We were eight and we were going to be astronauts. There wasn't a lot to it; we were going to grow up to the mature age of eighteen, we were going to go to the place where grown-ups got jobs, and we were going to tell the people there we wanted to be astronauts and they would send us up to the moon. We'd have to wait until we were about twenty-five for that, though, Paulie always told me, with big eyes telling me just how old twenty-five was. There's years of training to become an astronaut.
I asked if that would mean I'd have to get good grades in gym class. She said yes, probably. Maybe that was when I began to let go of my dream to be an astronaut.
But when I let go of it all the way, I was ten. By then I had gotten my third-grade education and knew a few things about space, and so did Paulie, but we still knew we could do it. We were over halfway to eighteen. Only waiting to do now until we could get in a rocket and leave this planet in our dust.
That was, until I mentioned to somebody on the playground that those were our plans. His impish face screwed up into a sneer in the way only a ten-year-old's can.
"You want to be an astronaut?" he said. "That's stupid."
The power of 'stupid' in the hands of ten-year-olds is more than enough to crush a dream. If Paulie had been there, she would have given this boy a piece of her mind, but she wasn't. I wasn't a fighter. A cold feeling started up in my stomach and spread to my whole body as this boy laughed at this dream that Paulie and I had carefully built up for years. That was the beginning of the end of that for me, but not for Paulie. Never for Paulie. I hung on for her sake, but from that day on, I don't think I really believed it.
I asked her if our dream was stupid while we were on the swing set at recess one day. She was swinging way above me, with her long flowy skirt flapping in the wind, showing off the band-aids plastered all over her knees. As soon as I said 'stupid', her attention snapped to me. She ground her sandals into the rubber mat beneath the swings and skidded to a stop and looked me dead in the eyes.
"It's not stupid," she snapped. "Why would it be stupid?"
"Because... I don't know, because it would be hard to do?" I shrugged. The boy hadn't offered much in the way of reasoning.
Paulie scowled. "Math class is hard. I still do that," she says. "Gym class is hard. You still do that."
"Yeah," I admitted. "I guess."
"Why shouldn't we do something just because it would be hard?"
"I don't know," I mumbled. I looked down at my feet and swung them. They didn't reach the ground yet.
Paulie got off the swing and stood in front of me, hands on hips, pigtails bobbing slightly. She had a frown on her face that told me what she was about to say was a fact.
"Hey," she said sternly. "We're going to the moon."
And I said okay then, and she nodded happily and got back on her swing. After that, we probably went back to my house and had a sleepover again, and again looked at all of our space books under the covers long after lights-out. We did that most days. And every time up to this one, I had just as much fun as Paulie. That time, though, I couldn't shake the little doubt that had started up in the back of my head. One word had started the first of many cracks in the illusion of going to the moon.
Time went on. Elementary school ended and Paulie and I went to middle school together. We saw less of each other as time went on, and started being friends with different people. We always had time for each other, though. We would help each other get ready for dates and dances and we'd pick each other up after breakups, of which there were many. Sometimes we would both break up with somebody at the same time, and we'd spend more nights together with pints of ice cream and movies and laughing that our exes didn't know what they were missing as we painted our nails every color we had.
And still, during those nights, when we were at the age where we were all supposed to be long over our wishes to be firefighters or ballerinas or scuba divers, Paulie would tell me we were going to the moon.
"We're gonna get out of here," she said confidently. "We're going to get a rocket ship and fly it straight off this rock. We'll build our own if we have to."
She stuck glow-in-the-dark stars onto my bedroom ceiling when we were thirteen. Over halfway to twenty-five, over halfway to the moon. She stuck them on there good. I tried to pry them off when I was fourteen and way, way too old for those sorts of things, but I couldn't get them off without messing up the paint on the ceiling, so I left them.
Paulie spent more time at my house than her own. I didn't think there was anything odd about that until almost high school, when my parents hinted, in tired tones, that Paulie spent way too much time around our place. They probably didn't think she was a good influence on me. She gave herself her first tattoo on her sixteenth birthday on the floor of my bedroom. It was a flower, painstakingly poked into her ankle. She offered to do one for me too. I didn't let her.
She never talked about her home life. I barely knew anything about her family at all, despite all the time we'd spent together all our lives. The first time I heard tears in her voice was when we were eighteen, the summer before we went away to college. It was over the phone – one of the only times she ever called me before coming over to my house. When she got there, it was the first time I ever saw her cry. I held her in my arms and shook with her as she told me everything her parents had told her – as I found out that all the bruises on her arms were not from gym class or bumping into things. She fell asleep on top of me that night, and I held on to her until I eventually fell asleep, once I managed to wrap my head around everything she'd told me. And I wanted to hold her like that forever and keep her safe from everything, but two weeks later we were leaving home and traveling two time zones apart.
We texted. We called every now and then. And I worried about her and she insisted there was nothing to worry about, that she was doing okay, just okay. And maybe I was too pushy trying to get her to tell me what was wrong, because she stopped talking to me so often. She would call me every now and then, sloppy drunk, one AM for me, four AM for her. Sometimes on Saturdays, sometimes on Wednesdays, even.
