Work Text:
Theresa Cabral is two weeks, three days, and ten hours from defending her PhD thesis in molecular biology when she gets a text from a kid she went to middle school with.
Michael Whitman (11:06 pm):
Did you see it?
Theresa is twenty-six years old, and her long-term girlfriend is already asleep in their bedroom, and her short-term apartment is littered with moving boxes because they only started getting settled last week.
When she first sees the name on her phone, she swears she must be having a mild hallucination from sleep deprivation because there is no way that fucking Michael Whitman from seventh grade Science is messaging her at eleven p.m. at night. She’s honestly shocked he still has her number.
She rubs her eye with one tired fist, massaging out sleepless eyebags as she reaches for her phone clumsily with the other, momentarily forgetting about her keyboard and all the grammatical edits she needs to make to her thesis, “Applications of the Star Eater: Examining the Genetic Makeup of Astrophage.”
She texts back with a small, sleepy smile drawn on her face at the absurdity of the situation.
Theresa Cabral (11:07 pm):
Hey, Michael, this is Theresa Cabral from middle school haha. I think you’ve got the wrong number but hope you’re well lol :)
She can’t even set her phone back face down on the table before it buzzes loudly again, and she has to pick it back up.
Michael Whitman (11:08 pm):
No, Theresa, have you seen the video?
She blinks back at the message, a sudden furrow coming to her brow and her smile faltering as another message comes through, Michael’s name displayed brightly on her phone again, surreal but still real nonetheless, the text notification hovering over her and her girlfriend’s faces on her lockscreen.
Michael Whitman (11:08 pm):
He climbed onto the fucking bookshelf to get away.
Okay, it’s coming together now. Michael is clearly drunk.
Theresa scoffs to herself, beyond bewildered that her old classmate from middle school is drunk off his ass and texting her of all people. They weren’t even friends in middle school. They barely spoke. They sat next to each other for half a semester until he broke her planet diorama once and had in-school suspension for a week. She hasn’t even thought of this guy for the better part of a decade, and now he’s just texting her out of the blue in the middle of the night? What kind of black hole has his life spiraled down since the last reunion?
She snorts and, again, starts to put her phone down, but the text notification blares loudly, and she has to look at her screen again.
Michael Whitman (11:09 pm):
He ran all the way to the fence before they got him. He tried to jump it.
Okay... that’s a creepy as shit message to receive at eleven from someone you don’t know anymore.
Theresa’s upper lip crinkles in distaste, and she texts back with cautious fingers, Who? because at this point, she seriously needs to know what the hell he’s even talking about. Seriously, what is he talking about? Who is “he”? Who is “they”? What fence? What bookshelf? What is going on?
She shakes her head to herself, still baffled beyond understanding that this is even a situation she’s in right now, and goes to fix two more spelling errors on her thesis before the next text comes in. She waits a beat to pick the phone up and read it, preoccupied with her editing, before she remembers that Michael Whitman is texting her drunk mysteries.
She smiles to herself again, letting out a soft laugh to tell her new apartment, can you believe this kind of stuff happens to me? as she turns the phone over, wondering which one of his friends is apparently running amok and wild and—
Michael Whitman (11:12 pm):
Mr. Grace.
Her smile falls all at once like she’s been struck across the face. She stares down at the phone in measured silence, wondering if somehow she’s read it wrong. Surely she has. Mr. Grace? He can’t be talking about—It can’t be about Dr. Grace, can it?
Michael was one of the handful of kids that called him Mister instead of Doctor because, according to them, only surgeons could be doctors. Dr. Grace is just a big nerd, Michael would say sometimes. I’d know because my dad’s a real doctor, and he says Dr. Grace is just a fruit.
Theresa takes a sluggish blink, still staring at the message with a feeling in her stomach that she can’t quite discern that’s starting to bubble up into her throat. It’s something blue and green and popping.
She hasn’t talked to someone else from their class about Dr. Grace in… well, in years. It’s been so long since he left… since he died. And, truthfully, she tries not to think about it too much because of the pit it often materializes in her stomach. The one that’s blue and green and popping.
