Inevitable and Only(57)

I nodded, and then, thank Poseidon, our food arrived before I could say “cool” one more time. Zephyr didn’t seem to mind my blunders, though. Or else he was just a very good actor. Which you already know, I reminded myself. Oh well. Either way, my stomach wasn’t churning the way it usually did when I got nervous or upset.

Dealing with the food kept us busy for a while. I knew how to use chopsticks, sort of, but there was a whole thing to do with mixing the wasabi and soy sauce, which came separately on a little white dish with two compartments. Zephyr showed me how to take a smidge of wasabi on the end of one chopstick and mash it into the soy sauce compartment, taste it, then repeat until it was as hot as I wanted. I mixed in too much wasabi right away, though, and coughed until my eyes watered. Zephyr laughed at me, and I swatted him with my napkin, which knocked his teacup onto the floor. It didn’t shatter, but tea splashed everywhere.

Ordinarily, I would’ve been mortified for all that to happen in front of a boy, but he was laughing so hard that I couldn’t help laughing, too. When we finally calmed ourselves down and the waitress had brought him a new teacup, I dipped one of my avocado roll slices into the wasabi–soy sauce mixture and, mimicking Zephyr, popped it into my mouth whole.

“Tha’s de-lishoush,” I mumbled around the mouthful of spicy rice, seaweed, and avocado. He beamed as if he’d cooked it himself.

We ate for a little while in silence. Then I said, “So, you’re in the middle of college applications now?”

He grimaced. “Yeah, it’s pretty much taken over my life outside of school.”

“You’re applying to drama programs, right?”

“Nope. Astrophysics.”

I almost dropped my chopsticks. “Are you serious?”

Zephyr prodded one of his rolls toward me. “Are you sure you don’t want to try some of the real stuff?”

“Maybe just one bite. I do eat fish every once in a while. Mostly when I’m mad at my parents.”

I took a nibble of his raw tuna roll gingerly and almost spat it back out. “Ew! It’s so—fishy.”

“Uh, yeah,” he said, drawling the words. “It’s, like, fish.”

This set us off into another round of laughter. What was I so giddy about? Was it something in the food?

“We’re high on wasabi,” he said, as if he’d read my mind. “Clears up your nasal passages and makes you all light-headed.”

“Airheaded,” I said.

“Speak for yourself!” He jabbed his chopsticks toward me and I jabbed mine right back.

“So,” I said. “Why aren’t you applying for a theater degree? You’re the best actor in this whole school.”

“I don’t want to be, like, working at McDonald’s the rest of my life. Most theater majors don’t just waltz out of school and make it big-time on Broadway.”

“I bet you could.”

He was shaking his head.

“Well, then you could teach! Like Robin.”

He sighed. “Okay, okay. That’s not the real reason. That’s just what I tell people. It’s a long story.”

“A long story?” I remembered what he’d said at Center Stage: Cadie, that’s what people say when they don’t want to talk about something. “Does that mean I should stop asking questions?”

He smiled. “No, I don’t mind talking about it. If I’m not boring you.”

“Of course not.” I motioned toward the two sushi rolls still sitting in front of him, untouched. “And maybe I’ll get brave enough to try that eel, if you distract me.”

He narrowed his eyes at me and ate another piece of sushi. Then he set his chopsticks down. “Okay. It’s like this. Imagine this is Earth.” He picked a grain of rice off his sushi and set it on the tablecloth. Then he added ten more next to it. “Now, Jupiter is about eleven times wider than Earth—you could fit, like, thirteen hundred Earths inside the volume of Jupiter. So imagine how enormous Jupiter is.” He put another piece of rice halfway down the table. “Here’s our moon. See how huge Jupiter is? Well, you could fit Jupiter plus all the rest of the planets in our solar system into the space between Earth and our moon. So that gives you a tiny sense of how much space is out there.”

He paused to let that sink in, then gestured with his chopsticks at the space between the grains of rice. “And that distance, from us to the moon? Is only like a third of the diameter of our sun. But the sun is just a star. The largest star we know of in the Milky Way galaxy is one billion times bigger than the sun. And yet, if you shrank the sun down to the size of a human white blood cell and shrank the galaxy along with it proportionately, the whole galaxy would be the size of the United States compared to that blood cell. That’s how huge our galaxy is.”

My head was beginning to spin.

“And then … try to imagine this: in just one photo taken by the Hubble space telescope, you can see thousands of galaxies. Each with millions of stars. Each star with its own planets.”

“Wow,” I breathed. I’d forgotten I was still holding chopsticks; they quivered as my hand hovered over my plate. I set them down carefully, as if I might disrupt the universe he’d just laid out on the table.

“Yeah. And that’s just the beginning. Makes you feel less depressed about only getting the chance to live one life, right?”