My Life in Science Fiction
A Girl Leaving: My Life in Science Fiction
Brook sat on a barstool in a Podunk gas station diner and sipped a box of Tang. Her gray eyes gazed through the water damaged ceiling tiles; she could see all the way to the moon. Only three years old, yet she already had that ache. “I’ll be an astronaut,” she told the moon. Of course it was listening.
The rockets roaring in her mind mostly drowned out her dad’s jibe and the clerk’s derisive laugh.
***
She had to be the best at everything, and she had to do it all herself. This was partly a survival mechanism because she was left to fend for herself at home, and partly because she imagined astronauts were perfect and independent. She meant to earn a place with them among the stars.
Eric at kindergarten told her girls couldn’t be astronauts. Brook named several, but his mind remained unchanged; Buzz Aldrin was the only astronaut Eric could remember.
“He wasn’t even the first person on the moon!”
Eric made a face at her and ran off with the soccer ball. Brook wanted to play, but she was so mad it made her a little dizzy. She leaned hard against the school wall and muttered, “I will go into outer space.”
***
Tuesday, January 28, 1986. She was in class when it happened, but she spent that evening glued to the news. She missed dinner. Barely smelled the sloppy pork-n-bean burrito her dad dropped on a paper plate on the floor beside her. And she might have spent the night dialing through the channels looking for more coverage if it weren’t for the National Anthem and the static that drove her to bed.
The Challenger disaster gave her a broken heart before she’d ever heard the phrase, and Brook just wasn’t the same afterward.
***
“Hey, you listening?”
She had a paperback spread beside her breakfast; of course she wasn’t listening. There was so little in her world worth the effort of attention that Brook spent nearly every waking minute lost in a book.
“Not as smart as you think, you can’t even remember your chores.” No response. “Shoulda never let you learn to read. Goddamn space cadet.”
At the magic word, she looked up from Bicentennial Man and Other Stories. “Hm?”
Her dad sucked beer and growled, “I said, ‘go feed the dogs.’”
She carefully withheld protest and left to do as she was told, but the book went with her. She didn’t want to explain another disappearance to the librarian.
“Here on Earth, we still have to work!”
***
Brook memorized episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation; she could turn the sound off and deliver the lines herself during reruns. It drove her dad’s girlfriend so crazy that she bought a tiny black and white TV at a yard sale and put it in Brook’s room.
“I don’t wanna see that stupid show again.”
With a veritable library in the closet and TNG on the nightstand, it didn’t matter that the swamp cooler couldn’t reach down the hall. Brook’s bedroom was…too perfect to last.
After her three-mile walk from the school bus stop, Brook arrived home to a confounding sight one afternoon. It was so hard to believe that she stood at the mailbox and stared awhile at the place on the hill where she used to live. She couldn’t go inside. The old brown trailer house was gone – hauled away somewhere – and everything she owned with it.
A few months later, Brook watched The Next Generation series finale on her grandma’s TV. When it was over she would have pretended her tears were due to the stress of being a homeless teenage girl who slept nights in the back of her dad’s pick-up with only the spare tire for a pillow, but nobody noticed. The same way nobody noticed that she mostly didn’t talk anymore, or that she’d stopped trying to share the stories she wrote in spiral notebooks.
She wrote even more words than she read, by then. And almost every story started with a girl. Leaving.
***
“You’re so smart… You should be a teacher, not a writer.”
***
“College?! Whaddya need that for? You’re already a damn know-it-all!”
***
“Science Fiction? You’re better than this.”
***
The girl kept leaving until she arrived someplace good. It wasn’t the moon, but it was better in many ways. And by the time she found it, she wasn’t really Brook anymore, so she changed her name. And adopted a second.
A decade later: “What do you want on your badge? Kay, or Sandykidd?”
“I think more people there know me as Sandykidd.” It didn’t bother her that her blog handle was more recognizable than her legal name. Kay would answer with a smile as long as nobody called her Brook.
At the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver, 2008, she drifted between panels like a woman dreaming. She spoke with voices she’d only read before. Nobody seemed to think she was too smart. Nobody suggested she should go back to the farm. A few people gently encouraged her to keep her day-job, but they were writers, too, so she could laugh with them. Considering the source, that advice was encouragement.
“That’s a really good idea.” Her husband was like her; always looking up. Of course he was a writer. And when she conceived of some unlikely thing, he looked for what made it possible. They were puzzle pieces that interlocked on every side. Almost inseparable and bound to leave outsiders wondering.
She smiled. “Let’s play with the idea some more. I think we can make it better.”
The magazine they built together after WorldCon was a proverbial second child. The boy-genius and the uncanny-zine both grew so fast it was like watching evolution in fast-forward. Their best experiments yet.
***
Five, four, three, two, one…
“And then what?” she asked.
Only three years old, yet he already had that ache. “BLAST-OFF!!”