A WALK TO THE STARS

Thirteen-year-old Jasper Finch was a skinny kid with a mass of brown hair stuck on his head like it was trying a space launch and glasses that seemed to want nothing more than to slide off his nose. He wasn't suited for middle school-he was lanky, quiet, agricultural, and certainly too likely to be found with his pencil scratching equations and math doodles in the margins of his history notebook.

After last year's science fair, when Jasper wandered on about space-time tunnels, he'd earned himself the Bridgeton Middle School nickname of "Wormhole Weirdo," during which he explained with enthusiasm while his classmates snickered into their hands. Jasper didn't mind. Not really. He'd take wormholes over their dodgeball games any old day.

Yet that Tuesday proved to be a bummer. It started at third period, where Mrs. Callahan was rambling about the Industrial Revolution, steam engines, factories-a perfectly boring stream of blah blah blah. Jasper was back at his desk, a castle of solitude by the window, where he would steal glimpses of the gray drizzling sky outside. His history notebook was open, but there were no notes about textile mills; instead, the margins were crowded with swirling vortexes, arrows shining through space, and tiny equations he had copied from another book about Einstein's theories in the library. "If you bend spacetime just right," he mused to himself aloud, pencil scratching, "you could connect two points-anywhere, anyway." His glasses began to slide off of the bridge of his nose, and he fixed them back again, blissfully unaware of the eyes that shifted with his muttering.

"Finch! You got something to contribute?" Mrs. Callahan's voice cut through our lesson like a whip. I nearly stopped moving, pencil paused in the air. Turning to look in unison, the class stared back at me, varied smirks and whispers rolled violently through my face. Tommy Grayson was two rows across, leaning back in his seat with his smile revealing trouble. "Yeah, Wormhole Weirdo," Tommy drawled loud enough for the whole class to hear. "Tell us about the space portals again." The class howled with laughter. Each of the original red spots erupting over my cheeks stung even hotter. I sunk lower in my chair and politely and quietly mumbled, "No, ma'am," but Mrs. Callahan sighed, shook her head back to the chalkboard, still looking for, anything to respond to the class. I felt like a carcass being eyed and surrounded by vultures; Tommy's fellow clowns grinned and snickered like that for the whole period.

Lunch was even worse. Jasper typically dined alone in the courtyard, crouched behind a scraggly bush, just to be left be while flipping through his notebook. Not today, though; Tommy and his little pack found him before he had a chance to even unwrap his peanut butter sandwich. "What's this, Finch?" Tommy said, snatching the notebook right out of Jasper's hands. The cover was half-torn from the rain last month, but the llama-lover marketers were much more a gold mine- wormhole sketches and equations, and cute little notes in the corners like "negative energy=key?" Tommy flipped to the latest one, a swirling funnel with arrows and numbers, and held it up in the air like it was trophy. "Your ticket to nerdville?" he sneered and tossed it to buddy Ryan, who then tossed it to another kid. They played keep-away, and giggled while Jasper lunged for it, sneakers ripping on the pavement. "Give it back!" he shouted but his voice cracked and they just laughed even harder. Finally, the big badass Tommy dropped it down a puddle by the cafeteria door and smiled - all teeth no soul. "Oops," he grinned. Jasper scooped the drippy mess up and ran while the idiot boys laughed and goofed off down the hall behind him.

He didn't cease running until he reached the woods behind his home. A wild sprawl of pines and brambles was there, a green wall that consumed all sound from the world and belched out silence. Jasper had referred to it as his thinking spot. A place where he could take a breath free from his parents hovering over him. The air smelled of damp earth and resin: sharp, fresh. He crunched into the ground with every step as he meandered through the trees. He passed the old oak tree that he carved his initials in two summers ago. The bark was still scared from a wobbly semi-circle written "JF." A squirrel dashed across his path in a burst of chatter, like it was yelling at him, and he grinned small. And muttered, "Yeah yeah, I'm late," as if the forest had been expecting him.

Jasper leaned back and envisioned it. Him, stepping through a glowing ring, popping up on a red planet with Tommy's dumb face nowhere in sight. "Take that, Grayson," he grinned, a little spark of triumph sparking in his chest. Sure, it was a pipe dream-wormholes weren't exactly backyard science-but it was a ton better than the real world. He flipped back to an older page, one with a diagram showing spacetime bending like a rubber sheet, and traced it with his finger. "If I could just figure the energy part...". He trailed off, thinking of the possibilities. What if he could visit a star system that had a sky lit up with two suns? Or a planet with oceans that glowed like liquid fire? He'd seen theoretical exoplanets in his library books-one with methane lakes, a planet that rained diamonds, a planet with an atmosphere thick enough that you could float like a balloon. "That would be something," he whispered, a grin lifting his lips.

The woods remained still around him, only the occasional bird chirped and twig cracked. Jasper stretched out his legs and nudged a pine cone, letting his mind drift. He thought of his dad, the one who got him interested in space, in the first place. Before he left, two years ago after the divorce, dad would sit with Jasper on the porch, pointing out the constellations. "That's Orion," he would say, tracing the hunter's belt with his finger. "There's the Big Dipper. Jasper, there's a whole universe waiting for you." The thought of a whole universe waiting for him made Jasper's throat clench. His dad was in California now, sending pictures of palm trees and saying he would come to visit "soon." But "soon" never happened, and Jasper stopped looking for it. At least the stars were still there.

