The boy dug into his coat pocket and shook the folded paper. “Phone book?”
She nodded at the backseat. Marshall grabbed the directory and flipped through the thin white pages. They had checked off each name as they added it, printing the addresses that were closest to each other, street by street. It had been Loo’s idea to re-create the petition that had been lost. Marshall had figured the details, estimating the hours, the miles he would have walked, the doors opened, the possible names. Together they forged the signatures. Now it was like a project from biology lab, each of them contributing their part.
They drove to Dogtown, carefully taking side roads so they wouldn’t pass by Mabel Ridge’s house. Loo still wasn’t ready to go back yet. She’d told Marshall about her grandmother, but had left out some of the details about the car (borrowed) and the lace gloves (stolen). Marshall had called the gloves sexy when she’d tugged them over her fingers to drive, and she didn’t want to say they had belonged to her mother.
The woods had become their regular spot. A place where they were least likely to run into anyone they knew from school; a place where they could be alone together without feeling they were doing so on purpose; a place where there was always something to see and point to—bird nests or giant mushrooms, beaver dams or wild batches of ferns; a place that filled empty spaces with the sounds of the forest; a place with just enough dangerous history that they felt they were taking a risk each time they walked down the path and the trees closed in behind them.
They hiked Babson’s boulders, from TRUTH to COURAGE to LOYALTY, all the way to Peter’s Pulpit, which was one of the biggest erratics—with a wide, flat top and sheer sides—a giant, imperfect, sloping piece of glacial rock. There was only one way to climb up, a thin crack along the side, and a tiny ledge they had to scramble and boost each other over. Once they reached the top they were hidden from the trail. An island of stone floating above the leaves. Loo spread out a blanket and they ate the lunch she had packed: cheese sandwiches, a bag of pretzels, some Cokes, a sleeve of Oreo cookies and an apple that she cleaned on her jeans and cut into sections with her knife.
After lunch they took out the map and the phone book and started adding to the petition. Marshall called out street names and Loo ran her fingers down the pages until she found a match.
“Thank you, Mrs. Paula Hayden, for your support.”
“The codfish thank you, too, John Pane.”
“Can you hear them, Robert L. Kendrick?”
“Blub, blub, Miss Beam. Blub, blub.”
Marshall wrote out the addresses in his slanted print, and then they took turns making signatures, first with their left hands, then with their right—loopy scrawls, single lines and careful curves—until their fingers began to cramp.
“Let’s take a break,” Marshall said. “Here. I brought you something.”
He reached into his coat and pulled out a book, thick with photographs and charts of the solar system. A quote from Carl Sagan was on the back cover: Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
“Wow,” said Loo. “Thanks.”
“I thought it could go with your planisphere.” He leaned over and turned the pages until they reached Neptune, a blue swirl of hydrogen, helium and ice. “Look at this.” He traced his finger around the circle, showing the planet’s orbit. “One year on Neptune is a hundred and sixty-five years here.”
“It’s hard to think about,” said Loo. “Time moving so differently.”
Marshall flipped the page. “This is called the perihelion. It’s the point at which an orbiting body comes closest to the sun. For Neptune, it’s two point seven-six billion miles.”
Loo touched a point on the planet’s trajectory. “It looks like it crosses paths with Pluto.”
“Every two hundred and forty-eight years,” said Marshall. “Then Pluto is actually closer to the sun. But they’re on different orbital planes, so they’ll never actually meet.”
“How romantic.”
“Yeah,” said Marshall. “Anyway, I thought you might like it.”
“I do,” she said. And she did. There were chapters on black holes and the big bang and asteroids and comets and satellites and centaurs and moons. In the back there was a chart with each planet’s mass and gravitational constant, with an equation to determine your own weight across the universe. Loo borrowed a sheet of paper and did the math while Marshall took out his sketchbook.
On Jupiter, Loo would weigh 283.6 pounds, while on Pluto she would weigh only 8. On Mercury she’d pull a respectable 45.3 but if she ventured to a white dwarf star, her body would balloon to 156 million pounds. Changing where you were could change how much you mattered. Loo stretched out her legs. Her muscles ached from waiting tables. The stone was hard beneath her body but also warm from the sun. She leaned back. She closed her eyes. It could have been a minute. It could have been an hour.
When she woke up, her body was stiff, her cheek pressing into the spine of her book. She could hear the fluttering of pamphlets, the scratch of pen against paper. Marshall was still drawing, but one of his hands was resting on her lower back. She turned her head toward him and his palm slid away.
“I was afraid you might roll off,” he said.
“What are you drawing?”
He turned the notebook. Across the page was a spaceship. There were round hovercraft holes along the bottom releasing steam, two rusted-looking engines with flame propulsion attached to the side with metal bolts, a bubble windshield and a weathervane marking north, west, south and east.
“I wish I could draw like that,” said Loo.
“My mom thinks I’m wasting my time.” Marshall held the pen tightly between his thumb and forefinger, ink smudging his skin. Loo watched his hands connect straight line to straight line, a simple back-and-forth movement until the formula changed, his knuckles bending, fluid and sinuous.
“She’s been trying to get me a spot on Whale Heroes. They’re following the humpback migration now, and just filmed an episode out on Stellwagen Bank. It hasn’t aired yet, but they brought in a bunch of local environmentalists and did a phone interview with my mom about the petition. She thinks if my stepfather puts me on the program, she’ll get more publicity.”
“You want to be on TV?”
“Not really,” said Marshall. “My stepfather is kind of an asshole.”
“Why’d she marry him, then?”
“She said she didn’t want to be alone anymore.” Marshall wiped his nose. “Didn’t your dad ever have any girlfriends?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe he did and you just didn’t know about it.”
Loo thought back to all the women who’d approached her father over the years—waitresses and teachers and librarians and checkout girls—and how Hawley always seemed to be backing away. “I don’t think so.”
Marshall looked at her, then back at his notebook. He took his eraser and rubbed at the page. “Maybe that’s why he has so many guns.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”