"So," Luna said, as she and Kevin made their way along one of the paths of the Lafayette Reservoir Recreation Area, dodging around the tourists and the families enjoying their day out, "why have you been avoiding me?"
Trust Luna to get straight to the point. It was one of the things Kevin liked about her. Not that he liked her liked her. People always seemed to assume that. They thought because she was pretty, and blonde, and probably cheerleader material if she didn't think all that was stupid, that of course they would be boyfriend and girlfriend. They just assumed that it was how the world worked.
They weren't together. Luna was his best friend. The person he spent the most time with, outside of school. Probably the one person in the world he could talk to about absolutely anything.
Except, it turned out, this.
"I haven't been…" Kevin trailed off in the face of Luna's stare. She was good at stares. Kevin suspected that she probably practiced. He'd seen everyone from bullies to rude store owners back down rather than have her stare at them any longer. Faced with that stare, it was impossible to lie to her. "All right, I have, but it's hard, Luna. I have something…well, something I don't know how to tell you."
"Oh, don't be stupid," Luna said. She found an abandoned soda can and kicked it down the path, flicking it from foot to foot with the kind of skill that came from doing it far too often. "I mean, how bad can it be? Are you moving away? Are you changing schools again?"
Maybe she caught something in his expression, because she fell silent for a few seconds. There was something fragile about that silence, as if both of them were tiptoeing to avoid breaking it. Even so, they had to. They couldn't just walk like this forever.
"Something bad then?" she said, sending the can into a trash container with a final flick of her foot.
Kevin nodded. Bad was one word for it.
"How bad?"
"Bad," he said. "The reservoir?"
The reservoir was the place they both went when they wanted to sit down and talk about things. They'd talked about Billy Hames liking Luna when they were nine, and about Kevin's cat, Tiger, dying when they were ten. None of it seemed like a good preparation for this. He wasn't a cat.
They made their way down to the edge of the water, looking out at the trees on the far side, the people with their canoes and their paddle boats on the reservoir. Compared to some of the places they went, this was nice. People assumed Kevin was the kid from the wrong side of town leading Luna astray, but she was the one with the knack for squeezing past fences and clambering up derelict buildings, leaving Kevin to follow if he could. Here, there was none of that, just the water and the trees.
"What is it?" Luna asked. She kicked off her shoes and dangled her feet in the water. Kevin didn't feel like doing the same. Right then, he wanted to run, to hide. Anything to keep from telling her the truth. It felt as though, the longer he could keep from telling Luna, the longer it wasn't really real.
"Kevin?" Luna said. "You're worrying me now. Look, if you don't tell me what it is, then I'm going to call your mom and find out that way."
"No, don't do that," Kevin said quickly. "I'm not sure…Mom isn't handling this well."
Luna was looking more worried by the moment. "What's wrong? Is she sick? Are you sick?"
Kevin nodded at the last one. "I'm sick," he said. He put his hand on Luna's shoulder. "I have something called leukodystrophy. I'm dying, Luna."
He knew he'd said it too quickly. Something like that, there should be a whole big explanation, a proper build-up, but honestly, that was the part of it that mattered.
She stared at him, shaking her head in obvious disbelief. "No, you can't be, that's…"
She hugged him then, tight enough that Kevin could barely breathe.
"Tell me it's a joke. Tell me it's not real."
"I wish it weren't," Kevin said. He wished that more than anything right then.
Luna pulled back, and Kevin could see her screwing her features tight with the effort of not crying. Normally, Luna was good at not crying about things. Now, though, he could see it taking everything she had.
"This…how long?" she asked.
"They said maybe six months," Kevin said.
"And that was days ago, so it's less now," Luna shot back. "And you've been having to cope with it on your own, and…" She faded into silence as the sheer enormity of it obviously hit her.
Kevin could see her looking out at the people on the reservoir, watching them with their small boats and their quick forays into the water. They seemed so happy there. She stared at them as if they were the part she couldn't believe, not the illness.
"It doesn't seem fair," she said. "All these people, just going on as if the world is the same, going about having fun when you're dying."
Kevin smiled sadly. "What are we supposed to do? Tell them all to stop having fun?"
