But when I climbed on, he was sitting with a boy I didn’t recognize. “Parker, this is my new best friend, Matty Stephens!” I froze in the aisle, looking at the boy with wavy brown hair sitting in my spot, and then at all the other seats, filled with older kids I was too scared to sit with. Someone behind me jostled my backpack and I heard some girls laughing. My chest felt tight and my skin felt hot, and I didn’t know what to do. But then Charlie flattened himself against the window. “Scoot over, Matty!” he said, and Matty grinned and squeezed himself against Charlie, and then I perched on the edge of the dark-green seat, hugging my backpack stiffly against my chest, trying not to topple into the aisle whenever the bus driver made a turn.
The next morning at breakfast, when I learned I had to go back to school again and that I still wouldn’t be in Charlie’s class, I cried so hard I couldn’t get on the bus with Charlie, so Mom drove me to school.
When we pulled into the parking lot, she smoothed the bangs on my forehead, giving me a soft kiss. “Parker, I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but it’s good for you and Charlie to find your own paths. That’s what growing up is about. You’ll always have each other, but this gives you a chance to see who you are on your own.”
That afternoon I wet my pants because I was too scared to ask Ms. O’Shaughnessy if I could go to the bathroom.
Over the next few weeks, things didn’t get much better.
I missed being around Charlie with a loneliness so sharp it made me get a weird fluttery feeling in my heart. Charlie was the friendly and brave parts of me—without him, I could barely talk to the other kids, words sticking in my throat like glue.
Charlie was the opposite. Even though he and Matty always made room for me on the bus, I was pretty sure Charlie didn’t need me anymore. He and Matty joined Cub Scouts and started playing baseball after school, so they could be on the Reds team together when they grew up. Charlie talked about Matty all the time: how Matty insisted you could get gum out of your hair with Diet Coke, how Matty was having his next birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese’s, how Matty got the highest score in the world in Super Mario Bros. When Matty came over after school, Charlie always invited me to join them, but it wasn’t the same.
I didn’t have a best friend anymore.
But then, one blue-skied October day, a kid from my class, Finn Casper, sat next to me on the playground.
“Do you want to hear something cool?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure. Like me, Finn didn’t have any friends. He frequently wore the same ratty Incredible Hulk T-shirt to school, and even though I’d never noticed it, I’d heard the other girls say he smelled and that he got his clothes from the lost-and-found box. He was loud and furious most of the time, the only kid in either first-grade class to routinely get time-outs, mostly for talking back to Ms. O’Shaughnessy, but once for shoving Eric Peterson over on the playground. While my unpopularity was silent, the type that at least allowed me to sit at the edge of the girls’ table at lunch, Finn’s was hard to miss.
I didn’t know then about the rest of the Caspers: about how his brother, Johnny, a seventh grader, had been suspended for threatening to kill a teacher during the second week of school because she caught him smoking by the Dumpster; or Devin, his uncle, who was currently serving time for running a meth lab in a trailer in the woods behind his house. And then there was Mr. Casper, who ran Casper’s Auto Body Shop, a store that never had any customers—clearly a front for something, but no one knew exactly what.
No, at that moment, I knew only that Finn was sitting right there, waiting, greasy white-blond bangs hanging in his eyes, and he wanted to talk to me.
“Okay,” I whispered.
He pulled a duct-taped plastic box from his pocket, holding it out for my inspection. “It’s called a Walkman and it plays music,” he said, then continued to dig until he triumphantly held up a set of earbuds, grinning.
“Like an iPod?”
“Yep. But the music isn’t on it—you have to put in old tapes.” He showed me something he called a cassette, which had “David Bowie Greatest Hits” written in purple across the top, a heart dotting each of the i?’s. “It was my mom’s before she died.”
I nodded, feeling sad he didn’t have a mom, but he was too busy popping open the Walkman on the non-duct-taped side and placing the cassette inside to notice.
“You ready?” he asked, handing me an earbud.
I nodded. He started to press a chunky button, but stopped. “You have to close your eyes.”
I closed them, hoping it wasn’t all some mean joke.
But then I heard music start from far away and begin to march closer, getting louder by the second. A man began to sing, his voice deep and twisty like a wizard’s, talking to someone named Major Tom, telling him to take pills and to put on his helmet.
In the background, another voice started counting down from ten to one, and my body leaned forward, wondering what would happen when he got to zero.
Then the guy said “Liftoff” and everything changed: the music twanging down to my toes before swelling back up, blasting through my chest and heart, up along my spine and through my ears, until it broke through the sky, flying.
It was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard, and I loved it.
I listened carefully to the words as Major Tom stepped outside the door into space. I wondered if that’s where Grandma McCullough’s helium people lived. I tried to imagine what being alone in all that dark sky would feel like. If it were me, maybe I’d try to steal a star, something prickly and hard and bright, something to keep close so I wouldn’t be lonely, something that was mine.
My attention snapped back to the song when Major Tom said to tell his wife he loved her very much, which made me sad because I thought of Finn’s dead mom and how much I loved my mom.
And then something went wrong, and the singer kept calling for Major Tom, but he said there was nothing he could do, and the music spiraled into mismatched blips and bleeps before it faded into silence.
I waited for Major Tom to come back.
Instead, I heard the click of the Walkman.
I kept my eyes closed for a second longer, and when I finally opened them, Finn was looking straight at me, and I could see the gap between his two front teeth, could see his eyes—the gray before a summer storm, occasional lightning at the edges, heavy with rain.
“My brother, Johnny, told me it’s a true story,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. They still don’t know what happened to Major Tom.”
I thought about it for a second—about how his wife probably still missed him every day, how scared he must be lost in space. “That’s really sad.”
“Don’t worry. I’m gonna find him someday,” Finn assured me.
“You are?”
“Yeah. I’m learning to fly, and when I grow up, I’m going to fly into space to rescue him.”
“You can fly?”
“I’m working on it,” he clarified.
I thought about the helium people. The idea of flying made my stomach hurt. “That doesn’t seem safe.”
“It is. Trust me.”
I looked doubtfully at the bruises on his arm, wondered if he got those from trying to fly. I felt a knot of worry start in my chest.
“This is all top secret,” Finn said, his voice urgent. “You have to promise not to tell anyone about any of it.”
“Can I tell my brother, Charlie?”
“Nope. Sorry. You can’t tell anyone. You have to swear.”
Even though I was still worried—about Finn’s bruises, about him breaking bones, about him falling from the sky—right then I felt a flush of warmth in my chest. This was what Mom was talking about: I finally had something that was mine, a secret, prickly and hard and bright like a star.
“Okay. I swear, cross my heart.”
From that day on, first grade got a little easier.
I had a friend, someone who was just mine.
Finn frequently forgot his lunch money and never brought lunch, so I always split my PB&J sandwich with him, divvying up my carrot sticks and grapes. We made up knock-knock jokes, testing them out on each other. We ignored the girls who called him smelly.
On some days, Finn was extra quiet, moving his body stiffly, like he was a robot, and I knew then that he’d been practicing his flying. During those lunches, I gave him all my cookies. And I made sure we stayed extra still at recess, listening to the Major Tom song and then the other songs on the tape.
I especially liked the one about being heroes, and even though I never told him, I imagined him being king and me being queen, just like the song said.
All that time, I kept my promise, never telling anyone about his secret identity.