“Obviously, we can’t feel any of it happening,” Vi went on, bringing Marianne back to reality. “If you think of time as infinite—going on forever—we’re just living in a teeny, tiny, incomprehensibly small sliver of it, so we feel like we’re staying still. But even so … We’re essentially exploding outward in slow motion. It’s like … if a firework never ended!”

Marianne tried to picture a never-ending firework, the sparks shooting out and then slowly drifting into the darkness for eternity.

She wanted to keep her eyes closed and watch them shoot to the moon and beyond, to the silent part of the universe, where everything was black.

“Right, but what does that have to do with the beginning of the world?” Nina interrupted.

Marianne opened her eyes.

“See, I told you I’m bad at astronomy,” Nina murmured to no one in particular.

“Right,” Vi said, breaking into a grin. Apparently, her look of worry and annoyance was not a permanent state. Her round cheeks bumped into the bottoms of her glasses, like her whole face had to move out of the way to make space for her display of happiness.

“At the beginning, there was that first explosion. Like a firework went off. The big bang theory says that after that happened, everything just kept going. So, in a way, we’re still living through the big bang now. Isn’t that amazing?”

“I don’t get it,” Marianne heard herself saying. And it was true. There were so many holes to that idea, so much left to understand. “What was before the big bang? Why did the big bang happen? What happens when it ends? See, this is what I’m trying to tell you. I can’t wrap my head around anything like this!”

Instead of scolding her, Vi said, “Marianne, that’s not not getting it. That’s just being unsatisfied. And that’s good. Science is all about asking those questions.” She paused. “See, I knew you might have a knack for the big theories and stuff. It requires … imagination.”

“Um, how do you know I have an imagination?”

Vi shrugged. “I see you daydream in class. Right?”

Marianne didn’t know what to say. Was that true about her? That she was a daydreamer with an imagination and a mind for big ideas?

Couldn’t be.

“What’s that Einstein quote about imagination?” Dan said.

Gosh, these kids really were a different species. They could just sit and talk for hours about all the things they knew.

“‘Imagination is more important than knowledge,’” Nina answered immediately, almost robotically, like it was something people said all the time. Marianne had never heard it before.

“So … We don’t know what happens when this big bang ends?” Marianne continued. It was funny—she really wanted to know.

“No. Time and space are so vast—meaning huge—that we can’t conceive of it.”

“Wow,” Marianne said.

“Wow,” Nina and Dan echoed her.

Marianne couldn’t stop seeing those sparks of fireworks shooting out and on and on forever, each spark holding a person or place she knew, or a planet, or a star.