There was no dresser so she moved back and forth across the room, flinging her pants and balled-up sweaters along the closet shelves. Lily had either neglected or forgotten to clean in the back, and the corners were covered in cobwebs that stuck to her fingers. Otherwise the shelves were empty except for an old crinkled shoe box. She opened it, finding a pile of photos and old postcards instead. Adri was notoriously nosy.
She moved closer to the bedside lamp and flipped through the contents. There were several photos of a woman she assumed must be Lily, some with a man who looked to be her husband, and some of her as a little girl. But most of the mementos were older, artifacts from before even her cousin would have been born: ancient ticket stubs from shows in the 1950s, an autograph from someone named Wayne Newton. One postcard was from New York City and very old—it showed a wide boulevard with people in hats and dresses strolling arm and arm, gazing into shop windows. It was postmarked May 7, 1920, and the writing was so faded it was close to illegible.
Beth—
Arrived New York last night and making my way to you tomorrow. Galapagos in tow. Did you get my letters? Will you be waiting for me?
Will you love her as much as I do?
Love, Lenore
Adri did the quick mental math to calculate how many years had passed since 1920: a hundred and forty-five. She read it one more time, then put the box back where she’d found it.
Finally, with nothing else to do, she turned out her light and lay down. In the silence of the strange room, a feeling still nagged at her and kept her from sleeping. Maybe it was nerves about living with a stranger . . . and a stranger who was also—weirdly—family. She wondered what Lily would be like—and it made her think of her old roommate at the group house back in Miami, and something she’d said once.
“I really admire you, Adri,” she’d said. “But I have to say you’re not very likable.”
Adri hadn’t shown that it hurt her, but it had stayed in her mind. She didn’t know why she couldn’t keep from being too blunt, too standoffish and distant, a little mean. She’d stopped trying to change it years ago; she could never figure out how.
Growing up she’d watched other kids buddying up—everyone with their weird quirks and flaws getting along anyway somehow, forming some mysterious club she couldn’t penetrate. She’d think to herself, How do they do that? It was like executing an intricate dive.
Adri wasn’t a diver. If anything, she was a pickax, chipping away at each day. The next three months living with another stranger, even one who was related to her . . . she would chip away at too.
In sixth-grade astronomy, Adri had read about neutrinos for the first time. They were particles that traveled across space—from one end of the universe to the other, unstoppable and anchorless. They could pass through matter, right through planets and people and everything else. When kids talked after that, about what they wanted to be when they got older, the image of that textbook page always flashed through her mind.
Now she pictured the day she’d be the one launching off from Earth, unstoppable. She hoped the time between then and now would go fast. As she fell asleep, behind her eyelids she watched herself pinging across space.
CHAPTER 2
The next morning Adri woke before dawn. She tiptoed downstairs into a pastel-green hallway and took in her surroundings: walls covered in bad art—paintings of flowers and vegetables, greeting cards with angels or puppies on the front with sayings like “Hang in there!”, a defunct robotic vacuum leaning against a corner, covered in dust. A magazine rack by the stairs overflowed with old newspapers, and a plush angel sat on the bottom step. Since Lily was still sleeping, Adri decided to work on the Theta.
She slipped back upstairs and quietly unfolded her small Desk Factory from its case, putting it on the nightstand beside her bed, programming it to print out the part she thought she’d need. Within moments the machine was churning out a small circuit board that she thought might do the trick. Then she crept back down the stairs and outside into the cool morning air.
But the circuit board didn’t fix the Theta. Neither did a reinstall of the operating system. It had been a long time coming and, she guessed, almost perfect timing.
She patted the hood sadly. She glanced at the sky, just beginning to lighten into an orange haze. “Time of death, sunrise.” The car was her most prized possession and possibly her best friend. She’d miss it more than anything or anyone else.
She turned, looking around, then veered left into the tall grass to the right of the driveway, blowing in the breeze. She wandered past the bunkhouse and into the back, where the yard gave way to fields of tall blue grass that stretched on forever and seemed to swallow a distant abandoned farmhouse.
Coming around the far side and back into the barn lot, she moved toward a small, dark bruise of a pond still engulfed in shadows. She didn’t notice the low, shin-height fence until she stumbled over it, just as a movement in front of her startled her.
“Crap,” she muttered. She leaned forward, her skin crawling. Something was alive at the side of the water; she could hear it scraping through the dirt. As her eyes adjusted she could make out a shape that looked like . . . what? An old shield? A huge rock? A moving huge rock? It was at least as tall as her knees.
She could just make out a shifting within the larger shape—the head. It was turning to look at her. And suddenly she relaxed.
It was a turtle. A tortoise, she corrected herself. The big ones were always tortoises, she knew from biology. She tried to remember if they were vegetarians or not. A big bowl of water sat near the lean-to that had been built, Adri assumed, to shade her from the sun.
Adri approached the animal slowly. She stopped a couple of feet away and squatted to sit awkwardly on the low fence.
“You look cheerful,” she said flatly, because the tortoise looked serious and melancholy, like most tortoises.
The creature was so large it was one step away from a miniature pony. It had a shell like a saddle, sloped and uneven and droopy looking, and a long neck, which it stuck out farther and farther now, craning to gaze at her inquisitively.
She scooted closer with an irresistible urge to lay her hands on the glinting shell and find out what it might feel like under her palm. The creature turned its head to her, snuggled against her arm.
“Oh, it’s like that, huh?”
She reached toward its neck and brushed something cool and metallic. She grasped it between her forefinger and thumb: a dangling metal name tag, more like a little necklace than a collar. She squinted in the dim dawn light.
Galapagos, it read. Chills crawled up her arms.
Just then, from the corner of her eye, she saw a light flicking on in the house. She glanced one more time at the tag, took a deep breath, and headed across the yard.
The house was warm, and salsa music was playing in the kitchen. A pale, tiny, wiry lady stood at the fridge waiting for a pot of coffee to brew on its side door. She gasped as Adri entered, and her face broke into a bright smile.