Joan opens her mouth to speak, but I beat her to it.
“I can use the bathroom downstairs and sleep in the tree house!”
“There is no way you’re sleeping in a tree house,” Mom says. “It’s totally unprotected.”
Occasionally Mom responds well to humor, so I grin, clutch my life jacket, and say, “See? I’ve got protection!”
She shakes her head.
“There are no actual humans around, Mom,” Pookie says, “in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“There are mosquitoes, which carry disease,” Mom says.
“Ah,” says Joan, “I thought of that.”
We all stare at her. She never thinks of stuff like that. You’d think she would because she’s a paramedic, but Mom is the one who worries about everything.
Joan pulls a lacy curtain thing out of a duffel bag. “It’s a mosquito net. Now he can be safe in the tree house.”
The rest of us are still staring at her.
She shrugs. “The guys at the station gave it to me as a joke at my farewell party.”
“Problem solved!” says Pookie.
Mom is not convinced. “What if the boards are rotted?”
“I stomped on them,” Joan says.
“What if he rolls over in his sleep and falls out?”
Joan sighs. “The railing is secure. I tested it.”
“What if there’s an emergency?”
“He can take your cell phone for the night.”
Mom closes her eyes. “Just this once.”
Joan winks at me. Just this once is Mom’s way of saying, We’ll try it because I’m too tired to fight but I’m scared and I don’t expect it to work. But sometimes it does and then she’s OK with it.
That’s what’s going to happen with my tree room.
Mom insists on watching me climb up the ladder to my tree room because she thinks I might fall. Joan stands behind her and gives me a nod and thumbs-up, which means just do what Mom says because it’s easier that way.
As soon as Mom goes inside I climb back down because I want to look through my telescope some more. The universe is amazingly clear and bright with no light pollution! You almost feel like you can touch the stars. It’s magic.
It makes me feel like the night a couple of years ago when the whole neighborhood watched the International Space Station pass across the sky. We stood outside for the entire time, which was only about four minutes, but still, we watched it move like a really bright star arcing across the vast darkness. We were all in awe, thinking, There are real people up in that tiny starlike thing, and we all felt connected for a few minutes and even waved and said, “Hey, guys,” or maybe the talking part was just me. At any rate, it was a very special moment for everyone, and that feeling of being together was so strong I’ll never forget it. I want to have that for all eternity, especially after I’m dead.
When I’m so tired my eyes won’t focus no matter how I turn the eyepiece, I go to my new tree room and lie down on my yoga mat and look up at the sky. It’s like living in my own planetarium. With a mosquito net over it.
I smile and take a deep breath. It smells like Christmas. That’s because there are so many pine trees around. Plus, it feels like Christmas because this place is magic.
The only bad thing is hearing the water of the lake lapping against the shore. I hope I don’t have any drowning nightmares. Then I’m mad that I thought about drowning nightmares because a lot of times when I think of something it comes true, even if I don’t want it to. I check that my life jacket is secure and force my eyes open to look at the stars so they’re the last thing on my mind and I can dream of finding my comet.
Maybe tomorrow night. I have to find it before the other comet searchers out there. Sometimes, when it’s really important to you, you can do magical things.
A hard plastic mask is on my face and people tell me to breathe but the air is outside the mask not inside and I try to push it off but they hold me down and press the mask over my nose and mouth and then the world gets blurry and sounds bubbly and far away just like it always does when this happens but you can’t stop it and then everything goes black and you drown.
Do you ever have that nightmare? Me too. It happens a lot. This time I wake up with the mosquito net on my face and I hear the water in the lake and even though I’m realizing I haven’t actually drowned I still gulp in big breaths of air. I feel pretty freaked but I’m not telling Mom or she’ll say, See, I told you the tree house was a bad idea.
I might tell Joan because she’ll say, Sounds scary, kiddo, but you’re OK, and then squeeze my shoulder so it seems like it was OK to be scared of drowning but it’s not such a big deal because actually it was just a dream. Then we’ll talk about the cosmos, which is another way of saying the universe, because she knows that always calms me down. I mean, how can you be upset when you’re talking about something as magical as that?
It’s like what Joan says about peanut butter chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies: “What’s not to love?”
I love the cosmos, which is why I’ve studied it my whole life and know a lot about it. I also love dogs (especially Labrador retrievers), Italian, Harry Potter, passion fruit juice, yoga (only one kind, though), marshmallows, this TV show called MacGyver, rocks, global sanitary issues, and a bunch of other stuff, but they’re all part of the universe so I figure they’re covered.
THE COSMOS = THE ORDER OF THE UNIVERSE, SORT OF
Cosmos means the order of the universe, except the universe isn’t really orderly. It’s more like when kids are lined up for recess and it’s sort of a line but arms and legs are sticking out and someone’s hopping in place and someone’s shoving off the wall, and someone needs the restroom and a fight might break out but basically you know that the kids will make it out to the playground and fan out in a scatter formation but stay on the playground, mostly. A siren might go off and some kids will scream and run in circles, and there’s always the possibility of a UPS truck losing its brakes and skidding onto the playground, scattering everyone, or a meteor hitting right next to the swings, you never know, but basically that’s what orderly chaos looks like. And then you go back inside for language arts.
