—

It was freezing when we got out. We didn’t have any towels, so we carried our clothes in our arms and ran back to the house. Noah was still on the couch playing the same game. I hustled past him and jogged up the marble stairs.

Once we were dressed, we went to Davis’s bedroom. He put the Iron Man on his bedside table, then knelt down to show me how his telescope worked. He plugged some coordinates into a remote control, and the telescope moved itself. When it stopped, Davis stooped to look through the lens, then cleared the way for me.

“That’s Tau Ceti,” he said. The way the telescope was zoomed in, I couldn’t see anything but darkness and one jittering disk of white light. “Twelve light-years away, similar to our sun but a little smaller. Two of its planets actually might be habitable—probably not, but maybe. It’s my favorite star.” I didn’t know what I was supposed to be seeing—it was just a circle like any other. But then he explained.

“I like to look at it and think about how the sun’s light looks to someone in Tau Ceti’s solar system. Right now, they’re seeing our light from twelve years ago—in the light they’re seeing, my mom has three years to live. This house has just been built, and Mom and Dad are always fighting about the layout of the kitchen. In the light they see, you and I are just kids. We’ve got the best and the worst of it in front of us.”

“We still have the best and the worst of it in front of us,” I said.

“I hope not,” he said. “I sure as hell hope the worst is behind me.”

I pulled away from Tau Ceti’s twelve-year-old light and looked up at Davis. I took his hand, and part of me wanted to tell him I loved him, but I wasn’t sure if I really did. Our hearts were broken in the same places. That’s something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself.

It sucked having a dead person in your family, and I knew what he meant, about seeking solace in the old light. Three years from now, I knew, he’d find a different favorite star, one with older light to gaze upon. And when time caught up with that one, he’d love a farther star, and a farther one, because you can’t let the light catch up with the present. Otherwise you’d forget.

That’s why I liked looking at my dad’s pictures. It was the same thing, really. Photographs are just light and time.

“I should go,” I said quietly.

“Can I see you this weekend?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Could we hang out at your house next time, maybe?”

“Sure,” I said. “If you don’t mind being harassed by my mother.”

He assured me he didn’t, and then we hugged good-bye, and as I left him alone in his room, he knelt back down to the telescope.

—

When I got home that night, I told Mom that Davis wanted to come over this weekend. “Is he your boyfriend?” she asked.

“I guess so,” I said.

“He respects you as an equal?”

“Yeah.”

“He listens to you as much as you listen to him?”

“Well, I’m not great at talking. But yes. He listens to me. He’s really, really sweet, and also at some point you just have to trust me, you know?”

She sighed. “All I want in this world is to keep you. Keep you from hurt, keep you from stress, all that.” I hugged her. “You know I love you.”

I smiled. “Yeah, Mom. I know you love me. You definitely don’t have to worry about that.”

—

After going to bed that night, I checked in on Davis’s blog.

“Doubt thou that the stars are fire, / Doubt that the sun doth move.”

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

It dothn’t move, of course—well, it does, but not around us. Even Shakespeare assumed fundamental truths about the fundament that turned out to be wrong. Who knows what lies I believe, or you do. Who knows what we shouldn’t doubt.

Tonight, under the sky, she asked me, “Why do all the ones about me have quotes from The Tempest? Is it because we are shipwrecked?”

Yes. Yes, it is because we are shipwrecked.

I hit refresh after reading it, just in case, and there was a new entry, posted minutes before.

“There’s an expression in classical music. It goes, ‘We went out to the meadow.’ It’s for those evenings that can only be described in that way: There were no walls, there were no music stands, there weren’t even any instruments. There was no ceiling, there was no floor, we all went out to the meadow. It describes a feeling.”

—TOM WAITS

I know she’s reading this right now. (Hi.) I felt like we went out to the meadow tonight, only we weren’t playing music. In the best conversations, you don’t even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It was like we weren’t even there, lying together by the pool. It felt like we were in some place your body can’t visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments.

And that really should have ended my evening. But instead of going to sleep, I decided to torture myself by reading more Ayala stories.

I didn’t understand how Davis could like her. She was horrible—totally self-centered and perpetually annoying. At one party scene, Rey observed, “Of course, when Ayala’s around, it’s never really a party, because at parties, people have fun.”

Eventually, I clicked away from the site, but I couldn’t bring myself to put away the computer and go to sleep. Instead, I ended up on Wikipedia, reading about fan fiction and Star Wars, and then I found myself reading the same old articles about the human microbiota and studies of how people’s microbial makeup had shaped and, in some cases, killed them.

At one point, I came across this sentence: “Mammal brains receive a constant stream of interoceptive input from the GI tract, which combines with other interoceptive information from within the body and contextual information from the environment before sending an integrated response to target cells within the GI tract through what is commonly called the ‘gut-brain informational axis’ but might be better described as the ‘gut-brain informational cycle.’”