Space Saver, Part I

What I ought to say is that the best part was the honor of being chosen to assist our brave astronauts and travel to space, but if I’m really going to be honest, the best part was the perfect, horrified O that Starshine Nubek’s mouth made after the announcement.

They’d told me when I got to school that morning that they’d chosen me to travel to space and fix the international space station, so I’d had some time to adjust to the idea. I’d also had time while sitting in a bathroom stall to listen to Starshine loudly critique my clothes (frumpy) my name (boring) and my likelihood of ever being anything but a total zero (absolute impossibility) and then pretend to be surprised when I walked out of the stall and tried to get past her to wash my hands.

Then Mr. Grandy came on the videocom right before first period lunch and made the announcement: “Students, I know you have all been anxiously keeping up with the malfunctions aboard the International Space Station, especially as many of you have parents aboard. I’m pleased to announce to you that a candidate to fix the problem has been chosen, and furthermore, is one of SEA’s own! Because of her outstanding all round work and a particularly insightful research paper on the dangers and uses of biotechnologies in space, Rachel Welsh will be traveling to the space station Thursday morning! Please be sure to give her our best wishes and thank her for her willingness to take this risk for our men and women in space!”

And everything changed. I showed up at school that morning as a slightly dumpy girl with zits and the boring non-space themed name who was actually really quite good at all this space stuff but nobody cared—because even in an elite, highly selective school for people who really, really want to get into rocket science, what matters is not what your grades are, but how good you are at standing in corridors looking pretty and saying witty things to boys.

(Was that a run on sentence? It was. Sorry, I get carried away sometimes.)

And by first period lunch, like magic, I became the chosen heroine who was going to do what we’d all been dying to do pretty much since potty training—go to space. And furthermore, I was going to do it in a heroic, life-rescuing way. For the first time since I started at this school, people noticed me.

Maybe you’re looking down your nose at me because even several centuries into the space age, statistically speaking, nobody goes and this was a chance in a lifetime. But you know what? Maybe I have a brain the size of a planet (Douglas Adams reference there for ya) and maybe I got in on a full ride scholarship while everybody else used nepotism, but I’m still a teenager. I’m still a normal person. Being liked, mattering to people—it felt like seeing the sun for the first time in three years.

I walked out of that classroom with the smiles of my classmates shining on me. Most people in SEA (that’s the Science Exploration Academy) are related to astronauts, so everybody had been talking about the equipment malfunction on the space station for weeks. People wanted to sit with me at lunch. Jett Carson wanted to interview me for the school newspaper. It made me smile. It made me want to cry. It made me want to never lose this. Never. Ever.

And that evening, an opportunity to never lose it dropped into my lap. First you need to know about what was going on at the space station and why they needed a high schooler in the first place. Don’t worry—I won’t get into ridiculous detail (believe me, I could, but I get that not everybody is a space nerd so I’ll spare you). Basically, the biomechanic skin on the outside had been burned by an unexpected and extremely large solar flare and the cells accessed to rebuild the skin and fix the burn were too young. So they began covering the space station in an unstable cellular structure, which almost worked right—except that now the skin rejected any adult contact. And with some testing they figured that it was age the skin was objecting to, and they’d need a kid to come replace the part that was malfunctioning.

Anyway, I was up late reading an obscure science journal on the history of biomechanic skin development….it’s the kind of thing I do. Part of why I’m unpopular. It seems that in the early days, the skin was highly adaptive, to the point that it would bond with any stray piece of DNA that came into contact with it and become unresponsive to anybody else. It seemed to me that adaptive skin might have something in common with young, unstable skin. I imagined myself changing the space station (accidentally of course) so that they needed me to go up there regularly, to keep everyone safe. I looked up from the article, my eyes glazed. How amazing would that be?

Then the next day, Astro sat down beside me. I didn’t notice at first, and then I felt a sort of warm glow come over me; it’s this incredible flustered awkwardness when I get within three feet of him—and here he was practically touching my elbow. I stammered something. He gave me that heart-stopping grin and said, “Hey, just wanted to let you know I think they made a great pick of who to send. I read that paper you wrote on biomechanics last year and it was fantastic!”

My mind was a total blank of panic so I just smiled, dazed, and probably with spinach in my teeth. He went on. “Did you know my mom’s up there?”

“Oh, no, I didn’t.” I lied, because I’d stalked him on every social media platform out there and I totally knew his mom was on the station. I knew he got into SEA on his own grades, too, not because of her. And that he looked really cute when he was motorbiking with his little brother.

He shrugged. “It made a big difference, honestly. I told my Dad you were the one they were sending and it helped. We’ve been really worried about her. And with them needing to send a kid up…Dad was afraid they’d send somebody who has a lot of money and not much brains. We’re worried the station might actually turn against the astronauts and…” He trailed off, looking unhappy.

I had caught on to something he’d said and brought it up to change the subject away from his Mom possibly dying. “You…Your Dad knew who I was?”

“Well yeah. I, uh, sent your paper to my parents after Ms. Hallson read it to us in class.” He looked a little embarrassed. “I guess that sounds kind of creepy. I’m into biomechanics myself. I had some ideas about the biomechanic skin problem they had. Ways we could fix it, that kind of thing. I mean—I’m just in high school, and they’ve got Ph.D’s working on it, but I thought about changing the way we manage the DNA reproduction to make it more stable.”

“How would you do that in space, though, with all the changing factors?” I asked, and his eyes lit up and he started off on an idea he’d had. We talked all the way through lunch and down the hall until he had to get to Biology and I had to go to Trig.

He jogged away, but as soon as he was out of sight my feet slowed and stopped. I stood in the hallway like a lightning struck fence post. You could probably see the smoke spiraling out of my ears. It wasn’t just that Astro had talked to me. It was that he’d given me an idea to destabilize the space station and make myself vital for running it. If I introduced my own DNA into the skin of the space station…it wouldn’t just reject adult contact, it might reject everyone but me!

Starshine came down the hall, her heels clicking, her backpack slung over her shoulder, a frown between her perfectly sculpted eyebrows. She looked up at me, flushed an angry red, and stalked past. I felt a fizz of pleasure. The most popular girl in school envied me. She wanted what I had. Yesterday morning I was a zero, and today…It would be so simple, so easy. Permanent popularity. An image of Astro’s face, appeared in my mind, worried about his mom, worried about the space station turning against its astronauts.

The second bell rang. I started to class, still walking slowly. It wouldn’t be that dangerous, would it?

This was supposed to be short and refused. Second part to come next month!