My family is like orderly chaos, too. There was a lot of shouting and running around in our new house last night, and also this morning, but basically I know that the coffeepot will be on, there’ll be something for breakfast, more boxes will be unpacked, and there might even be photos of us up on the wall. And Pookie will be in a bad mood, which Mom will try to deflect. Deflect means to change the subject and hope the person you’re talking to won’t notice. It doesn’t work with Pookie, but Mom keeps trying.
I just hope Mom doesn’t call a family meeting. Family meetings should be about cool stuff like we’re going to a planetarium or we’re going to Italy or even we’re having marshmallows for dinner every night this week, but they never are. Lately, the best you can hope for in our family meetings is that they’re boring. At least the boring ones don’t give me an upset stomach.
“Julian!” Mom calls from the bottom of the tree. “I’m here to watch you come down safely, and then we’re having a family meeting.”
“Asciugamano!”* I mutter. Why did I let my brain think about a family meeting?
*It’s OK. Uh-shoog-uh-MAHN-oh is not a swear word. It’s actually Italian for towel. But it sounds like a swear word because it’s got the sh sound and it feels really good in your mouth.
Mom has the kitchen looking like a normal kitchen, practically. She must’ve gotten up really early, because the coffee smells at least two hours old, all burned and sour. I don’t know how people can drink that stuff.
Our new house is Victorian, which means old and frilly, but the kitchen is modern. There’s a sink with a tall curved spigot like you’d see in a lab. I didn’t notice it last night. I walk over to it immediately, and just as immediately Mom knows what I’m thinking.
“No experiments, Julian. It might look like a science lab,
but it’s a kitchen.”
“Well,” Joan says, “experiments are OK as long as they’re supervised.”
“By me.” Mom glares at us with her hands on her hips.
Joan and I look at each other like Mom is the principal, and not a happy one.
Mom is still having a hard time getting over the Diet Coke and Mentos fountain I made for her birthday. It was magical and also spectacular. I guess it would’ve been more magical if I’d done it outside instead of in the basement.
Mom wanted to know what on earth I was thinking.
I was thinking that it was February and Mom hates the cold so I didn’t want to make her stand outside. Plus, it was last year so my brain wasn’t as developed. I still think a Diet Coke and Mentos fountain is magical. And anyway, Diet Coke doesn’t have sugar so the ceiling and floor and walls weren’t that sticky.
I think she was grumpier than usual because it was February, which Mom calls the longest month even though it’s the shortest. She says she goes stir-crazy. Magically for us, the Dog Star is brightest in winter when she’ll need it the most. The Dog Star may be the only way Mom makes it through February. Especially in Maine, because she says the winters are brutal.
“Sit down, everyone,” Mom says and gives a long sigh.
I quickly speak before Mom can start the meeting. “Everyone is invited to look through my telescope tonight. I’m going to teach you how to find Sirius, the Dog Star. It’s where—”
“Honey, we’ll get to that later,” Mom says. “Right now, I really need to tell you the projects you have to work on today so our bed-and-breakfast will be ready for business.”
It’s my turn to give a long sigh.
That’s when I hear the orangutan groan and realize the pile of blankets on the bench is actually Pookie.
Mom pats her back. “Come on, honey, this’ll be fun.” She’s using her perky voice, which always makes me smile. I bet it’s what she sounded like when she was a little girl.
“Stop grinning, freak,” Pookie says, squinting at me. “Can’t you tell she’s about to make us work?”
“This is a family project,” Mom says.
“I didn’t get a vote,” Pookie says.
“You’re fourteen. We know what’s best for the family.”
“Oh, so pulling me out of school and moving me to this deadwater just because you didn’t want to be a doctor anymore and you have to homeschool Julian because he’s a freak—”
“Pookie!” Mom and Joan shout.
Mom and Pookie yell at each other while I hold my stomach because it feels like my intestines are getting all tangled up. The meeting gets better fast when Joan yells at everyone to sit down and shut up. Everyone does because Joan has authority. She was in the Marines. The Merchant kind, which I don’t know what it is, but that’s where she learned to swear, according to Mom.
Joan says there are two goals, whether we like them or not, and now we can get to work:
Get the house ready for B&B guests (B&B means bed-and-breakfast, which is like a little hotel, but you get extra treats like eating morning glory muffins for breakfast with the family that owns the B&B, which I’m not sure is actually a treat since our family includes Pookie)
Be a good and happy host, or at least act like it in front of the guests
Mom and Joan leave a list of chores for each of us, so Pookie’s arguing was pointless. Mom heads to the van to get the license for the B&B, and Joan goes to her Outback to get her license for being a paramedic in Maine.
Pookie yells after them, “Did either of you ask my father?”
Mom and Joan lose their smiles and look at each other with eyes that say, Help!
My stomach is so tight it feels like my intestines just made a pretzel knot.
(This is a really big one but it’s important.)
