Lucy Jane Bledsoe

The world was divided into two halves.

On the bottom half, snow that went on for miles and miles. There wasn’t a single footprint, but the snow wasn’t flat. The wind had carved waves on the surface, so that it looked like a frozen sea.

On the top half of the world there was sky, nothing but sky. A creamy blue, softer than you would think, expanding on forever.

The wind was soft, too. Not soft-feeling. It nearly tore the skin off Victoria’s cheeks. But the sound of the wind was soft, a tender wail, rising and falling, with its own unique melody.

Antarctica. The southernmost continent. A land of ice and sky.

Victoria wrapped her arms around herself and shivered hard.

“Look,” Sonia announced to the entire class. “Victoria Von Woolf thinks she’s actually there.”

Victoria jolted to attention. She wanted to kick herself for once again becoming so lost in her imagination. She had thought she was in Antarctica for a few moments, instead of just looking at a monitor in Mr. Scholinsky’s science class at Sunshine Academy.

“Hey, Von Woolf,” Sonia said in a pretend-friendly voice. “Want to get together this weekend and do some math for fun?”

“Sonia,” Mr. Scholinsky said, “enough from you.”

Victoria lifted her pen to take notes as Mr. Scholinsky had instructed, but she couldn’t resist diving back into the story unfolding on the video. A woman was walking across the snow toward her. She had two thick blond braids that angled out, at different heights, from her head. Her smile too was crooked, and also forced, as if she were only smiling because someone said she had to.

“I’m Dr. Robin Reynolds,” the woman said, “and this is the South Pole.”

“A doctor? She looks like a Raggedy Ann doll,” Sonia commented.

“She’s an astronomer, not a medical doctor,” Victoria told her.

“I’m working on a team that’s building a telescope,” Dr. Reynolds said, “that will look deeper into the universe than any land-based telescope has looked before. The South Pole is the perfect place for it because it stays completely dark all winter, because we can see so much of the sky from here, and because there is very little dust and other junk cluttering up Earth’s atmosphere."

The computer monitor seemed to suck Victoria right into the story, as if it exerted a gravitational force. A moment later, she was standing at the South Pole, next to Dr. Robin Reynolds, who was saying, “And this is Dr. Victoria Von Woolf, my esteemed colleague, who is just weeks, maybe even days, away from discovering the means for time travel.”

Victoria grinned at her esteemed colleague.

“Look at the goofy look on Von Woolf’s face,” Sonia said, shooting down another one of Victoria’s imaginary flights, landing her back hard in the classroom.

On the video, Dr. Reynolds said, “We hope to have the South Pole Telescope ready in a few months. The moment the instrument receives first light will be the biggest day in my life.”

“Big deal,” Sonia said. “That was so totally boring.”

“It was not.” Victoria spoke up for the second time in one class period. That must have been an all-time record – and her mistake. Ever since her parents separated last summer she’d made a point of refusing to talk in class. So what. But Mr. Scholinsky had made it his own personal mission to get her “back on track,” as he put it. Involved. Plugged in. He actually used all those dumb words.

Victoria realized that he’d shown this video for her. He figured it would get her attention, and it did.

Now he pounced. “Victoria, tell us what you found interesting about the video.”

She counseled herself to give the usual shrug, or at the very most, a short, mumbled, noncommittal answer. But she couldn’t help it. Those waves in the white snow. That wind sounding like an alien calling from another planet. The sky that was so clear a telescope could look nearly all the way back to the beginning of the universe.

She blurted, “Looking through really powerful telescopes is like looking back in time. When I become an astronomer, I’m going to discover how to time travel.”

“Oh, right.” Sonia swung her head to the left and right, trying to garner the laughter of others. “As if you could become the next Einstein.”

“Victoria,” Mr. Scholinsky said. He narrowed his eyes and stepped toward her. “How would you like to go to Antarctica?”