What They Told Us

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.