When I finally make it back, Joe’s up and in the shower. By the time he gets out, I’ve returned the bike to the garage and changed into pajamas.
I can’t believe I slept so long at the house. I woke with a start, with a feeling that someone was there, like a presence. As if the stories the other kids told in the dark, whispered low to scare one another, were real. But then the light filtered in, everything clarified—and I remembered that I was alone.
Joe says he has to be on campus for most of Saturday, but has to is probably an overstatement.
He does work sporadic hours, I’ll give him that. But occasionally I think he builds in some extra time, just to have an excuse to leave. I don’t even blame him.
Truthfully, we get along just fine for roommates thrown into an unforeseen living arrangement. And in practice, everything’s working out as far as the courts are concerned. But in theory, he hasn’t taken too well to suddenly being responsible for his sixteen-year-old niece. Can’t say I’ve taken too well to it, either. It’s hard to take him seriously as a voice of authority—he was always just my mom’s slightly irresponsible, much younger kid brother, who took a few years off before attending college to see the world, with a spotty attendance record when it came to family affairs—and my presence probably doesn’t help with his bachelor lifestyle.
But on the plus side, he pretty much leaves me to my own devices. He’s adopted a random assortment of ground rules, which he came up with on a whim one night, but I mostly try to stick by them so I can fight the good fight where it counts. No drinking (not a problem), no boys (also not a problem), and no skipping school (mostly not a problem). If he ever catches me sneaking out, I can tell him that technically I haven’t broken any of his rules and hope that holds. I’m fighting him hard, though, on the house thing.
He wants to sell it. I don’t. After a lifetime of moving around campus housing with my mom, this was the first time we’d had a house in our name, and land. According to my mom, it would be a place for us all to grow roots.
It’s the only place I can feel them, still.
Technically, the house is now mine.
Technically, it’s Joe’s decision, since he’s the one who’d have to send the checks.
All these technicalities.
We finally cross paths at breakfast. Lunch? I look at the clock: too close to tell. He’s got two different kinds of cereal out on the kitchen table—we shop separately but buy vaguely similar things. The one time we went grocery shopping together, the woman at the checkout gave him some seriously judgmental looks and pulled me aside to ask if I was okay. Joe’s too old to pass as my brother, too young to be my father, too unsure of how to act around me to look casual. Anyway, that store clerk’s comment? I mock-gagged and laughed it off. But Joe was mortified. Now he drops me off with cash for my own stuff while he “runs errands.” I think he just drives around for a while until I text him.
“What are you doing today?” he asks, drinking the remaining milk directly from the bowl.
“Nothing,” I say.
He nods like I’ve somehow given a satisfactory response.
“The Albertsons wanted me to tell you that you’re welcome to use their pool whenever you want—it’s the yellow corner house, you know it? They have twin girls who are about your age.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I say. I do know the Albertsons’ house, and I also know the Albertson twins (for the record: two years younger, not my age), and not even the stifling heat could get me into their backyard pool.
He takes his bowl to the sink, rinses it out, and puts it in the dishwasher, then pulls open the freezer. “I’ll bring back something for dinner,” he says.
“Okay.”
He’s in jeans and a gray T-shirt, apparently acceptable attire for a postgrad at the university. I don’t know what he does exactly—some sort of anthropology research, along with a bit of teaching, I think. He used to travel a lot. Yet another thing I’ve disrupted. But his presence there was one of the main reasons my mom accepted that teaching position. He’s why we’re here, in West Arbordale, Virginia, after I spent most of my life in the suburbs of DC. Same state, very different reality.
Joe lives a little like a student, too, which is not nearly as glamorous as I’d imagined, in anticipation of college. Mostly it means ramen noodles and a lot of caffeine and a questionable laundry situation. I tried to get him to move to my house instead—more room for both of us—even suggesting we renovate, so we wouldn’t have to be reminded of the things that happened there. But he, like most people, won’t set foot in there any longer. “We can use the money from the sale to get a bigger place,” he suggested after our first couple of weeks together, when the realities of sharing a bathroom with a teenage girl, and vice versa, bordered on cringe-worthy.
As if I intended to stick around any later than graduation. “Let’s not make any long-term plans,” I said.
He looked relieved.
But now we’re still cramped in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom ranch, when there’s a sprawling house with land and an observatory just a handful of miles down the road. He’ll cave. I know it. The sting will pass. But in the meantime, that house can’t sell.
