Jodi Picoult - Shine

For almost a week now, they had moved in similar orbits, but they had not interacted unless they were forced to in a group project. Christina didn’t look at Ruth, but she jerked her chin: Okay .

Ruth explained what had happened with Ms. Thomas and Miss Van Vleet. “If you were in a crowd with a lot of people and someone asked me who you were, I wouldn’t say you’re the one with the scar on your ankle from where you fell last summer. I’d use something everyone would see right away, like…your purple shirt or your Holly Hobbie lunch box. Doesn’t it seem weird?” Ruth asked. “To not call something what it is ?”

Christina didn’t answer, and Ruth thought it was because she was still mad at her. But then she turned in her seat so that she was facing Ruth. “Maybe no one notices that you’re Black,” she said. “I mean, you act and sound just like we do.”

Ruth thought about this. It couldn’t really be true, could it? If she dressed in pants and played baseball and did gross things that boys did, like have burping contests, would teachers not know that she was a girl? You couldn’t unsee what was right before your eyes, could you?

Before she could mull on this further, Christina spoke again. “I never said I didn’t want to be your friend,” she said, her voice small. “It’s just…all of a sudden you’re at my school, with my friends, and I thought…I thought…” She raised her hand to the window and spread her fingers like a starfish. “What if they liked you more than they like me?”

Ruth didn’t know what to say. It was the first time she realized that a person might look like Christina, and live in a fancy home, and dress in designer clothing, and have everything her heart desired, and still go to sleep at night worrying.

Maybe we are more alike than we’re different, Ruth thought.

–

When Ms. Thomas turned off the lights in the classroom, everyone got quiet. Then she flicked them back on again. “Now,” she asked, “how long did it take for the light to come back?”

It was instantaneous, immediate. There was probably a word for faster-than-a-heartbeat but Ruth didn’t know it.

“Light moves fast. It can move 186,000 miles per second,” Ms. Thomas said. “The reason it seems like we see light the instant I turn on the switch is because light is so quick, and because we’re so close to it. But some light comes from much farther away-light from stars. They’re so far away, in fact, that we don’t even measure the distance in miles. We measure it in light-years-the amount of time it takes for light from that star to reach us, on earth. The reason stars look so small in the night sky is because they’re so far away from us.”

Ms. Thomas talked about the star that was closest to earth-the sun. She made Marcus stand at the front of the class with a flashlight and told him to turn it on. “If he was on the sun, and turned on a very bright flashlight…and we were all waiting in the classroom, we wouldn’t see that light for eight minutes. That’s how far away the sun is from us.” The next closest star was called Proxima Centauri. It was 39.9 trillion kilometers away from us, or 4.2 light-years, which meant that it would take four years-not just eight minutes-for Marcus’s flashlight to reach us on earth from there.

Ms. Thomas said that when we look at a star, we’re looking backward in time. We’re seeing a moment that happened millions of years ago.

Ruth thought about that. She knew Marcus’s little flashlight wasn’t powerful enough, but even so. What if there were kids on another planet who, years from now, saw it flash? What if, in the future, they had a piece of the moment Ruth was living right now?

It made her feel like yesterday and tomorrow weren’t all that far away from each other.

Then Ms. Thomas gave everyone a toilet paper roll and a circle of black paper. Each student could choose to create either the Canis Major constellation or Orion. Ruth looked over and saw Maia pick Orion. She reached for the other one.

They had to trace the spiky limbs of the constellations, and poke tiny holes in at their joints to make the stars. Ruth carefully drew the T of Canis Major, and its split legs. It looked to her like a stick figure without a head. She used a pin carefully to mark the stars. Then with Ms. Thomas’s help she affixed the black circle to one end of the roll, with electrical tape to seal the edges. When everyone in the class had finished, Ms. Thomas gave each of them a small penlight and pulled the drapes shut and turned off the classroom fluorescents. Everyone lay on the floor, shining their penlights through the toilet paper rolls, projecting their constellations onto the ceiling.

Ruth felt someone lie down beside her, and she turned to find Ms. Thomas staring up at the ceiling. “You see that star in the middle on top?” she asked, pointing, and Ruth nodded. “That’s called Sirius. It takes light from that star eight and a half years to reach us here.”

“That’s how old I am,” Ruth said.

“Well, then.” Ms. Thomas laughed. “If you can see it in the night sky, you’re looking at light that’s the same age as you.”

Ruth liked the idea of a star that she had something in common with. She wondered if she could convince her mother to let her out on the fire escape tonight to try to find it.

“It’s easy to find Sirius,” Ms. Thomas was saying, “because it’s the brightest star we can see.” She rolled to a sitting position and squeezed Ruth’s shoulder. “Sometimes, it even casts a shadow.”

The whole rest of the day Ruth found it hard to concentrate. She kept looking out the window at the cars below, and the people walking their dogs, and the ladies pushing strollers. She pictured a world bigger than the classroom, bigger than Manhattan, bigger than the boundaries of her imagination.

–

The scariest part of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test was climbing the rope that hung from the ceiling of the tiny gymnasium. There were two: one with knots, and one without. Ruth was worried she couldn’t even shimmy her way up the one with knots. You had to excel at all the sections: the shuttle run, the one-mile run, the curl-ups, the pull-ups, the rope climb, the V-sit reach. If you did, you got a gold certificate as an award.

Ruth, who got straight As, didn’t like failing at anything, even gym class.

Because of their last names, it was Maia’s turn just before Ruth’s. She picked the rope with the knots (girls had a choice, boys didn’t) and made it halfway up before she started to panic. Her eyes squirreled shut and her face went red and she clutched the rope like it was a lifeline. Even when Mr. Yorkey, the gym teacher, told her to come on down, she couldn’t unhook herself. It took two other teachers to help pry her off the rope, and when Maia reached ground level the other girls flocked around her like worker bees to the queen. Lola was chosen to help walk Maia to the nurse’s office.

When it was Ruth’s turn, she wiped her hands on her shorts and pulled with all her might to anchor her feet to the bottom knot. Then she closed her eyes and inched her right hand up to the next highest knot, and then her left, and then she crunched her legs up until her feet found their next hold. She did this again, picturing herself as a caterpillar, bunching and relaxing, concentrating only on getting to a knot higher than the one Maia had reached. When her hand reached up to grab the next knot and instead she found the bell on the ceiling to ring, signaling that she’d reached the top, she was surprised. She skittered down the rope, flushed and proud, and imagined coming home with that gold certificate. Mama would put it up on the refrigerator.