patted his pockets. “No bells are currently ringing, and I still don’t have the key.”
“You must have left it on his desk.” Wade shoved Darrell aside and retraced his steps down the narrow iron staircase to a small office on the third floor of Painter Hall.
Wade’s father—Darrell’s stepfather—was Dr. Roald Kaplan, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Texas in Austin, and Painter Hall was the home of an eighty-year-old observatory housing one of the largest telescopes that still operated by an intricate system of cranks and pulleys.
Wade sighed. “Darrell, you have
A flicker of interest flashed across Darrell’s face. In typical fashion, he responded off center. “I do enjoy the punk which is called steamy.”
It being spring break, both boys were looking ahead to a long week of no school. Which to Wade meant nine days of reading astronomy textbooks and nine nights of studying stars from the university’s observatory. He was pretty sure that to Darrell vacation meant some strange combination of hibernating and nonstop eating.
Or thrashing his Stratocaster at maximum volume.
Darrell had been trying to form a band for months with no luck. Wade felt there were two reasons for that. First, Darrell wanted to call his band the Simpletones, which was supposed to be ironic but maybe wasn’t. And second, he only wanted to play surf-punk, which Wade was pretty sure was not a thing.
They pulled up to their father’s office. Wade grabbed the knob, tried to turn it. That door was locked, too.
“Are you kidding me?” he said. “Dad won’t be back from the airport for another half hour. I have to show you this scope. I wonder where Campus Security’s office is. They’ll let us in—”
“Don’t move. I think I grabbed a campus map,” said Darrell, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets. “If Security is even up yet. It’s only … eight-ish. Which for some reason reminds me I’m hungry.”
“You ate a muffin an hour ago.”
“Exactly. One whole hour. You think Dad will let us go for an early lunch? How long do you think all this will … oh.”
“‘Oh,’ what?”
Darrell slid a dull brass key out of his pocket. “Is this what we’re looking for?”
“I knew it,” Wade growled. “Come on.”
“Fine, but are we still talking about nothing to eat?”
Wade laughed. “Sorry, bro.”
Darrell mumbled something, then hummed a raucous guitar solo as they made their way back up to the dome. Good, thought Wade. This is what Darrell did when he was more or less happy. Obsess about food and hum riffs.
Five minutes later, the boys pushed through the door of the old observatory, and the atmosphere of the large room washed over them like a wave of the past.
Darrell whistled. “You weren’t kidding, steampunk!”
Centered directly below a huge copper dome stood the famous Painter Hall telescope. A twelve-foot-long iron tube built in 1933, it was poised on a brick platform and was meticulously balanced by a giant weight, making it easily maneuverable into any position. Wade explained that the scope’s lens measured a mere nine inches across—compared to, say, the McDonald Observatory’s scope, whose mirror was thirty-six feet across. But this was a historical instrument, and Wade loved that. He loved the places where science and history crisscrossed. There was something exciting about lenses and gears and mechanisms that made exploration that much more, what was the word, human.
Wade had long had a thing for the old Painter Hall telescope, ever since his father first brought him into that round room. It was there he learned to locate the planets and constellations. It was in that observatory that he’d read the myths that lay behind their exotic names. It was there where he’d come to appreciate his own tiny place in the vast cosmos of space.
Where math and magic become one.
“Not bad, huh?”
“Not bad at all.” Darrell jumped up to the platform. “Cables, cranks. Levers. A clock drive! Mechanical future stuff. I love it! What awesome stuff can it do?”
“Not much in the daytime, but we’ll come back tonight for some real stargazing. Don’t mess with anything until I find the operating instructions. You’ll love the way it swings around with just a touch.” Wade plopped down at a small desk near the door. His father was writing a history of the telescope and had set up a research station there. “Just wait. Mars will be as close as a dinner plate.”
“I wish I were close to a dinner plate,” said Darrell. “Do you still have nothing to eat?”
“Since the last time you asked? No. But why don’t you check those pockets you never check?”
“Because I obviously don’t carry food with me … oh.” Darrell pulled a slender packet from his other pocket. “Gum is food, right?”
“It is if you swallow it,” said Wade.
“I always do.”
Before he’d met Darrell and his new stepmom, Sara, three years ago, Wade had hoped for the longest time that his real mother and father would get back together. He was crushed to realize they weren’t going to, and he was still having trouble accepting that the past was really the past. But he saw his real mom often (she lived in California now) and was coming to understand that you move on and learn to live with lots of stuff. He also had to admit that the new families were working out really well.
“Can you believe Mom’s going to be lost in the jungles of South America for a week?” Darrell asked from the platform. “Well, not lost, but hunting down some crazy writer?”
“I know, a week with no phones, no electricity, nothing.”
“Except bugs,” said Darrell. “Lots of bugs. Then she flies to New York. Then London. My jet-setting mom.”
“Sara’s supercool,” Wade said.
“Yes. My mother is.”
Any way you looked at it, the best part of the deal was Darrell himself. From the instant the two boys were introduced, he’d become the brother Wade had always wanted. They complemented each other in just about every way, but at the same time, Wade and Darrell couldn’t be more different.
Darrell had short dark hair, olive skin, and deep brown eyes that he got from his Thai father. Wade was fair-skinned, sandy-haired, and lanky. Darrell was five feet four and a guitarist of strange loud stuff that might be really excellent or might just be loud. Wade was three inches taller and owned an iPod full of Bach, because Bach was not loud, was the most mathematical of composers, and was someone his mother had taught him to love. Darrell was a junior tennis pro. Wade wore sneakers like a junior tennis pro. Darrell was comfortable with just about everyone. Wade felt more comfortable with Darrell than he did with himself. Finally, Darrell was usually
