Space Saver, Part II

Here's part two! And here's part one, in case you need a link. I changed the title. Titles are hard.

The sendoff Thursday morning was overwhelming and uncomfortable. Just because I really want to matter to people, doesn’t mean want to be the one the entire school is staring at while they cheer and clap.

Not until graduation anyway, and that’s only going to be for about 30 seconds as I grab my diploma and walk away, so…. definitely not the in the same category as walking out of the school doors surrounded by a corridor of every single student and teacher at SEA (325 students enrolled this August, and that’s just the students. Besides the teachers, all the janitors and lunch ladies and secretaries were out there, too). They were all waving flags and screaming and holding balloons of me. Yes, I said they were holding the balloons of me—some genius had printed my face on them. If you’re at all self-conscious about your looks, let me tell you, do not put them on something that can be inflated.

The launch pad was just behind the football stadium, so it was a long walk. Fortunately, the gauntlet I was walking through morphed into a pack that followed me down past the gym and out onto the football pitch, so that was an improvement. But even though that would have been enough to give me nerves, it wasn’t really the main reason I was uncomfortable. First, I had just been given the most abrupt and horrifying self-revelation I’d ever experienced, and second…I had a sticky place under the fold of the space suit’s left sleeve. A sticky place just begging to have somebody’s DNA on it.

Now hold up. I know what you’re thinking about my moral quality and my willingness to endanger an entire space station to make myself more popular, and I’m just asking you to hold off on judging me long enough to hear what actually happened.

So.

The ISS (International Space Station) people came and got me just before the end of first period (yes, I had to sit through first period, which was the worst waste of time in the world; not only could I not concentrate, neither could anybody else.) As I was on my way to the bathroom and my space suit, Dr. Patrisky came trotting down the hallway and said, “Rachel, could I have a moment?”

So you have to understand about Dr. Patrisky. She’s unique at our school. She’s a Ph.D, for one, but more importantly she’s spent years actually in space. We have all kinds of really well qualified teachers, but she’s the only one that’s a space veteran. She was on the first trip to Mars, if you can believe it. She’s brilliant. All of us, but especially us girls, think she pretty much hung the moon (there’s some more space humor there, for you.) And she treated me like everyone else. She wasn’t the buddy-buddy type teacher. But I always had this feeling she didn’t like me. For no reason; like I said, she wasn’t really close to anybody…it just felt that way, somehow.

So of course, I was immediately even more nervous, and I went over to her. She kind of pulled me to the side into an open classroom. I’m standing there, clutching my backpack to my chest so she couldn’t see how nervous I was (because you know, if you’re pale and sweating, hiding behind a backpack is definitely going to distract from your obvious terror.)

She smiled at me and said, “Now Rachel, there’s no need to look terrified. You’re not in trouble. I’m sure you have enough stress right now. I just wanted a half a second to give you—well, an encouragement.”

I nodded, still terrified. Dr. Patrisky keeps her hair up in this classy, braided bun, and she’s fairly old, but you can tell she used to be really pretty, even though she’s smart, too. Sometimes I thought that’s why she didn’t like me—I got the smart part, but I missed out on pretty…I always used to feel awfully disloyal even thinking of such a thing about her, but sometimes I wondered anyway.

“We’re all very proud of you, Rachel. I simply wanted to speak to you about community.”

“Community?” I parroted, like an idiot, clueless.

“I’ve noticed that while you are a spectacular student, you seem to have no interest in connecting with your fellow students. Pardon me for saying so, but you give the impression that your brilliance makes you a better person than they are.”

Her voice was so kind, so gentle and considerate—and each word felt like a blow. She thought I was arrogant? That I didn’t want to be part of the community? Sheer shock prevented me from bursting into tears as she continued, still so quiet and kind. “I just want to encourage you to spend some time thinking about what this means for your fellow students. This is an honor for you, yes, but you shouldn’t just use their need as a further bolster to your ego. You should be wanting to serve them, to show them you care about them.” She smiled again. “That’s all. Just something you might want to be thinking about.”

And then the ISS people were calling me over and running over the itinerary and what was going to happen, and my mind was just a howling vortex of shock.

All this time I was idolizing her, and she was thinking I was selfish and arrogant. I felt a hot lump in my throat. I wanted to leave all these ISS people and tell her about all the times I sat down with people at lunch and tried to be part of their conversations and they just talked over me. I wanted to tell her about Starshine standing in the bathroom detailing what a failure I was where she knew I could hear. I wanted to tell her about all the school activities I had to skip out on because I couldn’t afford them, even with my scholarship. But I couldn’t. All the words would just stick in my throat because she hadn’t even given me a chance. She hadn’t even tried to know me; she only saw my grades and my isolation and decided that both must be my choice.

A Superman-looking man wearing a polo with ISS emblazoned on it had inserted himself next to me and was hustling me down the hallway. He was talking so fast he barely took time to breathe, but I didn’t hear a word he said. How could she think that of me? How could she imagine that I thought I was above them, when I’d tried so hard to be part of their stupid preppy rich-kid lives and just been stomped on? Wait, what was that? Stupid, preppy rich kid lives?

