“Okay, before we go in, there are a few rules you have to follow.” I stood at the edge of the woods facing Tripp and Priya. “No running or jumping or wrestling or throwing your shoes or dive-bombing or sword fighting with sticks or anything else that might involve throwing things into the air. No loud talking. No singing songs about burps. Or singing songs in burp language. You have to act normal around Huey. Cash won’t put up with any …” I reached for the right words, but realized the best word was, “anything. Cash won’t put up with anything. Got it?”
Priya nodded and Tripp saluted me.
“You sure this is safe?” Priya asked, her hands buried in the sleeping bag she’d brought along. She eyeballed the darkness surrounding us.
“Aha!” Tripp yelled pointing in her face. “Who’s not so sure about the zombie thing now, huh?”
Priya swiped at his finger and he whipped it away and right into a tree trunk. He sucked on it. “I am totally sure we are not going to be attacked by zombies, Tripp. I’m more worried that you’re going to tear down the whole forest on top of us. Watch where you’re—”
But it was too late. Tripp, walking backward and nursing his finger, tripped over a tree root. But to our surprise, he didn’t fall. Instead, he pivoted on one toe, stretched his arms to the side, did a graceful leap, and landed, his heels together, his hands clasped at his left hip.
“Did that really just happen?” I asked.
“What was that?” Priya asked at exactly the same time.
Tripp looked sheepish. “What?”
“You didn’t fall,” Priya said. “Something is up. First you’re riding a bike, and now you’re leaping over tree stumps and not falling?”
“And standing funny,” I added.
“Nothing is up. I just got lucky,” Tripp said, and almost to prove his point, he turned and walked face-first into a poison ivy plant that was growing up the side of the tree.
“No problem, guys,” he said brightly. “I’ve fallen into poison ivy so many times, the doctor says I’m immune to it now.”
Priya and I exchanged skeptical glances. “Come on,” I said, “we’re almost there.”
Cash was already there waiting for us. I could see the flashing spotlight before we were even all the way out of the woods.
“Don’t touch anything,” I reminded Tripp as we hiked to the top of the hill. But Tripp was busy saying, “Whoooa,” the same way I had said it when I first came to the hill. Even Priya seemed to be mesmerized. She clutched her sleeping bag under one arm and trotted to the top of the hill, gazing skyward.
“It’s so beautiful up here, Arty,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said proudly, as if I (1) had made space beautiful myself, and (2) had discovered the hill, neither of which I’d actually done.
We spread out Priya’s sleeping bag, and Cash enthralled them both by letting them peer through the telescope at the various constellations and nebulae he pointed out. We sat on our blankets and talked about Huey, about his purpose and our plans to be the first astronauts (yes, I knew I was lumping myself in with an actual astronaut, but I was sort of in the moment) to discover life on Mars.
After a while, we turned off Huey to lie on our backs across the blankets. Just looking, just talking, just telling star stories and pointing to things nobody else could follow.
“The moon is so huge from up here,” Priya said. “It almost feels like you can reach up and touch it.” She held her hands straight up into the sky, her bracelets clanking to her elbow. “Our science teacher told us that the moon was once part of Earth. She said it was knocked off in a crash. Weird to think we’re looking at more Earth up there.”
“I’ve heard that,” I said, pulling myself up on an elbow so I was facing her. “Some scientists think another planet smacked into us and fused together with us, and the stuff that was knocked off in the impact gathered together to become the moon. They say the rocks on the moon have identical oxygen levels as we do here. They called it the um … the um …”
“The giant impact theory,” Cash intoned.
“The giant impact theory,” we all repeated at the same time.
“What I think is cool is the way the pieces that were knocked off found each other and came back together to form the moon,” I said.
Priya raised her eyes to meet mine. “It’s, like, even being scattered about couldn’t make it forget who it really was. Maybe someday it will find its way back to Earth and become whole again.”
Nah, it’s actually moving away from Earth, I wanted to tell her, but something tickling the backs of my ears made me think she wasn’t really talking about the moon anymore, so I didn’t say it, even though I wasn’t entirely sure I knew exactly what she was talking about.
“So what happened to the people who were on the parts that got knocked off?” Tripp asked.
“It was billions of years ago,” Cash said. “No people.”
“How do we know?” Tripp asked. “Could have been billion-year-old people on that thing, minding their own business, sitting around in their tightie whities, playing their Xboxes, drinking a soda, whatever, and then all of a sudden, bang! They’re floating out in space. Ahhh!” He waved his arms and legs like someone flying through gravity-less space.
“There are so many things wrong with that scenario, I don’t even know where to begin,” Priya said. She raised a finger. “One, this was back when the earth was brand-new. There weren’t any people. Two, Xbox, really? Even you should be able to remember a time before Xbox. Three …” She trailed off, her nose wrinkling. “What is that …”
Just as she said it, I smelled it. One of Tripp’s silent but deadly after-dinner bombs. “Tripp!” we yelled in unison, both of us sitting up. Even Cash pulled himself up, groaning.
Tripp grinned. “Sorry, couldn’t help it. Thinking about people being blown off the earth into space gets me gassy.”
Priya jumped to her feet and began tugging at the sleeping bag. “Ew, and you did it on my bag. Get off! Get off!”
Tripp laughed, and I had to press my lips together to keep from laughing along with him. Something told me Priya would not find the humor in it, which was something weird that happened to her when she stopped being Priya and started being a girl—she stopped seeing the inherently funny aspect of bodily functions. “It was a re-creation of the giant impact theory,” Tripp said, rolling over into the grass. He lifted his leg. “Kapow! Moon dust!”
“You shouldn’t do those kinds of things in front of a lady,” Cash said, though he looked a little like he was trying not to laugh as well.
“She’s not a lady. She’s Priya,” Tripp said.
“No, she is a lady, Tripp,” I said, and I wanted to suck the words right back into my mouth as soon as they came out, because I was pretty sure they sounded like mushy gushy mush mush.
They must not have, though, because Tripp simply tipped the empty thermos over his tongue to catch the very last drop of hot cocoa and said, “Pfft. Lady. Whatever.”
But when I rolled Priya’s bag into a tight tube and handed it to her, she smiled at me.
Kapow. Moon dust.