Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 69877 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69877 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
“Making excuses? It’s been almost two weeks since you called me all gooey-voiced after almost becoming roadkill.”
“That’s beautiful,” I say. “I had no idea you were such a poet. And I’ll call him. When my horoscope says I should.”
“Oh no you don’t.” She shakes her head. “You’re not going to use astrology the same way you did science.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?!”
“It means that I don’t want to see you shift one set of rules for another set of rules, all so you can keep yourself safe and tidy. You’d be missing the whole point.”
“Which is?” I ask, curious for her take.
Instead of answering the question, she gets a slightly wistful look on her face. “Do you remember summers when you were a girl? I had that big house I rented up in the Hudson Valley, and you and your brothers would come stay with me for a couple months.”
“Sure, of course. I loved those days.”
“You loved those nights,” she amends. “You spent every clear evening flat on your back in the grass, staring up at the sky. You loved it.”
“Well, of course. I’ve wanted to be an astronomer since I was nine.”
She shakes her head. “No. That’s the Wikipedia version of Dr. Miranda Reed’s story. And it’s the story you’ve told yourself, no doubt fed subtly to you by your parents around the time they started sending you to summer science camp instead of my place.”
“Oh, Lillian.” I reach for her hand. “I’m sorry. I never realized that you must have felt—”
“Posh.” She waves this away impatiently. “It has nothing to do with me. I took on quite the virile paramour the first summer you quit coming to visit. This is about you, darling. You don’t remember, or don’t want to remember, but it wasn’t until you were twelve that you declared you wanted to be an astronomer. I remember because I pitched in to help with that expensive telescope for your twelfth birthday.”
I frown. “I don’t understand. If I was obsessed with the night sky before that…”
“You were obsessed, but not with cosmetic microwave background and dark matter.”
“Cosmic,” I correct. “Cosmic microwave background.”
She lets out a dramatic sigh but refuses to be distracted from her point. “Don’t forget who you were before you decided you wanted to add all those fancy doctors to your name.”
“Who was I?” I ask, genuinely curious, as Lillian heads toward the front door.
“A girl who believed that the stars were magic, that the moon held secrets, and who the universe had a plan for. And no,” she adds, giving me a pointed look over her shoulder. “That plan wasn’t tenure. You wanted to be a rock star.”
* * *
A few hours after Lillian’s departure, the movers arrive with my boxes. Luckily, as far as moves go, this one’s not terribly overwhelming.
Since Cottage One is already furnished, I had most of my furniture put into a storage unit just down the road. Same with all of my kitchen stuff, since Lillian has all of that as well. She’d generously suggested that I could move her stuff out while I was here, to make it feel like my own place. But I realized I’m not even sure what my own place would look like. Or rather, I do. It would look a lot like the drab little one-bedroom on-campus apartment that I’d lived in for six years, yet somehow failed to leave a mark on of any kind.
I’d always meant to make some sort of effort to settle in. To hire a decorator, or at the very least, hit up Pinterest for some DIY inspiration. Hell, even a generic image framed on the wall would have been something. Instead, the poor space had been a house, but never a home. You would know that someone lived there—there was a couch, coffee table. Kitchen table, chairs, bed. But any insight about the person? The furniture had been neutral, the walls bare. Even the stacks of books, which had been everywhere, had been tucked tidily into corners, not displayed or laid out on the coffee table with any sort of pride or enthusiasm.
That had been both the hardest and the most satisfying part of the moving process. Stacking my dozens of academic books and papers into boxes, taping them up, and then banishing them along with my boring furniture to storage.
Practically speaking, it had been necessary, given that Lillian’s place—and personal style—is basically the opposite of my own. Lillian likes to call herself a maximalist, which is a euphemistic way of saying she’s a borderline hoarder. Every corner has a quirky lamp, funky statue, or well-loved houseplant. Every shelf is covered in gnome figurines, snow globes, or little trinkets she’s collected from trips and friends over the years.
But while there’d been no physical room for my books, I realized I didn’t want to make mental room for them, either. Or maybe I did want to, and that had made it all the more necessary to put them out of reach. If I wanted to uncover a new Miranda, a Miranda who is more than facts and intellect, I needed to make room for a new kind of knowledge. Academia has been my haven, my books my security blanket. So away they’d gone until the end of the Horoscope Project.