Her hands shake a little bit as she texts back.
Theresa Cabral (11:12 pm):
What do you mean?
This time, she doesn’t try to set her phone down. She stares at the screen in dead silence, eyes focused on the words, watching the little dots that appear as Michael starts typing with bated breath, and her heart starts to make an uneasy rhythm.
Michael Whitman (11:13 pm):
Someone from the Hail Mary expedition is trying to expose the head lady or whatever and make some big court case about ethics. I don’t really know the details, but she dropped this found footage an hour ago on YouTube and everyone’s going crazy over it. I think it has like a million views already or something
Found footage. Found footage of what? Found footage of Dr. Grace? What is he talking about?
She texts back with stumbling, clumsy fingers.
Theresa Cabral (11:13 pm):
I don’t understand
The little dots pop back up immediately.
Michael Whitman (11:14 pm):
she has all these clips compiled from right before they sent Mr. Grace to space and he didnt wanna go
Theresa stares at her phone in silence.
Michael Whitman (11:14 pm):
He was fucking running for his life, dude.
She doesn’t even know how she’s supposed to reply to that. Her brain is running a hundred miles a minute trying to catch up with the information she’s just been given, this information that cannot be true. There’s no way that’s true, right? Didn’t wanna go. What does he mean by didn’t wanna go? Dr. Grace gave everything so that his students and the rest of the world could live. He sacrificed himself for that mission—his whole life, his whole existence. And Michael Whitman from seventh grade is just going to text her thirteen years later and say that he didn’t want to go?
Theresa Cabral (11:15 pm):
what?
It takes a minute or so before Michael texts her back with nothing but a YouTube link.
The video title is, so simply, “You’re Murdering Me.” Theresa’s eyes hover on the link in silence, locked on the thumbnail that loads of a blurry office space and a bright spot of yellow in the center. Even in low definition, even in the tiny thumbnail, she can pick out Dr. Grace’s favorite raincoat that would always hang in the cabinet behind his desk.
She doesn’t want to press this link. She doesn’t want to even press it.
It’s been years since she last saw Dr. Grace, even in her memories. His face has grown foggy in the recesses of her mind now and a soft, hazy cloud resides over the place where his head should be whenever she thinks about their last conversations. She remembers he had blue eyes, but she can’t quite remember what shade, and it feels like a crime, somehow, to misremember him, so she tries not to picture him at all for fear she’ll see something wrong.
The last time she saw him in real life, she was just shy of her thirteenth birthday.
One day, he was at the school, teaching them about the Petrova line and the little black dots, and she’d turned in her paper on soundwaves as they were all leaving class. She remembers she had forgotten to put her name at the top, and Dr. Grace had given it back to her and said, “Whoops, looks like you forgot something! How else will I know who did such great work?” before she walked out the door.
It was the last thing he ever said to her.
The next day, she came into class, and the sub, Mr. Kenny, was there instead of Dr. Grace.
Mr. Kenny was so obnoxiously, distressingly boring. All the kids thought so. She still remembers how they would make fun of him and use the class period to goof off or play Minecraft or Cookie Clicker instead of paying attention. Dr. Grace was fun. Dr. Grace remembered things like students’ birthdays and interests, and he would have asked her what she did for her thirteenth birthday. He would’ve asked her what the theme of her party was if he were here. But he wasn’t. Mr. Kenny was. And Mr. Kenny was a boring piece of shit.
Every day, at the end of class, as all the other kids were filing out, Theresa would go to Mr. Kenny (who was always sitting at Dr. Grace’s desk which made her skin crawl) and ask, “When is Dr. Grace coming back?” and his face would always get pink with embarrassment as he said, “I’m sorry, Theresa, I don’t know.”
With nothing but her own brain to turn to for answers, she began to hypothesize that Dr. Grace had gotten sick. Maybe he caught a really bad case of the flu or pneumonia; he had allergies and always got sick when Spring and pollen rolled around. Maybe he had a really bad allergy attack and was in the hospital.
Other kids started coming up with their own theories, too.
