“Your dad’s looking out for you.”
I bristled at Ethan explaining my own father to me—as thoughEthancould possibly understand Dad more than I did. “Thanks for the info. I understand my own dad.”
“Do you?” His tone shifted. “Because your dad—he’s really smart, you know.”
“Dude.” Didn’t Ethan have his own parents? Why did he need to be my dad’s favorite, too? “I know. He’smydad.”
“Right.” Ethan held up his hands. “Yeah.” His phone buzzed and he glanced at it. “Oops, gotta go.”
To Dad’s office, probably, to spend the day bonding. I tried to keep the edge from my voice and failed spectacularly. “Spreading the word about century-old mapping techniques?”
He flashed me a grin. “Someone’s got to.”
“Apparently.”
I burned with jealousy as I watched him go.
Then my phone rang.
***
A few hours later, I stood in the office of Dr. Cora Bradley, a cramped attic room on top of one of the houses downtown. She was a tall Black woman in a Cornell sweatshirt and leggings, and she studied me quizzically. “I hear you want a job.”
“I’d love one. Whatever you have available.” The woman who’d called me—the same one I’d talked to yesterday—had told me Dr. Bradley might have an opening and could meet with me at eleven. I’d thrown on a black skirt and shirt I often wore when hostessing at Lulu’s and googled the scientist on my ride over. Her bio on Harvard’s website linked to her graduate thesis and postdoc research, along with her current specialties. “Your research on classification systems sounds cool.”
Dr. Bradley squinted, like she wasn’t quite sure what to makeof me. “You’re in high school still, right? With an interest in astronomy?”
“I’m starting at UMass in the fall. But yes, I’ve always loved space.” I felt like a kid saying this. Of course I loved space! Who didn’t love space?!
“What do you know about it?”
What did I know about…space? Not as much as I’d like to before an interview. My lack of preparation made me feel nervous and unmoored. “I used to watch meteor showers with my dad growing up, and I know the basics of, like, the Oort cloud and string theory and which planets and moons have ice on them.”
“Hm.” She leaned back in her chair. According to what I’d found online, she was thirty-eight; she’d done her undergrad in Ithaca and her PhD at Princeton. Her (unlocked!) Instagram account consisted of pictures of her dog and the sunset, and her tagged photos showed her at brunch, as a bridesmaid, on beach vacays, and at conferences. “The intern I was supposed to have bailed, so I have an opening and some funding. It’s not sexy work. You’d be doing a lot of data entry and QA—running tests whenever I make a change to my algorithms and comparing it to other people’s, generating test results and bug reports.”
“Sounds cool,” I said, because while I wasn’t entirely sure what everything meant, I really wanted this job. “What are all the, um, algorithms and data for?”
“Ah. Yes. I’m working on a comprehensive map of low Earth orbit space debris and the ability to calculate its location at any given moment.” She rattled this off like I used to reel off people’s orders at Lulu’s.
My eyes widened. “Oh. Cool.”
“If I can get it to work,” she said wryly. “Who’s to say.”
“And—sorry—QA is…?”
“Quality assurance. Making sure there’s no bugs or inaccuracies when you roll out a change. Come look.” She pulled up an image on her monitor of Earth suspended against darkness, haloed by a thick glow. Dots clustered around the planet, forming an almost solid golden aura. They became more scattered further out, like sand spread across the floor. The dots also tightened up in a distinct elliptical line around Earth.
“This is a depiction of all the space debris out there,” Cora said. “You’ll notice there are two distinct fields—the thick cluster in low Earth orbit, and the ring around Earth in geosynchronous Earth orbit. The Department of Defense tracks close to thirty thousand pieces, but there’s a lot in low Earth orbit not being tracked. That’s what I’m working on. It’s smaller, but still dangerous since it moves so quickly. Fifteen thousand miles an hour—about eight hundred times faster than a speeding bullet. Plenty capable of damaging satellites or the International Space Station or space flights.”
Wow, as though it wasn’t bad enough we’d effed up the earth and oceans, apparently we’d managed to pollute space, too. “That seems…bad. How did the trash get out there?”
“It’s decommissioned satellites, lost spatulas, paint flecks, all sorts of stuff.”
“And if we can track it…you could clean it up?”
“Yeah. We’d know where pieces would be at certain times, which would help both with avoiding collisions and cleanup.”
She showed me some of the programs I’d be using, and the type of data entry and reports I’d run to double-check her data and to check her predictions against those of other researchers. She didn’t ask a ton of questions about my experience, but I tried to shoehorn in examples of being detail oriented and a hard worker whenever possible. After an hour, she sat back. “I could use you three times a week. The pay’s not great, but depending on your school’s rules we might be able to swing it for credit. I can’t promise you’ll get to do any original research, though.”
