“Thanks for being flexible, Jamie,” Kent says, pulling on his jacket. “I really appreciate you moving El’s class to tonight. I’m sorry to ask at the last minute. And after I told you to stop doing so many favors for people.”

Kent doesn’t realize it, but he’s the one doing me a favor, right now. I’m desperate for distraction while I wait for Noah to be ready to talk.

“No problem at all, honestly.” I lean my shoulder against the door, watching as he hastily steps into his boots. “Did something come up?”

“There’s a parent-teacher conference that I’m already running late for.” Kent checks his watch and cringes. “I would have planned better, but I didn’t even know about it until an hour ago, when the school emailed me a reminder. Ellen was supposed to bring home a paper with all the information, but she never gave it to me.”

“What - she hid it from you? Does she not want you to go?”

“No, she just lost it.” Kent shakes his head, an affectionate look on his face. “I swear, the minute she sets something down, it’s as good as lost. The poor baby forgets where she put it in like, two seconds.”

I move out of the way so that Kent can get to the door, but he hesitates, rubbing his temples.

“This probably isn’t going to go very well,” he says quietly. “I just found out that El didn’t turn in any of her assignments this week.”

“Oh, no.” I press my lips together, trying not to wince at him. “Well - I’m sort of her teacher, too, right? So if it goes badly, just come back here and I’ll tell you how awesome Ellen is for like, forty-five straight minutes.”

“Might have to take you up on that.” Kent laughs half-heartedly, then pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Hey, at least this time I’m not the only parent being pulled in for a meeting about their kid, right?”

A glimmer of anxiety moves behind Kent’s eyes, and I rest a sympathetic hand on his arm.

“Honestly, Kent, Ellen is doing great in my classes. She gets distracted easily, yes, but she’s listening. And I think that she’s learning, too. I hope.”

Kent flashes me a grateful smile, then zips up his jacket.

“She’s in her room. Thanks again, Jamie. Let me know if you need-”

“I’ve got it, just go before you’re late!”

Kent nods, slaps my shoulder, and heads out.