A rumor went around the entire school that Dr. Grace died in a fiery car crash, and it spread so far and so immediately, all the way to eighth grade and sixth grade and the high school in the next county over, even, that the principal had to send out an official release to all the parents that said Dr. Grace wasn’t dead, he was just on leave.
On leave for what? Why couldn’t they say? More rumors started flying.
In the earliest days of his absence, a kid suggested the school was investigating him, but no one could ever determine what for. One person said they thought he was stealing money from the school to afford his fancy dioramas and formaldehyde animal jars. Someone else said he had an inappropriate relationship with a student, but that one got shut down pretty fast by admin with a new email shot out to the student body and parents that asserted, very strongly, that no faculty at Grover Cleveland Middle School had ever had inappropriate relationships with students or any minors, for that matter.
Theresa wasn’t quite sure about that because the PE teacher always gave her the creeps, but she knew Dr. Grace wasn’t that type.
One of the kids who wrote for the school newspaper started to ask around if maybe he’d been kidnapped. They even called the local police station and asked for comment. That one didn’t linger long, though, because the consensus by all the seventh graders was that no one kidnaps 30-year-old men, even if they’re as cute as Dr. Grace, because there just isn’t a market for that, even with perverts.
“Perverts don’t wanna buy 30-year-old science teachers, Theresa,” Luthor had said loudly in the hallway. “They wanna buy little girls. And even if Dr. Grace screams like one, he’s not a little girl.”
Somehow, Theresa had found herself a little offended on Dr. Grace’s behalf that people thought he wasn’t worth kidnapping.
Someone—maybe it was Hector Lowe—said he ran off to get married, and he was honeymooning in Cabo. Kids latched on to that rumor pretty quickly because it was positive and fun and salacious all at once. Then everyone started spreading rumors about who he got married to. Ms. Herman in the eighth grade (English teacher) was also mysteriously out, but the rumor that the two of them eloped died down when she returned the following week with no wedding ring and an arm cast.
One kid finally had the guts to ask her, “Did you and Dr. Grace get married?” during third period, and she laughed so hard she cried. That, everyone assumed, meant they did not.
Then, of course, the sexuality rumors started running around the school, and someone—Mary Flora, it was totally Mary Flora who started this one—said that he married a man by the name of Luke Glanton, and the school found out and fired him because he’s gay.
A few angry emails went out to the principal about that one from parents (especially same-sex coupled parents), and the principal made a passive-aggressive comment during an assembly a few days later about how the personal lives of staff are not her business, and also not the students', and that no one at Grover Cleveland Middle School will ever be discriminated against because of their sexuality.
Everyone decided that was confirmation that Dr. Grace was both, in fact, gay and also getting fired.
They didn’t find out the truth until several months later.
Dr. Grace disappeared in April and didn’t return for the rest of the semester. Everyone waited every single day for two months for him to show back up, but summer break came in May, and Dr. Grace did not come with it.
Theresa spent her entire summer in a depressive funk that even art camp couldn’t fix until August 8th, when Project Hail Mary was officially announced to the public. And, alongside it, came an official announcement from the principal that Dr. Grace would not be returning for the 2022-2023 school year because he was part of the mission.
Their very own Dr. Grace, part of an interstellar effort to save the whole world… Theresa would be lying if she said she wasn’t proud. She was all smiles for the next week and a half before school officially started, riding the wave of Dr. Grace’s success like it was her own. Her favorite teacher was going to save the planet. That sort of felt like she was saving it too.
During the first assembly of her eighth-grade year, the assistant principal told everyone, “Dr. Grace wanted to let all of you know that he misses you and is excited to be back next semester after the launch to tell you all about it.”
Then Theresa rode that high through the first week of school. Dr. Grace was coming back and, even more excitingly, he had things to tell them. He was probably learning so much and would make a whole week’s lesson about the Hail Mary. Maybe he’d get a medal of honor or something or he’d return with artifacts from the spaceship.
All the kids in the middle school chattered nonstop about it, all the questions they’d ask him when he came back, what he was currently doing, how their very own seventh-grade science teacher was going to save the world.
