How to Become a Planet Read online

  How to Become a Planet

  Nicole Melleby

  Algonquin Young Readers 2021

  For Liz,

  because I promised her outer space.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Criterion #1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Criterion #2

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Criterion #3

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Nicole Melleby

  Publisher Copyright

  In 1964, two astronomers at Bell Labs in New Jersey started testing a horn-shaped radio antenna. They wanted to detect the natural radio waves produced by gas clouds in space.

  Instead, they encountered something they couldn’t explain—low-level energy, coming evenly from all directions in the sky.

  Without realizing it, they had made one of the most profound discoveries in human history: Light from the big bang itself, released when the universe was only 380 thousand years old, less than one hundredth of one percent of its current age.

  –Timothy Ferris, Dark Universe, The American Museum of Natural History

  Criterion #1

  A planet must orbit the sun.

  1

  Pluto was on the phone with the Hayden Planetarium Astronomy Question and Answer Hotline, trying to find out how to create a black hole, when her mom broke down Pluto’s bedroom door.

  Pluto wasn’t allowed to lock her door, but that night the rule didn’t stop her. She needed to keep everyone, everything, out so she could just . . . just stop. Just turn off the lights and shut her eyes and stop, which was something she had been thinking more and more about lately.

  Hence, the black hole.

  But she couldn’t do that, couldn’t stop or think or anything, with the way her mom was pounding on the door, shouting over and over, “Open the door, Pluto! Let me in! Just open the door!”

  The voice on the other end of the phone was jovial and kind as they explained how black holes were created. But that wasn’t right, wasn’t what Pluto wanted. She knew how black holes were created in space. She knew that it took a dying star, an explosion, and a gravitational game of tug-of-war.

  That didn’t help her here, now.

  Pluto felt heavy sadness, a weight that pushed down on her chest, and she could hear her mom sobbing as silent tears fell down Pluto’s cheeks. That weight, and Pluto’s reaction to it, was too much. Too dramatic. It was too dark in her bedroom, when it was sunny and spring through her window. She was too shut down for someone who confided everything to her mother.

  Her mom’s voice, outside the door: “Pluto, please. Please open the door!”

  The muffled voice on the other end of her phone: “Can we help you with anything else today?”

  Pluto’s head rested against her cold wall, light gray and plastered with little glow-in-the-dark stars she had tacked on with her mom when she was four. She picked at one with her thumbnail, pulling it off and taking bits of gray paint with it. She couldn’t explain what happened next, only that the sadness turned to anger in her chest, and she knew those little stars wouldn’t help her. They wouldn’t die and explode and suck her into their dense nothingness, and she was mad at them. She was mad at those little stars, and at the voice on the other end of the planetarium hotline, and at her mom, and at herself, and she needed the stars to come down. She needed them to stop glowing.

  She dropped the phone and ignored her mom, and she pulled at those stars, one by one, yanking paint off the wall and throwing them away. It still wasn’t enough to make everything stop, and she reached for the books on her bookcase, the astronomy ones her mom had bought her every year for her birthday, and she threw them, too, reveling in the sound of hard thumps as they hit the walls and the floor.

  She reached for her brand-new book, too, the one about the Challenger sitting on her desk next to her mom’s old computer, the one her dad had sent to try to make her feel happy, which was ridiculous, really. The Challenger was a tragedy, and Pluto had enough of her own sadness lately. She held the book up as high as she could, but before she could launch it across the room, she heard a loud, splintering crack—which was just as satisfying, really—like something huge crashing down, down, down.

  But it was just her wooden door, and then her mom’s arms were holding her tight.

  2

  When it finally came after one hundred and eighty long days, the first day of summer break didn’t matter to Pluto. The countdown she’d made with Meredith still read 34 Days Until Freedom!!! because Pluto hadn’t been to school in over a month. She hadn’t had to worry about end-of-the-year pool parties, or endless have a great summers, or Meredith begging her to just be her friend again.

  And, finally, she didn’t need to worry about school calling home, asking where she was, asking when she was coming, making her mom’s voice tremble as she spoke into the phone, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do, either.”

  Instead, what Pluto did have to worry about was that her mom was already out of the shower, shuffling around in the bathroom they shared, nearly ready to start the day. The hall light was on, bleeding into Pluto’s bedroom, making the thick purple curtains that blocked out the morning sun null and void. If she had a bedroom door, she would close it to block out the light and the sound of her mom as she hummed while she got dressed.

  But Pluto did not have a bedroom door, and hadn’t had a bedroom door for a little over a month now.

  Her mom stuck her head in the doorway. “Hey, Shooting Star,” she said, words mumbled as she spoke around the toothbrush in her mouth. “You’re with me today, kid, so start making some moves.”

  Pluto and her mom both knew she would not be “making some moves.” Pluto resented the fact that her mom even suggested it, that her mom went about her morning as if nothing had changed inside Pluto, as if an endless month in bed could suddenly come to a stop without trouble.

  When she didn’t move: “Plu, I’m serious.” As if that made a difference.