He brushed away that idea and concentrated on his notebook. He turned the page to another one where he had written a quote by Stephen Hawking: "Wormholes could allow us to travel faster than light, if only we could stabilize them." Jasper had double underlined that quote and scratched in the corner, "Negative energy-exotic matter? Research." He didn't totally get it; exotic matter was way over his pay grade-but it seemed like magic, the sort of magic he might believe in. He began sketching again-not a light saber but a wormhole with a star field on the other side, with little dots for planets he might visit someday. "Maybe I'll find a place where no one has heard of Tommy Grayson," he murmured, chuckling quietly to himself.

The forest seemed to concur with this sense of ease as silence soothed him. Jasper took a moment to spread his vision around at the various objects of familiarity. The pine tree he had leaned against had a knot in the trunk that appeared to be a cartoon-style eye winking at him, while just a few feet away a patch of moss was glowing green and basking in a beam of stray sunlight. He'd spent countless hours here together over the years, mostly reading or simply contemplating. Once, while trying to do the cool thing and build a fort out of arrayed fallen branches, but when it ultimately crumpled to the ground he was left with a splinter and a bruised status. He smiled at the memory of that day, but the forest was quickly shaken from its calmness by the advent of another sound: a low hum that emerged faintly at first and grew slowly louder, like a truck idling occupancy a county away.

Jasper shot up, pencil still stuck in is fingers. A low hum began to vibrate in his body, moving up his legs until his knees wobbled. "What the hell?" He yelled, just able to stop himself from getting up. His glasses slid down again; he pushed them up and squinted at the trees. It was not sound in his head; it pummeled loudly and low, and it felt as if it had real mass, vibrating the pine cones around his feet. He placed his hand on the trunk of a pines and felt the sensation come up into his arm; a dull buzz that made him grind his teeth. "This is not good," he maintained feeling the pulse of blood in his heart. The forest looked totally normal-tall pines, bright yellow light flashing in between the trees-but something about it felt different. The air felt static; it was weighed down, as if the weather was going to change.

He took one step, then another, following the hum, which took him deeper into the woods and around a group of brambles that he usually avoided due to the thorns surrounding them. The ground sloped down, and he almost tripped over a root and instead grabbed onto a low branch. "Get it together, Jasper," he said, trying to kid himself, curious to the max. The hum was clearer now, a constant drone that sounded like some force from the earth itself. He pushed through a curtain of pine needles which had a sharp smell in his nose and froze. The ground beneath his sneakers was glowing, as if a faint blue was leaking up out of the dirt and needles below.

"No way," he whispered, falling to his knees. He hesitated, hovering his hands, until he finally pushed some of the debris away. A circle of light shimmered beneath the debris, about three feet across, sharply-defined and pulsing as if alive, as if some cosmic heartbeat was vibrating the center of it. It wasn't sunlight or a torchlight; it was too vivid, too alive, almost like liquid star-glitter pooled in the earth. Jasper's breath caught. For a moment, his notebook slipped out of his hand, thumping to the ground beside the glow. "A wormhole?" he muttered in disbelief - the word half-laugh half-prayer. Ideas and equations whirled together; Einstein, Hawking, the midnight scribbles that were fueled by adrenaline and caffeine. There is no way this was real. But here it was, humming, glowing, pulling him with magnetic energy.

He drew closer, the strange blue light illuminating his face, flashing through his wide eyes. His skin glimmered, all the hair on his body prickled and ended in goose bumps, his heart thumped so loud that he thought the trees might hear. "This is it," he said, shaking but determined. "The real deal." A shortcut in space - maybe to Mars, maybe home, fleeing from Tommy and those puddle stompers. His fingers skittered over the strange light, momentarily forgetting the notebook. Every nerdy fiber of his being told him to try it, to see where it would take him. He thought of the places he dreamed about - planets with rings like Saturn, blue burning stars, other worlds where he wouldn't be the weird kid. "Could be anywhere," he whispered, with a too-wide grin fighting its way through his nerves.

"There's only one way to find out," he made his decision, retracting the journal back to himself and holding it in front of him like a shield. He stood up, took a hesitant breath, and rolled his shoulders back. The glow pulsed with intensity, the hum swelled into a high wail that drowned out the whispers of the forest around them. "Here goes nothing," he muttered, and took a leap forward. The light erupted, engulfing him completely. Jasper let out a shout as the world went fuzzy, poured down a tunnel of stars that began roaring around him. Colors evaporated as streaks of colors - blues, whites, purples - moved past them. The colors burned and Wild. His stomach lurched and echoed back through the void as he grinned and wore his glasses or their full journey through the numbness at the end. The chapter closed down on the chaos. Jasper's surprised eyes had captured the universe in collapse, his journal flipping and having its own attach to his body, a child of everything.