JAN 20, 1986

Dear Bridget,

T-minus eight days until Challenger launch.

It is recess on my first day at Jefferson Middle School. We finished lunch a few minutes ago.

I had a peanut butter and fluff sandwich. Francine made it this morning. She put it in a Crayola Carnation Pink plastic lunch box with My Little Pony from TV on the front. I have a new backpack too. It is also pink. Salmon Pink, not Carnation Pink. You know I hate pink, all shades, but I can’t help liking it a little bit now because the backpack is only mine and the lunch box is only mine and I like having things that are only mine, even if they have to be pink.

Fluff tastes funny. Have you had fluff? It is marshmallows but spread out, like butter, which is confusing for my tongue but mostly okay.

This afternoon I will go to the regular sixth-grade class with Miss Chambers and Mallory and Mary-Beth. Mallory likes horses and Mary-Beth talks too quiet.

While we are in social studies, Basketball Alex, Wispy Lip Luke, and Stuffy Nose Thomas go with Mr. Malone to seventh grade.

Music Margot and Bouncing Buddy stay here with Mrs. Pierce.

That is what Mrs. Pierce said when we made my picture schedule. Except she does not know the special names I gave them.

After Morning Circle, this morning was like other new-school mornings. Testing, testing, testing. Boring, boring, boring. I wish I was at Billy and Francine’s house with NASA Bear and my attic window, listening to “Space Oddity,” soaring through the stars instead.

Mrs. Pierce set out blue plastic shapes and asked me to touch them.

“Touch triangle. Touch circle.”

When I did it right, she gave me a cut-up piece of gummy worm like Bouncing Buddy got for waving backward. I have never gotten candy from a teacher for doing a good job before. When I picked the wrong shape she took my hand and placed it on the right shape. It made me mad to get so many wrong but I could not listen to her asking each shape because there was too much going on, same as in kindergarten and first grade and second and third and fourth and fifth and sixth and the half of seventh I already did before I had to go backward. There is too much going on, always. Every school, every grade, every classroom, the same.

But not the good kind of same.

Outside there are squirrels even though it is winter.

Inside other kids are noisy.

Plus the ceiling lights have a hum.

And heat rattles through a metal vent.

And pencils scratch papers, which bothers my ears.

And my brain keeps going to the moon. I think I’m full of space dust.

So sometimes when she said “triangle” I thought maybe she wanted “square” because I could not hear “triangle” over all the square sounds around the room.

Then she did the same thing with colors so I started not listening. I think I touched the plastic colors but I do not know if I was looking because in my mind I was seeing outer space and stars and feeling the moon rocks kicking up beneath my feet. So many moon rocks.

I started thinking about the day NASA picked the winner of the First Teacher in Space contest.

July 19, 1985.

You said announcing the winner on my twelfth birthday was fate. You hoped the launch would be scheduled for the day you turn eighteen, which would also be fate. I did not know what fate meant then and I don’t know what it means now, but since NASA picked January 1986 instead of August 1986 I guess fate is not something they care about.

Know what I remember best?

When you held up the newspaper and read “Out of more than eleven thousand teachers, NASA has chosen Christa McAuliffe of New Hampshire…,” then started screaming, the butterflies already in my tummy fluttered all the way up into my chest. I had to cover my mouth because I thought they might escape! All those teachers, more than I can count, maybe more than there are stars in the sky, and NASA picked one from our New Hampshire! I don’t know why I cried. Maybe because of the butterflies, maybe because of the fate, or maybe because your happy-screaming was too loud.

Then you said we were going to rocket out of foster care together just like how the astronauts would be rocketing out of Earth’s atmosphere, remember?

That was my favorite part.

That’s why you need to come back soon.

I do not want you to miss it.

Recess is over. Mrs. Pierce wants me to put my scribbles away. That’s what she called my letters notebook—scribbles. My words to you look like scribbles to her, which makes her just like every other teacher, ever. Teachers think I cannot read like how Francine thinks I cannot read but maybe they are the ones who cannot read. You could always read my letters. You never called them scribbles. Babies scribble. I’m not a baby.

I miss you.

Love,

Your Super Nova