Ready for this?

The grand-prize winner of the Smithsonian Institution’s Women in STEM contest would win twenty-five thousand dollars.

That’s right. Twenty-five thousand dollars.

That’s twenty-five with three zeros after it, for them to use however they want. Plus another twenty-five thousand, for their school, which made it even more unbelievably spit-take, drink-spillingly mind-blowing.

But twenty-five thousand dollars. I knew exactly what I’d do with it, too. Because twenty-five thousand dollars is enough money even in adult terms for a down payment on a house your sister and her husband are trying to save up for.

I couldn’t be Mom’s left hand. I couldn’t be a mother the way Nonny would be.

But if I worked hard enough, I could calm that financial black hole in Nonny’s mind.

I could help bring Thomas home, so he wouldn’t have to take any more faraway jobs.

Kids sometimes weren’t the very nicest, and sometimes that would remind me that I had a scarred heart and missing chromosomes and didn’t play any of the games in PE very well. If I could do this one humongous thing, though, this biggest of all accomplishments, then maybe I’d have that inside me like hot herbal tea and warm marmalade toast no matter what cold words anybody else said. Even if nobody else knew what I could do, I would know.

Sometimes in my brain, an idea arrives huge and round and blocks out most everything else, like an eclipse. I could feel this idea of the contest, of helping Nonny, doing exactly that. Mom knows my mind works this way sometimes and calls it my tunnel vision. She knows I can get too focused on something when it’s so bright in my mind’s eye it’s like the sun, that one idea shining its own light over all the rest. But winning this contest and helping Nonny? Yeah, that could be my sun for a while.

I could do it. I had to.

Silent Questions

With Nonny staying, I decided to try talking to some new people at school. If it didn’t go super great, like last time, Nonny and I always had Celtic Woman to cheer me up. And my new secret mission made me feel braver, somehow.

At lunch I brought my peanut butter sandwich to a table with some new girls. One girl had the NASA logo on her T-shirt, so they seemed like they would be fun to eat lunch with. They smiled when I sat down, which was good. I told them my name and they each told me theirs. The girl in the NASA shirt was named Charise.

We talked about classes and then I talked about my sister and her piano and how beautiful her wedding was and also about my mom’s bakery.

“She makes these special cupcakes with dark purple frosting and white sprinkles and it makes them look like constellations,” I said.

“Oh.”

“One time I was helping her make the cupcakes and my grandma had given us this big ceramic yellow bowl that we keep apples in and I was moving it to make room on the counter and then I dropped it and it totally broke.”