The Same Stuff as Stars

“I just know,” she said. “I choose we explore the shed.”

“How come you get to choose?”

“Because I’m the biggest.”

“You’re always the biggest.”

She ignored him and picked her way around the yard to the small shed. The door sagged like it was worn out from trying to stand up straight for too many years. There was an encrusted orangy latch that could no longer fasten, from which drooped a useless lock, its rusted shackle hanging open. She pulled at the door, but the bottom was embedded in dirt and it didn’t move. She gave it a tremendous jerk, yanking it wide enough open to peer in. “It’s like the door to the Secret Garden,” she whispered.

“What garden?”

She didn’t answer.

NINE

A Is for Astronomy

The shed, as Angel might have guessed, was piled with junk, but there was enough space for the two children to slip in. There was a small dirty window on either side and, to her surprise, light coming in from above. Not from an unpatched hole, but from a little tower with holes as though someone had put them there on purpose. Then she remembered the fourth-grade field trip to see maple syrup being made. That building had a tower with holes in it to let steam and smoke rising from the boiling sap escape. So what she’d thought was a shed in Grandma’s yard was really a sugar shack, long past its maple sugaring days. Around the walls the children could see stacks of old papers and magazines, a baby bed, a highchair, something that might once have been a lawn mower, rusting sap buckets and large metal pans. In the middle, loaded down with more papers, was the old boiling stove, a piece of rusted pipe still hanging from the wall.

Bernie wrinkled up his nose. “It stinks in here.”

It did smell in the shed, like mold and rot, and something sickly sweet, left over from its days of glory when sap had boiled down to syrup on the stove.

“I don’t like it in here,” Bernie said. He began to wheeze. At the clinic they had told Verna to watch for signs of asthma.

“Go back outside,” Angel commanded. She meant to follow him, but something caught her eye: a line of books, tall volumes that had once been maroon, now multicolored with mold. She pushed aside a stack of buckets to get close enough to see what they were.

“An-gel,” Bernie whined from the open door.

“Just a minute. Just a minute.” They were old encyclopedias. But the sky wouldn’t have changed, would it? She searched the shelves for the S volume—something that would tell her about the stars. The volumes were all out of order, so she ran the point of her fingernail across the numbers and letters until she found Sordello – Textbooks and began frantically to flip through the musty pages, trying to ignore Bernie, whose whining was getting louder.

Between “Star Chamber,” which was not about stars at all and “Starfish,” which might look like a star but wasn’t one any more than she was, there was a long article about “Star Clusters.” She could tell it was way beyond what she could understand. Bernie was blamming on the side of the shed, but she couldn’t stop now. “Okay. Okay. I just need a minute.”

“That’s what you always say!”

She didn’t bother to argue. Her eyes raced down the page. At the end of the article it said: See Nebula; Astrophysics; Astronomy. Of course, astronomy. That was what she wanted.

“An -gel!”

“Hold your pants on, Bernie. I said I wouldn’t be a minute.”

“You already been lots of minutes.”

“Well, you just got to wait a few more minutes.” Why was it you could always find everything except the one thing you had to have? There was Volume 1, but it stopped with “Antarctic.”

“I’m warning you, Angel Morgan, you better get out here this minute. Or...or else!”

There it was! She pulled out the heavy volume and turned quickly, setting the pile of buckets clattering about. She picked her way around them—no time to stack them upright again—and came out of the shed panting, as though she had just finished a long race.

Bernie eyed her and the big book with suspicion. “I’m telling,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m telling Grandma you’re stealing her book.”

“I’m not stealing. I’m just borrowing it. Like from a library.”

“You are, too, stealing and you know it.”