Where You End Read Free

on. The men talk into their gadgets, probably calling for help. They gesture and shrug and run their hands through their hair. They’ve decided it’s best not to touch her.
    A girl in a T-shirt walks on the grass and stands next to the body. My heart smacks my chest. The girl leans over the belly. A guard tells her to step away and she backs off; then she looks up toward me and back at the sculpture. I turn around and walk slowly away, counting to ten, trying not to look suspicious. There’s no way she knows. I run, without looking back, even once. I would’ve pushed harder, I think, had I known metal would give like that.

two
    I find my breath in front of the command module that carried Aldrin and his men to the moon and back. It looks so much smaller than it did when I was the kid reading the placard. It’s the same blue carpet at the Air and Space, the same smell of armpits and dust from second grade. The only difference is that everything’s shrunk a little, especially the Columbia. This is the safest place I could think of. It’s hard to tell if anybody is after me. I wouldn’t know what to look for. I consider climbing into the module and making like I’m Michael Collins, fogging up the space helmet and reporting back to my own Houston.
    But I remember Michael Collins was a putz, taking pictures of the lunar surface while his buddies bounced around making small steps and giant leaps. The man drove the thing through the Earth’s atmosphere, scorched a layer in five-thousand-degree heat, and when he came home to his wife and she asked him w as it cold on the moon, what did the moon feel like, how did you like the moon, all he got to say is it was spectacular, honey, from the window of my command module . I don’t want to be Michael Collins.
    I may be a vandal, and they’ll arrest me or make me do community service, and I will never get into college, but if I drive myself to the moon, I will not hide in the fucking spaceship.
    So far, I have no missed calls, no handcuffs, no fat police officer telling me to sit down in a room without windows. Just the image of a woman with a small head and very little face. When I close my eyes, I see bronze. When I open them, my pale, shaky hands. I have to think. Focus that lens , Adam would say. I buy a ticket for the next planetarium show and settle into a center seat, where my memory explodes like a ball of hot gas.
    Elliot played the upright bass in the jazz band, and I had seen him lugging that monster into the music room on Wednesdays, practice day. I learned to get to school a little late those mornings, to time it so I could watch him drag the instrument in and maybe work my way up from a nod to a smile, even a word. I didn’t love him yet, obviously, but his boyish face, the sleepy green eyes, the whole Wednesday ritual became a resource for me, something to space out about on the bus ride home, a reason to hold my hair up and study my crooked mouth in the bathroom after brushing my teeth. I am a photographer. I see people; and then I want to keep them. All I knew was his name. It took us many Wednesdays to make any real contact.
    The day we finally spoke it was snowing, but our school stayed open, and we were two of a handful of students who showed up. Half the teachers stayed home. Elliot and I didn’t have any classes together, and I figured band practice would be cancelled, but I didn’t protest when my father asked me to help shovel the car out.
    We did the whole thing with a cookie sheet and a spatula, so by the time we got to school I was sure I’d missed Elliot. Shaking the snow off my boots, feeling the rising disappointment, I reminded myself of how smart I actually was. I read biographies. I played a decent game of Scrabble. I could hold my own in a music-snob rant. I had friends and a more-than-decent shot at art school. The boy snuck up.
    â€œIt’s just the two of us, I think.”
    The scratchy