Free First Day On Earth by Cecil Castellucci

I ever intended to be.”
    “Isn’t there anything you like about Earth?”
    “You, Mal. I like you.”

43.
     
    Posey is waiting for me when I get out of the boys’ room. I think it’s kind of weird that she’s waiting for me, but Posey is the type of person who doesn’t really care if something seems weird. She does look like she’s pretty excited and has to talk to me right away. I wonder if it’s about the dog.
    She shoves her phone in my face.
    “What?” I say. I don’t know what I’m looking at.
    “Read,” she says.
    It’s a news article about a civilian spacecraft that’s going to blast off in a secret night launch from the desert in the next few days.
    “So?” I say.
    “I thought maybe we could go,” Posey tells me. “Why?”
    “Because there’s a spaceport right here in our own backyard, and I think it would be cool to go see something blast off into the sky.”
    I get a kind of vertigo feeling. I put my hand on the wall and lean on it, trying to look as cool as I can while also steadying myself.
    Posey is standing there and looking at me. Other people are looking at Posey talking to me. Darwyn is fiddling with his bag near us.
    I look back down at the screen.
    For years, the desert in California has served as a spaceport for civilian attempts to reach the stars
.
    “My parents took me to see a rocket launch when I was younger,” Darwyn pipes up. He’s done what he does best — he’s inserted himself into a conversation he wasn’t having.
    “I thought we could go,” Posey says. “Anyway, we could go stargazing afterward. You know, make it a thing.”
    “I don’t have any plans,” Darwyn says. “I can bring food.”
    “Why don’t you just go, then?” I ask Posey. I am not trying to be mean, but I have plans to go to my own space launch. And there will be no civilians involved. Except me, hopefully.
    Posey cocks her head to the side as if to say,
Are you serious?
    “No one likes this kind of stuff but you, Mal,” she says, spelling it out for me.
    “I like a lot of stuff,” Darwyn says. “I’ve been meaning to get into space stuff.”
    I realize that I always hear Darwyn saying that. He’s always doing exactly what everyone else is doing. But he’s never doing his own thing.
    I give Posey back her phone.
    “I’m pretty busy,” I say.
    Then I walk away.

44.
     
    Hooper comes to me after I leave an Alateen meeting. He’s standing at the bottom of the stairs at the community center. He’s touching my bicycle and then pulling on his hair. He’s agitated.
    “Mal,” he says. “I got a message. There is a mining ship near this solar system. They are willing to come get me.”
    That feeling. That feeling bursts inside of me. Hooper is going to go and I’ll be alone again. It’s like the sun setting. Like being condemned to eternal darkness.
    “I want to go home,” he says.
    “That’s great,” I say. “So I guess this is good-bye.”
    “Will you help me go meet them?”
    “Why do you want to leave here so badly?” I ask. “Why don’t you just stay?”
    “I’m all alone,” he says.
    And for all the alone he likes being, I realize that he’s lonely. I know all about lonely and it’s terrible.
    When there has been a disaster, people seek out aid workers. Hooper might be alone, but for him it’s a galactic-size crisis. And I’m his only hope.
    “Okay. I’ll help you.”

45.
     
    When they come, I’ll ask him to take me with him.

46.
     
    I’ve been looking at the map to nowhere that Hooper gave me, the map to the middle of the Mojave Desert. I am poring over it. Trying to see what possible place Hooper could imagine that the ship is telling him to head toward.
    Everywhere in the Mojave seems like a road to nowhere.
    But then I see something. It’s not that far from the place that Posey talked about. The road he wants to be dropped off on is near the road that leads to the Mojave Air and Space Port.
    I’m worried now that Hooper could just be