“It wasn’t me,” Rebecca says, playfully elbowing Gaby. I laugh too loudly and my friends imitate me. It’s like I’ve been training for this my whole life. No one will guess that I’m trying to get us in trouble. We keep laughing and shoving. And then Ms. Garcia’s eyes are on us. Just like I planned.

“Girls, I’ve already separated you once before. Clearly you cannot handle sitting together. You, Gaby, sit there. Rebecca, you take the seat up front.” Ms. Garcia is pointing left, then right. She looks at me. “Mercedes, you park yourself right here.” She points to a seat in the second row from the back, only a few feet from the door we entered.

Perfectly positioned for sneaking out.

As the lights dim, I spot Mattie again. She’s sitting at the other end of the half circle of seats. Near the other exit door. Her eyes are huge. She glances across at me. We catch each other’s eyes for the split second before we’re plunged into darkness.

“Woooo!” call out the boys as we sit in the planetarium, our eyes trying to adjust to the dark. Someone shouts a curse word and then I hear Ms. Garcia. “Adam, Dante, and Joaquin, do you three want detention?”

I keep squinting in the blackness, and pretty soon pinpricks of light pop up above me. One by one, the glow of stars appears like very dim and very slow-motion fireworks. Humming music thrums through speakers, louder and louder, until it feels like we’re floating in an upside-down bowl of glitter.

Once, when Tristan was a baby, Tristan’s dad took us camping. We drove into the mountains and set up a green tent in a clearing. I remember roasting marshmallows and feeling bad that Tristan was too little to eat them. When it was time to go to bed, his dad put out the fire with a bucket of water, sending clouds of smoke into the sky. Once the smoke cleared, we were in total darkness. Tristan was asleep in his car seat, but Mom and I leaned back on the picnic table and looked up at the sky. We just sat there for a few minutes, in silence, staring at the night sky. And then Tristan’s dad pointed out which constellations were which. Mom kept correcting him (she knows the constellations because she grew up on a farm). He got offended, and then she got mad at him. Tristan started to cry, and his dad ended up sleeping in the car.