The Glue That Isn't There

The car smelled like cold pizza and the heater was losing. Maya's mom drove with both hands tight on the wheel, watching for deer. Soren had a flashlight clamped between his teeth and a star chart spread across both their laps.

"You're going to drop wax everywhere," Maya said.

"It's a flashlight. It doesn't have wax."

They had been at the planetarium show. The narrator had a smooth voice and said things like the cosmos and our place within it. Soren had written down one number before the lights came up. He showed it to Maya now, in the bouncing flashlight beam.

Sixty-eight percent.

"He said that's how much of the universe is dark energy," Soren said. "And then he said nobody knows what it is."

"Both of those," Maya said. "In the same sentence."

"In the same sentence."

Maya pulled the chart closer. Little dots, named and numbered, all the stars somebody had already found and measured and filed away. She liked the chart less the longer she looked at it. It felt too finished.

"That's wrong," she said.

"Which part?"

"The order of it. You don't measure something first and then not know what it is. You don't know it's there, and then you find out what." She frowned. "This is backwards. They know the amount of a thing they've never seen."

Soren stopped chewing the flashlight. "That is backwards."

Her mom's voice came from the front. "You two okay back there?"

"How do you weigh something invisible," Maya said, not to her mom.

Soren clicked the flashlight off. The dark made it easier to think. "Okay. Guess. I'll guess too. How would you do it."

"You'd watch what it does," Maya said immediately. "You can't see wind. You see the tree."

"Right. So somebody saw a tree move."

Maya pressed her hand flat against the cold window. Outside, the fields rolled by black, and the stars sat still above them, the way stars always sit still, like they have all the time in the world.

"Gravity pulls," she said slowly. "Everything pulls on everything. So the whole universe, all the galaxies, they should be pulling each other back together. Slowing down. Like throwing a ball up."

"That's what everybody thought," Soren said. "My dad's old book says that. They expected it to slow down. They were arguing about how fast it was slowing."

"So they measured it."

"And it wasn't slowing."

Maya turned from the window. "It was speeding up."

The car went over a bump. The star chart slid off Soren's knees and neither of them caught it.

"That's the tree moving the wrong way," Maya said. Her voice had gone quiet and fast, the way it did when she was ahead of herself. "That's a ball you throw up, and it doesn't come down, and it doesn't even slow down, it goes up faster. There has to be something pushing. There has to be a hand you can't see, on every single thing, everywhere, pushing it all apart."

"And nobody knows whose hand," Soren said.

"Nobody knows if it's a hand at all."

They sat with it. The heater ticked.

Soren found the chart on the floor and held it up against the window so the starlight came through the paper from behind, turning all the printed dots into shadows.

"Here's what gets me," he said. "Sixty-eight percent. That's most of everything. That's more than two thirds of the whole universe. And then all the stars," he tapped the chart, "all of this, every galaxy anyone ever named, all the stuff we're made of, the whole list, that's the small part. We're the small part."

Maya looked at the chart. At all the careful little names. She had thought it was too finished. It was not finished. It was a list of the leftovers.

"We named the foam," she said. "And missed the ocean."

Her mom slowed for a curve. "You lost me ten minutes ago," she said cheerfully. "Is this homework?"

"No," they both said.

It was not homework. Homework had answers in the back. Maya thought about the people who first saw the wrong number come back, the people who expected slowing and got speeding, and how they must have checked it six times before they believed it, the way Soren checked things, and then believed it completely. She thought about how those people, the cleverest people alive, had looked at most of the universe and been able to say only this. That it is there. That it pushes. That we do not know what it is.

"They didn't get to find out," Soren said, like he was reading her. "Some of them. The ones who measured it. They're going to die not knowing what it is."

"That's not sad," Maya said.

"I didn't say it was sad."

"It's the opposite." She turned all the way around in her seat, knees up, facing him in the dark. "It means it's still open. It means the biggest thing there is, the most of everything, is sitting out there right now and nobody on Earth has a clue. Right now. Tonight. While we're driving."

Soren clicked the flashlight back on and found a blank corner of the chart, in the margin, past where the printing stopped. He did not have an answer to write. He wrote the question instead. What is the push.

"They might not solve it for a hundred years," he said.

"They might," Maya said.

"Or it might be somebody who's eleven right now."

Neither of them said anything to that. The car pulled onto the long straight road toward town, and the stars in the windshield held perfectly still, the way they always did, the way they only seemed to.

Maya pressed her hand flat against the window again. Out past her fingers every galaxy in the dark was racing away from every other galaxy, faster this second than the last, pushed by the something with no name, and the glass under her palm was cold and did not move at all.

Soren leaned across and put his hand on the window next to hers.

"Hold still," he said. "We're already not."

The two handprints fogged the glass, side by side, and slowly faded from the edges in.