It made sense that Shawn had ended up doing something smart and interesting. The little glimpses I got of his brain in the past made me expect it from him.
When I found him on the back porch, he was already peering into the telescope, which he had set up right outside the door on a flat bit of concrete. The thing was bigger than I expected. It was made out of white and silver cylinders and looked like a piece of machinery that would fall off a spaceship.
“What are you spotting up there?” I asked.
Shawn shot straight up and turned to me. He’d thrown a gray hoodie over his T-shirt, and it looked soft and worn. “Have you ever looked at the stars before?” he asked.
“Nope,” I answered. “You remember, your brother and I weren’t very good at going to science class. Or any other class, really.”
“Right.” Shawn smiled. “Well, the real expensive telescopes can cost tens of thousands of dollars. I can’t afford that, but this one is still pretty nice. There’s a lot of exciting stuff coming up in the sky next week, too, starting with a meteor shower.” He bent down and looked into the telescope, fiddling with it. “For tonight, though, maybe you’ll like this?”
Shawn stepped aside, and I bent to peer into the telescope. “Don’t touch it,” he said quickly. “Just put your eye close.” I did as he said, and for a second, I thought I was just looking at a black blur. Then, all of a sudden, my eye adjusted, and something stunning came into focus.
Against a backdrop of stars, a spiral of light floated before my eyes. A bright white glowed in the middle, and around it, light tinged with blue and purple swirled. It looked like someone had spilled liquid stars across the sky, and I’d never seen anything quite like it. “Damn,” I said, still peering. “What is that, Shawn?”
“Messier 81. It’s usually called Bode’s Galaxy.” I finally tore my eye away from the entrancing object, curious to hear his explanation. Shawn had folded his hands behind his back, and as he looked up to the sky, a slight smile played on his face. “The light in the center is a black hole. It’s kind of like a giant, weird energy ball that weighs seventy million times as much as our sun weighs. The lights around it are all stars and star dust. It’s been gathering them for thirteen billion years.”
“Stars and stardust?”
“Two hundred and fifty billion stars,” he answered with a satisfied nod.
I laughed. “I don’t know if those numbers make sense to me.”
Shawn met my eye with a grin. “They don’t make sense to anyone!” he said. “That’s why I like it so much.” I smiled back, but he turned straight back to the telescope. “Anyway, that’s the kind of thing I look at out here,” he added awkwardly.
“Dope,” I said. “Thanks for showing me, Shawn.”
“Sure,” he answered as he turned back toward me. “Thanks for looking!” As he took a step, though, he stumbled over his own feet, then lurched forward.
“Got ya,” I laughed. I caught his arm as he sprawled against my chest, steadying him. His body was warm and soft against me, and it sent a pleasurable shiver down my back. “Guess you have to look down sometimes, too, huh?” I kept my hand on his arm and offered him a smile so that he knew I was only teasing.
Shawn stepped back, then tugged at the bottom of his hoodie. “I guess so,” he said.
I yawned and rotated my neck. “I should probably get to unloading the truck already, huh? Will it bother you if take care of that now?”
“Not at all. I’ll just be out here if you need me.”
“Sounds good. Glad you’ll be around this summer, Shawn.”
“Yeah,” Shawn answered quietly, then smiled. “Me too, Cass.”
Chapter Three
Shawn
“He’s hotter!”I declared as I threw my arms in the air. “He’s somehow magically even hotter than he used to be!”
I was pacing around the living room, unable to sit still while I video-chatted with Audrey over my laptop. Cass had gone to run errands about an hour earlier. After hiding in my bedroom all morning, I had a ton of energy to shake off.
“What kind of hot?” she asked. “Is he still the troubled, brooding type?”
“Exactly. His eyes are this dark, rich brown that I’ll never forget, just a shade darker than his hair. It’s like I get swept up every time I look in them. He’s a lot stronger than he used to be, and he’s all tatted up, with these chains and snakes on his arms.”
“Yum,” Audrey answered.
“But he looks just like high school, too,” I declared. “He has the same high cheekbones and the same long hair.” I glanced at the laptop. “He wears it tucked behind his ears, hanging down to his shoulders,” I tried to explain, like I could possibly capture what was so hot about Cass in words.
“I don’t know,” I sighed, then plopped down on the worn purple rug that filled the living room. I fixed the laptop so I could face Audrey. “It’s like he’s just perfectly chill all the time. Like everything is easy for him, and it makes it easy for you to be around him, too. It’s so nice, I almost forget I’m such a weirdo. But then he smiles at me, or he indulges me and acts like he cares about my telescope, and I just turn into a nervous fourteen-year-old kid all over again.”
