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tonight, no moon to wash out the starlight.
    “But that was only the beginning, the wonder of that blizzard of stars. Something else was happening. With Grandma, my world was the earth. The earth of trees and oceans and people and sockeye salmon. Now the night in the Atacamaseemed to be telling me something: look… look …there is more . I saw a gusher of stars from one end to the other and I thought, It’s the Milky Way! My galaxy! I was filled with a sense that I belonged to something way bigger than I ever imagined. Than I ever could imagine. The ends of it were unreachable. I could travel at light speed for a million lifetimes and I would barely get out of the driveway.
    “But you know what got to me most?” We were both too mesmerized to ask. “It wasn’t the sense of the vast endlessness of it all. It was just the opposite. It wasn’t that it was all too much for me to comprehend. It was that no matter how big and unimaginable it was, it was my home. My ultimate neighborhood. My hometown. It was where I belonged. And—here was the best part—so did everybody else belong. Everybody who is and everybody who ever was. I wasn’t alone after all. I was connected to it all. That star there”—he pointed—“it’s my neighbor…and that one…and that one…. And Grandma. For the first time in ten years I sensed her presence in something that wasn’t a picture or a memory. She was outthere too—but not really there , because everything is here . And that’s where”—he took my hand, and I knew on the other side he was taking Lily’s—“that’s where I found myself. There.” He brought our hands to his heart. “Here.”

Lily
    E ven before Poppy said Grandma was out there, I knew he was talking about more than stars. When Poppy stopped talking, we just lay there in the snow, looking up. After a while I started to feel what Poppy felt. I started to feel comfortable, at home, like the world was our room, like the stars were our ceiling.
    On the ride home Poppy told us about entanglement. He said entanglement shows that everything in the universe is connected. He said that light is made up of particles called photons. “Sometimes,” he said, “photons come in pairs. It’s called entanglement.” He looked at us squeezed into the shotgun seat. “You could call them twins.” I jabbed Jake in the ribs. Poppy said if twin photons areseparated, they still act as if they’re together. You could put them on opposite ends of the universe and it wouldn’t make any difference. “If you tweak one photon,” he said, “the twin on the other side of the universe will twitch.”
    I jabbed Jake again, hard this time. “See?”
    Jake squawked. “Ow!”
    I was so busy thinking about entangled twin light particles that we were on the porch at home before I remembered something. “Poppy!” I said. “You said you found yourself in two places. Where’s the other one?”
    He didn’t say a word. He took a step back. His grin got bigger and bigger under the porch light. When it seemed his grin was ready to crack his face in half, he pointed with both index fingers—straight at us. And grabbed us in a bear hug that lasted forever.
     
    THE END

Jake
    I knew she would try to end it there. She says that since I had the first chapter, she gets the last and so she gets to end it wherever she wants. But somebody’s gotta be the Whole Story Police here, and the hug on the porch wasn’t the end.
    In the first place, the bear hug didn’t last forever. It lasted about five minutes—which, I admit, is pretty darn long for a hug. Even the hug when Poppy left next day wasn’t as long. Lily was mad and thumping his chest one minute, bawling into his arms the next. Poppy said don’t worry, it wouldn’t be another ten years before he showed up again. I’m not sure we believed him.
    Before Dad drove us all to the airport, Poppy came into our room and got all whispery. “Listen,”he said, “I have a suggestion for you