“I’ll help you pull up the website and application,” Emma says.

“No need,” I say, but she gets up anyway, and I follow her to the dining room. She logs in, then types in the website, clicking on a tab marked New Applications. Before she’s fully out of the way, she pauses and says, “Mason, I think this could be a really good opportunity. I know it can be hard to concentrate on things like this when you have so much going on in your life, but I think you should really consider it.”

That sort of snaps me out of the mermaid trance I’m in. Annoyance wells up in me.

She’s looking right in my eyes and it’s pushing me off-balance, because, really, what does she know about my life? She’s here, an adult, in her own home, making her own choices, with her own family. She has no idea what it’s like to be me, or how painful it is that I don’t actually get to consider things like astronomy camps. Not when my main goal is finding my mom. “I’ll think about it,” I say quickly, and she gives me a nod and a look that makes me think she’s seeing straight though my BS.

“And if this program isn’t it, we can always research more,” she adds. “There are even a few that are sleepaway camps, two or three weeks. They all looked incredible.”

“Cool,” I say, but I’m so desperate for her to leave, I’m clenching and unclenching my jaw. This is my first computer access in over a week, and now that it’s within reach, I feel like I might explode. She takes the hint and walks out.

I exhale. The keyboard is sticky, like every other surface in the house, and as I scroll down on the website, I find Simon and Emma’s friend right away. Professor Singh is young and Indian, with dark brown skin, her black hair swept up into a bun. According to her bio, she studies how galaxies connect with each other via the exchange of energy and matter, and she’s used the Hubble Space Telescope to look for hidden matter.

Honestly, this sounds… incredible.

Boston University has several world-class telescopes, which is interesting, and even laboratories where they come up with the instrumentation. There are all these photos of students standing together in groups in front of telescopes, grinning, and for one tiny second I allow myself to think about what that would be like—to be around people who used words like “instrumentation,” taking notes on things like deep space and matter. But that makes me think about the notes in my notebook, and then it’s all I can think about, and now my head is swimming again.

I have to get my notebook back.