AT THE STATE science fair in May, so many people came up to our table that some were craning their necks to get a look at our poster board. Adults dressed up with fancy jackets and name tags pored over every inch of our project. They passed around the rocket and scribbled things on their clipboards and asked us all kinds of questions. They closely inspected the airframe and fin designs. They seemed especially fascinated with the radio transmission system.
“It’s like a satellite,” some college professor said. “They’re doing a lot of things with that now, NASA and the government. They’re trying to put together a map of the world with satellite signals so you can know where you are in the world at all times. Like a virtual atlas. And there’s another satellite project that’s trying to look for extraterrestrial life.”
Benji looked up. “Say what now?”
I grinned and turned to answer another question.
“You’ll never believe this,” Benji said excitedly when we were on break. “Rumor is there’s an actual place that’s opening up this year that’s built just for looking for aliens. And get this: it’ll be right near San Francisco!” He stuffed half a sandwich in his mouth. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this space stuff is actually pretty cool sometimes.”
I laughed and took a sip of Dr Pepper. “Who even are you anymore? What happened to the real Benji?”
“Taken over by an alien, actually. There’s a faulty chip in the back of my neck. You have forty-eight hours to remove it or the entire planet is in danger.”
I rolled my eyes. Benji was back again. “It’s nice to see you nerd out over something other than comics for once.”
“Hey,” he interjected. “Not a nerd.”
“Two more months and you’ll be answering questions in class.”
“You’d have to wake me up first.”
The thing was, Benji actually paid attention in class sometimes. He still doodled in his notebook, but I rarely had to wake him up. I, on the other hand, had started hiding issues of The Flash under my notebook in class. At first, it was a little hard to believe—how could someone survive lightning and then develop superpowers?—but I had to admit, I was hooked. Now, I was through the first two volumes, and the scribbles and doodles from the corner of Benji’s notebook had spilled over to mine.
“You know,” he said. “The new Spacebound issue comes out today.”
“Will you get it?”
Benji shrugged. “Yeah, eventually. I mean, I still read the series. I like it a lot. I’ll probably read just to find out what happened to Gemma’s spacepup. But after meeting my dad I went back to them and . . . I just wasn’t obsessed with them anymore. Is that weird?”
I shook my head. “Not at all.”
“I’ve been reading a lot of X-Men now,” he said. “I wanted to read some other stuff. But I’m starting to talk to my dad some, so that makes up for it.”
“Yeah, you’d mentioned,” I said. “How’s that going?”
There was a tentative smile. “Getting better, I think.”
“That’s good, I guess.” I straightened up and checked my watch. “Awards are soon. Should we call everyone back in here?”
Benji looked around the room. “Yeah. Our moms are probably looking at the high school stuff. And Danny—” He froze. “Wait a second.”
I followed Benji’s line of sight right down to the guy walking down the row toward us. He came right up to our table, put his hands in his pockets, and smiled.
“Hey, kid,” David Allen Burns said. “Surprise.”
We didn’t win the California State Science Fair. We got third.
But still, when the judges announced our names, and everyone clapped, and Mom and Benji’s mom and dad cheered like crazy, and Mr. Devlin looked like he’d faint from happiness, I looked out from the podium and thought, It doesn’t get better than this.
Except it did.
Because after we were handed our medals, Mr. Devlin pulled Benji and me aside.
“So people have been talking about your rocket,” he said. A smile spread across his face.
Benji and I exchanged looks.
“Some people from the NASA Ames Research Center were there,” he said.
“The NASA?” Benji asked incredulously. “Like . . . the one that sent people to the moon?”
“The one and only,” Mr. Devlin said. His cheeks were bright red with excitement. “They have a base in the Bay Area. The folks over there loved your experiment. They said you two should seriously think about a future in this kind of stuff.”
My heart dropped into my stomach.
It was all we could talk about when we went out to Vic’s. I ordered my usual strawberry milkshake. Benji looked over at me. “Come on,” he said. “Not gonna celebrate with a little extra?”
