The Icarus Project Read online

  Luckily, mammoth bones had also been discovered in North America. A huge cache of bones had been found in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and some were recently found in Colorado, which, from a tourist standpoint, was cushy compared with Siberia. Dad was trying to get funding to do fieldwork on Saint Paul Island in Alaska. He spent many sleepless nights writing up his proposal and doing research. I could handle a trip to Alaska—even in winter it wouldn’t be that bad.

  “Did you hear about the grant?” I asked through a mouthful of spaghetti. I had seen an official-looking letter in the pile of mail by the door and had wanted to rip it open and read it, but instead I had put it on top of the pile and waited.

  Dad stared at his plate and twisted his fork around and around, building up a massive ball of spaghetti strands. I swallowed. This was not a good sign. For some reason, Mom had all the luck in our family; grants flowed her way, and she went on expedition after expedition. But not Dad. Science wasn’t fair.

  “Not this time,” he finally said. “The economy’s tight.”

  “That’s just another excuse. The economy is always bad.”

  “What can I say? The grants are fewer and the competition gets fiercer every year.” He tore a piece of bread in half. “We have to adapt.”

  I groaned. Why couldn’t he fight back, get angry? “But you worked so hard.”

  “I’ll apply again next year. There’s always another chance.”

  “You’ll get one soon,” I said, but it felt like a lie. What was I supposed to say? Pep talks were tough.

  After dinner Dad made me wait in the tent while he brought out a surprise. Even though he was a whiz with turning ground meat into a delicacy, he was not as good in the baking department. I peeked out of the canvas flap and saw the sparkler on top of a huge brown mound. I held the tent open while he carried in a cake.

  “Wow! It’s beautiful.” The sparkler glowed, and a warmth spread over me. Dad always came through. I leaned my head on his shoulder, then gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.

  “I know you miss your mom, so I wanted to make a surprise,” he said. “Wait till you see what’s inside.”

  “Inside?”

  Once for Thanksgiving, a teacher at my school baked a dime in a pumpkin pie and whoever found it got good luck. I got it—and swallowed the dime whole. It was never seen again. I really hoped there wasn’t any loose change baked inside my surprise cake.

  “You’ll see,” he said, a mischievous grin spread across his face. “Now make a wish and blow out the sparkler.”

  I closed my eyes, but it only took me a second to make my wish … I wanted to go on an expedition—a real one, far, far away. I focused really hard on my wish, willing it to happen. I visualized hot sands and great stone pyramids. I imagined myself floating down the Nile in a slow boat, the way Cleopatra drifted along on not a boat but a sedan carried on the sturdy backs of men. I wished for an adventure where I could dig up something important, something really rare that none of the scientific experts saw coming. I opened my eyes, pulled the sparkler out of the cake, and waved it across the darkening tent as looming shadows stalked the canvas, until at last it sputtered out in my hand.

  Dad cut the cake and then proudly pointed to the inside.

  The cake was made up of a half-dozen layers, each in a different shade of brown, from light beige to putty, then tan, on to a mocha layer, then plain chocolate, and finally to a dark devil’s food chocolate. “I wanted it to look like the layers of rock,” he said. “And, trust me, it wasn’t easy. I have a newfound respect for Betty Crocker.”

  I laughed. “It’s so cool!” I dipped a finger into the icing and licked it off. “Very chocolaty.” This was the kind of cake one might expect from a science-nerd dad—both delicious and educational. “It’s the best cake ever.”

  “You might want to wait until you take a bite to decide that.” He cut off a huge slice. The tower of chocolate toppled over onto my plate. It looked a little shiny and wet. I dug my fork in and took a big bite.

  “It’s a little raw in the middle. Oh, is it one of those molten cakes?” I asked.

  Dad tilted his head like he was considering the possibility. “Yes!” he answered a little too eagerly. “It’s molten, like a volcano.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me. He was totally making that up.

  I swallowed a mouthful of the undercooked batter. “It’s really good.” And it actually was.