I close the door after him, then turn and set off for the stairs.

~~~~

The door of Ellen’s bedroom is open. I stop there to knock, then spot her in bed, sprawled out on her back.

Her fists are clenched, and her face is screwed up in concentration. Even her toes are curled with whatever monumental internal effort she has going on.

I cross the room and sit down on the bed next to her.

“Hey, you,” I say, and she opens one eye. “What are you doing?”

Ellen rubs her face, blowing out a frustrated breath. “Thinking.”

“You’re just laying here thinking? That’s not very nine years old of you.”

“I’m trying,” she says, “To think like the other kids do.”

“What?” I stare at her, my smile dropping away. “What do you mean?”

“Like-” Ellen struggles for the right words. “More - organized. Straighter - lines? I don’t know.” She scowls, then flings her arms up over her head. “It’s not working.”

That I’ve caught her doing this makes my heart ache. I set a hand on her foot, and when I speak, I can hear how unusually serious my voice sounds.

“You don’t have to think like the other kids, El.”

“But wouldn’t it be easier?” She looks up at the ceiling, blinking hard. “Then dad wouldn’t have to talk to my teachers all the time.”

“You’re not in trouble, bud. That’s not why he’s talking to them tonight. All the other parents do these conferences, too.”

“I know,” she says. “I mean the other times, when I am in trouble. It makes him sad, I can tell. I don’t want him to be sad.”

My heart twists again, and I offer Ellen a hand. She takes it, lets me pull her to sit upright.

“I like the way that you think, El. You remember when we talked about Jupiter? How it has way more moons than Earth does? How those moons have oceans much deeper than ours?”

Ellen perks up immediately. “Yeah?”

“Right, so - there's Jupiter, and there's Earth. One isn't better than the other, they're just different. And it’s okay to be different. It's natural. We're each our own planet, in a way.” I tap her nose affectionately. “I’m sorry that it makes things hard for you, but don’t feel bad about your dad having to talk to your teachers. He goes to bat for you because he loves you, and he loves that you’re different. Alright?”

Ellen nods slowly. “Alright.”

I consider tickling her, distracting her - but she still looks thoughtful, so I wait.

“I wanted to tell you something,” she says abruptly.

“Okay. I’m listening.”

“It was-” Her face screws up again. “It was about, um - what we were just talking about.”

“Your dad?”

“No.”

“Planets? Jupiter?”

“Jupiter!” Ellen grabs my arm. “Yes! I made something!”

She scrambles out of her bed, rushes to the tiny desk where she’s supposed to do her homework, and comes back over with a notebook in her hands. She opens it to the first page and gives it to me.

It’s some sort of list, a long list, written out in her scribbly handwriting. I scan my eyes over the first few items: Callisto, Ganymede, Amalthea, Thebe…

“What is this, El?”

“Jupiter’s moons!” she says excitedly, beaming at me. “You said that there are seventy-nine of them, and I wanted to see them all, so I looked them up, and then I wrote them down!”

“You wrote-?” I stop, stunned, looking at the notebook.

Ellen actually copied out what looks like the names of all seventy-nine moons. I stare down at the page, then look back up at her.

“El - seriously? I didn’t tell you to do this!”

“No, I wanted to! That’s not all of them, though. There are twenty-six that aren’t named yet! So I named those ones, obviously.”

I flip to the next page, where I find Ellen’s list of names for the other moons of Jupiter: Olivia, Kent/Dad, Gabby, Jamie, Aiden, Angie, Destinee… it goes on and on. At the bottom of the list is the name for the very last one: Ellen.

I feel a smile unfolding slowly on my face.

“Claimed one for yourself?” I ask, tapping her scribbled name.

“Yes!” Ellen grins at me. “I couldn’t find pictures of all the unnamed ones, so I decided that mine has a lot of waterfalls, and the trees grow candy, and there’s no school, and Gabby is the queen.”

“Gabby is the queen?” I laugh. “You’re not the queen? It’s your moon!”

“I’m the princess,” Ellen explains. “And also a knight. I live in a treehouse. It’s pretty sweet.”

“How long did this-?”

“Also, Jamie!” Ellen tugs on the sleeve of my flannel, bouncing up and down. “Did you know that Jupiter has days that are only ten hours long, and there’s a storm there that hasn’t stopped for three hundred years! And-”

“El, how did you-?” I stare at her, struggling to wrap my head around all this. “We didn’t cover that stuff.”

“No, I was reading about it! On dad’s laptop. After our class, I read a lot of stuff about it! I stayed up until-” Her voice drops to a whisper. “Until three in the morning! Dad caught me, though. He said I had to go to sleep.”

I’ve always known that when Ellen is interested in something, she flings herself into it full-force. I mean, she wore a sheriff’s costume every day for almost a year, and before that, she was a mad scientist in a petite white lab coat.

But this is something new.

She was up until three in the morning devouring information about this most recent thing she’s interested in. Information she held onto, even though she can't remember where she set down the paper she was supposed to give Kent.

My immediate response is a rush of delight. I’m thrilled that I’ve gotten Ellen so interested in what I’d tried to teach her about, but - something gives me pause.

“El, did you do this instead of doing your homework for your other classes? Your dad said that you missed some assignments this week.”

“No, I did this right after our class about it. I just forgot to show you!”

“Oh, okay.” I’m relieved, and then confused. “Wait, so - why didn’t you do your regular homework? You did all this, but not that?”

“I…” Ellen’s bright expression collapses into a guilty, anxious frown. “I don’t know. I meant to. I was going to. But I just - didn’t.”

I wasn’t trying to make her feel bad - I was just curious - so I smile at her.

“Hey, it’s okay. Maybe your teachers will let you make them up later.”

“Maybe,” she says.

The total lack of enthusiasm in her voice is almost comical.

I look down at the notebook again, realizing that in my surprise I only asked her questions, didn’t really say anything about it.

“This is super impressive, El. You shouldn’t stay up that late again, but this is amazing. Quite the brain you’ve got there, bud.”