“Okay, well, call if you need anything. Or if you go to the Albertsons’ house.”
“Will do,” I say. We do that awkward dance where he can’t decide whether to pat my head or my shoulder and I hold up my hand to try to wave him off with a halfhearted goodbye before he gets started. Too late. He goes for the top of my head today, patting it twice, like I’m a puppy.
I’m trying to cut him some slack. He’s doing me an enormous favor—yet another technicality, if we’re keeping track. There was a brief discussion back in December about whether it would be in my best interest to live with my father.
It would not have been.
The things worth knowing about my father could be tallied on one hand: he gave up parental rights when I was just a baby; he currently lives in Germany with a new wife; I hadn’t seen him in over seven years by the time he showed up in December.
Though Joe was listed as guardian in my mother’s will, he still had to agree to the responsibility. There was another option, if it proved too much for Joe. My father and his new wife (Betty? Betsy? I’m still not sure) came to visit after Joe called, to offer their brief and awkward condolences, and to sit down with Joe and discuss what was to happen to me. I heard them talking it over at night, in the living room. A list of pros and cons, of which I was the subject.
It would only be another year and a half, I told Joe the next day, desperate to tip the scales. A year and a half until I was eighteen, off to college, out of his hair. We could make it work, I promised.
Joe pretended he hadn’t been thinking it over. He said, Of course, Kennedy, it’s not even a question. But come on. The walls here are not as thick as he would like to imagine.
He’s twenty-nine. I’ve thrown his life into chaos. He’s missed all the nuance of the first sixteen years of parenting. So. I’m trying.
I retreat to the cramped space that used to be Joe’s TV room but now fits my bed, desk, dresser, and boxes. The only décor in here is a framed picture on the windowsill beside my bed, a photo from last fall: me and Elliot and my mom at the top of a lighthouse, my hair blowing in Elliot’s face, Elliot trying to push me away, my mom laughing. The last photo I have of all of us together, when we went with her on a long-weekend work conference.
The photo was taken by my mom’s colleague-slash-new-boyfriend, Will. The outing had been Will’s idea—I don’t think he was expecting us to be there. Honestly, at the time I would’ve preferred to spend the last day at the hotel pool, but my mom insisted, and so there we were.
Two hundred and twelve steps to the top, with my mom talking about the history of the place, and Elliot reciting facts about the construction, Will correcting them both, and me trying to tune them all out, my hands on the cold, spiraling concrete walls as I counted in my head, my mother’s voice echoing through the stairwell.
I wish I could focus on her words, remember them. But all I have in my memory now is the tone of her voice, over the count I was keeping. Elliot was probably listening, and not just because he thought he was supposed to. He was probably actually interested, as he was in all things new to him. For two people who shared so many physical traits, we were so different at the core. My mother used to joke, I swear I raised them the same. Elliot used to joke, I locked her in the closet whenever you were away. Which is a lie. He would never. But that was just like Elliot, taking the blame for setting the bar a little too high for my life.
Other than this picture, my clothes, and my computer, I haven’t really gotten around to unpacking or making myself comfortable. Like I said, I’m an optimist.
I’ve got the radio telescope data pulled up on the computer now, but right away I can see something’s wrong. And not the good type of wrong, which would make it seem like the telescope was picking up something other than background noise. Instead, this is the type of wrong that makes me think something is broken.
Usually, the radio telescope is set to monitor frequencies where signals can be transmitted through space. The readout typically looks like one of those medical heart monitors, almost a flat line, but with little peaks and valleys.
Today, it’s nonexistent. Not even background noise. It takes me a second to realize that the radio telescope didn’t register the right frequency channel. It’s set to something different, or else it’s pulling in some interference, I think.
Elliot built the dish and made the program, so I have to drag the scale around for a bit before I finally find the data set where there’s actual activity, and at first my heart jumps, seeing a section of the readout—it looks like a repeating pattern of pulses: a quick spike, then a longer pause, over and over again, like a signal, or a message.
I lean closer to the screen, until I can see my own reflection in the monitor: openmouthed, wide-eyed. But then I realize there’s a serious mistake somewhere, either with the program, or with the radio telescope itself. Because this potential activity is registering where no frequency should exist. The program is displaying what would be a typical radio signal range, except it’s negative.
Negative.
