“Farah! Farah!” Shirin had thrown open the door of the room next to hers.
Hugo stayed on the other side of the hallway, as far from Farah’s room as he could get, but Alma peeked around Shirin. She was curious about the big sister who said high school was better than middle school and who was—ugh!—too cool to hang out with Shirin now.
Farah was like an older version of Shirin, but with makeup, and hair that fell in loose, flowing waves. She looked incredibly sophisticated and pretty, stretched out on her bed with a textbook open in front of her. She didn’t look like someone who would have trouble fitting in anywhere. Alma backed away from the door, feeling suddenly as awkward as Hugo.
“Where’s my telescope, Farah?” Shirin demanded.
“Get out, Shir!” her sister yelled, throwing a pillow.
Shirin blocked it with the door. “Is it in there? Let me come look!”
“No way!” Farah said. “Last time you were in here you shattered my lamp and pulled my shelves off the wall, remember?”
“I only pulled down the shelves because I was falling!” Shirin protested.
“Yeah, exactly,” Farah said. “You were falling. You always fall.” Shirin opened her mouth to shriek something back, but Farah cut her off. “It’s not in here, Shir! I promise. Why don’t you check the tower?”
Shirin wrinkled her nose, then stomped off down the hall. Alma was eager to climb to the top of the window-wrapped tower she’d seen from the outside of the house, but before she followed, she peered through the door one last time. Farah was smiling after her little sister, and when she saw Alma, she smiled at her too.
Alma gave a little wave and then hurried after Shirin. She felt, strangely enough, the way she had after talking to James last night—as if someone who had seemed far away was actually quite close.
Shirin took them to a set of winding stairs that led to the tower. At the top there was a round room so tiny that Alma could almost touch both sides if she stretched her arms out. Curved windows took up much of the wall space. It was stuffy and crowded, and it was the most wonderful place Alma had ever seen.
“I’ve always wanted a tower,” she said. “Was it built for stargazing?”
“Probably not,” Shirin replied. “But that’s why my mom liked it. It made her think of her mother, my grandmother, who actually studied astronomy in Iran—that’s where she was born. She was like super brilliant. And Persians used to be really into astronomy. Still are, actually.”
“Fascinating fact,” Hugo said, “some of the earliest and most well-known astronomical texts were written by ancient Persians.”
Shirin’s telescope was nowhere to be found, and the moon had already set, which was something Hugo had to explain; Alma hadn’t realized that the moon didn’t rise at sunset and set at sunrise. He was able to show them Venus in the just-fading sunlight. Venus, he told them, was known as both the evening and the morning star, despite actually being a planet.
“Betelgeuse—that’s a star—will probably be the next supernova visible to the naked eye,” Hugo told them. “We’d be able to see the explosion, even in the daylight.”
“Will it happen soon?” Alma asked, pressing her nose to a windowpane. “Can we watch it?”
“Maybe tonight,” Hugo said. Alma and Shirin gasped until he continued, “But maybe not for a million years.”
“Very helpful, Hugo,” Shirin said, rolling her eyes.
“Why,” Alma wondered, “can’t we see the supernova I saw, then? The one that knocked into the Starling and made her a runaway star?”
“If I may propose a very unscientific hypothesis,” Hugo said. “When we look at the stars, we are looking into the past. Space is inconceivably immense, and light can only move, well, at the speed of light. Even light from our sun takes eight minutes and twenty seconds to reach us. So by the time light from a very distant supernova reaches us, the actual supernova event is far in the past. The quintescope, however, appears to show us what is happening right now.”
“We see things in real time through the quintescope,” Alma said slowly, trying to understand. “No matter how far away. But how?”
“How did the Starling fall to Earth so rapidly? How is there a Starling at all? Why do some elements on Earth seem to light up like fireworks? I don’t know.” He gave a jerky shrug. “But that is why I like astronomy so much. Because there’s so much we don’t know. And because everything comes from the stars.”
Shirin was spinning slowly in a circle, her gaze taking in the panorama of sky. “As amazing as that is, if everything is from the stars,” she said, “then everything is the same. Nothing is extraordinary or magical or mysterious or anything like that.”
“Logically,” Hugo said, “you are correct, Shirin. If everything is extraordinary, then nothing really is.”
Alma thought about what she had seen through her quintescope on that first night. She thought of the brilliant light bursting forward, propelling stardust into a universe that was so intricate, so vast, so unfathomable. Somehow, being a part of that made her feel both insignificant and wondrous. It made her feel connected and the same but also separate, also marvelously different.
“Or,” Alma said, “everything really is. Everything really and truly is extraordinary.”
Alma, made of elements, watched Venus shining up there, a planet made of elements. She was connected to the stars. She was connected to the earth. And to water and air and fire. And to her friends and to her family and to everything that surrounded her, in Old Haven, her old home, and here in Four Points, a place that was finally beginning to feel like home too.
She was connected, and she was also herself, with Alma-ness inside her and many somethings that could be done, somethings that only she could do.
There was magic in that, magic and a deep mystery.