Chapter 2

“Great,” I replied. “Professor Adams posted the procedure for the project on the class website, so we should figure out a time to go over it. The sooner we knock this out, the better.”

I try to be kind to others, and I try to be outgoing. But I often get so fixated on the things that are important to me in my life, like getting perfect grades or passing the MCAT, that I tend to be oblivious to the lives of the people around me. I’m not suggesting I don’t like socializing with others or that I’m uncaring. I do care about people. At least, I like to think I do. It’s just that I tend to get in my own way regarding friendship. Autumn was going to challenge that about me.

At this time of year and at our latitude, Jupiter, along with its moons, arced high in the sky at night. Our assignment wasn’t a particularly hard one. We just needed a few pieces of equipment: a telescope, a tripod, a digital camera, and an adapter to connect the camera to the telescope. We could have rented the equipment from the astronomy club, but Autumn surprised me by saying she had everything we needed.

That meant then that the only thing we needed to do was coordinate times to meet up and snap photos of Jupiter. The varying orbital periods of the moons is a complicating factor. It takes Io forty-two hours to orbit Jupiter. Europa, eighty-five hours. Ganymede, one hundred and seventy-two. And Callisto 17 days. All of these values can, of course, be found with a simple google search, but our task was to take a series of photos of Jupiter over the next few weeks, then use the moon’s positions and, given Jupiter’s diameter, to derive their orbital radius, their orbital period, and then finally calculate the mass of the moons using Kepler’s law. Luckily, Jupiter and its moons were bright enough that we didn’t need to go anywhere special to escape the light pollution. We could even take the photos from a clear spot on a hill near my dormitory. Jupiter is one of those rare celestial objects that can shine through the perennially creamy Los Angeles night.

Our first night of photo-snapping was that Friday. Jupiter would be high enough above the horizon and dark enough to catch some decent photos.

I waited there on the hill on a blanket with a thermos of hot chocolate, listening to the cheerful crickets chirping, taking in the wonderful fresh fragrance of the Eucalyptus trees that rustled their leaves in the breeze, while I waited for Autumn to come with her equipment. Despite our rocky start, I was eager to hang out with Autumn. Despite the tense air between us, I still had a bit of a crush on her.

After ten minutes of waiting, I started getting impatient. After fifteen, I texted her, asking where she might be. I received no response. I tried calling. Straight to voicemail. After half an hour and needing to pee, I gave up and went back to my dorm room, incredibly annoyed that she had stood me up.

It wasn’t until the following morning that I received a text from her.

I’m so, so sorry, Joey! I completely spaced out and forgot about the project last night 🙁 Can we try again tonight??

The timestamp for the text was four in the morning. She must have gone out partying all night in lieu of our assignment. That was the thing that made the most sense to me. What else would a college freshman do on a Friday night?

I wanted to text back something petty. Something to make clear my anger with her for ditching me. I was really spun up about getting ditched, especially thinking about how eager I was about the possibility of hanging out with her. I wrote a quick and venomous text, but before sending it, I deleted it. It wasn’t in my nature to be petty. So, I took a deep breath and instead texted,

No worries. Maybe Friday night wasn’t a good idea, haha.

At first, I wrote to propose Saturday night, but I didn’t want to sound like I didn’t have a life, so I deleted that and instead texted her that I was busy Saturday night and asked if she was free to do it Monday night instead. I got an immediate text back from her.

Sure! Monday night works for me! Have a good weekend!

I hated myself for not calling her out for ditching me without warning. I wished I could stick up for myself. I wished I was more assertive.

Saturday night rolled around, and contrary to what I had told Autumn, I didn’t have any plans.

Besides studying for the MCAT, my other big hobby was gaming. In high school, I really got into World of Warcraft (my main character was a night elf priestess). Much of my socializing happened through that game. It was a great way to keep in touch with my friends (my guildmates) after we had all gone our separate ways for college. We used to play a lot on Saturday nights. We’d play for hours and hours, sometimes until the sun came up. But these days, none of my guildmates were on that much anymore. Tonight was much the same. My guild’s ‘Discord’ channel — our method of online communication — was as empty as a ghost town. Feeling a bit bummed about playing a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG all alone on a Saturday night, I decided to go out for a walk around campus instead.