I shrugged. “I know what I like.”
“I guess so,” he said. And then he picked up the menu and ordered the deluxe sundae, toppings and all.
All of us ended up staying hours at the ice-cream shop. Benji’s older brother, Danny, came by, still in his baseball uniform and everything. He’d brought his girlfriend, Chelsea, and they squeezed into the booth that wasn’t quite meant to fit seven people but managed to anyway. It was the first time I’d talked to either of them. Chelsea wore big hoop earrings and had her blond hair pulled up into a ponytail, and Danny had an easy smile and eyes just like Benji’s. Danny ordered a vanilla milkshake and told us that he could drink milkshakes in under a minute, and when we dared him to, he downed the whole thing, leaving him with a goofy lopsided whipped cream mustache. We all laughed at him. Chelsea shook her head, but she was smiling, and then she leaned her head on his shoulder.
As I was finishing my strawberry milkshake, I realized that Benji’s entire family was together, finally. I mean, sure, cramming them all into one booth might not have been the best idea. And I couldn’t tell if Danny was ignoring their dad, or if he was just super-focused on his girlfriend. But the whole time, Benji was grinning from ear to ear. And my heart swelled up in my chest in this good and inexplicably painful kind of way.
“It was really great, seeing them all together like that,” I told Mom at dinner, over our bowls of rice. “Benji was really happy.”
Mom smiled. “I saw.”
“He’s been talking to his dad lots now. He even invited us to come visit LA sometime this summer. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Benji and I are making a list of all the things we have to do once school’s out.”
Mom paused before looking down. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that.”
“About LA?”
“No, about this summer,” she said. “I just got off the phone with your grandparents.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes!” Mom said sharply. “I mean, yes, of course. They’re fine. We were just discussing . . . our future.” She didn’t quite meet my eyes. “And we talked for a long time and I was thinking that maybe . . . it’s best to be closer to them.” She shifted in her seat. “As in, live closer to them.”
The happiness dissipated from my chest.
“So . . . we’re moving?”
“Baobao, it would be a good way to start over and settle down for real,” Mom said. “And I thought you’ve always loved the city.” She paused. “And I know you and Benji are good friends, but you won’t be far from him.”
But we wouldn’t be a three-minute bike ride from each other’s houses.
“What do you think?”
I loved visiting San Francisco. I loved seeing the fog roll over the Golden Gate Bridge and driving through winding hills. I loved going to all these different restaurants and trying chicken and waffles one day and mochi the next. I loved going to my grandparents’ favorite dinner place in Chinatown, where we’d sit around a huge circular table and try everything on the rotating platters and see Dad’s face turn bright red after he ate anything with spice in it.
But I’d never truly imagined living there, because moving meant I would have to leave this place.
Moving to San Francisco meant leaving the place where Dad and I would look for meteor showers from the back of his truck. We’d leave behind the breakfast diner I’d been going to all my life with my favorite strawberry milkshakes in the world.
“I know you miss him,” Mom said, as if she’d read my mind. “Just because we’re leaving doesn’t mean we’ll stop missing him. But I want us to be surrounded by family. It’ll help us heal, maybe just a little bit.”
I thought of the boxes of Dad’s stuff that had stacked up around the house, untouched for months. I thought of the times Mom had sat at the dinner table, staring at the painting Dad had gotten her; I thought of all the potted plants and the vines of English ivy that she’d bought in the months after That Night, that she’d carefully cultivated until they spilled across the kitchen, as if she were desperately trying to breathe some kind of life back into the house. I thought of the times I heard her crying, softly, behind her closed bedroom door.
Maybe, just maybe, moving to San Francisco would be the Next Best Step.
I couldn’t look her in the eyes. “I have to think about it.”
She nodded, chewing her lip. “Okay.” Her eyes softened. “Thank you, baobao.”
Leaving Sacramento also meant leaving my best friend, and that thought bothered me more than I thought it would.