"I miss you," she'd day a lot. "I wanna come see you. As soon as I get enough money I am leaving this place and coming to steal you away."
And one day – in December of our sophomore year – she actually did it.
It was a Wednesday, and I was sitting up late doing homework, when my roommate came in and told me someone was waiting for me outside. I was confused for a second, and then my heart started racing.
I sprinted down the stairs and out of the dorm as fast as I could, hardly daring to believe it, and there Paulie was – dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, standing out in freezing temperatures.
She grinned at me.
"Hey," she said. "Wanna go to the moon?"
I blinked at her. "What?" was all I could come up with. The dream was long dead. The word 'moon' had not come up between us in almost three years.
She rolled her eyes. Her right eyelid twitched a little when she did it. Just like always.
"You wanna go to the moon?" she repeated. "You do, right?"
"Uh. Yeah, sure," I said. "Um. So... do I need to go grab my stuff, or..."
"Come as you are," she said, vaguely waving her hand. "C'mon. We're not going to get it prime-time or anything at this point, but it's worth a shot."
She waited for me to nod, and then put her hand out. I took it and we laced our fingers together, just like we always had.
"You're freezing," I said, rubbing my hands on hers.
"This has nothing on Rhode Island, okay," she said. "This is like. T-shirt weather."
I was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie. I was shivering.
"Do you want my jacket?" I insisted.
She bumped me with her elbow. "So chivalrous," she said, laughing. "I'd rather you didn't die of cold before we get to where we're going."
"Where are we even going?"
"Well. I haven't looked around all that much, but there's a nice field over there." she pointed across the street from my dorm building. "Big hill in the middle. You know it."
"Yeah."
"So. Yeah. That's where we're going."
We crossed the street and walked into the park. We passed a little playground as we made our way up the hill, hand in hand. She walked up ahead of me. I kept slipping in the mud and almost pulling her over. But we made it.
She sat down on a half-wall surrounding a little garden at the top of the hill. I sat down next to her, and she lay down with her head in my lap.
"This is where we stop," she said. She lit a cigarette, took a draw from it, and pointed up at the sky. "There."
I looked up, and there was the moon. Full and round. Not too many stars to be seen around it – only a few managed to shine through the weird, orange light of the city night sky.
"Perigee," Paulie said. "The closest we'll get."
And that was it. The dream was gone. Breathed away by Paulie like smoke. Not that it hadn't already been dead for years, especially for me – but now it was buried. Now it wasn't coming back. Now I had seen its lifeless form with my own two eyes.
We were both quiet for a little while. Paulie powered her way through that first cigarette, breathing the smoke all over me, and then lit another. She offered me one. I shook my head.
She took a long drag on the second cigarette, and dropped her arm out to the side.
"How fucked is it," she said. "That we're not supposed to have it figured out yet."
"What do you mean?" I started stroking her hair. That calmed her down sometimes.
"Like. I'm talking to my therapist, right, and I'm telling her how my life's a mess and everything, and I feel like I'll never get everything together, and you know what she tells me?"
"What?"
"She tells me I'm twenty years old. She tells me I'm young. That I've got plenty of time to figure everything out. She tells me I'm not supposed to have everything figured out yet. Do you know what the average life span is for a human being, Monica?"
"It's like. Seventy-five, isn't it?"
"Seventy. So basically. Basically I'm supposed to have no fucking clue what my life is going to be until I've used up a full third of it. And even after that, not really. Nobody expects me to have my life nailed down by the time I'm twenty-five. These are supposed to be the best and freest years of my life and I'm supposed to be spending them completely in the dark and having no idea what the rest of those years are going to be."
She flicked an ember off the end of her cigarette. I scuffed it out with the toe of my shoe. She was quiet again, and I didn't push her.
She took a few deep breaths and closed her eyes.
"I'm staying over tonight," she said quietly, just as she had thousands of times before. "Please?"
"Of course," I said. "You're probably tired, huh? It's one AM for you still."
"Is that all?" she mumbled.
She sat up and leaned against my shoulder for a little while. She put out the cigarette. I put an arm around her. We looked up at that moon for a little while, and I reached up, closed one eye, and covered it with my thumbnail.
"Way too far," I murmured.
"Half a year's drive," she replied.
"We'd never make it. No rest stops."
"We'd probably get lost anyway. End up on Mars or something."
We stopped again. We took each other's hands again. After a while, we stood up together, and made our way back down the hill. I held tight to her hand, ready to catch her if she stumbled.
We crossed the street and walked back to my dorm room. I briefly introduced Paulie to my roommate, and then I gave her one of my shirts to wear and we climbed into my bed. We kissed once and she tasted like cigarettes.
Paulie slept facing me, with her arms curled up between us. I put an arm over her waist and held her close to me to keep her warm.
I could see the moon out my window. It was watching over us, just like it always had. And it was far away, just like always.
But the moon was different now. It was cold. Because now we knew we wouldn't ever reach it. Maybe we'd known it all along. Paulie almost certainly had.
Maybe it had been stupid to start with.
I fell asleep next to Paulie beneath a starless ceiling, running my fingers through her hair, wondering what was next now that we didn't have the moon.