They Said She Was Strong So They Never Had To Choose Her novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Her Name

"Me?" I said.

"You found it," the director said. "You should be the one to say its name. Ten minutes, in the main hall. There will be about a thousand people."

I sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet.

Boone looked down at me from the stove.

"Yes," I said into the phone. "Okay. Yes."

The national meeting was in a convention center in downtown Phoenix, the second week of January.

The observatory booked me a hotel room on the fourteenth floor.

My mother flew in.

My roommate drove down from Flagstaff with Boone in his truck, with a cooler of her granny's sandwiches because she didn't trust convention food.

"I'm bunking with your mama," she announced in the hotel lobby. "We already discussed it. She snores and I talk in my sleep. It's a perfect match."

"She doesn't snore," I said.

My mother and Boone looked at each other and said nothing.

My roommate made me buy a navy dress for the talk.

"You are not announcing a comet in flannel."

"Astronomers wear flannel."

"Astronomers wear flannel to look at the comet. You're wearing a dress to own it."

On the morning of the talk, she sat on my bed with her phone while I tried to get my hair to stay up.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, wow."

"What?"

"Kenzie's page is gone. Deleted. All forty-one thousand."

She scrolled.

"And the gear company posted the settlement. Her dad paid back every fee. Plus a license for your sunrise and two other shots, paid to you."

She turned the screen around.

There was my name, in a legal statement, next to a number with a comma in it.

"Huh," I said.

"You keep saying huh about the biggest things that happen to you."

"It's a good word."

The main hall was bigger than the auditorium in Flagstaff, by a lot.

A thousand chairs. Two giant screens. A podium with a little light on it.

My advisor fixed my collar backstage without asking.

"Don't rush. Breathe at the commas. And if anybody asks you a question you can't answer, say 'great question' and look at me."

"What will you do?"

"Answer it, obviously."

The director introduced me.

I walked out into the light with my knee clicking and stood at the podium.

The room was full of people who'd been looking at the sky for longer than I'd been alive.

In the fifth row, dead center, sat my mother.

My roommate was beside her in a Texas Tech hoodie, holding up her phone to film.

Boone sat on the end of the row, very still, watching me.

I put up the first slide.

One frame from the survey, in October.

A faint gray smudge, low in the east, circled in red by the software.

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