I’d almost finished my yoga video when I heard the door open. I was folded in gomukhasana, cow face pose. Knees wrapped and stacked on top of each other, torso bent. I turned my head slightly to see the intruder. Ethan.
He looked taken aback. “Hey. Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt.”
In tune with the gentle, soothing voice of the YouTube instructor, I unraveled my legs and took a cat-cow. “Come to check out my moves?”
He smiled briefly. “I was sent to let you know there’s an ice cream bar being set up.”
An ice cream bar. Was this family for real? But also, sweet. Literally. “I’m almost done.” I stretched my legs out to either side and bent forward, resting my forearms and head on the ground.
I heard Ethan sit beside me. He stayed there, silent, and when I came back to a seated position I saw him with his back to the wall, staring up at the cobalt sky, the piercing stars and waxing moon. He turned. “Your dad told me you got a job about astronomy.”
A small knot released inside my chest. Dad must have thought the internship was impressive if he’d bothered to tell Ethan about it. “Yeah.”
Ethan gave a chin nod toward the heavens. “So what’ve you got?”
“What, like do I have stars in my pocket to show off?”
He laughed, then pointed to the sky. “I’ve got the Big Dipper. Sometimes I say I can see the Little Dipper, too, but mostly because people are super insistent I see it and I want them to move on.”
“Ah.” I smiled, reluctantly endeared to him. “You see the two stars forming the edge of the rectangle of the Big Dipper furthest from the tail?”
“Man, you want me to see it, too.” He peered skyward. “Yeah.”
“Those are the pointer stars. Dubhe and Merak. If you follow them in a line, they lead to Polaris, which begins the handle of the Little Dipper.”
“Sure,” he said dubiously. “Polaris is the North Star, right?”
“Right. Can you see it?”
“Maaaybe. Oh! Yeah!” He swiveled to look at me, grinning. “Nice.”
“Wanna know a trick? At twilight, when you can see both the North Star and the horizon, you can figure out your latitude.” I held out a hand, made a fist, and then stacked my other fist atop it. Then I moved my first fist to the top, and my other hand on top of that, so I’d measured four fists between the horizon and the star. “Each fist is ten degrees.”
He did the same thing as I had. “So we’re at forty degrees latitude?”
“Exactly. I mean, not exactly, roughly, but yeah. It’s part of celestial navigation. The fist method.”
He grinned at me. “Sounds dirty.”
“Ethan.”
“It’s not my fault, it’s how I’ve been socialized.”
I shook my head, a small smile escaping. “You said you’re writing about Gibson’s comet for my dad.” I lifted my gaze back to the sky, as though expecting to see a ball of icy rock burning across the heavens. “You must know a little about astronomy, too, then.”
“I’m actually not writing anything comet-related. I’m writing about Gibson before he discovered the comet, in the early nineteen hundreds. Your dad has a whole chapter on one of his colleagues, and since Gibson’s got a Nantucket angle, we’re including him. I’m writing a sidebar.”
“That’s really cool, you writing your own thing.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah.” Ethan Barbanel’s existence might annoy me, but my dad’s nerdiness had rubbed off: good research and hard work seemed cool.
“Thanks.” He cleared his throat, and I wondered if it was a nervous habit he’d picked up from my father. “He’s spent a lot of time teaching me. It’s really meant a lot.”
My stomach twisted, a hard, vicious yank tightening up my insides. The goodwill and friendliness I’d begun extending toward Ethan vanished.
It would have meant a lot to me, too, if Dad had bothered spending time with me. But why would he, with Ethan around? Ethan was friendly and easygoing and interested in the same things as Dad. Why wouldn’t Dad pick him?