I poke her forehead, and she breaks into a smile.

“Really?”

“Yeah, this is incredible!” I start to hand her back the notebook, then stop. “Hey, is it cool if I show this to your dad?”

Her face brightens up right away. “You think he would like it?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Okay, wait, then-” Ellen turns and hurries back to her desk, returning with a handful of loose papers. “Here, give him these, too!”

I spread the papers out on Ellen’s bed, let my eyes travel over them.

It’s a bunch of drawings of Jupiter and its various moons, all in crayon. Wobbly, in a little-kid-art kind of way, but there are small details everywhere. Ellen even colored in the red spot on Jupiter’s surface, the storm she mentioned that’s been raging for hundreds of years.

There are pages and pages of drawings.

“Oh my god, Ellen!” I manage, looking up at her. “You’re - you’re really into this, huh?”

She turns shy, fidgeting her fingers together. “Sort of. Yes.”

“Wow.” I gather the notebook and the drawings into one stack. “You know what? That’s amazing.”

She beams at me again.

“Amazing,” she repeats.

“Yeah, that you did all this? That’s definitely amazing. You even drew the storm! That’s some attention to detail.”

“The storm is - oh - Jamie, did I tell you that Olivia and I made a bunch of snowballs yesterday? We hid in the bushes at recess and got some of the mean boys in our class! They were mad.”

I break my gaze away from the drawings and look at Ellen, tipping my head to the side. This is yet another instance of her throwing a completely random thing into one of our conversations.

I’ve stopped asking her why she does that. It happens pretty regularly, but she never seems to know how to explain, and that makes her frustrated, so now I just roll with it.

“That’s my girl. Destroy those boys.”

“We did,” she giggles, bumping the fist I’m holding out.

I set the papers aside and fix her with a smile.

“Speaking of snow, I was planning for us to talk about how plants survive the winter, for today’s class. But it looks like you’re thinking about space right now, huh?”

Ellen briefly narrows her eyes at me, like she’s trying to figure out if she did something wrong.

“Yeah, but it’s okay!” she says quickly. “We can talk about plants! I’ll listen, I promise.”

I’m sure that she’ll do her best, but I know better than to try teaching Ellen about one thing when her focus is squarely on another. Thankfully, with a class size of one, I can easily adjust for it. We can do today’s lesson next time, and it won’t be a problem.

But it does make me a tiny bit nervous. I just hope that Ellen is getting all the information she needs, taking these classes with me. If she’s back in regular science classes next year and she doesn’t know anything that the other kids know, it'll be because their teachers kept them on a set track, and I didn't do that with her.

I shake my head, trying to stop that line of thought before I can spiral.

“It’s okay,” I tell Ellen. “We can do some more stargazing. It sounds like you already know more about Jupiter than I do, so - you want to pick a different planet to talk about?”

“Mars,” she says instantly. “It’s the next closest one to the sun, after Jupiter.”

I smile at her, then tap her nose again. “Go grab your coat, little Martian.”

She grins widely, clasps her hands beneath her chin, and bounds for the door.

I stay behind for a moment, looking at Ellen’s drawings. There are scribbles in the margins, words in her handwriting. Arrows point to different parts of the pictures, explaining what she was trying to illustrate.

Cloud break, she’s written - Jupiter’s heat escapes into space here!!

Lightning bolts a thousand times brighter than Earth’s!!!

Deserts that move around all the time!?!?!? Ask Jamie if they do it on Earth too!!

I smile down at the pages, gather them into my arms, and get up from Ellen’s bed.

My phone starts to buzz before I can take a step. I set everything down again, pull it out of my pocket.

My heart stumbles over itself.

Noah is calling me.

I take a deep breath, and answer.

“Hey, man! What’s up?”

A beat of silence follows.

“Hey,” Noah says. “I was - I wanted to…” There’s another silence, and then a forced-sounding laugh. “You know what? I fucking forgot what I called about. Nevermind.”

An obvious lie, but calling him out on it won’t help with anything.

I press my phone closer to my ear. “I can wait until you remember.”

“No, don’t worry about it. What are you up to?”

“I’m about to teach a class. Sort of. Like, I’m not a teacher exactly, but - I mean - yeah, it’s a class, and I am teaching it. So. Technically.”

“Is it Fumfering 101? Waste of your talents. You should be teaching the master class, bro.”

“Oh, ha, ha.” I scowl at my phone, but I’m not about to let Noah distract me. “Look, why don’t you come over, later? Maybe Brother Weed will jog your memory, remind you what you wanted to talk about?”

“Nah, I can’t. I’m the only one looking after Nik tonight. Raj and Mel aren’t here.”

Regardless of what they’re doing, I’m kind of surprised that they didn’t invite Noah.

“Where are they?” I ask.

When Noah speaks again, I sense a current of deep unhappiness in his voice. Barely discernible, but definitely there.

“Raj, um... decided to take Mel out of town for the night. They’re staying at a hotel in Greenrock. Mini romantic getaway type of thing, I guess. I don’t know.”

I freeze to the spot, my eyes widening.

I can think of a very good reason why Raj might want to get Melanie away from Noah for one night. Why he wouldn’t want her to be distracted with Nik. Why he’d want it to be just the two of them.

He’s going to talk to her about it. Tonight.

I press my fingers over my mouth, my heart hammering. “Oh, my fucking god.”

“What?” Noah asks. “Didn’t catch that, bro.”

“Oh-” I clear my throat. “I was just, um - just about to say that I can come over there, if you’ve got Nik. If you do want to hang out, that is.”

“Not tonight, dude,” Noah yawns. “Too tired to chill. Sorry. I’ve gotta roll, actually. Talk to you later. Have a good class.”

“Okay, well - if you change your-”

I stop mid-sentence, cut off by the dial tone.

I stand there, still and silent, only moving to lower my phone from my ear.

Eventually, I unlock it again and type out a text to Raj.

You can do this, man! Total faith in you! Here if you need to talk.

I send it, hesitate, and then write one more.

Good luck.