to shop. Well, I was going to shop. Big-time. But then Mom got the flu. Also big-time. Then Dad had to fly to Seattle for work. So good-bye France, and that’s why he called you, Uncle Roald, and … wait. You did talk to my dad? He said he was going to call you.”
Dr. Kaplan frowned. “I …” He fished out his cell phone and tapped it several times. “It must have run out of battery. I’m so sorry I didn’t get his message.”
Lily clucked her tongue. “No one should ever let his battery run down. I never let my battery run down. Your phone is like your brain. More important, even. Anyway, my dad dropped us here for the week and—ta-da!—here we are.”
Something sparked in Wade’s head. “Us? We? Here we are?”
Lily turned and made a little wave toward the house. “Becca came with me. Wade, you remember Becca, right?”
Of course he did.
Becca Moore.
The instant Becca walked out of the shade of the overhang, Wade stood up like a soldier at attention. He couldn’t stop himself. It was instinctive and weird. He knew it was. But more than being weird, it hurt, because Wade was still in the car. You don’t stand up in cars. Even convertibles, which his dad’s car was not. As Wade jammed his head into the ceiling, he knew it must look epically dumb.
Guys didn’t stand up for just anyone.
But then, Becca Moore was not just anyone. She was … interesting. His brain wouldn’t let him go any further than that.
Interesting.
Becca was born in Massachusetts and had moved to Austin when she was eight. She was tall and fair and had long brown, almost black hair tied in a loose ponytail. Wade was a little afraid of her because she was so smart, but she didn’t broadcast it and was almost as quiet as he was, which was another cool thing about her. As she walked over to the car, she was wearing a faded red 2012 Austin Teen Book Festival T-shirt, slim blue jean leggings, and mouse-gray ballet flats so soft they made no more sound than if she were barefoot.
Interesting.
Dr. Kaplan got out of the car and hugged both girls. “Well, we’re glad to have you visit. Come on in!”
Darrell couldn’t stop laughing as Wade unfolded himself from the car and limped to the front door.
No sooner had they all piled inside than Lily spun around. “Pose!” She snapped another picture with her phone. “So awesome. Wade with his eyes closed. Darrell looking like … Darrell.” Then she found a seat in the living room, tugged a sleek tablet computer from her bag, and instantly began to type on its touch-screen keyboard. She looked up. “I’m writing a travel blog. But you knew that, right?”
No one knew that. If Wade had realized he would end up on the internet, he might have combed his hair that morning. Or washed it.
Lily grinned as she typed. “Vacation Day One. The Big Disappointment. A week with my cousins Wade and Darrell. I can barely bring my fingers to type these words …”
Darrell frowned. “Ha. And also, ha.”
Tearing his eyes away from Becca, who sat quietly on the couch next to Lily, Wade watched his father move distractedly around the living room. The coded email from Uncle Henry was obviously on his mind. Of course it was. Code? What did code even mean, except keeping a secret from someone? Who would Uncle Henry and his dad need to keep secrets from?
When the snappy conversation between Lily and Darrell finally paused, he spoke up. “Dad, the email?”
“I need your celestial map,” his father said, as if he’d been waiting for a lull, too. “The star chart Uncle Henry gave you when you were seven.”
Wade blinked. “Really? Why?”
“You’ll see,” his father said.
In the quiet of his room, Wade slid open the top drawer of his desk. He removed the leather folder as he had the night before. The map, so precious and so rare, would now, suddenly, be the center of everyone’s attention. But why did Dad want the chart? Puzzling over this, he brought it into the dining room, where he found them all sitting around the table.
His father pulled out a chair for him. “Wade, open the map, please …”
He unzipped the folder and opened it flat, revealing the thick sheet of parchment creased over itself twice. He saw, as he hadn’t in the darkness of his room the night before, faint, penciled letters on the backside, reading, Happy Birth-day, Wade. Carefully, he unfolded the parchment on the table and spread it out faceup.
Becca leaned over it, her eyes glowing. “Wade, this is so gorgeous. Wow …”
“Thanks,” he said quietly.
Spread out, the map was about the size of a small poster. It had been engraved in 1515 and was exquisitely hand painted. The heavens were colored deep blue, and the original forty-eight constellations described by the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy were drawn and starred in silver inks. Crater, Lyra, Orion, Cassiopeia, all the others. Evenly spaced around the map’s edge was a sequence of letters in gold forming an incomplete alphabet, which had always puzzled Wade and about which his father had offered no real explanation.
“Okay, so,” Dr. Kaplan said, taking a deep breath. “First we have the email.” He produced the printed email from his blazer pocket, then carefully traced his fingers over the letters bordering Wade’s star map. “Uncle Henry gave you this chart for your birthday, knowing you would like it.”
“I love it,” Wade said almost reverently. “It’s what really got me super-interested in the stars.”
“I know,” his father said. “Maybe you don’t remember me telling you, but it wasn’t the first time I had seen this map. Heinrich showed it to me while I was still a student, quite a few years before you were born. He had a little apartment then; he still does.”
“Have you seen him since then?” Becca asked.
“Once, then letters, email once in a while,” he said. “Heinrich had always been a collector of antiques. One night twenty or so years ago, in front of me and some other students, he unfolded five identical printings, all hand-colored, of the same map from the sixteenth century. This map. As we all watched, he took out a pen, dipped it in gold ink, and without a word, inked an alphabet around the edge of each one.”
“But the alphabet is messed up,” Lily said. “It’s only got … seventeen letters.” On her tablet she typed in the gold-inked letters framing the star map, while Darrell did the same on a yellow pad.
C D F G H I J K M O P Q V W X Y Z
“Of course.” Dr. Kaplan slipped on a pair of reading glasses. “We noticed the same thing. Heinrich told us our alphabets were one part of
