FEB 1, 1986

Dear Bridget,

It has been four days since the Challenger disaster. Since I understood that you are not coming back. Since the Wests asked to adopt me. I have not gone back to school. I’ve been here at home with my future forever family and NASA Bear, thinking.

And talking.

Sometimes I talk out loud, like I used to talk to you, and Billy and Francine try to understand but it’s hard. So for the last three days, Francine has been writing words and drawing pictures for me. She keeps them all in a special spiral notebook with a Crayola Goldenrod sun on the front cover. She made a page for food, a page for books, a page for family, a page for friends, a page for places, a page for space, and two pages just for school. (NASA Bear is on the space page, not the family page, but that’s okay.) Francine says Mrs. Pierce is going to work with me on communication a lot when I go back, and Miss Chambers will too, but it’s hard to talk without you.

It’s hard knowing I will never talk to you again.

Yesterday, Billy and Francine took me back to the white cross on the side of the road. We painted your name on it together, with Francine’s hand over my hand holding the brush. Then Billy helped me bury a tin box full of the letters I have written you in the last two weeks, except for this one. This one I will keep with me. We also put the stolen Little People astronaut in there and a newspaper clipping about the Challenger disaster.

I am keeping the tape you made, the one with “Space Oddity.”

I will still be an astronaut, Bridget. I know it has only been four days since the explosion and Billy says we can’t know what’s next for the space program, but I believe they will send astronauts up again. I’ll be with them, someday. Maybe not on a vacation trip to the moon, like how people go to Disneyland and Myrtle Beach, because space is serious business. But maybe I will be the First Autistic Girl in Space.

Francine says I can do anything. She says I am smart and brave.

She also says you can still see me, so I should try to make you proud.

I like to think you are already in space, waiting for me. When I am old and I die, I’ll join you on our secret planet, like the Little Prince, where together we will rake out our active volcanoes.

Last night, Francine looked up nova in the book from my astronomy class. It turns out a nova is not an explosion at the end of a star’s life, like a supernova. A nova is an explosion on a white dwarf that makes a dull star get brighter and brighter all of a sudden until it is the brightest thing in the sky after the sun and moon, but then it fades back to normal. A supernova kills a star, but not a nova. In a nova, the star survives the explosion.

That’s me, Bridget.

I survived.

You are gone.

But I’ll go on.

I miss you.

Love,

Nova