47/

Mel presses her ear to the finished wood of the door.

“It’s good for…have interests,” her teacher is saying. “…when it gets… schoolwork…being…a need…step in. Even…astrophysicists…writing skills.”

“We’ve tried,” she hears from her dad. “No matter…do, Mel…seem interested…subject.”

“That may be. But even so—”

Pulling back, Mel wanders down the dark hallway to the windows and watches the snow gather on the sill before she peers up at the clouded sky.

A door creaks behind her and she hears her pop call her name. Her footsteps echo and bounce over the linoleum and the still rows of lockers. Neither of her parents look very happy that she wandered.

On the ride home, her dad clears his throat. “You’re really making this school thing hard for yourself, you know.”

Mel leans her head against the glass to look up at the clouds and asks why. “I’m never going to use any of that stuff again once I get to college.”

Her pop laughs, eyes glancing up to meet hers in the rearview. “Why do you think that?”

Mel crosses her arms and sighs and purses her lips. “I’m just not going to need that stuff.”

“Scientists write papers,” her dad says, turning around to face her. “so there’s English. You still live in this country, and need to understand how it works and operates and what your responsibilities are as a citizen, so there’s civics and economics. You’ve always done fine in the sciences and math. What does that leave?”

“History,” Mel closes her eyes.

“You definitely need to know history to be a scientist,” her pop says. “How else would you know what others have done?”

“Yeah but I don’t need US history for that,” Mel says, bouncing her heel up and down and crossing her arms against her chest. “I can just learn that history as I need it.”

“And what context will you have for that history, if you’re missing what else was going on in the world at the time?”

Mel scoffs. “I can just look that up, too.”

Her dad sighs. The cabin of the car settles, punctuated by the low hum of the tires and the occasional clicking of the turn signal.

“Do you know who Enrico Fermi was?” her pop’s eyes glance up again to catch Mel shake her head. “He was an Italian physicist. He worked on The Manhattan Project after he emigrated to the US in the 30s. You know what that is, right?” Another quick glance. “He was also the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor. Big name in physics. There’s a paradox named after him exploring why we haven’t found extraterrestrial life yet.”

“He was a nuclear physicist and an astrobiologist?”

“No. It’s named after him because of a conversation he had with some other physicists, apparently. They were talking about extraterrestrial life. He brought up that by numbers alone, there should be other life out there. But there isn’t. That’s what makes it a paradox.”

“Maybe we just haven’t found it.”

“That’s one of the explanations of the paradox,” her pop nods. They stop at a red light. Mel watches the snowflakes melt on the window and twists her fingers in her lap. “That we haven’t listened the right way, or enough, or that other life is too far away for us to find. My favorite possible explanation is the great filter: that there’s some great barrier — or multiple — that makes life exceedingly rare. It could be positioning, or have to do with simple or complex single-cell life, or multi-cell life, or the intelligence to use tools. People like me, who buy into the great filter theory, think that life on Earth somehow passed whatever filter there was to grow into what it is now.”

“Okay,” says Mel. “That’s cool and all, but I don’t know what it has to do with history.”

Her pop half-smiles, and she can hear the amusement in his voice. “If you’re going to discover aliens, don’t you think it’s important to know the context and history of the people who stand against you?”

“Against me?”

“Let me finish,” her pop said. “It might be there are multiple filters. Maybe the filter is behind us, and we somehow surpassed it on Earth. But it could also be ahead of us. Something so big and terrible it’s destroyed all the other life — some obstacle or challenge that life can’t overcome, that we on Earth haven’t seen yet. The more proof we find of extraterrestrial life out there, the more likely it becomes that the filter — or at least a filter — is ahead of us.”

“So you think if we find aliens, it’s bad?”

“Very. So do a lot of others.”

“But what does that have to do with history?”

Both her parents laugh. “Kid, what do you think this whole conversation has been?”

“Yeah, but that’s interesting history. I want to know the history of aliens. I just don’t care about the rest of it.”

“You wouldn’t skip through a book just to read the dialogue you wanted to, or fast-forward through most of a movie, would you? History exists in context. The more you know, the more you understand how we got here and where we’re likely to go.”

They pull into a spot on the curb and her pop kills the engine.

“Think about it,” he says, giving her one last glance in the rearview before he opens his door. Mel chews her lip and zips up her coat and shivers in the cold air. She tilts her head back to watch the snow fall in dizzying circles. It sticks to her eyelashes and her coat and her gloves. She closes her eyes and stays there until her dad calls her inside.

“I don’t care what other people are afraid of,” she whispers to the sky. “If you’re out there, I’m going to find you.”