation for soil that we won’t get for years?”
“By the time Martian soil enters our atmosphere, we want to know exactly how we’re testing it. We’ll jump right in, and we’ll start to know right away what Mars is truly capable of.” He laughs. “I know it sounds strange, but Mars could be an integral part of Earth’s future, one way or another.”
He takes us on the tour of the lab, stopping at other similar stations and pointing out infrared tests, pH testing, and more. At each station is a MacBook and a notepad, all of which seem to contain the exact steps to test the soil. Before I know it, thirty minutes have passed and my channel has found a few thousand new followers.
I gesture for Brendan to wrap it up. There’s no doubt my fans would let him talk for an hour if he wanted, but I always like to leave them wanting more. Not so much they feel like I’m teasing them, but just enough to keep them on the hook.
“Looks like we’re out of time.” He laughs and winks at the phone. “And just as I was about to show you the really cool equipment.”
“That was wild,” I say to Brendan after we sign off. “I thought it’d be a five- or ten-minute thing, but we had about three hundred thousand people watching live the whole time. Barely anyone dropped off! Just leave me a comment if you want me to tag you in the video.”
“Thanks. God, that felt good. I know it was just me talking to an iPhone, but it really felt like someone was listening to us. The media folks keep batting down our press releases. I don’t want to blame StarWatch, but …”
“Maybe we could change that,” Leon says, and the three of us share a silent nod.
“But anyway,” Brendan continues, “I’ll share your video with my colleagues, and I’ll download the app and see if I can figure it out. God, I’m twenty-five and I already can’t keep up with technology.”
As Brendan takes us to the cafeteria to meet back up with Donna, I ask him, “Do you think you’d ever post more videos? If NASA’s batting down your announcements, why don’t you just put them out on your own?”
“If you asked me yesterday, I’d have laughed in your face, but that was fun … I think I might try. How do you even build a following, though?”
I shrug. “Just have to keep putting content out there that your followers like. I’ll tag you and tell people to go to your page for more updates. Let’s see if that does anything.”
“Well, this is where we say our goodbyes,” he says as he passes us back to Donna.
We pace away, and I notice Donna’s a little more erratic than normal. She seems frazzled, her face flushed and hair disheveled.
“Sorry, kids. I just had … a hard interview, let’s just call it that.”
Once she calms down, she talks to us about their social media campaigns. I’m somewhat interested, because it seems like a cool job, but I’m too zapped of energy from the interview to respond much.
“The fact of the matter is, we’re funded by Congress. If we don’t have public interest, we don’t have a program. But StarWatch thinks people only care about drama, reality TV, that stuff. And then you came along. I’ve said this the whole time, Cal, but I think you’re going to do wonders for this program. Keep doing these videos.” She grabs my wrist, and our eyes meet. “Show everyone what this program is really about.”
When the cab gets to my house, I squeeze Leon’s hand before leaving.
“Thank you for, you know.” I pull in a shallow breath to still the butterflies in my chest. “It was really … nice.”
He lifts my chin and looks into my eyes. “See you soon?”
I lean in and plant a kiss on his lips. (In a cab. In Texas!) There’s something gratifying about kissing someone goodbye. Just having someone to kiss goodbye is special, and I hope I never take him for granted.
When our lips pull apart, he smiles, and I taste his breath one last time before I get out of the car.
The steps I take to my new home are lighter somehow. And I feel the city life peeling off me like cicada skin.
When I get into the house, I see Mom curled up on the couch with a too-thick blanket and her Nintendo DS. The air-conditioning is on full blast, but she’d spend her whole life under a blanket if she could. I know better than to mess up her postwork self-care ritual, so I give her a quick “hey” and slide into my room.
Mom’s anxiety has always been present, even with her therapy appointments and an assortment of low-dosage medication. She’ll leave parties early, and traveling and traffic give her a bit of panic, but she manages.
One hour of quiet time each day is her goal. Time for her. Even Dad respects that, regardless of the fights they might get in and the yelling that probably counteracts all her meditation.
