Atmosphere(28)

“No, no, you go. Please.”

“Okay.” Vanessa shifted her head from side to side. “Oh, what to pick, what to pick. There are so many. Even as a teenager,” Vanessa said, “I stole money out of the vending machines by taking them apart. I hot-wired a car for a friend of mine. I drank too much. I slept around.”

That last one made Joan take her eyes off the red light to look at Vanessa. She turned back only when she remembered herself.

“I did too many drugs.”

“Drugs? What drugs?”

“I smoked pot at first, did LSD.” Vanessa looked at her and considered whether to go on. “Tried heroin.”

The sound Joan made was somewhere between a gasp and a gulp.

The light turned green, and Vanessa pressed her foot on the gas. Suddenly Joan hated the way her own confession had sounded coming out of her mouth.

“Please don’t read too much into my story,” Joan said. They were approaching the park.

“What do you mean?”

“About ratting out my sister. Just . . . please don’t think that I can’t be trusted, or I ruin people’s fun, or I’m a coward, or anything like that. I’m not.”

“I know.”

“Okay, it’s just, with my sister, it was . . . I always feel like I’m trying to do the right thing and getting it wrong. I don’t know why I told you that story. You’re right, I am a prude. And always early. And all the things you think I am.”

“I don’t think of you any differently than I did when you got in the car,” Vanessa said. “You are what you are, and I like what you are. Anyway, nobody is one thing all the time. Maybe you’ve been a Goody Two-shoes up until now. But anything can happen,” she said, laughing, as she pulled into the parking lot. “The night is young, and you’re out with a bad girl.”


It was dark now, with hundreds of stars visible. They put down a blanket, and Joan set up the telescope as Vanessa stood on the grass and stared up at the sky.

“We might be up there one day,” she said.

Joan looked through the eyepiece. “I know.” She could show Vanessa the constellations without it. But the truth was, Joan relished any moment to show people certain stars up close. How else could she tempt them to fall in love? Joan got Rasalgethi, the head of Hercules, into view. She looked at Vanessa.

“Okay, come look.”

Vanessa moved over Joan’s shoulder, and Joan backed away to give Vanessa a chance to look. As Vanessa brushed up against her, Joan noticed that she smelled like baby powder. Joan now felt gauche, wearing perfume.

Vanessa peered into the eyepiece.

“That is Alpha Herculis, or Rasalgethi, which is Arabic for ‘Head of the Kneeler.’ It’s almost four hundred years into the past you’re looking. It appears to be one star to the naked eye, but it’s—”

“Is it a binary?”

“It’s actually a triple star system.”

“Okay.”

“Hercules has no first-or second-magnitude stars, so it’s a great place to start expanding your celestial landmarks. It’s not like Lyra or Cygnus, or even something like Bo?tes or Auriga, which we can see tonight on the horizon. Hercules doesn’t have a bright star that draws your eye to it. Though a lot of the stars are magnitude four, which is decent. The brightest star is actually called Beta Herculis, not Alpha. Don’t get me started on that.”

Vanessa laughed, and Joan gently pulled her away from the telescope. “Can you see Rasalgethi now with your eyes? As I point to it?”

Vanessa’s sight line followed Joan’s finger. Joan watched Vanessa’s face for any sign of recognition.

“I think so,” Vanessa says.

“Okay, now to the right and farther toward the zenith, you should see a star a little brighter than Rasalgethi—do you see it?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

“That’s Beta Herc, also known as Kornephoros—the ‘club bearer.’ Now we’re looking at Hercules upside down. Rasalgethi represents the head and Kornephoros one of his shoulders. From there, you should be able to make out the four stars that are the torso. They are called the Keystone asterism. One star at each point of his shoulders and hips. With two arms coming off it. The one off of Kornephoros goes up, almost like he’s throwing a football. The other arm goes out to the side, as if he’s pointing.”

“I can see that,” Vanessa said.

“All right, so follow it down, you’ve got his pelvis, in this asterism there, and then two legs.”

“He looks like he’s running,” Vanessa said, smiling.

“Exactly. He’s standing or dancing—or, as most commonly interpreted, kneeling—on Draco’s head. Draco being the representation of the dragon Ladon, who Hercules defeated outside the garden of Hesperides.”

Vanessa took her eyes off the sky. “Placed there by Zeus, I assume. Almost all the constellations are placed by Zeus.”

Joan smiled. “Well, most of the northern constellations. At least in Western cultures. They say that when Hercules—or Heracles, I should say, since that was the Greek name—was poisoned by Hydra’s venom, the human part of him died but the immortal part of him joined his father and the other gods on Mount Olympus. And Zeus had the image of both him and Draco placed in the night sky, to honor him.”