DARK MATTER, DARK ENERGY, AND THAT ELEPHANT
Earth and everything on it (including us) and all the other planets are full of atoms. They’re the little tiny particles you can’t see that we’re all made of. They’re always moving even though we can’t feel it. Just like Earth is always spinning around and orbiting the sun at the same time but we never get dizzy from it. Plus, meteors are flying past and barely missing Earth (in astronomical terms, at least) and stars are exploding and isn’t it weird how there’s all this craziness happening in our universe but we don’t feel it? It’s scary to think about all the craziness out there. It kind of makes Mom forgetting the chocolate syrup and having to drink regular milk not such a big thing. Unless you’re Pookie. Then the universe is going to explode.
Anyway, we and all the other things that are made of atoms make up less than 5 percent of the universe. Which makes sense if you look at a picture of the solar system and see all that empty space around the sun and planets. And it’s dark. So dark matter is this stuff, which we don’t know what it is (even physicists because they don’t know everything). What we do know is that it tries to hold things together. It’s part of what helped make planets to begin with, we just don’t know how. Pretty cool, huh? Dark matter makes up less than one-quarter of the universe.
You’re probably thinking, “If everything we see makes up less than 5 percent of the universe, and dark matter makes up less than 25 percent, that’s not even one-third, so what’s the rest of the stuff that’s out there?”
Good question.
It’s called dark energy and it’s like taking every superhero’s worst enemy and making a supergalactic Team of Evil out of them.
It’s a powerful force that’s trying to rip the universe apart.
I know.
Scary.
But don’t worry, because it’s not going to happen anytime soon. I don’t think. Although the universe is expanding faster than physicists originally thought, so now it may be only millions of years instead of kajillions.
In our family the dark matter, the stuff that holds things together, is Mom and Joan. And like a real physicist, I don’t really understand them. For one thing, they’re grown-ups; for another, they’re my parents.
And even though I said before that Pookie is a black hole, I think she’s really more like dark energy because she’s always trying to rip us apart. I know she’s only one person and she’s not very big, but she takes up over two-thirds of the room when she talks, and two-thirds of the energy, and two-thirds of the ickiness.
And what gives dark energy its power is an elephant.
Do you know what it means when people say the elephant in the room?
I didn’t, either, but I asked and what it means is this:
There’s not really an elephant in the room. There’s some topic that’s big and awkward and everyone’s ignoring it even though it’s really obvious—like if an elephant were standing in the middle of the room and everyone acted like it wasn’t there.
In our house, the elephant is Pookie’s dad.
She wants to know who he is and where he is and what he’s like. And she wants to go live with him.
I don’t know why. Mom and Joan aren’t perfect, but compared to a lot of moms in books and movies, they’re just as good and sometimes a lot better because they’re not (1) lying in bed depressed or (2) all upset because they’re going through a divorce or (3) dead.
Plus, it’s not like her dad has been very dad-like since she was born. She’s never seen him. Maybe he doesn’t even know how to be dad-like. I think she’s taking a big risk.
On the other hand, if she really wants to go find him and live with him, it’d make things a lot easier around here. You’d think Mom and Joan would jump at the chance. They’re always saying things like, I’ve had just about enough of this! or, If you think it’s so bad here, you should see how other people live! etc.
(Etc. means there’s more examples but either I can’t think of them right now or they’re all pretty much the same so it gets boring.)
But here’s the thing, Mom and Joan are actually upset that Pookie wants to leave. They look like the universe is going to en
d and they’re always whispering and sometimes Mom is crying. See? Dark matter that you don’t really understand, all you know is they’re trying to hold things together.
Pookie is the dark energy.
And so far, she’s winning.
Mom and Joan drive off without answering Pookie’s question about her dad.
“Maybe your dad is in a parallel universe,” I tell her.
Pookie tries to deflect. “Have you seen my swim goggles?”
“Maybe they’re in a parallel universe, too.”
She rolls her eyes. “Is everything better in a parallel universe, dork?”
“Not necessarily. It could be worse. It’s just different.”
“I have an idea. Why don’t you go to a parallel universe? Like now.”
“I might be in one already. But then I might break off from that one and go to another, or maybe clone myself and go to multiple universes at once. Isn’t that magic?”
Pookie makes her orangutan noise and stomps down the front stairs with her beach towel.
“Do you want to work on our chores together?” I call after her. She always used to make a fun game out of chores.
“I’m not doing any of THEIR chores. This B&B is our parents’ stupid idea, not mine.” She stalks off to the dock.
The dragon in my stomach starts breathing fire and twisting itself in knots again. If Mom and Joan come home and Pookie hasn’t done the jobs on her list, there will be a rift in the space-time continuum.*
*That’s not an actual cosmic event, by the way, but it sounds really cool.
I pick Pookie’s list up from the floor where she threw it. The first thing she’s supposed to do is clean up her room, Jill. I can’t do that because if I went in her room I’d be toast, but she’s also supposed to get her piles of stuff out of the hall and into Jill, which I do by hurling them through the door without actually stepping inside. Her room is a mess, anyway, except her bed is made because she says that makes a room look neat, and her bedside table has the DAD Father Daddy picture frame on it she bought at Target. There’s no photo of her dad, though, because we don’t have a picture of him.