No sooner do I have my headphones on and a new tape in when Mom peeks in my room. From this far away, she seems at peace. She stares at me, pleasantly, from across the room, so I return an awkward smile.
“Want to grab dinner tonight? I don’t feel like cooking, and there’s nothing in the house. Plus, your dad won’t be back until late tonight—they’re starting flight tests, or something like that.”
“Just like that? On the first day?”
I’m used to Dad not being home some nights, or getting home incredibly late. He was an airline pilot, after all. But being late because he’s stuck in Colorado because of a blizzard makes a lot more sense than this.
She shrugs. “We should probably get used to it. You know your father won’t say no to anything, especially not so soon. It’ll be worse if he gets put on that mission, god forbid.”
I agree to dinner and suggest a Tex-Mex place Leon told me about while we were chugging champagne. She smiles at that and bounds out of the room. If she’s happy, and Dad’s happy, and I can still do my videos …
Maybe Clear Lake won’t be so bad.
Shooting Stars
Season 2; Episode 7
In this episode of Shooting Stars, astronaut Mark Bannon sits down with host Josh Farrow to discuss the new candidates, as well as his future in the Orpheus missions. (New episode airs 6/17/2020)
“My man Josh, how are you?”
“Astronaut Mark Bannon. We’re so glad to have you with us again. For those of you just joining, welcome to Shooting Stars. We’ve got an exclusive with Mark Bannon tonight. Last time we had a one-on-one was … I think it was back in Florida, last season.”
“Ah, right. The Orpheus IV launch. Thinking back, did I come off as nervous? Because I was a wreck that whole week. You know, if IV wasn’t such a clear success, I don’t think we’d have Orpheus V on the horizon at all. It was the Apollo 7 to our Apollo 11—one mistake and we’d all be unemployed right about now.”
“That’s true, Mark. Last season had such a different tone, don’t you think? This was just after Grace Tucker was brought on, just before the Senate pushed through funding to, presumably, get us to Mars. But back then, we simply didn’t know if the people were going to want to invest in the future of spaceflight.”
“You know, you’re right. It’s good to look back on some of those old interviews. You really came in and ramped up interest in the program, Josh. I don’t know where we’d be without you.”
“We found it to be a really interesting opportunity, if you don’t mind my honesty. We saw it as a way to bring the country together. To rekindle that patriotism we’ve been missing in the past few years. Our viewers might not know; it was one of the first truly bipartisan issues since the midterms—one that a very polarized Congress didn’t know how to act on, with the party lines looking jagged.”
“Indeed. So they turned to the voters, who called in droves, demanding the funds be set aside to complete the Orpheus project. And that’s why we of the Orpheus Twenty are able to get us closer and closer to Mars every day.”
“So let’s talk about the new recruits. You’ve been working with them for a full week now—any stars among the pack?”
“Do you know how many thousands of applicants they get? They’re all stars.”
“Then let me ask the more devious question, Mark, but the one that’s most asked by our faithful viewers. We’ve been going back and forth on whether you or Grace Tucker would be taking the lead on Orpheus V. Well, now we’ve got another jet pilot in the ranks. Could Calvin Lewis Sr. be a threat?”
“We’ve been in flight tests all week, and I’m not lying when I say I’m proud to work with such brilliant pilots. But let me set one thing straight. This isn’t a competition. There aren’t threats. This isn’t 1968. Orpheus V will most likely go to me or Grace because we know the ship the best, but that has nothing to do with skill. We all have the skill. Think of Orpheus VI. Orpheus VII. Those endeavors will need pilots too, and NASA’s going to match up the best person for each job, just like they carefully select every other scientist. Look, I’ll level with you: I think you guys at StarWatch do a whole lot of good, I’ll be the first one to say it, but this isn’t a reality competition. The stakes are high enough—it doesn’t get any more real than life or death. We’re all just glad to do our part.”
“I understand. Hopefully our viewers do too.”