Here is what I know about Cecilia Payne:
That meant she was the perfect person to use for both my second-semester class project and the Smithsonian contest. A small, whiny voice in my head kept trying to remind me that I was competing with high school juniors and seniors for that grand prize. That didn’t scare me for too long, though, because I knew I would work harder than anyone. I’d write the best letter the Smithsonian people had ever read, and not just for a seventh grader. Then Nonny and Thomas and the new baby would be set. Then, after all these years of Mom and Dad and Nonny helping me, I’d actually be able to give something back. Something great.
If I was going to use Cecilia for my letter, though, and do the most amazing awareness project the Smithsonian had ever seen, there was more to learn. I wanted to test out an idea before moving on to this semester’s person.
I flipped open my computer, tapping my toe on the floor out of habit. I put my cup of green grapes next to the computer on my desk. Tippity-tap on the keyboard and pretty soon I was on the Harvard website. Maybe Cecilia wasn’t in my textbook, but after hearing about her on the documentary, I wondered what Harvard had to say. I typed in her name in the Harvard website search bar.
Boom. A whole special astronomy lecture series named after Cecilia. That seemed pretty nice of the Harvard people.
I kept looking. I clicked around and found the list of people who have been Astronomy Department chairs at Harvard. And guess what I found out.
There have been seventeen Astronomy Department chairs at Harvard.
Sixteen of them are men.
I think that makes Cecilia even more special.
The Astronomy Department chairs seem like cool guys. I mean, anybody who studies astronomy for their job has to be pretty cool, right? I wondered, though, if more girls would want to study the stars if they knew about Cecilia.
One thing about me—I’ve had to stay home sick from school a little more often than other girls, but I think it’s worth it if it means watching documentaries about the world and the super-cool people in it. Turner syndrome meant I had a higher number of ear infections than most kids and an immune system whose only defense weapon seemed to be a squirt gun, but that was okay. Knowing Cecilia was worth a little flu, any day.
I liked learning and teaching myself cool medical stuff, too, probably because I spend so much time around doctors. Most of that stuff is fascinating, and very good to know. A few things, though, are not so good.
Like how sometimes when a baby is ready to be born, it isn’t facing the right way, and the baby and the mommy can get really hurt. Maybe even die. That is called breech.
Like how sometimes a baby gets born much, much too early, and it’s like taking muffins out of the oven when they’re still soupy goopy dough, except with a baby it’s things like their heart and lungs and brain that aren’t ready. That is called premature.
Like how sometimes if the mom’s body can tell that there is something wrong with the baby, something like a missing chromosome, it will get rid of the baby on its own. Whether the mom wants to or not. That’s that scary word again: miscarriage.
Now that there was an actual new baby coming into the family, I couldn’t get those things out of my head. I was lying on my bed thinking about my letter and everything I knew about pregnancy and looking at the posters on my wall, and I think that’s what gave me the idea.
Everything was converging, and Cecilia was in the middle of it.
It was time for a Universe Deal. The most important deal I’d ever make.
There are two posters next to my bed. One is of the muscles in the human body. Those are much harder to memorize than bones. The other poster is of the Milky Way.
I could hear Mom and Nonny in the kitchen down the hall, laughing about something. The whole time she’d been here we’d never stopped talking about the baby. She finds out next month if it’s a boy or a girl. She and Thomas haven’t decided on names yet.
I knew exactly who could help. Cecilia wasn’t a biologist, but she took something beautiful and mysterious and figured out each of the beautiful and mysterious things that went into it, and isn’t creating a new person the exact same thing? If there was someone on the other side—someone in the afterlife—who could figure out how to keep Nonny’s baby perfectly healthy and perfectly safe, maybe it was her. Plus, Cecilia had had kids. Three of them. She knows what it’s like.
I knew Cecilia could help me, because the woman who figured out what stars are made of had to be one of the smartest women in the world. She was there in the middle of both of my Big Questions, my answer and my solution to helping Nonny with both her financial black hole and with being sure of a safe, healthy baby.
I walked to my window and looked out at the sky that was still bright and clear and blue. Remember that old song from the movie Pinocchio? About wishing on stars? Did you ever wonder where the idea of wishing on stars came from? I looked it up once, and it goes back a long time. A way long time. So it went like this—way back in ancient Greece there was this guy Ptolemy. He wrote about how sometimes the gods got bored doing their normal, godly things and sometimes they would look down from the heavens onto the human, mortal world. And sometimes when they did that, a star would accidentally get knocked loose. So when you saw a shooting star it meant they were looking down on you. It meant they were listening and might possibly grant you your wish.
In the middle of the afternoon I couldn’t see any stars, especially shooting stars, but I knew they were there.
Here’s what I’m asking for, Cecilia Payne, I thought.
No complications.
No defects.
No missing chromosomes. No extra chromosomes. No syndromes.
I knew Universe Deals went two ways, and I knew I needed to do something for Cecilia Payne, too. Do something important for her, so she could do something important for me. The most important. It would be like putting something good into the stirring soup of the universe until it swirled and swirled its way back to you. Before, when I made the deal with Rosalind Franklin, I used the papier-mâché projects we were doing in art class. I sculpted a tall, spiraling ladder of DNA. It turned out sort of flaky and droopy, despite working my absolute hardest on it, but I painted Rosalind’s name a bunch of times on the inside, like she was holding up the whole thing. And she did. Mom got better.
So what about this time? My history book was at the foot of my bed, open to the page on Eleanor Roosevelt. I’d picked her for my first-semester presentation because I couldn’t get that quote that Ms. Trepky had said out of my head, and when I really looked at pictures of Eleanor she seemed a bit odd-looking, just a little, and that made me want to know more about her. I was glad she was in my textbook, so lots of other odd-looking girls could read about her.
That was what I could do for Cecilia, I thought.
And that was what I could do for my Smithsonian Women in STEM contest project.
I will get you in my textbook, I told Cecilia.
What better way to teach people about Cecilia and raise awareness of her work? Ms. Trepky would help me. The contest deadline and the baby’s due date were right next to each other, practically on the same day, so if this idea worked it would be like the planets aligning, each one reflecting its light toward us at the same time. I’d get Cecilia into the textbook, then win the Smithsonian grand prize.
That is my promise.
I didn’t say it out loud, at least not yet, but that is the promise I made in my head to Cecilia Payne, PhD.
That is the wish I made.
I made the promise, and then my hands felt cold. Seniors had a lot more writing practice than I did, and writing a letter as good as the letters they might write wouldn’t be easy. Plus, I didn’t even know who made textbooks. Can you call the textbook people? Are there textbook people?
I would have to find out.
Because what if the baby was hurt or sick? What if Nonny got hurt? What if …
No, I wasn’t even going to think about that. Because I would write the best letter, write it over and over again until it sparkled so bright they couldn’t ignore it. They’d read it and see what I saw about Cecilia. And in return Cecilia would make sure Nonny and her baby were fine.
They had to.
Give Nonny a perfect baby, I wished with every nucleus of every cell in my body. A safe, healthy, undamaged baby, I wished on every shooting star I or Cecilia might ever have seen, and I bet she saw a lot.
And we will start learning about the woman who discovered what stars are made of.