Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

learned? If you can spot the stars Altair, Deneb, and Vega during the summer, you will see that they form a triangle. And that triangle always points south. If you are ever lost, you can find those three and know which way to go.

We can succeed or fail, get it right or get it wrong, love and lose the ones we love, and still the Summer Triangle will point south. And in that way, I know everything will be some type of okay—as impossible as that can seem sometimes.

Plus, Joan has already been. She has, in her nightstand at home, that elusive talisman that every astronaut aches for: the gold pin. Evidence that she was one of the chosen few humans who have ever left this planet.

‘You have to have something on the line, for it to be called character.’ ”

Didn’t Lydia understand that if one of them made it seem like it was okay, the rest of them would be sidelined as humorless? Didn’t Lydia get that this was how the men kept them separate and underestimated?

Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway.” “Oh,” Joan said.

Bravery, Joan suspected, is almost always a lie. Courage is all we have. She didn’t want to lower herself to the game men played.

“Guys, if anything goes wrong on Saturday, anything…” she said. “If Sally so much as sneezes at the wrong time, everyone will blame it on the fact that she’s a woman. And then none of us will go up there for a very long time.”

Sally had done it. Any of them could be assigned now. Their moment was coming.

But to love Frances was to be always saying goodbye to the girl Frances used to be and falling in love again with the girl Frances was becoming. She missed every Frances she had known. But oh, this Frances. This

People were her meaning. Frances and Vanessa.