Girl on the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

they can never get everybody in the government pointed in the same direction. Maybe the stars have finally aligned.”
    In a year and a half working for her, Conn had never asked Peo about her moonshot. The training for it, she would talk about a little. Obliquely, she would talk about its aftermath, about being shut out from trying again. But never the mission itself. Conn had seen right away that Peo avoided the subject as best she could. But today, Conn’s curiosity overcame her.
    “How do you think it’ll feel? Seeing other people on the moon,” she asked carefully.
    “Took them long enough,” Peo said.
    “Do you hope one of them is a woman?”
    Peo, formerly the presumptive first woman on the moon, thought about her answer. “I do,” she finally said.
    “I was twelve,” Conn said. “Not your typical twelve year old—I was watching feeds from Mars rovers and lunar prospectors when I was eight.” Peo smiled. “I was just...in awe. To think there was someone in the world who decided she wanted to go to the moon, and did it. You couldn’t shut me up about becoming an astronaut after that.”
    “We were watching too, on the other side of the world,” Pritam said. “My parents wanted me to become an astronaut. Then Cole Heist and his crew were killed landing on Mars, and I didn’t hear another word about it.” He seemed embarrassed, like he hadn’t meant to go that far into the story.
    “What happened to you?” Peo asked Conn. Conn didn’t understand at first, then gleaned that she meant Conn deciding against becoming an astronaut.
    Conn never had told Peo about her condition. She had never been brave enough. She was reluctant, with Pritam there, but she owed Peo an honest answer. She swallowed. “I was diagnosed bipolar-A when I was seventeen. Without drugs, I’m either Wonder Woman or a puddle of goo.”
    Peo considered her. “So NASA won’t take you.”
    “That’s my understanding.”
    “Oh, you’re right, I’m afraid. I wonder how many kids like you NASA misses out on because there are no Rite-Aids in space.”
    “I guess their argument would be that their astronaut pool is healthier and stronger that way.”
    “Sure. But smarter, more creative, better managers, better teammates, better improvisers? ‘Nope, sorry, you’re lactose intolerant, we can’t train you.’I can’t see the logic in it.”
    Conn couldn’t, either.
    She asked Peo and Pritam to keep her condition to themselves.

# # #
    Grant and Conn celebrated her birthday together in January. Grant surprised Conn with a painting of an astronaut on the moon painted by moon-walker Alan Bean. Conn knew for a fact that Grant’s job didn’t pay him enough for him to afford such a thing, and she deeply appreciated it. But part of her was also troubled by it. For his birthday, in November, Conn had gotten him a paperweight shaped like Saturn off bEtsy. That seemed to her to be more in keeping with where their relationship was and where it was heading.
    The first week of February, everything iced over, deep. Mounds of snow were encrusted in two-inch thick shells. Ice sheeted the roads and sidewalks, and the city all but ordered residents to stay indoors. People who had to go outside walked as gingerly as if the ice might break and submerge them. The careless slipped and bruised their knees, elbows, tailbones; twisted ankles and torn menisci crammed hospital emergency rooms. The city didn’t dig its way out so much as hack its way out, like jungle explorers through overgrowth.
    Then a blizzard dumped twenty inches of snow on the Windy City, a couple days in the forties melted the top layers, and another freeze came. Illinois Tech was closed Monday and Tuesday, re-opened Wednesday, then went dark again starting Thursday, anticipating treacherous travel, still a commuter school.
    Conn was bored. Grant was snowed in, as she mostly was. No school, only urgent work matters to take care of.
    The supermarket adjacent to her building