Free The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel by Andrew Sean Greer Page A

She was an Indian princess in disguise among the common people, and they should take note. But really it was just that they didn’t treat her like a child; they talked to her like an adult or, rather, as if they were children, too, as if she were no different; and yet, still, secretly, she pined for that distinction. She loved the way other adults, like Kim’s parents, fawned over her, brought presents, deferred to her as if she might save the world. None of that happened with her father’s friends. Instead, these scientists and grad students might spend an hour in her room playing with her camera while she sat on the bed picking at her jeans, arms crossed and furious. Didn’t they know who she was?
    Lydia ran across the field toward the barn. She had decided she would spend the whole evening there, in the loft with her magazines and diary, spying on the adults. Grass broke at her ankles, wet from an earlier rain, and flecked water into the air. Her socks were getting wet, and green, but she was careless. She hardly ever noticed anything except the object of her focus; somehow, the absentmindedness passed over the professor and grew in his daughter. Blue moths were floating over the field—she didn’t notice them—and, caught in her wake, they flew like tissue into the sky, which was as blue as they were. She hated being eleven. It killed Lydia that she wasn’t twelve; she despised being eleven; it was so young. It seemed to her that she’d been cursed with childhood forever, that no one else in the world had ever been so young for so long.
    So there she was, climbing up the splintered crosspieces of her ladder, wet straw clinging to her hair as the bats slept high in the rafters; there she was getting higher but, to her mind, no older. And there was her father, cutting lamb into cubes, humming some new song through his gray beard, some tune he’d heard on the radio, trying to be relevant and oh-so-seventies. Yet he could hardly go to bed without another year passing him by. The girl with straw-littered hair, a mere slug in time, and her portly father moving like a greyhound through it.
    The doorbell rang. Someone had arrived too early.
    Above, out away from the little farm built on its quarter-lot of an orchard, the apple blossoms only green teeth on the branches— above, into space, past the Moon and Mars and the asteroids, somewhere out near Jupiter—the comet sailed on its bent orbit. Just a fist of ice and dust now, a few kilometers across, nothing propelling it but momentum and these giant gravities, no heat here to give it a tail or any brightness. Dark and asleep. It was nearing its farthest distance from them—its aphelion, its half-birthday—oblivious, of course, to the party being thrown in its honor.
    “Manday!” Swift yelled in the doorway and it was indeed Dr. Manday, holding a bottle of wine like a baby. His skin was drier and paler than it had been years ago, and he was as stout as Swift now, though a decade or so younger. Perhaps it was his timidity that aged him faster, and his old friend had always cursed him for that, demanded that he listen to rock music and wear blue jeans instead of the stiff collars and slacks of an old man. Manday couldn’t bear it; it was hard enough for him to be an American. The loudness and frankness of being American, the utter selfishness and greed and great compassion of it, the whole opera whose stage he stepped onto—it was hard enough acting his role without having to be young, or brave, or handsome as well. Did he have to leap into the very fire?
    “Best wishes to your comet,” Dr. Manday said and waited in the doorway.
    Swift made no gesture for him to enter, but stood there in his apron, that frightening knife clenched in one fist. He was looking past Manday into the sky, burning blue as flame, and perhaps to what might be hidden out there, impossible to see; perhaps wondering whether either of them would live to see it again. These were troubled times.