HALIEN

Chapter 1: The Meteor Shower

When I hear the world following I think lab safety, directions. When I think of making it my mind goes to discoveries. And when I think of Indio Valley, I think of our proximity to two internationally-ranked Dark Sky Preserves – two thousands points of light on a clear night – but most people think of Coachella.

The word scientist was invented for girls like me: lying on the hood of my truck, under the Lyrid meteor shower, wearing three pairs of headphones (soft earplugs and a headband, with noise cancellers on top) because my neighbors are drag racing and I want to focus on the stars.

The word scientist really was invented for girls. It started as a bit of a slur – a researcher with a penis was called a Man of Science, so to describe the ladies, they needed something less, something science-ish. Imagine me with a posh British accent when I say, years ago, it would have been simply ludicrous to imagine my short brown hair, pierced nose, and Mexican-heritage in a lab coat. (Can your "heritage" even wear clothes? No – but it would be the first thing most of my colleagues noticed when I entered the room.) I'd have at least three unwanted prefixes – Female-, Latina-, and Young- all before the word Scientist – as if they could combine to somehow lessen the suffix I'd worked so hard for – PhD. Miles above, a star winks at me, as if to say, "Isn't that fucking ridiculous?"

My neighbors rev their engines, as if they agree. 

If they were to drag race their cars straight up, they'd reach the stratosphere in just over an hour. Muscle cars don't have enough thrust to escape Earth's gravitational pull, so they might be whooshed around and around the planet a few times before eventually falling back into the atmosphere and burning up. But if they could go further... If somehow my hotrod neighbors had unlocked the secrets of the universe and faster-than-light travel... if they could catch up to the Golden Record (13.2 billion miles away and counting), they'd find that Earth's holotypical scientist doesn't have her bachelor's degree either.

The Golden Record is like Earth's Tinder bio: it's got all our favorite songs, pictures of people eating and playing with dogs; it even has nudes – a drawing of a naked man and woman and detailed notes about the chemical compositions of our bodies. It's a compendium of everything important to us humans – in case an alien spacecraft ever intercepts the Record and is curious enough to figure out how to read it. And all the scientists on Earth are represented by Jane Goodall – one of only eight people to have earned a PhD from Cambridge, despite never getting a bachelor's degree (though she had more than enough comparable work experience, obviously).

I'm not knocking Jane Goodall, only saying: if I can't afford to finish my undergrad by the time I'm twenty-one, I'm in good company. Tons of scientists haven't technically graduated because "their people" (Jews, or Muslims, or – gasp! – women!) weren't officially allowed to study. Since I've come to terms with the fact I can't achieve a post-doc by thirty, I've decided my new goal is to be an astrophysicist by the time I'm in my seventies. I figure the extra fifty years of runway will be more than enough: fifty years ago, we sent people to the moon using computers dumber than the cracked-screen cellphone I have unceremoniously jammed in my back pocket. Maybe by the time I can afford grad school, it'll be free. And maybe all cars will be flying or autonomous or completely silent – so there won't be any more drag racing to distract me.

Thinking of the crack in my phone screen, I shift my weight, as twin Mustangs race down the road past me. Besides, I think, it doesn't always take a windfall of grant money or a veritable mine of data to make a discovery. We're doing PowerPoint presentations in my gen-ed physics class this semester and I've chosen to profile astronomer William Herschel, because he discovered redshift with a data set of just fifty points. (We can hear redshift, it's that thing when a fire truck goes past and the sirens sound lower when they get further away – or when the squeal of a Mustang's tires get miraculously less grating.)

On the other hand, it took more than five petabytes of data to make the first photo of a black hole – that's more data in one photo than 40,000 Instagram girls could accumulate in a lifetime of selfies – so maybe school prices will continue to sky rocket and my dreams will become even more of a shot in the dark.

All I want is to get out of Indio. To make something of my life, as far from the desert's screams (of hawks, and Coachella crowds, and drag racing wheels on the pavement) as my talent will take me.

But most of the time it feels like all my academic aspirations are redshifting, drifting further and further out of my reach.