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Listen. The astronaut thing, that’s easy, man. To become one, you need to get sixty-two miles off the ground. You don’t need to get to orbit, you don’t even need to be hanging up there all that long either. Just arc up, hit the point, and when you get back to ground: you’re technically an astronaut.

Serious.

Virgin Galactic offers the flight to all them rich people. You get in a vehicle called SpaceShip Two that looks like one of them retro rocketships from old black and white fifties sci-fi movies, but painted white, not silver. That thing hangs from the bottom of a flimsy looking jet plane that takes it up into the air, and then drops SpaceShip Two and lets it take off.

I know this because just one week after we signed the documents and left St. Thomas in a private jet, the engines of a Virgin Galactic SpaceShip Two kicked on as we dropped away from the carrier. It shoved me right on back up into my chair.

You been on a roller coaster?

When the rocketplane gets forward and points up and really opens up, that’s exactly what it feels like.

Boom and thunderation, and when you look out that porthole, what do you see? Land dropping away behind you quick. Like falling into the clouds because everything turned upside down, and it feels like a fat man is sitting on your chest so you can’t hardly breathe.

This sort of thing just didn’t happen to us, as my dad said. Not me. Not my family. Not me with my St. Thomas accent, feeling out of place next to the three other families who had arrived at the Yggdrasil program with us. Not me with my dreadlocks upsetting the company trainers because they said it’d be dangerous if I have to get a helmet on in space with all that locked-up hair (but I insisted on keeping them anyway).

Lucky.

So crazy lucky, I thought.

Every time I thought I had an amazing day: flying out of St. Thomas safe, or finding that our luxury hotel room had unlimited room service. And then I’d have another amazing day just right after it.

People cynical. Politicians say people aren’t interested in space no more. No one cares about all that expensive stuff. But if that’s true, how come every time a dumb probe lands on Mars, it’s the most popular thing on the web?

Deep down, you know people all dream. If you offered someone a free trip to space, or even the edge of space, you think they won’t take it?

Anyone would take it, I guarantee you that. These four other families from across America had.

I read books, comics, watched movies. Who didn’t want that adventure? The chance to see whole new worlds?

We knew the All Tree, as everyone now knew the alien starship called itself, would be showing us even greater wonders. But this was Christmas for me. And after everything my family had just been through, things were finally turning around.

This was an adventure before the even bigger adventure.

At sixty-two miles up, you can see the atmosphere: a tiny blue band of haze all wrapped up around the Earth like a ring. From the ground the atmosphere seems all tall and infinite. But not when you get this high.

Up here the curve of the Earth got tight, tight, as if it was wrapping itself up into a ball outside the window. And suddenly, my perception changed: the Earth wasn’t this great expanse of land underneath, but a massive sphere we were next to.

At sixty-two miles, the Earth was a world I was looking down on, not flying above.

People say things are “breathtaking.” Now I realized that word had a specific meaning. You lost your breath; you gasped. It got sucked right from your lips.

They let us all unbuckle and wobble around, weightless. I didn’t know the other three children well. Just their names. Jessica always wore dark eyeliner, like she was a goth that smiled or something. Sofia I knew came from Miami, as we’d picked her family up on the way to New Mexico from St. Thomas. Alex came from California and had stringy long hair that was right now floating around his head.

And it was funny, I realized, no had given him grief about his long hair.

I should have talked to them, but instead I just stared out the porthole as we all kissed the edge of space and looked down at the Earth.

All of this was paid for by Yggdrasil. Our trip out of St. Thomas in first class. Swanky hotels. Rides in limousines. I loved it all. So did my mother. But it worried my dad that there were always security guards around us. “To keep you safe,” they said.

“From who?” my mother asked.

“A lot of curious people who might push too much,” one of the guards explained. “Or maybe some crazies who’re obsessed with getting up to space. We’re here to make sure you’re safe.”

My favorite perk was free room service. Sometimes I would give the two security men who stood outside our door extra orders of fries that I would order, as it seemed like they had a very boring job.

They wanted to help us, the men in suits who met with us said. They wanted to help us prepare for space. Which is why we’d take the Virgin Galactic trip.

But the suits lied.

***

All us four kids from the four different families that Yggdrasil had contracts with went up on one rocketplane, all the parents on another. None of us thought about why. All too excited.

It was cool to meet the other three. We’d been kept apart for the most part.

I felt that New Mexico felt like another world as we came back down to land. An alien place. Far from palm trees and the cool tradewinds, far from the ocean and sand. It was the desert. It might as well have been Mars to me: so red and sandy.

When the rocketplane landed, the heat shimmered off the flat, rusty looking land as far as I could see. An ocean of sand that swallowed me up as people in blue suits and sunglasses, pretending to be all concerned, but coming off fake and false and plastic, surrounded me and took me into the cool depths of a concrete building. They separated Jessica, Alex, Sofia and me from each other.

Another overly concerned woman in a dark blue suit and blonde hair cut short just above her ears put an arm around my shoulder and let me into her office.

“Kadie, my name is Catherine Atwater,” she told me, “I have some bad news.” Her face was ghost pale and she looked very nervous.

I shivered. Not just because it was cold, but because when someone comes to you with that kind of tone you know something horrible is coming for you. And after all the good things that had just happened, I felt like this had to be something that would shatter me in two from the whiplash.

“Kadie. The other rocketplane, with your parents aboard… there was an accident…”

My ears stopped working. I let her words pass me by while I stared past her shoulder as I tried to understand how I’d flown up to the edge of space just an hour ago and now was coming down so hard.