  Pluto was serious, too. She needed to stay in bed, under her thick purple blanket covered in white little stars. Her mom had picked out the bed set the moment Pluto outgrew the small wooden crib with the solar system mobile. The blanket was warm, and it was soft, and it was not something she was willing that morning, or any other, to give up.

  The bed shifted as her mom climbed in, smelling like the Taylor Swift perfume Pluto had bought her for Christmas last year. Her mom’s arms wrapped around Pluto’s middle, holding her close against the scratchy fabric of one of the low-cut tops her mom always wore that Pluto hated. Her mom’s breath tickled her ear. “I don’t want to pay for a sitter, Pluto. I want you to come with me.”

  Pluto felt a familiar feeling rise from her stomach up into her throat, one that made her want to scream and cry and argue, if only she weren’t so tired. Tears came anyway. Twelve-y
ear-olds couldn’t stay in bed all day on their own, no matter how much they might need to. If she was older, an adult, she would stay in bed and no one could force her to do anything, a fixed planet around which everything else moved while she ignored it. But for now, Pluto was the moon and her mom was the planet she was forced to orbit.

  Even if that meant being pulled out of bed, every inch of her silently protesting, while an invisible rubber band that kept her body strapped down was yanked taut as her mom tugged her into sitting. “There’s my girl,” her mom said, as Pluto blinked at her slowly. Her mom’s eyes were gray, like clouds during a rainstorm, and while they were always so gentle when they looked at Pluto, they hadn’t wrinkled at the corners with a genuine smile in what felt like forever. That, though, was comforting, because Pluto could not remember the last time she really smiled, either.

  “Get dressed,” her mom said simply, as if she wasn’t asking her to do something that required a Herculean effort on Pluto’s part. “I’ll go make you something to eat. It’s the first day of summer, Plu. It’s time to start having fun again.”

  She left Pluto alone to fight the urge to curl into herself and sleep. Standing hurt. Looking over at the Challenger book still placed on her desk with the ripped spine hurt. She picked it up, and the cover and first handful of pages slid away from the rest. Even broken, it was heavy in her hand, which was heavy on her arm, which was heavy on her shoulder. Gravity, it seemed, was extra hard on Pluto.

  In fairness, gravity had been harder on the Challenger. The shuttle had fallen from the sky before it was even close to orbit. It all happened so quickly, the smoke and the explosion and the destruction. Pluto often wondered about what that moment had been like, the one after everything was okay, but before everything was not okay, where the Challenger and the seven lives on it were somewhere in between, not okay but not not okay.

  Pluto called the Hayden Planetarium Astronomy Question and Answer Hotline to ask, once. After a brief moment of absolute silence, the voice on the other end of the phone quickly launched into a detailed account of all the mechanics of why the Challenger didn’t have a successful takeoff, which didn’t answer Pluto’s question at all.

  She placed the broken book back on her desk and reached for her phone instead, the one she got for her tenth birthday “just for emergencies” but mostly used to download podcasts and, at the time, text back and forth with Meredith.

  There was a notification that one of her favorite astronomy podcasts had a new episode about meteoroids, comets, and asteroids waiting to download.

  Pluto knew a lot about meteoroids, comets, and asteroids already. She knew that when objects speed into Earth’s atmosphere, the heat produces a streak of light from the trail of particles they leave in their wake.

  She looked over at her bedroom wall, at the little white specks left in the gray paint from where she’d yanked off the plastic stars one by one a month ago, hearing her favorite podcast narrator in her head: Like an asteroid, Pluto Jean Timoney leaves a trail of her own destruction in her wake.

  “Pluto!” her mom called. “Don’t forget your meds!”

  The little orange bottles sat right on top of her desk, next to the broken book. Take 1 with food. Take ½ in the morning. Take 1 as needed.

  Depression and anxiety. Two words. One brand-new diagnosis.

  3

  The bell above the pizzeria door jingled as they stepped inside. “Kiera! We’re here,” her mom shouted. They’d hired Kiera, a college student, for the summer, and she was tasked with opening up.

  Kiera was either the tall pretty one with the long, long black braids, or the shorter pretty one with the sea-green eyes. When she was younger, Pluto used to love the older girls. She would follow them around and cling to their server aprons and let them lift her into their arms as she twirled their ocean-salted hair around her fingers. But at the end of the summer they would always leave, and they would rarely come back. She didn’t know why it hurt as much as it did, but she decided it hurt less when she didn’t bother learning their names.

  “We’re back here!” Kiera called from the kitchen.

  Which meant Donna was there already, too.

  Donna was also Pluto’s fault, and of all the changes in the past month, Donna was the one that Pluto fought hardest against. Pluto’s mom wouldn’t hear any of it. “I need help if I’m going to be able to figure out what’s best for you and still run the restaurant,” her mom had said. “So, Donna stays. Because I need her.”

  Donna wasn’t a Timoney, and she was the first person who wasn’t a Timoney to ever run Timoney’s Pizzeria. Pluto didn’t like how she changed the way their menus looked (“The old ones were a little too difficult to read”); she didn’t like how she hovered by the cash register when the new college girls were using it (“They make so many careless mistakes, we should consider confiscating their cell phones”); and she didn’t like how Donna made Pluto sit at the counter instead of a booth when Pluto was there for lunch (“Leave the booths free for the customers, Pluto”).

