Chapter Text
The small stack of brightly-wrapped packages had dwindled, the colorful paper and shiny bows that had adorned gifts now crumpled and scattered. The toys and storybooks they’d contained were neatly arranged near the wall. She’d taken a break to play with the new tricycle, pedaling around the room while her dad made jokes about Mach speeds and her mom told her to watch out for the table, but eventually the possibilities of the remaining packages had been too much of a lure.
“Here’s the last one, Lucca.” Dad was smiling as he handed her a blue-and-gold package. It was thin and rectangular. “Can you guess what it is?”
“It’s a giraffe,” she said, giggling because it obviously wasn’t. (One of the toys she’d gotten was a plastic version of the long-necked animal. That present’s odd shape had mystified her until she’d opened it.)
“Someone’s had too much birthday cake,” Mommy murmured.
Lucca ran out of giggles and righted herself eventually. “It’s a book, really, because it’s a rectangle,” she told them to make sure they knew she’d known all along. She tore off the wrapping paper and held it up. “See! A book!”
“What’s the title?” her father asked.
Lucca turned the book over in her hands. The first word was her name, but the second she needed to sound out. “Lucca’s Laboratory Notebook.” That was strange. There wasn’t any picture on the front, either. She flipped open, but there were no pictures inside, either. Or words. Just a bunch of blank pages. It looked a lot like the blank books Daddy used when he was doing Inventing. She’d borrowed one once to write a book, saying the words aloud as she scribbled with crayon. It had been disappointing, though, because the crayon markings never turned into words she could read later on, after she’d forgotten things. “It’s not a storybook,” she said, uncertain and a little confused.
“You’re going to write the story, Lucca,” her mother said, and then explained about experiments and hypotheses , and how everything started from asking a question.
That night her parents woke her up when it was dark out and had her get dressed again. It was confusing until they explained. Lucca ran through the house behind her mother with a flashlight, as her parents shut off all the lights that could be seen from the outside. It was a little scary, walking through the house in the dark -- familiar shapes of tables and chairs seemed to loom like monsters -- but she forgot it all once they went outside and stood away from the house.
The sky was full of stars, more than she could remember having ever seen before. The longer she looked the more there were, peeking out in the spaces between other stars.
“Pick me up,” she told her father, but even once she sat on his shoulders the stars were still tiny and out of reach. She stretched her hands as far as she could, trying to grap the glowing ribbon of light that her father called the Milky Way even though it didn’t look like the stuff you drink at all.
“And you know, Lucca? They’re all just like the sun.”
That didn’t make any sense. “They’re not the sun!” Lucca informed her mother. “They’re stars. The sun is big and you don't look at it and it comes in the day. They’re different. They're small and it's night.”
“They look small because they’re far away,” her father said with a laugh. “Like how our island looks tiny from the mainland. But they really are just like the sun. Some of them have their own Earth, too. Maybe even their own people.”
That much seemed right to Lucca. She still couldn’t understand how there could be suns out at night, but if they were all just like the sun, they should have Earth, too. And on each of them there was a Lucca and a mommy and a daddy, looking up at all of them.
“How many are there?” she asked.
“That sounds like a good question for your notebook,” her mother said.
Data: 47 stars (Lucca) 15 stars (Dad) 98 stars (Mom)
Suggestions for Improvement: Get more people. (Lucca) Everyone counts stars in a different part of the sky, so you know you aren’t counting the same stars. (Dad)
What I learned From This Experiment: There are too many stars to count by yourself!