The campus was lively. People hung out in gaggles, drinking beverages from hidden containers, producing the strong, ropey smell of a certain smokable plant.

I went down a lonely path beneath the rows of lamp posts with their quiet, slanting lights, along rows of lavender and golden poppies that had just started to bloom. Then I went out to the soccer pitch and strolled along the bleachers. The tall bright flood lamps were still on, saturating the field with their bright lights despite the game finishing over an hour ago. Moths and beetles swarmed around each light in frenzied balls like there was only so much light to go around, and it was each bug for themselves. They made little dinking sounds whenever they bumped into the lights.

I put my earbuds in to listen to my go-to solitary Saturday night walk playlist. First up was ‘Smashing Pumpkins.’ I bobbed my head and sang along with Billy Corgan to ‘Bullets with Butterfly Wings.’ Then came ‘Drive’ by Incubus while I walked around the quad. Then it was ‘The Ramones singing ‘Sheena is a Punk Rocker,’ and I shredded on the air guitar, fantasizing about being a lead guitarist in a punk rock band. I play the piano decently, but I often wish I had taken up the electric guitar instead.

As I came back around to the quad to start back for the dorm, I passed by the hill where Autumn and I were supposed to look at Jupiter through a telescope together last night. I came to a jolting halt when I saw a figure on the hilltop bent over beside what could not be mistaken for anything else except a telescope.

As I stared at this figure, Stevie Nicks was belting out the chorus to ‘Edge of Seventeen’ in my ears – ♪Just like a white-winged dove sings a song, sounds like she’s singing Ooo! Ooo! Ooo! ♪

The figure stood silhouetted against the light that eked from the nearby dorm room windows, the unmistaken hallmark shape of a floppy beanie atop the figure’s head. It was Autumn on the hill. My heart began to pound to the rhythm of the guitar and the frantic drums.

I took my earbuds out and walked up the hill. She spotted me and waved.

“Hey, Autumn. What are you up to? We didn’t agree to meet tonight, did we?”

“No, but I felt so bad about ditching you last night. I thought I’d make it up to you by taking some shots tonight. I got some good ones already!”

“Oh, you really didn’t have to do that.”

“It’s alright. It’s a brand-new telescope, so I’m super pumped about using it!”

I glanced at the telescope. It looked really fancy, with glowing buttons and all. She saw my amused expression and explained,

“It’s a custom-made eight-inch Cassegrain reflector! It’s computerized, too, so you can fix it on a celestial object, and it will track it through the Earth’s rotation. The Astro club’s got nothing like this baby.”

She patted the top of the tube. Her eyes glinted with pride.

“It looks…expensive.”

Autumn snickered. “It probably would be if you bought it from a manufacturer, but a friend built it with his own hands. He’s an engineer. Gave it to me as a gift.”

“A friend built you a whole telescope?”

“Well, he built it for himself, technically, but he’s not able to get out to use it as much as he used to, so he gave it to me. Shipped it all the way from Australia too! Came just last month.”

“That’s amazing. Sounds like a cool friend to have.”

“Yeah! Met him on an astronomy forum.”

“Oh, so an internet stranger.”

Autumn laughed. “No, a friend! He’s sweet.”

I raised a skeptical eyebrow but didn’t prod further. She was obviously very excited about the telescope, and her excitement was endearing, so I didn’t want to ruin the moment. Besides, as a dork with dorky hobbies and dorky internet friends myself, who am I to question her life choices and who she befriends?

Coyly, she asked, “you wanna see it?”

She giggled. “Jupiter, of course.”

“Oh, um, yeah, sure.”

“Then take a gander, my friend.”

I walked over to the telescope. There was a digital camera attached to the end of the tube at the bottom end of it. She popped it off, then screwed on an eyepiece.

“It’s all set up, so all you have to do is put your eye on that and be amazed.”