Theresa remembers very vividly hearing Michael Whitman in the hallway between periods saying, “Why would the government even want a science teacher? Mr. Grace is such a loser, there’s no way he’s actually that involved. He probably volunteered to get people coffees or something just so he could pretend to be part of it.”
Unrelated, Theresa chucked a book at his head across the classroom the following period and got in school suspension for three days. It was the only black dot on her otherwise spotless school record.
The next few months wasted away all too fast as news about the Hail Mary spread widely and rapidly to the public and every corner of every country. She followed the updates as closely as she could, hoping to see some sort of interview or statement from Dr. Grace, just some sort of proof that he was alive and well and coming home soon.
The closest she ever got was an article published about a court case—some type of intellectual property dispute that she didn’t fully understand and that was promptly overturned before anything even progressed—where a photo was published of a tight lipped woman named Eva Stratt storming out of the court house (“refused to comment” was in all caps beneath the photo) and, rushing behind her, was Dr. Grace.
His glasses were hanging around his neck precariously, one end piece slung over his ear, and he had a concerned scrunch to his face, his mouth formed around a soundless sentence. Shocking to no one, he was wearing a bulky cardigan and, in his haste to follow Eva Stratt, it had fallen off one shoulder, and he was in the process of reaching to grab it and pull it up.
It was the only photo Theresa had of Dr. Grace—the only proof he was even alive from the last four months—so she printed out ten copies and gave them to all her friends at school.
The next evidence of Dr. Grace’s involvement came a month later, in September, when an article called “The World’s Saving Grace: The Disgraced Dr. Grace” (which was way too many “grace”s in one title) was posted by a small-time reporter.
It chronicled Dr. Grace’s departure from academia and even attached his publication about water-based life that Theresa read in full despite not understanding a word. It called him “the new leading authority on astrophage biology.” Theresa beamed.
They attached the same photo of him that the middle school still had posted on their website, where his hair was flat and overly combed. Theresa always thought it was a terrible photo of him. But she printed out the article nonetheless and put it into her school binder, as a reminder that Dr. Grace was doing great things. He wasn’t missing; he was just off saving the world, and he’d be back soon to tell the kids all about it.
A few of the kids wrote letters to him or drew photos and sent them off to the official PO Box that could be found online for the Hail Mary mission. There was some blurb about how anyone could help, and if anyone had information, ideas, or expertise to offer, they should; “saving the world is a group effort.”
Theresa’s dad said the website was a bunch of “PR bullshit to make people feel like they’re being heard” and that, in reality, there was no PO Box and all their letters were being sent off into the void, but Theresa chose to believe that Dr. Grace would get hers and know she missed him. That he would know they all missed him so much. He was the best teacher she’d ever had. Science just wasn’t fun anymore without him.
The launch was in November—everyone knew that the second Project Hail Mary was announced—which meant Dr. Grace would return for work in January when the second semester started. Theresa was counting down the days. All the kids were.
She wouldn’t have him again, unfortunately, since her seventh-grade year was over, but he was one of those teachers who never minded when past students dropped by to say hello, and, surely, since he was responsible for helping save the world, her eighth grade science teacher would let him come into class for a guest lecture or something.
The Hail Mary was set to launch on November 23rd. It was a Wednesday. Kids snuck their phones out during lunch to watch a livestream of liftoff. It was amazing. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.
Finally, one teacher got so sick of telling all the kids to put their phones away that she just pulled up the livestream on a smartboard in a classroom, and kids filed in to watch. They packed the room close to bursting, kids touching shoulders and elbows, all standing squashed into the room like sardines in a can, staring with slack jaws and wide eyes as steam and smoke billowed out from the rocket’s bottom.
A reporter said, in a distant, scratchy voice over the smartboard speakers, and there goes the Hail Mary now, Earth’s solution to the decaying sun. On board, three dauntless astronauts have given their lives to this mission. They have made the ultimate sacrifice for the greater good and we can only give them our thanks!
The rocket sailed up, up, up into the stretch of empty blue sky. White smoke billowed out behind it, plumes of grey following suit. It painted the sky, swirling watercolors of stagnant, blank shades.
