The next day, I was eating lunch in the library again, but this time it was different.
This time Talia was eating lunch with me.
We were lounging in the beanbag chairs by the magazine section. Talia’s mom had sent her with a big Tupperware of rice with chicken and pineapple and a sweet sauce that smelled so good it made me shiver.
“Your mom seems like a really good cook,” I said as I ate my peanut butter banana sandwich.
“Yeah,” Talia said.
“My mom owns a bakery. We should do a combo dinner sometime.”
I was scared that somehow that would be the wrong thing to say, but Talia said, “My mom could do pork. Does your mom make coconut cream pie?”
“The best.”
We both turned back to the open notebooks on our lap. I’d gotten better at remembering about Silent Questions, and earlier that day I’d figured out something new about Talia. We were both writers. At least kind of.
“How’s it going?” I asked her.
She groaned. “I hate sonnets,” she said.
Talia had signed up for the Creative Writing elective. She told me she was really excited about it at first, but that they were just doing boring stuff like essays and descriptive paragraphs. And sonnets.
“I keep trying to tell Mr. Gradey that rap counts. That Logic is poetry. But he won’t listen.”
I looked down at my notebook. I had a good chunk of my letter written, about how Cecilia had influenced the world, but I couldn’t figure out how the letter should start. I wanted the first paragraph, even the first sentence, to be so wham-bam amazing that they would have to give it the grand prize.
“How’s yours coming?” she asked.
“I thought I knew what to say, but it’s harder than I thought,” I said.
“What’s yours for again?”
I cleared my throat. She’d liked my other plan, my sandy-locker plan, but I didn’t know what she’d think about Cecilia Payne.
“It’s for this contest at the Smithsonian. Ms. Trepky told us about it once, on the day you came. They’re making a new Women in STEM exhibit, and you do a project to teach people about a woman scientist you think people should know about, and then you write a letter about it and submit it, and the winner gets twenty-five thousand dollars.”
Talia choked on the piece of chicken she was eating. “Twenty-five thousand dollars?”
“I know.”
“Dude. You’ve gotta win this.”
“I know. Then I could use the money to help my sister when her husband is looking for a better job.”
I said it without thinking, and then right away wondered if this was one of those wrong things to say. One of those times when what I thought or said was strange or weird, and I didn’t know it until afterward, when people gave me funny looks. I’d keep the Universe Deal to myself, but now Talia knew why I wanted that money, and I had no idea if she’d think I was being naive or dumb or silly.
But she didn’t. She nodded, looking thoughtful and focused, if I was reading her face right. “Who are you writing about?” she asked.
“Mine’s about … well, there’s this woman—her name is Cecilia—and she was a professor at Harvard a long time ago and she figured out what stars are made of. Like the chemicals and stuff. Then another professor sort of took credit. It’s a little complicated. But anyway, she’s not in our textbook. And I think she should be.”
Talia leaned back in her beanbag. “She figured out all that about stars, and she’s not in our textbook? That’s dumb.”
“Exactly!” I said.
She looked up at the ceiling for a minute, her long dark hair billowing around her face like a cloud of thought.
“Start simple,” she said. “Say, ‘Listen, I may be a young girl, but I’m writing to you about something very important.’”
I paused, my pencil held above the paper. “Hey, that’s really good.” I scribbled the words down before they left my brain. I’d type everything out nice and neat later.
She sighed again. “And yet I can’t come up with a freaking thing to say about … what did he call it? ‘Petrarchan love.’ I don’t know what to say about some dead white dude.”
“Hey,” I said. “That’s what your sonnet should be called.”
“What?”
“‘Some Dead White Dude.’”
Talia laughed so hard she snorted. “Oh man, Mr. Gradey won’t like that very much. I’ll do it.”
She crossed out a few lines she’d written and wrote “Some Dead White Dude” in big letters. I hoped I wasn’t getting her in trouble again. My dad says it’s important to be a Good Influence Friend, and I couldn’t tell if I was being one or not.
But by the end of lunch, she had her poem written.
And by the end of lunch, I had my letter.