May 6th
I SKID into the Bragg Science Center with a minute to spare before my meeting with Professor Santoro. If there’s one thing she hates, it’s tardiness, so I take the stairs to the fifth floor at a run. I shouldn’t have agreed to drinks with Erin, one of the seniors in the physics department, last night—because it wasn’t just drinks, of course, we ended up at her place after a few rounds—but I was feeling reckless, and now I’m paying the price.
I nearly heave as I take a breather on the third floor landing. Definitely paying the price. My head feels like someone is hitting it with a sledgehammer repeatedly. And the hookup wasn’t even worth it. Way too much spit.
I’ve always been full of bad ideas. Experiments of the explosive variety in the chemistry lab at St. Catherine Academy. Bonfire parties in the woods at the edge of my hometown in South Jersey. Hookups of all kinds in closets and classrooms and public bathrooms. Lately, I’ve had plenty of extra bad ideas.
It’s easier to jump headfirst into hookups and parties with every bit of my spare time than think about him, after all.
Sebastian Miller-Callahan. Disgustingly nice. Disgustingly good at making me come. Disgustingly good at baseball, too, and that’s something that should have tipped me off—it’s never easy with athletes.
Not to mention the fact he’s my best friend Penny’s boyfriend’s brother. Nope. Mr. Golden Baseball God is in my life for the long haul, and no number of hookups can change that fact.
Hasn’t stopped me from trying for over a month now. Hasn’t stopped me from wishing I was a different sort of girl. If I was a nice girl, and deserving of Sebastian, then maybe I wouldn’t have fled the day his brother walked in on us about to get down to business.
I smooth my hair as I rush down the hallway. I might be hungover and more heartbroken than I’d ever admit, but there’s no way I’m letting that mess up this assignment. Talking my way into Professor Santoro’s lab this summer, even though I’m only going into junior year, is something I refuse to take for granted. I worked my ass off in high school to get into McKee and its top five undergraduate astronomy department for this exact moment. A chance to do real research, to start what will hopefully be a long career spent staring at the stars—and to give my application to the astrophysics study abroad program at the University of Geneva a leg up.
I remember the exact moment I fell in love with space. I’d been aware of it before, of course, but it wasn’t until a summer bonfire during a family vacation that I looked up and really saw it. My nonno—a dreamer in a family of practical people—brought a telescope to the beach, and while everyone drank wine from paper cups and laughed around the bonfire, I followed him to a quiet spot by the dunes.
“Let’s find a planet,” he said as he set up the telescope. “Maybe we can see Mars or Jupiter. Summer is a good time for planet hunting.”
It felt like magic, peering at the sky through the telescope. We found them, and Saturn too, my eyes wide as I glued my face to the lens.
“One day,” he said, hands in the pockets of his linen pants, gazing up with as much reverence as I’d seen when he prayed in church, “maybe they’ll find another little girl gazing at the sky through a telescope, wondering about Earth. Maybe you’ll be the one to do it, Maria.”
He always told me that I could do anything. As I grew up and my interest in space consumed me, he sent me articles from NASA that we’d read together. He encouraged me to sign up for advanced math and science classes and join the robotics club. The morning before he died of a heart attack, he picked me up from school—I’d gotten in trouble with the nuns yet again—and told me that he knew I was destined for something great.
When I get to Professor Santoro’s office, I knock on the door, and spend the five seconds waiting for an answer combing through my messy hair. Ugh. Why did I hook up with Erin, again?
Sebastian Miller-Callahan is still in my head, that’s why.
That stops now. I have lab work to focus on. A study abroad program to get into. A future to plan—hello, NASA—that’s far away from New Jersey and the di Angelo family, thank you very much.
None of that involves a certain green-eyed baseball player.
I’m the one who walked out on him, anyway.
I bet he hasn’t thought about me at all.
“Enter,” Professor Santoro calls.
I push open the door gently.