“Hey, what’s this?” The Superman-looking guy’s tone changed, snapping me back to reality. He was frowning at my mousy brown hair.

“This isn’t regulation!” He barked, glaring around at the other ISS people. They all froze, wide eyed. “Did nobody tell her about the hair regulation?! Come on, people, we don’t have time for this!”

One man said, “What—”

But Superman cut him off. “I can’t believe this. Does anybody have scissors? Anybody?” He turned to me and held out a hand like I was about to start protesting. “Don’t worry, this is not your fault. It’s regulations; your hair has to be at least two inches above your shoulders.”

So I stood there, having my hair hastily chopped by a thin man whose hands shook under the ferocious scowl Superman was aiming at him. Superman’s name was Dill, he told me, as he stood around with his hands on his hips looking resigned to everyone else’s incompetence. I figured if you look like someone carved your jaw out of granite you could get away with a dweeby name like Dill.

But I wasn’t really interested in making small talk with a random adult. Because my final thought before the Hair Incident kept repeating in my head. Had I really just called all the other students at SEA stupid, preppy rich kids? Was that actually what I thought about them? Was Dr. Patrisky…. right? Well, not totally right. I had tried. I had been snubbed. But…

And all of a sudden, the magnitude of what I’d been planning nearly knocked me off my feet. I was going to endanger people’s lives to get attention! What the heck?! What kind of scumbag had I turned into? What kind of friendship could I have with Astro if I knowingly endangered his mom?

They were done with the haircut. I was being hustled towards the bathroom with two ISS women, given a hundred instructions about the order of putting on the space suit, even though it seemed they were going to supervise every moment. And above it all, Dill boomed in this fake-jolly, being-a-fun-guy-but-can-we-please-get-a-move-on voice, “No DNA contamination, remember! The whole bathroom’s been totally sanitized and sealed, but just in case something’s visible, dooooon’t touch it!”

As I walked into the bathroom, I fished my tiny piece of chewed gum out of my pocket and dropped it in the trash. It didn’t even make a sound, just vanished. I was glad. I wanted it that way. I felt sick, and it wasn’t nerves about the flight. How had I even considered changing the bioskin for myself?

The ISS women helped me navigate the layers and fittings for the space suit. And somehow, even as they layered me down with the many parts of the space suit, I felt lighter than I had since I’d come to SEA. How can I explain it? After wanting popularity and importance for so long, so badly, the realization that it wasn’t the goal of my life, that it didn’t have to control everything I did or how I thought about myself, that I could set it aside for a higher goal—I felt like I could breathe again.

The suit finally buckled and snapped and zipped in all the right places, ISS women asked me how it felt and I wiggled around to settle in, waving my arms and shaking my hips. We laughed together and suddenly I felt great. I was going to space, and I was going to help people, and who needed endless adulation when you got to do that?

“Alright,” said the taller of the two women. “Let’s get you out there before Dill has a coronary.”

They turned and headed out. I followed them, tugging on my sleeves as I went. As I did, I noticed my gloves sticking slightly to the fold at the end of the sleeve. I tapped it again. How odd, to have adhesive right there, right where I’d thought I’d stick my gum.

“Um,” I said to the two women, whose names I didn’t know because I’d been too busy having an internal revolution, “Um, there’s this…”

And I stepped out of the bathroom into blinding flashes of light. About two dozen reporters were right there, at the bathroom door, faces eager, shouting questions, waving microphones. Dill swooped in between me and them, waving his arms, “Please, let’s settle down here, Miss Rachel has a schedule to keep. I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have after the launch!”

So we hurtled forward, surrounded by the ISS people, tailed by reporters, towards the murmuring mass outside the school doors that would be my classmates, waiting to send me off.

And that gets me back to where I started. The balloons, the screaming. Astro was in the front line, waving, giving me a thumbs up. Maybe I could really be friends with him when this was over. Maybe I had misjudged some of them.

Then we were on the concrete launch pad, the flashes going off, everyone bundling me into the cockpit and giving me instructions and encouragement. There were three of them; the two ISS women and the man who had cut my hair, looking slightly more substantial wearing his own space suit.

Dill was right in amongst everything though apparently he was staying earthbound to manage PR. They couldn’t have picked a better PR guy, I thought. His voice is so loud he could shout down any opposition to anything.

“Mr. Dill,” I said, “There’s this sticky spot on my sleeve—”

He grabbed my sleeve, tugged it once, shouted, “Don’t worry about it!” and then clapped my helmet on my head. “Get on in there!”

So in I went. And there was the countdown, and the roar, and the tremendous rattling and the pressure and the thrill of SPACE, and well, just for a moment…I forgot there was a sticky spot on my sleeve. That sticky spot, on my pristine space suit, right in the same place where I had thought to attach something to sabotage the International Space Station.