He realized the danger in saying that slightly too late as Luna leapt to her feet, cupped her hands to her mouth, and yelled at the top of her voice.
"Hey, all of you, you have to stop! My friend is dying, and I demand that you stop having fun at once!"
A couple of people looked around, but no one stopped. Kevin suspected that hadn't been the point. Luna stood there for several seconds, and this time, he was the one to hug her, holding her while she cried. That was enough of a rarity that the sheer shock value of it held Kevin there. Luna shouting at people, behaving in ways that they would never expect from someone like her, was normal. Luna breaking down wasn't.
"Feel better?" he asked after a while.
She shook her head. "Not really. What about you?"
"Well, it's nice to know that there's someone who would try to stop the world for me," he said. "You know the worst part?"
Luna managed another smile. "Not being able to spell what's killing you?"
Kevin could only return that smile. Trust Luna to know that he needed her to be her usual self, making fun of him.
"I can, I practiced. The worst part is that all this means no one believes me when I tell them that I've been seeing things. They think it's all just the illness."
Luna cocked her head to one side. "What kind of things?"
Kevin explained to her about the strange landscapes he'd been seeing, the fire wiping it clean, the sensation of a countdown.
"That…" Luna began when he was finished. She didn't seem to know how to end though.
"I know, it's crazy, I'm crazy," Kevin said. Even Luna didn't believe him.
"You didn't let me finish," Luna said, drawing in a breath. "That…is so cool."
"Cool?" Kevin repeated. It hadn't been the response he expected, even from her. "Everyone else thinks I'm going crazy, or my brain is melting, or something."
"Everyone else is stupid," Luna declared, although, to be fair, that seemed to be her default setting for life. To her, everyone was stupid until proven otherwise.
"So you believe me?" Kevin said. Even he wasn't completely sure anymore, after everything people had said to him.
Luna held onto his shoulders, looking him squarely in the eyes. With another girl, Kevin might have thought she was about to kiss him. Not with Luna, though.
"If you tell me that these visions are real, then they're real. I believe you. And being able to see alien worlds is definitely cool."
Kevin's eyes widened a little at that. "What makes you think that it's an alien world?"
Luna stepped back with a shrug. "What else is it going to be?"
When she asked that, Kevin got the feeling that she was every bit as stunned by all this as he was. She just did a better job of hiding it.
"Maybe…" she guessed, "…maybe all this has changed your brain, so that it has a direct line to this alien place?"
If Luna ever acquired a superpower, it would probably be the ability to leap tall conclusions in a single bound. Kevin liked that about her, especially when it meant that she was the one person who might believe him, but even so, it felt like a lot to decide, so quickly.
"You know how crazy that sounds, right?" he said.
"No crazier than the idea that the world is just going to snatch my friend away for no good reason," Luna shot back, her fists clenched in a way that suggested she would happily fight it over the issue. Or maybe just clenched with the effort of not crying again. Luna tended to get angry, or make jokes, or do crazy things rather than be upset. Right then, Kevin couldn't blame her.
He watched her coming down from whatever nearly crying space she was in, winding down from it piece by piece and forcing a smile into the space instead.
"So, terrible disease, cool visions of alien worlds…is there anything else you aren't telling me?"
"Just the numbers," Kevin said.
Luna looked at him with obvious annoyance. "You get that you weren't supposed to say yes there?"
"I wanted to tell you everything," Kevin said, although he guessed it was probably a bit late now. "Sorry."
"Okay," Luna said. Again, Kevin had the sense of her working to process it all. "Numbers?"
"I see them too," Kevin said. He repeated them from memory. "23h 06m 29.283s, ?05° 02′ 28.59."
"Okay," Luna said. She pursed her lips. "I wonder what they mean."
That they might not mean anything seemed not to occur to her. Kevin loved that about her.
She had her phone out. "It's not right for a license plate, and it would be weird for a password. What else?"
Kevin hadn't thought about it, at least not with the kind of directness that Luna seemed to be applying to the problem.
"Maybe like an item number, a serial number?" Kevin suggested.
"But there are hours and minutes there," Luna said. She seemed utterly caught up in the problem of what it might mean. "What else?"