I crouched down and lined up my eye to the eyepiece, and my eyes went wide, and my heart skipped a beat.

“Oh my God! It’s Jupiter!”

“Of course. What did you expect? Santa Claus?”

Somehow, seeing Jupiter through the telescope filled me with just as much excitement as I might have to see Santa Claus. I was half expecting to see just a blown-up version of the bright dot that Jupiter appeared to be to the naked eye, but what I saw in that eyepiece was a clearly recognizable real-life version of all those photos I’ve seen of the giant striated sand-colored marble with its trademark swirling great red spot.

I glanced wide-eyed at Autumn. She gave me a wide grin.

“Autumn, it’s so beautiful!”

“Crazy, huh? Now take a look again and tell me what else you see.”

I looked through the eyepiece again, and this time I noticed four smaller spheres spread out across a neat axis.

“The Galilean moons? Yup!”

“It’s hard to tell which one’s which just by looking at them now, but with the camera, I can set the exposure to capture just the right amount of light, and with some post-processing magic in lightroom, I can get their true colors to come out You can tell each moon by their colors. But you can also already sort of figure out which one is which. The farthest one you can see now is Ganymede. The closest one is Io, I’m pretty sure. Look, you can even see her shadow on Jupiter’s face.”

“Autumn, I’m speechless. This is breathtaking.”

“Yeah… too bad there’s so much light pollution, though. There’s a lot more stuff out there than we can see here. I could show you the Magellanic Clouds, Pleiades, and my favorite, the Andromeda Galaxy. If I had my own car, I’d get away from the light pollution. I’d spend every weekend out in the desert just looking up at the night sky. I love it.”

I smiled at her. I smiled at the pleasing thought of spending time in the desert with no man-made lights, the only illumination coming from the stars, planets, and galaxies.

“I have my car here, so maybe we can go sometimes,” I said.

“Aw, that would be perfect!” she said.

I blushed, thinking about spending time with Autumn stargazing. I thought of that day at lunch when she mentioned going out to Joshua Tree to see the comet. With my eyes pasted back onto the eyepiece, I said.

“Maybe we can go out to see the comet at Joshua Tree.”

“You’d really want to?”

“I mean, I still don’t want to make it our project, but yeah, I think it might be a cool thing to do.”

“Cool.” She breathed excitedly.

“So, what is it about Andromeda that makes it your favorite?”

“What makes the Andromeda galaxy my favorite? Hmm, well it’s just amazing to see how big it is in the sky, which is to say how close it is to ours. I mean relative to other galaxies, of course. Did you know that Andromeda and the Milky Way are going to collide?”

“Oh really? That sounds dangerous.”

“I mean, it won’t happen for another four or five billion years from now, and when it does happen, it won’t really be that catastrophic. Star collisions will be a rare event. But some stars will form binary systems, which is a cool thought, isn’t it? Two stars from a completely different galaxy coming together to form a couple. How cute is that?”

“Very cute,” I agreed.

Autumn snickered in that adorable Muttley way.

“Oh! Have you ever seen Mars through a telescope? That’s another one I can show you.”

“Let me show you! It should be just above the horizon now.”

She hopped over to stand beside me at the telescope. Her nearness immediately filled me with warmth, like a slow dip into a hot bath on a frigid day. And the scent of her perfume, which came strongly off her neck, like lemon drops, made my heart swell. I did everything I could to suppress a sigh of satisfaction on account of her sudden proximity.

She grabbed the telescope’s remote and began to steer it away from Andromeda with the same furrowed concentration as before. But, without warning, she winced and dropped the remote. A shock of fright spidered through me as she doubled over and began to heave. She heaved so harshly I was afraid a lung was about to pop out of her mouth.

Alarmed, I crouched beside her and put an arm around her.

“Autumn! Are you alright?”

When she finished heaving, she took out a handkerchief to wipe her mouth, and she nodded.

“Yeah, I’m good. Just a little nauseous. Sorry about that.”

She shuddered, put away her handkerchief, then began to steer the telescope again like nothing had happened, though her eyes still flickered with weakness, and sweat beaded on her forehead.