  After I had finished eating and had helped do the dishes, I headed to my room and changed into my pajamas. As I was climbing into bed, I saw my reflection in the now-black computer screen. I’m very different from my parents, at least in appearance. Mom’s hair was glossy brown, and Dad’s was dark blond, like an old golden retriever’s. Due to some freak of nature or some warped gene, my hair was … pure white.

  Not blond, not honey, but snowdrift white.

  It was cute when I was a baby. Everyone thought my hair would darken as I got older, but no. My hair was born old—the color of powder, the color of milk. Now everyone thought it was weird, definitely stare-worthy. The other kids said I was part albino or part mutant spawn.

  Once I overheard one of my parents’ friends say that it was no wonder my hair was white—Mom and Dad loved the past so much they had made an old baby.

  Dad said that one day I would be a famous scientist like Jane Goodall and everyone would recognize me on sight, because my white hair would be my trademark and make me look both glamorous and wise at the same time. Which, he said, was a really hard thing to do. He said it was just like the way movie actress Katharine Hepburn was really tall and always wore pants back in the days when most actresses were petite and always wore dresses, but she could pull it off because she owned the thing that made her different. She didn’t slouch.

  So I handled it. I grew my hair out really long and wove it in two long braids. I cut my hair into blunt, serious bangs. But I also wore hats a lot—especially in winter, when it wasn’t strange to wear a hat, because stares could be tiring.

  I snuggled down under the covers and turned off the light. My best friend, Zoey, and I had stuck star stickers to the ceiling in an ill-fated attempt at creating a galaxy, but even though they didn’t look like a real sky, they made the room feel less lonely, which was strange because the real stars were light-years away, and Mom was only on another continent. She was probably swaying in her ropy hammock at this very moment, staring up at the stars, and hers weren’t made of plastic.

  I saw Zoey’s head bobbing over the tops of a troop of field-trip kids linked arm in arm, all of whom were wearing yellow shirts. Zoey and I had decided to hit the Air and Space Museum first because there was a new exhibit in the planetarium that she wanted to see. Not that we hadn’t seen a million star shows, but they never got old.

  Zoey and I had been best friends for about three years. Her parents were space freaks, and her dad worked for NASA and her mom at the museum. That’s how we met. We were Smithsonian kids.

  The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., isn’t one museum. It’s a group of museums all lined up in a giant rectangle, and the whole area is called the National Mall, with the sharp pointy pencil of the Washington Monument in the middle and the Lincoln Memorial at one end, with lots of trampled grass in between. Zoey’s mom and my dad both had office space at two of the coolest museums. The fact that Zoey and I had embraced the coolness of museums just helped cement our friendship.

  Zoey had a brown mocha mustache on her upper lip. I wasn’t allowed to drink mochas, because they had coffee in them and my parents said that coffee would stunt my growth. Zoey’s mom was German and didn’t buy into the coffee growth-stunting myth. She let Zoey drink coffee if she wanted, except that Zoey said coffee tasted like boiled bark, so she opted for mochas, which were coffee mixed with chocolate, and she always gave me a sip. Plus, Zoey was a head taller than I was, so growth stunting wasn’t a concern.

  Zoey zipped around the group of kids and came over and linked her arm in mine. We darted to the line f
or the star show. The security guard, George, gave us a nod. We were regarded as regulars, having come in many days in a row when the Pluto travesty hit a few years back. Zoey was a diehard Pluto fan and still couldn’t bring herself to accept the terrible fate that had befallen her beloved planet when some superior-brain-celled scientists decided to flick Pluto right out of our solar system, declaring, blasphemously, that it wasn’t really a planet anymore.

  She would much rather have traded in Mercury. “Let the sun eat it for breakfast,” she said. “Just keep Pluto.” When I had asked her why, she said it was because Pluto needed us. It was way out there, alone in the freezing darkness of space, and it needed all the friends it could get.

  It was during the Pluto travesty (as it will be forever known) that Zoey and I bonded as best friends. Then one day George called us the ghost girls, and I cringed, thinking he was making fun of my long white hair—white as a ghost. And George must have realized it, too, by the look of utter terror on his face. Zoey took it in stride, though. She asked him what made us ghost girls, and George said it was because we always haunted the museum, which was true.

