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.