“That’s so cool,” he whispers earnestly, because Oliver doesn’t know how to be fake.
The concept of social pretense is as foreign to him as going outside without shoes is to me. If he thought astronomy wasboring, he’d say, “Astronomy is boring,” and then he’d suggest we talk about something else.
“I can’t believe you study space. That’s where aliens live.”
“There’s been no confirmed evidence of extraterrestrial?—”
“Have you ever seen the moon through your telescope?”
“Of course. The moon is the first object most amateur astronomers observe. You can see the craters and the maria—the dark patches. They’re ancient volcanic plains, not actual seas, even though the early astronomers thought?—”
“Can you see the flag?”
“What?”
“The American flag. The one the astronauts planted. Can you see it?”
I stare at him. “No. The flag is approximately 125 centimeters tall. You’d need a telescope with a resolution of about?—”
“Man, wouldn’t it be sick to go up there? We could walk around and bounce.”
I flinch as Oliver jumps to his feet. For a heartbeat, I’m back in my father’s kitchen, where even the sound of a cabinet closing too hard could mean the difference between a quiet evening and one spent tiptoeing around his mood.
“The gravity on the moon is one-sixth of Earth’s,” I offer. “So yes, you would bounce. Astronauts on the Apollo missions described a sort of loping gait.”
“Ryan.” His lips stretch wide, revealing a row of slightly crooked teeth, the left canine overlapping just a bit with the incisor next to it. His eyes morph into half-moons of pure delight. “We should go to the moon.”
“We can’t go to the moon, Oliver.”
“Well, no, not for real. I’m talking, we shouldpretendto go there.” He says it as if the distinction is irrelevant, as if pretending and doing are separated by the thinnest of membranes, and all you need to break through is your imagination. “Hold on. Don’t move.”
I wasn’t planning to.
He disappears behind the furnace. Cardboard scrapes against concrete, followed by a heavy crash. A muffled “I’m fine!” Moments later, Oliver emerges, dragging two enormous cardboard boxes that must have held appliances at some point. One says “KENMORE” on the side. The other has “FRAGILE” stamped in red letters.
“What are you doing?” I ask, though I already suspect.
Oliver drops the boxes at my feet, then darts to a workbench along the far wall. He grabs a pair of scissors, a roll of duct tape, and a black Sharpie thick as a nightstick. “We’re making spacehelmets for the moon.” He cuts into the first box, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration. The scissors aren’t cooperating—they’re the dull, kid-safe kind. He ends up tearing the cardboard with superhuman strength and youthful determination. “You’re gonna be my copilot.”
“Astronauts don’t have copilots. The crew consists of a commander, a pilot, and mission specialists.”
“Ryan.” A strand of dark hair falls across his forehead, curling slightly where it touches his eyebrow. The basement’s single bulb catches in his eyes, turning them into glittering orbs. “Do you want to go to the moon with me or not?”
The rain intensifies outside. Upstairs, Oliver’s mom is vacuuming in the living room. The basement air hangs thick with the sharp tang of old paint, the musty sweetness of cardboard boxes, and something earthy that might be mildew creeping along the concrete walls. Nobody has ever asked me to go to the moon before.
“Yes,” I say. “I do.”
Oliver’s grin could power a rocket. He hands me the second box, and for a while, we work in silence. Cardboard scraps fly everywhere. Rectangles are cut out of the front for a visor. By the time we’re done, if you squint and have a generous imagination, it vaguely resembles a helmet.
“Abrams, we have a mission.” Oliver shoves his helmet onto his head. The left side dips lower than the right, obscuring one ofhis eyes. Every few seconds, his hand darts up to push the cardboard contraption back into place as gravity fights back. He deepens his voice to what I assume is his impression of a mission control operator. “Houston, we are go for launch.”
I glance down at my helmet. The cardboard is slightly damp from the basement humidity. The whole thing is ridiculous. I put it on anyway.
The world shrinks to the rectangle of my visor. Oliver stands in front of me and forces me to see the basement as something out of this world. The gray concrete floor stretches endlessly in every direction, becoming a barren, pockmarked landscape. The furnace is a lunar module. The washer and dryer are geological formations. The single bare lightbulb overhead is the unfiltered sun, harsh and white in the vacuum of space.
“Mission Control, this is Commander Jacoby.” Oliver’s voice is muffled inside his box. “We have landed on the surface of the moon. Abrams and I are preparing for our first moonwalk.”
My ribs seem to expand, letting me breathe fully for the first time in years. I hadn’t realized how tightly I’d been holding myself since that moving van pulled up to our new house—or perhaps even earlier, when the hospital visits began, when Dad’s voice turned to granite and the spaces between his words stretched into chasms.