  One night I had a sleepover at Zoey’s house, and I drew a picture of Pluto with my gel pens on her shoulder blade like a tiny tattoo. Zoey’s mom had a case of hair dye stashed in the garage from when it had been on sale at Sam’s Club. We borrowed a box and Zoey dyed my hair. The name on the package was Cinnabar, and in the picture on the front the model had gorgeous reddish-brown hair. Little did we know that red dye on my white hair would turn it vibrant pink. Don’t get me wrong, I like pink. Pink has a bad rap as far as colors go, ever since it was usurped by princesses. Pink by itself was pretty enough, but a head full of pink stood out, and I had been going for subtle. An explosion of hot-pink hair wasn’t subtle. Plus, my parents freaked. Luckily, the color was only semipermanent. My scalp still tingled at the memory of the dozens of shampooings Mom had subjected me to.

  The planetarium was filling up fast. Zoey and I leaned back and stared at the artificial black sky. Zoey knew I missed my mom, and she didn’t have to say a word. Instead, we let the silence fall over us while people shuffled in to watch the show. Finally, she said, “Only humans would make a fake sky so that they could watch the stars drift by over and over. I bet the aliens in outer space are laughing their little green butts off at us.”

  “OK—green is now the color of alien butts,” I said.

  “If you add that to your color theory,” she replied, twisting a strand of her long curly hair around one of her fingers, “I expect a footnote to reference this date and time when you publish.”

  Parents who are academics are obsessed with publishing. Getting papers published is really important, because it puts scientific ideas into scholarly journals, where colleagues can review and comment on them. This builds credibility. (At least that’s what my parents told me.) Being published makes it much easier to get grant money for research and fieldwork.

  That reminded me of my dad and his failed grant application. Zoey must have received some brainwaves, because she looked over at me and asked, “Hey, did your dad ever hear back about his proposal?”

  My stomach knotted. A big pink knot, I decided. Pink was the color of stomach knots.

  I sighed, a long drawn-out Pluto sigh. “Yeah. He heard and it sucks. Denied once again. It’s not fair.”

  “Man, you would think with the discovery of that baby mammoth a few years back that mammoth research would be a hot topic.”

  “‘Money is tight.’ That’s always the excuse. Never enough money.” I rolled my eyes.

  “I hate money.”

  “Me too. Money doesn’t deserve a color. It’s the color of trouble.”

  The lights in the auditorium flickered, and a wave of hushed silence spread over the crowd. Blackness engulfed us as we looked up. Black was the absence of color. It was the color of freezing outer space. And of closed eyes. Where colors went to die.

  After watching the show, Zoey and I headed over to the Natural History Museum. Tilda was the administrative assistant who worked for Dad and all the other professors who shared office space in the corner of the building. She waved us forward with long, glittery red fingernails.

  “Something’s up,” she whispered with minty breath.

  A bowl of individually wrapped Life Savers rested on her desk. Zoey and I both dug our hands in at the same time.

  “What?” I asked.

  “A call came in early this morning. There’s been a major find … and your dad’s been on the phone all day.” Tilda beamed.

  “What kind of find?” Zoey asked. “Animal, vegetable, or alien?”

  “Fossil evidence.” Tilda drummed her fingernails on the desk blotter. Someone had drawn a childish sketch of a mammoth with long curly tusks on the calendar.

  “Mammoth evidence!” I blurted. Excitement flooded through me. I couldn’t believe this was happening. “Wow! That is so awesome.”

  Tilda nodded, her lips curling into a satisfied smile.

  “Where did they find it?” I asked.

  “Well, we don’t know all the details. At least I don’t. But the call came from the Canadian Arctic.”

  “The Arctic…” Zoey crunched down on her Life Saver.

  “This sounds big,” I said.

  “Very.” Tilda jabbed the button on the phone for Dad’s office line with her sparkly red fingernail. Red was a vibrant color, exciting and full of energy. “Jason, your daughter and her friend are here. May I send them in?”