"Maybe like a delivery time and a location?" Kevin suggested. "Those second parts sound like they might be coordinates."
"It's not quite right for a map reference," Luna said. "Maybe if I just Google it…oh, cool."
"What?" Kevin asked. One look at Luna's face said that they'd hit the jackpot.
"When you type that string of numbers into a search engine, you only get results about one thing," Luna said. She made it sound so certain like that. She turned her phone to show him, the pages set out in a neat row. "The Trappist 1 star system."
Kevin could feel his excitement building. More than that, he could feel his hope building. Hope that this might really mean something, and that it wasn't just his illness, no matter what anyone said. Hope that it might actually be real.
"Why would I see those numbers, though?" he asked.
"Maybe because the Trappist system is supposed to be one of the ones that have a chance of harboring life?" Luna said. "From what it says here, there are several planets there in what we think is a habitable zone."
She said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. The idea of planets that might have life seemed like too much to be a coincidence when Kevin had seen that life. Or seen some strange life, at least.
"You need to talk to someone about this," Luna declared. "You're…like, the first proof of extraterrestrial contact, or something. Who were those people looking for aliens, the scientists? I saw a thing about them on TV."
"SETI?" Kevin said.
"Those are the ones," Luna said. "Aren't they based in San Francisco, or San Jose, or something?"
Kevin hadn't known that, but the more he thought about it, the more the idea tugged at him.
"You have to go, Kevin," Luna said. "You have to at least talk to them."
***
"No," his mother said, setting her coffee down so firmly it spilled. "No, Kevin, absolutely not!"
"But Mom-"
"I'm not driving you to San Francisco so that you can bother a bunch of nutjobs," his mother said.
Kevin held out his phone, showing the information about SETI on it. "They aren't crazy," he said. "They're scientists."
"Scientists can be crazy too," his mother said. "And this whole idea…Kevin, can't you just accept that you're seeing things that aren't there?"
That was the problem; it would be all too easy to accept it. It would be easy to tell himself that this wasn't real, but there was something nagging away at the back of his brain that said it would be a really bad idea if he did. The countdown was still going, and Kevin suspected that he needed to talk to someone who would believe him before it reached its end.
"Mom, the numbers I told you I was seeing…they turned out to be the location for a star system."
"There are so many stars out there that I'm sure any random string of numbers would connect to one of them," his mother said. "It would be the same as the mass of the star or…or, I don't know enough about stars to know what else, but it would be something."
"I don't mean that," Kevin said. "I mean it was exactly the same. Luna put the numbers in and the Trappist 1 system was the first thing to come out. The only thing to come out."
"I should have known that Luna would be involved," his mother said with a sigh. "I love that girl, but she has too much imagination for her own good."
"Please, Mom," Kevin said. "This is real."
His mother reached out to put her hands on his shoulders. When had she started having to reach up to do that? "It's not, Kevin. Dr. Yalestrom said that you were having trouble accepting all this. You have to understand what's going on, and I have to help you to accept it."
"I know I'm dying, Mom," Kevin said. He shouldn't have put it like that, because he could see the tears rising in his mother's eyes.
"Do you? Because this-"
"I'll find a way to get there," Kevin promised. "I'll take a bus if I have to. I'll take a train into the city and walk. I have to at least talk to them."
"And get laughed at?" His mother pulled away, not looking at him. "You know that's what will happen, right, Kevin? I'm trying to protect you."
"I know you are," Kevin said. "And I know that they'll probably laugh at me, but I have to at least try, Mom. I have the feeling that this is really important."
He wanted to say more, but he wasn't sure that more would help right then. His mother was quiet in the way that said she was thinking, and right then, that was the best that Kevin could hope for. She kept thinking, her hand drumming on the kitchen counter, marking time as she made up her mind.
Kevin heard his mother's sigh.
"All right," she said. "I'll do it. I'll take you, but only because I suspect that, if I don't, I'll be getting a call from the police to tell me that my son has collapsed on a bus somewhere."
"Thanks, Mom," Kevin said, moving forward to hug her.
He knew she didn't really believe him, but in a way, that made the show of love even more impressive.