I was ready to throw up on her desk.

“Kadie? Kadie? Are you listening?”

Listening? Why should I be listening? When rocketplanes had problems they exploded. I just stared at her.

Someone moved next to my side and handed me a glass of water with two pills. “What is that?” I asked.

“They’ll help,” Catherine told me.

The pills stuck in the back of my throat, but I swallowed them and looked back at her. “I…”

“Are you feeling up to this?” Catherine asked.

I nodded at her. I had no idea what she was talking about, I was still in shock as she turned the flat screen on her desk to face me.

My dad, with his own tightly wound locks loose and hanging around his face, was on the screen. Mom next to him. Both in hospital beds surrounded by screens, an IV, and a doctor in a white coat who stood just off to the side.

Whatever the pills were, they stopped the room from spinning.

“I know you having a rough time,” my dad said, his accent a solid touch of the familiar here in the surreal. “We okay. And remember: we both love you, very, very much, you hear?”

My mouth felt gritty and too dry. The room began to spin, and I fell forward, my head hitting the desk. I didn’t want to fall, I wanted to hear everything they were telling me.

“I need to ask you a question, Kadie,” my dad said.

“Yes?”

“Do you really want to go up there? How bad?”

“Real bad,” I said. I was fading away like a light shore breeze. The pills. And what was this about?

My mother closed her eyes and smiled. My dad nodded. “Okay then.”

“Well,” Catherine hissed at someone standing behind me. “Let’s get moving.”

I realized, slowly, that I’d been drugged. Those pills weren’t for nausea. Something was very, very wrong. I tried to mightily lift an arm that felt like it had been tied to the desk as I slid down the chair.

“Dad?”

“Be safe out there, son.”

The drugs Catherine given me shoved me deep into a blackness darker than the purple edge of space I’d seen that morning.

My dad glanced at my mom, then at me, and walked to the door to look through the peephole.

His shoulders sagged. “The police,” he said.

My mom looked to the balcony, but we were five floors up.

There was nowhere to go.

Dad slowly opened the door, and a short, pale man in a suit stepped between the police. “Mr. Stephens, may I come in?”

He had a suitcase with him and he flowed into the room as if he belonged there. “I’m a representative of the Yggdrasil Corporation.” He set the suitcase down on the coffee table and opened it to reveal a variety of legal documents. “We are a public/private partnership between certain arms of the US government. Our aim is to figure out exactly what this starship is and what we can learn from it.”

As that sunk in he removed several of the legal documents and placed them carefully on the glass top of the coffee table. He waved us all to sit, as if we were in his office or something, rather than him being in our hotel room.

“We followed this invitation here because we’d like to offer to pay for your trip to Ecuador. In addition, we’re offering you training to deal with zero gravity and teach you what little we know about space and what life aboard a starship might be like. We’ll show you how to use spacesuits, and even take you up to space. The three of you will become astronauts.”

He smiled when he said that.

My dad may not have done well in school and barely graduated, but he frowned in suspicion. “And what you want in return?” he asked, folding his arms.

The representative smiled again. “A quick man, Mr. Stephens. To the point. We want you to tell us everything you can about the All Tree. We’ll give you communications equipment. Every little thing you can tell us helps us advance science, and your country, a great deal. In return, we’ll give you a stipend, as well as training.”

Much to my embarrassment, my dad didn’t know what the word stipend meant. He frowned again.

But the representative pushed one of the contracts toward him. “Would two hundred thousand dollars be acceptable? There’s a possibility of larger bonuses when you return from your trip.”

That… was an extraordinary amount of money. For three weeks of our time.

“We… haven’t even agreed to go, yet, as a family,” Dad said, the faintest crack in his voice.

The man smiled politely and placed a pen down in front of us. “Well, I’ll leave you to discuss it.”

“Damien!” My mom gasped, grabbing Dad’s shoulder tight.

“I’ll be right outside the door,” the representative assured her. “But I’ll need an answer within the hour. There will be other families who will be coming into the program, not just you. It is okay if you turn us down, but we need that answer fast so that we can set things in motion right away. Three weeks isn’t a lot of time to accomplish what we have in mind.”

As the door shut we all stared at each other.

To be honest, I was still terrified about what my parents would say next. They looked somberly down at the carpet.

“Well?” I asked.

They’d been watching the news and the TV. They knew about the contest. They knew what this all meant.

“Two years is a long time, Kadie,” Dad said quietly.

“And that money is a lot of money,” Mom replied.

I didn’t want to jinx anything. I sat and looked at them both.

“Things like this, they just don’t happen to people like us.” My dad shook his head in awe.

“But it happened. Can we let it just go?” Mom asked.

“It would change everything,” they said together.

And then they looked at me.

“And you? You want to? You really want to go?”

Every molecule in me vibrated, threatening to rip me apart from barely concealed excitement.

“Are you kidding me?” I stared at them both. “You see the books I read? You know the comics? You think I watch shows about the space program because I’m bored?”

I remembered reading about an astronaut saying that when he’d gotten to space and looked back at the entire world, everything changed because he could see the entire freaking world was just there in front of him: tiny and fragile and so small.

I wanted to experience that. I wanted to see amazing wonders. Things with my own eyes that almost no one else had ever seen.

“Yes. I want to go. A thousand times yes. Hell yes.”

And that right there, that, was how I became an astronaut.