Theresa stared.
The reporter was listing the names of the astronauts. She remembers this still. Hearing the reporter croon, Chinese Commander Yáo Li-Jie is piloting the ship and will be survived by his wife and daughter—
First, a photo of a strong-looking, stoic man appeared in a spacesuit. He was holding his helmet in his lap, and then the livestream became a split screen between his photo and a woman carrying a young baby staring up at the ship ascending. She wasn’t even crying. Theresa will never forget it… that she wasn’t crying. The baby wasn’t even crying. It was all so eerie and surreal, the way they just blinked up at the ship, knowing they would never see their loved one again, and, somehow, it seemed as though they had made a terrifying peace with it.
Theresa remembers finding a lump in her throat and wondering to herself, how do you ever find peace for something like that?
The announcer went on to say Russian engineer, Olesya Ilyukhina— and, again, a photo of an astronaut appeared alongside a split screen of all the people waving her off. Olesya’s people were far more eager than Yáo’s family, waving and hooting and hollering. They were smiling even. A different, equally as horrifying form of acceptance that Theresa’s thirteen-year-old mind couldn’t wrap itself around.
The reporter said, Originally, Dr. Martin DuBois was meant to join as the on-mission science expert. However, we have received news that, due to Dr. DuBois’ unfortunate and sudden passing—
A photo of an astronaut appeared on screen. No family split screen to wave him off. They were probably at a funeral. A few hushed murmurs fluttered through the crowded room. It was the first time any of them had heard about a death involved in the mission.
There has been a last-minute replacement to the expedition—
The classroom started to chatter so loudly that the teacher, Mrs. Heather, had to tell everyone to settle down and wave her hands for them to do so.
Serving as the new science expert on board, the leading expert on Astrophage biology, Dr. Ryland Grace, volunteered to complete the mission in his place.
They showed a photo of him. He was not dressed like an astronaut. He was not an astronaut. He was dressed like a school teacher. It was the terrible photo of him that was posted on the school’s website, with his stupid flat hair and his awkward crooked smile.
Dr. Grace hated that photo of himself.
The packed classroom stared in dead silence at the screen.
Theresa remembers how much the silence ached. It was so still and quiet, with no one moving so much as a centimeter; all their eyes were captivated solely by the photo of Dr. Grace, split-screened alongside the rocket blasting off. He had no family in the crowd.
He only had a packed room of eighth graders watching from another state as he was shot into space. Surely he knew they were watching, right? Theresa always wondered that. If he knew.
She remembers thinking, but he didn’t even say goodbye.
The rocket reached the peak of the clouds before the class seemed to come to that jarring realization all at once.
Trang Le, from the back of the classroom, so clear and crisp, said, “Wait, what the fuck?”
Abby Meyer followed up with a stunned, petrified, “Dr. Grace is killing himself?”
And the entire room had promptly erupted.
Theresa remembers a girl she had never spoken to breaking down into sobs in the corner of the classroom, and Trang repeating “what the fuck!” a second and third time, and, over the commotion, Mrs. Heather told him to go straight to the principal for his language, but he wouldn’t move.
None of them would move; they just kept staring at the smartboard, watching as the rocket blew past the sky and into space, taking Dr. Grace with it.
The school was sent into such a frenzy by the announcement that classes were immediately cancelled for the rest of the day and, instead, the entire middle school was shuffled to the gym for a random, unscripted assembly where their principal shakily addressed everyone and said, “I know this news comes as a shock to everyone. It comes as a shock even to us. But what Dr. Grace has chosen to do takes more bravery than we could ever comprehend.”
Theresa doesn’t remember much about the content of the assembly other than the tremor in Principal Smith’s hands or the following weeks, honestly.
Bravery… Bravery, she said.
Theresa remembers that the school outsourced two grief counselors to hold group counseling sessions during lunch, and their regular school counselor was always booked. There were lots of conversations surrounding the concept of suicide being brave.
Theresa was in one of the grief groups. She thought it was dumb. How are you supposed to mourn someone who isn’t really even dead yet, but who you know will never be alive again?
