Between Us and the Moon - Rebecca Maizel Page 0,107

the words trail away. I meet her steely eyes and my face collapses. I cry into my hands. “He held his hand behind my head. He told me he loved me. Me.” Tears fall over Scarlett’s cheeks too, which only makes me cry harder. “But it’s all a lie. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know the truth.”

Scarlett does what I can’t remember her doing since we were babies.

She scoots closer and hugs me. She doesn’t let go, either. Her grip is stronger than I thought. She squeezes and it’s like a tiny fist clenching around me. Something circles in my chest. A whole universe—a constellation. The hook, which has been pulling at me, drawing me to the surface, has brought me all the way to the stars.

“I love him,” I say and collapse, crying even more hot tears.

“I know,” she says and grips me harder. “It’s okay.”

I close my eyes and let Scarlett pull me to her chest. I let her heart beat against my ear.

I let it dance.

I close the door to my bedroom. The silence evens my breathing. I was intending to shower but stop at my desk. I clench my jaw and run my fingertips over the Waterman Scholarship application. I understand the elemental construction of paper: cellulose, fibers, and water. Facts still comfort me.

I slowly sit down in the chair. My palm rests flat on my many stapled pages of data. I know this place. I take pride in meticulous reports. I wait for the relief to wash over me at the sight of an experiment well done. But it doesn’t come.

Beside the desk are mounts, three types of LED flashlights, and four models of telescope lenses. The top of my application says: Sarah Levin. She is the girl who can work all this equipment. She is the girl who knows the way to academic success.

She is split in two.

I think I might know how to bind her back together.

My fingers wrap around a pen and I slide forward a notebook. The ballpoint hovers over the blank lines and I reread the Waterman Scholarship essay question.

Please explain in 1,000 words why your experiment successfully represents who you are as a scientist and how the execution of your experiment reinforces your educational goals.

I press my pen to the paper.

Local astronomers told me I was being “silly.” They asked in various forms: Why track a comet by hand when there are plenty of reliable, computerized sources to accurately project the right ascension and declination of a comet? Why bother calculating this yourself?

I tracked this comet successfully from its initial discovery at the University of Hawaii to the day it reached its perihelion, July 3rd 11:13 p.m. As you can see from my attached reports, my calculations were exact.

Much to the surprise of my mentors at Summerhill Academy in Rhode Island, I only used electronic sources to program my telescope and confirm my calculations.

I pride myself on the persistence and meticulous observation I pursued in order to accurately track our fast-moving friend. After all, it makes me who I am. I am fully committed to my experiments and never once in the year that I spent tracking the Comet Jolie, or P/1413, did I waver from this commitment.

Not until this summer.

You might be wondering why in an academic paper such as this I would bring up my social life. You see, before this summer, I didn’t have one. I sat in bio lab or at the observatory, looking at the stars. I loved being a Mathlete and deconstructing fractions and percentages. I missed school dances, games, and parties, just to observe the night sky.

I was living a fraction of my life. A half-life. I watched the world.

Nietzsche says, “One must have chaos within oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

This summer, I stopped watching the world. Instead, I dove in the ocean, danced in crowds of people, and laughed at jokes that I otherwise would have heard from the outside. Those who never once looked up at the stars and wondered what it all means embraced me. They let me in. I was part of their world. Suddenly, I was the one with my feet planted on the earth. I wowed my new friends with my statistics and commitment to the pursuit of truth about our beautiful universe. My stars always led the way.

So, you ask, why does my experiment successfully represent who I am as a scientist? Regardless if I get this scholarship or