  She nodded her head toward Dad’s office while scribbling whatever he was saying down on a pad of paper.

  The office was the size of a rich person’s closet, so it was small as offices went but gigantic for a closet. Dad said that academics didn’t need a lot of space—it was the ideas that were big. I pushed on the door, which didn’t open all the way because of the stack of books behind it.

  Dad hung up the phone and waved us in. Zoey and I squeezed into the cluttered space. Though the office was small, the ceilings were high, and all the stuff was stacked upward. The shelves were filled with books, and replicas of bones seemed to go up and up into the fluorescent sky.

  Dad’s face lit up when he saw us. His ear was bright red from having been pressed to the phone. “Did Tilda tell you about the mammoth?”

  “Not much. Just that there was a big find.” I wanted to hear the news from him.

  “A major find in Canada. Do you know how lucky we are? The site is close. Really close.” Words spooled from his mouth. “Plus, an ecotourism company discovered it—Clark Expeditions.” He read off his notepad.

  “What did they find?” I asked.

  “Mammoth bones.” He lowered his voice even though it was just the three of us shoehorned into the office. “And maybe … more.”

  “More what?” I asked in the same hushed, quiet voice.

  “Organic material.” He used a loud stage whisper for dramatic effect.

  When Dad talked about organic material, he meant the good stuff, the meaty stuff—like animal flesh, which wasn’t gross if you thought about it scientifically.

  “Like a mammoth body? Do they think they found a frozen one?” He beamed.

  If there was a real frozen mammoth buried in the ice up in Canada, this was huge. Mammoth bones were not rare. In fact, though always an important find, the bones were nothing new. There was an entire creepy mammoth graveyard filled with hundreds of bones in Siberia. Russia had cornered the market as far as mammoth finds went. But a body was entirely different. No wonder Dad was so excited.

  “Is it a baby? Like the ones found before?” Three baby mammoths had been retrieved from the Siberian steppe, in various stages of preservation.

  “Not sure. Let’s not get overly excited,” he cautioned. “We’re not sure what exactly was found—it could be nothing.”

  “But it’s serious.” I looked at Zoey, and she gave me the thumbs-up sign.

  “Yes. We’re taking this very seriously. A team w
ill be assembled and sent to investigate the find.”

  “Wow. That’s colossal.” Zoey’s smile showed off her shiny braces. “So are you going to Canada or what?” Zoey always got to the point.

  “What’s this mean, Dad?” I was starting to get a little nervous, the thrill of discovery ebbing away. “Are we going? Wait, who gets to go? I get to go, too. Right?”

  Dad’s mouth hung open. He sighed, clearly not knowing what to say. “We’ll talk when I get home. I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” Panic washed over me. “You can’t leave me at home,” I snapped, and dropped my backpack on the floor.

  “Don’t get excited. We’ll discuss it later tonight when I have more details.”

  Which really meant Don’t embarrass me in public with a hysterical outburst. Sensing trouble, Zoey ducked out of the office.

  I suddenly felt hot and claustrophobic. I couldn’t let another one of my parents jet off on an expedition without me.

  Dad stood and gave me a quick hug and pat on the back.

  But I wasn’t going to let it go. “Come on, Dad. Please.” Please was the last refuge of the desperate, but begging was not beneath me. I had to go with him.

  At that moment, the phone rang, and he snatched it up. He turned his back to me and spoke hurriedly into the receiver. With a glance over his shoulder, he said, “I have to take this call. It’s Randal Clark. Can you get a ride home with Zoey’s mom? Thanks. You’re a trouper, Maya.”

  Then he pushed me. Not hard, but enough.

  Dad had never pushed me before. He pushed me right out of the office and shut the door. I stood in the hallway and stared at the carpet. It was the color of ground-up corn. The color of broken chips left at the bottom of the bag after all the good chips had been eaten. I felt chewed up. Left over. That ugly carpet was me, stepped on and ignored. Was Dad going to suddenly up and leave because some cool mammoth was found in the Arctic?