  And she didn’t like how her mom seemed to just give in to any and all of Donna’s changes.

  Her mom didn’t seem to mind, though. If anything, she seemed eager to share the responsibility. When Pluto’s mom was a little girl, she’d wanted to be an astronaut. She’d wanted to touch the stars and look into that vast unknown and uncover it. She’d wanted to step on the moon and leave behind her footprint. Space offered an endless array of possibilities, and Pluto’s mom wanted the chance to explore every single one.

  Instead, she ran a little pizzeria on the Keansburg boardwalk.

  Pluto’s great-grandfather had bought the New Jersey hole-in-the-wall that would become Timoney’s Pizzeria in 1956. When he died, he left it to his oldest son, Pluto’s poppy, and when Poppy died when Pluto was five, he left it to his only daughter. Pluto figured Poppy thought he was doing her mom a favor, like his dad had done for him. Pluto’s mom practically grew up in that pizzeria. She was taught how to count using the money in the register, learned fractions from the pies themselves.

  But Pluto knew her mom still had dreams of NASA, even if her talking about going back to school happened less and less and hardly at all anymore.

  Pluto didn’t remember much about Poppy. She remembered he smelled like oregano and oil—just like her mom—and that they both had the same too-many-teeth smile. She remembered he always wore a Rangers hat, and how any time she threw a tantrum (of which there were many), he picked her up with his large hands under her armpits and set her in the “penalty box,” which was any isolated corner.

  She remembered how he used to tell her, when she was small enough for him to lift onto the counter next to the register, that her grandma sometimes had tantrums she couldn’t control, too.

  “Did she have to sit in the penalty box?” Pluto had asked.

  Poppy had laughed at that.

  But both he and her grandma were gone, and the penalty boxes were traded for antidepressants.

  Kiera came out from the back kitchen (she was, as it turned out, the college girl with the braids), with Donna trailing her. “Hey, guys!” Donna said, smiling bright in a way that reminded Pluto of a “mom smile,” even though Donna didn’t have any kids.

  “Hey, D, sorry we’re late,” Pluto’s mom said. “I’m glad you’re here. I didn’t think you were coming in today.”

  Donna waved off Pluto’s mom’s concern with the dirty rag in her hand. She was a tall woman, with wide hips and thick dark hair and brown eyes. She had moved to the Jersey Shore from Staten Island a year ago and seemed more at place in an Italian pizzeria than Pluto and her mom (with their blond hair—bleached in her mom’s case—and light eyes, regardless of their heritage) ever did. “I forgot I scheduled an early delivery someone had to sign for. I didn’t want to make you rush in,” Donna said.

  “You didn’t have to do that. We’d have gotten here.”

  Donna looked doubtful. Pluto was doubtfu
l.

  “It was really no problem. But you want to come help me bring the crates in so I can head out and Kiera can get the tables set?” Donna asked, motioning toward the kitchen where the deliveries were brought in from the back door.

  Pluto’s mom placed a hand on Pluto’s head, playing with the semi-greasy strands of her ponytail. Pluto hadn’t taken a real shower in a few days. “I’ve got your workbooks in my bag if you wanna start looking at those?”

  Thinking about those workbooks made Pluto’s stomach hurt, made her want to curl into a ball, into the dark, and disappear.

  There were thirty-four days of school Pluto had not attended. There were more than thirty-four phone calls made home. There were two home visits, and three different doctor’s notes, and endless arguments between Pluto’s parents.

  But a deal had been made so Pluto wouldn’t have to repeat the seventh grade come September, and her mom would no longer be in trouble. That deal involved a tutor throughout the summer, workbooks and lessons, and a whole lot of studying Pluto did not want to do. Could not do. Would not do, full stop.

  Just thinking about it made her feel sleepy, and weighed down, and made her chest tight. Too tight.

  “Oh! Anna, before I forget,” Donna said as Pluto’s mom began pulling the stack of workbooks out of her large shoulder bag and Kiera pulled the cleaning supplies out from under the front counter to start wiping down tables. “Julie next door said they’re doing one of those wine-and-paint nights at the pavilion. She and Barb were going to try to get all the business owners together to go. I figured we could schedule a couple of our better girls for a few hours that night so we could join in.”

  Pluto’s mom’s smile was tight. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “We could use a night to ourselves,” Donna said. She was looking at Pluto when Pluto glanced up at her.

  Pluto’s mom didn’t drink, and she wasn’t exactly the wine-and-paint-night kind of person, anyway. She was the attend-Comic-Con or binge-watch-Star-Trek-on-Netflix kind of person. She was the kind of person who’d met Pluto’s dad at a renaissance fair upstate. Pluto’s dad loved role-play and games—he still met with his Dungeons & Dragons group every Saturday, which was why he usually couldn’t take Pluto for entire weekends. And Pluto’s mom had gone dressed up as a member of Star Trek’s Starfleet who got lost traveling through time.