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even think what a drop from the hayloft to the barn floor would do to the lens of a telescope.
    She lays it carefully between them. “What is it?” she asks, crouching down to inspect it more closely.
    “It's a telescope,” he explains, shining his flashlight on it.
    “What's it for?”
    Tyler can't believe someone his age doesn't know what a telescope is for. Maybe it has to do with her being from Mexico, a subject he will not bring up. Last thing he needs is a girl crying in his secret spot. Bad enough she has intruded into it. “It's for seeing into the far reaches of the universe,” he says. Okay, it doesn't see that far, but Tyler loves to pre-tend that his is a powerful telescope, as powerful as the one at the Museum of Science. Maybe some night he'll discover some new star cluster or spot a spaceship zipping around the stars.
    “My gramps gave it to me last Christmas,” he explains as he sets it up by the opened hayloft door. The half- moon casts only a faint light inside. Without Tyler even having to ask, Mari takes the flashlight and shines it wherever his hands are screwing together the parts.
    “See that star there, that bright one?” He takes the flashlight from her and uses it as a pointer. “Now take a look.” He invites her to kneel down and peer through the telescope. A way of thanking her, even though he didn't really ask her to help him.
    “Amazing!” she gasps.
    Tyler feels his heart soar proudly as if he has arranged this incredible night show himself. And his is a piddly tele-scope. Wait till she looks through the one at the Museum of Science! “That's the North Star. It always points north. That's how when there was slavery, people would escape and follow that star all the way to freedom in Canada.”
    “Like the Three Kings,” she says in an awed voice. “And what about those ones that look like a scooper?”
    “That's the Big Dipper. And those that are like a little upside- down house, that's Cepheus. And then, see the cross right overhead? That's the Northern Cross.”
    Tyler teaches her the most prominent constellations, first pointing them out, then having her look through the telescope. She is surprisingly quick for a girl.
    “Did your grandfather teach you?” she asks when they are through.
    Tyler nods. He doesn't trust his voice to explain that yes, Gramps taught him the most important things. As a matter of fact, Gramps would have been the one looking at the stars with Tyler tonight if he were still alive. “My grandpa died this June,” he finds himself saying, although he hadn't planned to mention it even at school to his friends. Talk about private.
    “I'm sorry,” she says simply, which strikes Tyler as just the right thing to say. No clumsy consolations, no asking for the gory details. Then she tells him her own grandmother died last December.
    “What about your mother?”
    “My mother is alive!” she says, so quickly and sharply, it kind of surprises Tyler. “She is away on a trip. She is coming back soon.”
    So much for Mom's sappy idea that the girls don't have a mother. Tyler suddenly remembers the letters he was sup-posed to get from her. Mari was probably writing to her mother. “My mom wanted me to pick up some letters from you?”
    It's her turn to fall silent. “My father … he took care of them.”
    Tyler follows her gaze out the loft door toward the small lit- up trailer. In the silence, he can hear the twittering of the swallows perched on the beams overhead. It strikes him that the loft of a barn is not a usual hanging- out place for a girl, even a girl who is good at learning the constellations. “So why did you come up here?”
    “The birds,” she tells him. “I come to visit them. I watch them all day flying in and out and in and out.” She waves her hands in the air. “Like a dance.”
    “Those are swallows,” he tells her.
    “Swallows!” Mari seems delighted. “We have this song about swallows in Spanish. We call them