I let out a groan of frustration. I may have only taken a year of physics so far, but I do know there’s no such thing as a negative frequency. Not in reality. And definitely not something that Elliot would have programmed to record, either. It makes no sense.
Just to double-check (because, again, only one year of physics so far), I type negative frequency into the search bar, but it only tells me what I had assumed: it only exists in mathematical theory, not reality.
I scan the data, looking for the time stamps, and see that it registered from just after 1:00 a.m. until I pulled all the data, a short time later.
Freaking Marco. I hope they didn’t damage the satellite dish last night. I hope Lydia didn’t perch on the edge of it, and Sutton didn’t throw a beer bottle at the center. I hope Marco didn’t stumble into it on his way back last night, knocking it off axis.
It’s probably just the computer program, though in some ways, that would be worse—I wouldn’t even know where to start with that.
God, it’s hot. But another six-mile bike ride it is.
The dish looks fine, but Elliot built it, so I’m not really sure what could be happening on the inside. It’s still angled at the right spot, and structurally, everything looks sound. The cable’s buried underground, though, so that will have to wait. Best to track down the most likely culprit first.
I head in the opposite direction from my house, over the split-rail fence, to the other side of the fields. There’s a development here, mostly modest two-story homes with landscaped backyards and two-car garages. Marco’s house is the third on the right from the way I enter—from the field, not the road. His car, an old green sedan, is parked in the driveway, and I’m assuming one or both of his parents’ cars are in the garage.
I ring the doorbell, hear footsteps before his mother opens the door in workout clothes. Her face is makeup-free, her hair brushed up into a messy bun. Like this—relaxed and casual—she reminds me so much of my mom that I instinctively look away at first.
“Hi,” I say. “Is Marco here?”
His mom has that look of surprise and sympathy, which eventually merges into a painful smile. “Kennedy, how nice to see you! Did you call him? I think Marco’s still sleeping.” Then the sympathy and surprise swing in my favor, which I’ve grown used to with teachers and parents alike. She pulls the door open before clearing her throat. “Well, go on up.”
“I’ll just be a minute,” I say, to reassure her.
I knock once, wait to the count of five, and then let myself into Marco’s room. He pushes himself to sitting in his bed. From the noise that escapes his throat, he must be nursing a hangover, not that I’m surprised. But he doesn’t even question what I’m doing here, just flops down on his back, lifting a hand at me in greeting. He’s so disoriented by my presence I feel my stomach do that flip from the first time I was in his room last September, working on a school project, when I knew he liked me and he knew I liked him and the anticipation was so all-consuming I could only think of things in proximity to Marco.
Current calculation: five steps from Marco’s feet.
“Marco,” I say, and he flings an arm over his eyes. “Last night, did you guys mess with the telescope?”
“The…what?” He rubs his eyes, pushes himself to sitting again, folds his legs up under the sheets. “Hi, Kennedy,” he says, like we’re starting over.
I take a step closer. “The radio telescope. The satellite dish. Did you do anything to it?” Current calculation: four steps from Marco’s bed.
“We didn’t touch it,” he says, now fully awake. He blinks his dark brown eyes twice, frowning. “How’d you get in here?”
“Your mom. What were you doing out there last night?” I ask.
Marco lifts one shoulder in half a shrug. “It was Lydia’s idea.”
And this is where my affection for Marco wanes. Nothing is ever his fault, or his idea. He’s painfully indecisive, even more so in hindsight.
“And why did Lydia want to go there?” I ask. Lydia is Marco’s best friend, and Sutton is usually kind of her boyfriend, not that they like the label. But that’s the best way to describe them. They all live in the same sprawling neighborhood behind my house.
“I don’t know, we were at Sutton’s, and his parents came home, so Lydia said we should go there, and I don’t know, I couldn’t think of a reason not to, really.”
And that, in a nutshell, is Marco. He runs his fingers through his messy hair, and no part of me wants to do the same. It’s been six months since I touched him last, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it since. Six months, it seems, is enough. “You swear you didn’t touch it,” I say.
“I swear,” he says.
I turn around and leave. He calls my name. I don’t look back.
Back at Joe’s, I look over the data again. I’d ignore it, except there’s definitely a pattern. A spike every three seconds or so. And it repeats. On and on it goes. I log on to the amateur SETI forums, and I compose a message:
Anyone ever register a signal at a negative frequency? I’m picking up a pattern of pulses. Interference probable.—KJ
I post it.
I wish Elliot were here.