Troubling a Star by Madeleine L'Engle

the rest of plankton like the Milky Way to the other visible stars in the sky. This particularly intrigued Cookie, the non-scientist in our party. Dirk pointed out that there are, in the sea, somewhere around ten billion billion diatoms, little particles of energy invisible to the naked eye, and each as individual as a maple
leaf or a snowflake. Ten billion billion is about the same order of magnitude as all of the stars in the universe. Cookie took this information and went off to meditate on it, his own face as luminous as a star.

    I liked the glimpses Adam II was giving me of a Cook who was far more complex than the quiet man I saw in Aunt Serena’s kitchen. Cook’s kitchen.
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    When I got home, bearing the usual package of cookies, there was a letter from Adam waiting for me. I took it off to read in what Rob calls privatecy.

    Dear Vicky,
    I need to take a break from preparing for my next Spanish literature lesson. I’m pretty fluent in Spanish—my best friend in high school was Puerto Rican. But my street vocabulary is very different from that of the great writers, and it’s not as easy as I thought it was going to be. I comfort myself by thinking that brushing up on Spanish before my trip is a good idea, though I’m not sure why. I’ll be in Vespugia only a night or so, and everybody at the station will be English-speaking and most of them will be American. Aunt Serena says the Puerto Rican accent and the Vespugian accent are very different, but she thinks I could get along if I was dumped alone in the middle of Vespugia. It’s an interesting country, but right now politically troubled.
    Hope all goes well with you. Did you say Suzy was taking Spanish? My favorite non-science course is Shakespeare.
I think my parents are right, and that I need to keep my horizons as wide as possible. I guess these are our “salad days, when we are green in judgment.” That’s from Antony and Cleopatra. One of the men on my hall has a good Shakespeare book of quotations and I enjoy leafing through it.
    I’ll see you Thanksgiving weekend, and I look forward to that.
    Love,
Adam

    That was a really nice letter. I put it carefully in my school copy of Hamlet. I’d look up some quotations to send to Adam when I answered his letter.
    Suzy came home then, and I was glad I’d read the letter from Adam in privatecy and put it away before she could see it. She began talking about the next school dance, the Christmas dance, in mid-December. I had Adam’s friendship. That was more important than any school dance.
    John came home on Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and I was amazed at how glad I was to see him. I no longer felt put down or overshadowed by my big brother. It was snowing lightly, but he suggested, “Want to go for a walk with Rochester and me?”
    â€œSure. Love to. Let me get my boots.”
    We struck off across the field and then went into the woods, where it was protected enough from the snow that we could sit on the stone wall, with Mr. Rochester lying beside us, lowering himself a little arthritically so he could put
his head down on John’s feet. John bent down and scratched between the big dog’s ears.
    I asked, “What do you know about South America?” Adam was going to expect me to be a lot more literate than I was about Vespugia and all the places he was going. Adam II’s journal had helped fill me in, but I still needed to know more.
    â€œNot much. Lots of unrest. Lots of problems. Why?”
    â€œAdam’s going to be there.”
    â€œAntarctica isn’t South America. It’s another continent, and a big one.”
    â€œAren’t a lot of the South American countries interested in Antarctica?”
    â€œThe whole world’s interested in Antarctica. We’re running low on fossil fuels. We’re going to need another source of energy. Messing around with Antarctica would be a bad idea. Just because