But there was another sorrow too. And that was what came after. The not talking. The pretending like things were no different. The loneliness of never getting to cry out to the people you loved best how angry and scared and brokenhearted you were. If his family could only have talked about what happened, they might have been able to comfort one another. The sorrow would have been there still, but it would have been so much better to shine the light on it.

Look, they could have said. Here is what I feel. Over there is the monster I have to fight off. Over there is the mess he made when he came crashing in the room. There’s the broom to clean it up. There’s the space that was left, after.

Angry as he’d been at his father lately, Nate knew what he wanted then. He wanted his dad to see this. Nobody would understand better the glory of this moment.

Nate lifted the Polaroid camera from the bench. There was a single picture sheet left. He put his eye to the viewfinder and snapped the picture button.

As he waited for the film to develop he ran through his pi digits. When he peeled back the paper, there it was, still damp: the image of a dark black box, its edges only barely visible. But inside the box—fuzzy yet unmistakable—you could clearly see a firestorm of cosmic rays from some long-ago-exploded star.

The last vestiges of the moon hung low over the horizon when Nate returned to the house, though dawn was approaching. In his room he leaned over his sister, sleeping in his bed, her horse Midnight pressed tight to her chest.

“Junie,” he whispered. “You need to wake up now. You need to get dressed.”

Her eyes opened, crusty with sleep. “I dreamed I had a horse named Poco,” she said. “I dreamed I was riding on a cloud.”

“We’re going on a trip,” he told her.

“It’s still nighttime. Mom’s not up yet.”

“Mom’s not coming with us. This is just our trip. To Warm Springs.”

They dressed in the dark. Nate had a candy bar Naomi had given him and a pack of very old beef jerky he’d found under his bed when he cleaned out his room. “That’s what’s great about jerky,” his father once told him. “It can’t dry out because it starts out dry already. One thing that always comes in handy on an adventure is a stick of beef jerky.”

They brushed their teeth in the kitchen. Nate made sure his sister went to the bathroom, the way his mother always told her to before a long trip. They were already out the door when she asked him, “How are we getting there?”

“In the car.”