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By the time we got back to the dorms, the cold air had sobered me a little, but I was still buzzing, the fluorescent lights in the hallway making my head throb and the texture on the carpet seem hyper-real. Thomas and Gretchen waved good night, and Milton caught my shoulder as I made to follow Charles to our room.
“One sec,” he said, suddenly serious. “About Thomas. Just don’t fuck with him if you don’t mean it, okay?”
“Fuck with him? I don’t fuck with him.”
Milton hesitated. “Just don’t treat him the way Will treats you.”
“What!? I don’t—”
“Babe, you kind of do. I know you probably don’t mean to.”
I shook my head, and Milton patted me on the shoulder.
“Okay. Just… you know how shitty it feels, so be careful with him.”
I nodded, bewildered and nauseated, all the good feelings of the evening rushing out of me like a deflating balloon.
THE STARS rushed past and we zoomed through the planets’ atmospheres, space debris suspended in the thick darkness. I was shaky with awe at the scale of the known universe, even rendered in flickering light and color on the ceiling of the planetarium.
The e-mail from my astronomy professor telling us we had to go to the planetarium for class had come while I was FaceTiming with Will, and I told him it’d be more fun if I could go with him. He’d rolled his eyes at me and muttered about “puppy dog eyes,” but he’d been smiling when he agreed.
Today was the first time I’d seen him since taking my leave of his apartment after our winter break together. We’d talked and texted over the last couple weeks, but I could tell that Will was skittish about the way we’d left things, and I decided to prove to him that I wasn’t some codependent loser by not asking him to hang out every day.
When he’d walked up to where I was waiting in front of the entrance, though, my heart totally leapt. He had come from work, so he was dressed impeccably, and the reminder that he’d left work early to make sure we could catch the last show made me all warm and swoony.
Now, I reached out and twined my fingers through Will’s where his hand rested on his thigh. I did it without thinking, seeking some connection in the face of the sublimity of space. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Will turn to look at me, but I just kept my gaze heavenward and after a minute he squeezed my hand back. My chest was hollow with yearning, my stomach aflutter with affection for Will. For the feel of the hand I held, the leg our hands rested on, the warmth of his shoulder just touching mine.
Love. Not affection. I knew it, really. It had to be love because you didn’t feel affection for a hand. You fucking loved it. Right?
I was light-headed, the word zinging around to the tune of the whooshing keyboard and the zinging strings that accompanied our rush through space, my skin tingling as if it were only molecules magnetized toward Will by the force of his pull. I wanted to close my eyes, to shut out a vastness that dwarfed my love, but I couldn’t because I wanted both.
I wanted all the solidity of Will’s hand on earth, and I wanted to be blasted apart by echoes of it thrumming through space like the afterimage of a supernova.
“MAKES ME feel like we’re in Rebel Without a Cause,” Will was saying as we left the planetarium and walked through Central Park.
“I never saw it.”
Will shook his head at me the way he did whenever I hadn’t read or seen something he considered essential to being a cultured human in the world. I got the sense he’d worked really hard to catch up on all these things when he left Holiday.
“In class the professor told us this amazing story about Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan,” I offered. “Part of the Voyager project was that on board each of the craft were these records where they recorded a bunch of sounds from Earth—like little Earth capsules or something to communicate things about our world and about humanity if they ever made contact with alien life, and Carl Sagan was the one to curate it. Like, jeez, how do you curate the experience of Earth? It’s so wild.”
My shoulder brushed Will’s companionably, but he didn’t put any distance between us.
“Ann Druyan was the creative director of the project, and she and Carl Sagan fell in love while they were working on it. So she had the idea that they should include a record where they measure electrical impulses of the brain and the nervous system then translate that into sound, with the idea that possibly if the record were found those sounds could be translated back into thoughts. Which is such a brilliant idea, just in theory.