Abby, who was catholic, described it as limbo. Dr. Grace was in limbo. Not dead but not alive. Just suspended in space forever.
One day, during group, Trang asked the horrifying question, “What will happen to his body? Will it just float out there forever? Will they ever go get it so we can bury him?”
And Theresa had promptly broken down, bawling into her hands—the first time she had cried about it at all—so hard and ragged that she eventually had to excuse herself to vomit in the bathroom, and her mom had to come pick her up.
Her mom spoke to the principal about getting her removed from the group.
Dr. Grace rarely made appearances in her conversations after that. He existed solely in the pages of her journal late at night and the pinning of his article to the bulletin board in her room, and, finally, in her statement of purpose essay for college when she applied. She has to thank him and his journey to space for getting her into John Hopkins.
On the tenth anniversary of the Hail Mary’s departure, Theresa was twenty-three years old and still went back to her old middle school for the vigil they held. Everyone wore their thickest coat to fight the cold.
They renamed the middle school after him. Grace Cleveland Middle School. She still feels a little bad for whoever “Grover” was that got replaced, but not that bad. Dr. Grace deserves it.
To her knowledge, the middle school vigil is the only sort of funeral that was ever held for him.
Part of her likes to think he’s still alive, somewhere out there in space, exploring the cosmos. She’s never let herself think about it that much. Or, that is, until she’s sitting in her apartment close to midnight with her phone trembling in her hands staring at a video titled You’re Murdering Me.
Michael doesn’t text anything else. Just the horrifying link with a photo of Dr. Grace’s back as the thumbnail.
She presses it before she can even think better of it, and the world turns around her in slow motion, like she’s been separated from reality and herself, all of her thoughts slipping and sliding out of her brain like blood pouring from a wound as the video starts playing.
It feels so foreign to hear his voice again after so long.
“My place is in the classroom,” she hears Dr. Grace say.
“I can’t do it,” he says.
His voice is distant and wet.
“What is this?” He asks through a choked laugh as more people enter the room.
“It feels like you’re betraying me,” he says, and now that he’s standing, she can see the strained, scared smile on his face even in bad quality.
The faceless men descend on him like predators on prey.
He climbs on a bookshelf to get away. He looks like a cornered animal. He shoves a chair at them. He runs. He runs. The camera changes to an outdoor camera of even worse quality, mounted on the outside of a building, and it follows the chase, Dr. Grace sprinting as fast as he can away from three, then four, then five men all following after him.
He was never very fast.
The video quality is too poor to see anything clearly and, even if it was, it’s too far away to see closely, so Theresa can’t see the tears on his face but she can hear them in his voice, the way it’s thick and choked as he begs—he’s begging them—to let him live.
He sounds terrified.
He’s screaming at the top of his lungs, and he sounds fucking terrified. He tried to jump the fence, but they tackled him like he was an escaped animal from a cage, and they pinned him to the ground—there are men all over him, hands all over him—and he’s gripping at the ground and digging his fingers into the grass futily, and he’s sobbing at the top of his lungs, hysterical and raw and petrified, “No! No! No! I can’t do it! Please! Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”
They stab a tranquilizer into him—Theresa barely sees it, but she full-body flinches in her seat when she realizes what’s been done… as she watches him squirm and beg and cry out until he goes limp and they drag his body away.
There are still ten minutes left in the video, but she can’t stomach even knowing what it contains, so she turns it off in a panic, shoving her phone across the table.
The lump in her throat is one she can’t push down, no matter how many times she panickedly swallows; it feels like the size of a planet, like the entire galaxy is lodged in her trachea and keeping her from being able to get a breath in.
She can’t breathe.
They murdered him. They shot him into space for him to die. All this time, she’s harbored the smallest bit of… resentment in her against him, this sense of betrayal that he had left them behind without a proper goodbye. But they didn’t let him. Because he didn’t want to go.
She isn’t touching her phone, but she can see the texts starting to light up her screen.
Did you see it?
Have you seen it?
That video.
She breathes out shakily and snatches her phone off the table, typing back with quivering fingers.
I just saw.