Professor Beatrice Santoro is a major reason I chose McKee University over all the other offers, some with better scholarships, when it came to college acceptances. She’s a badass older Italian woman who took one glance at me and understood my background, both the challenges and the love. And now, after two years spent working my ass off in this department to earn credibility, I’m finally in her lab. She rarely lets undergraduate students into her inner sanctum unless they’re rising seniors, but I earned this spot. Impeccable lab work and attendance. Fluency in Python and C++. Volunteering at the campus planetarium. Attending every visiting lecture and symposium.
My grandfather had been the only one to tell me he believed in me—until Professor Santoro.
You have a bright future, Mia. A future in the stars, if that’s what you want. If you’re prepared to work for it.
I’ve spent two years working to be worthy of those words, and now I’m ready to prove it.
“Mia,” she says in a warm voice. “How are you today?”
Professor Santoro’s office is a little nook of a room. Books everywhere, framed photographs of space and stars on a gallery wall, her degrees in a row behind her desk. She takes notes by hand, regardless of the computer program she’s using, and stacks of those little notebooks line her desk like sentries.
As I sit, she adjusts her thick black glasses, which give her gracefully older face a touch of quirkiness. Her silver-threaded hair hangs loose around her shoulders.
I manage a smile, even though I want to hurl on her desk. “Great. How about you?”
Professor Santoro leans back in her chair, pressing her fingertips together. “I’m well. Very happy to have you as my undergraduate researcher for the summer. I think this assignment will be a good challenge for you, given your interest in exoplanet discovery.”
I nearly bounce my leg in excitement, but manage to reel it in. Exoplanets are a relatively recent discovery—they were theoretical, officially speaking, until the 1990s—and now, scientists have discovered thousands. They’re simply planets that orbit a star other than our own. Out of the billions out there, one might be capable of sustaining alien life. Professor Santoro has been involved in this research since the beginning, and the thought of working alongside her, even on a small scale, to discover and classify these planets, is enough to make everything else fade away.
“Alice will email you the lab schedule,” she says. “You’ll have assigned readings for our weekly roundtables, so make sure you come prepared. I want you to work with her to rewrite the program we’ve been using to measure these planets’ atmospheres. I think your eye for code will help us streamline it. I want a mock version up and running for when they release the new James Webb data, so it can be part of the analysis for my current paper.”
I nod. “Absolutely.”
Her gaze turns shrewd. “How are things, Mia? How is your family?”
“Fine.”
“Do they still think you’re student teaching?”
My face flushes. I stare at my lap. My family’s big idea for a woman’s career is temporary—teaching until I have children of my own. My nana did it. My mother and her sister. My older sister Giana is teaching for one more year before squirting out kids with her husband, never mind that growing up, she wanted to become a lawyer. It’s what they think I’m studying, and I haven’t corrected them. But if I get into the Geneva program, I’ll be able to use it as concrete proof that I’m meant to be in this field and explain everything to them. It’s not like I want to lie about something this huge, after all.
“It’s easier this way. They won’t—they won’t understand.”
“Nevertheless,” she says, “they’re your family. My parents didn’t understand my desire to bury my face in a telescope either, but they came around.”
“Your father was a doctor,” I say. “My dad installs HVAC systems.”
She takes off her glasses, folding them carefully. “I’m hosting a symposium at the end of June. Colleagues from several universities will be coming, and I want you to give a presentation on our research.” She holds my gaze. “Do you understand?”
My breath catches in my throat. “Yes.”
“Do well, and you won’t need a recommendation from me for the Geneva program. Robert Meier will hear you yourself. I’ve already told him he’ll be able to see my most promising student when he attends.” She stands, signaling my dismissal. I slide my bag over my shoulder. “I hope you will consider inviting some family members to see it.”
I can tell it’s not much of a suggestion, but I don’t touch it. Not now, when the only person I’d want to invite is dead. I nod. “See you on Monday.”
She’s already turned to the bookshelf, riffling through the tomes. Onto the next problem for the day. “Monday.”
