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It was dying. No way to save it. And Amy Parkens watched with a child’s fascination.

The night was perfect. No city lights, not even a moon to brighten the cloudless sky outside her bedroom window. Billions of stars blanketed the vast blackness of space. Her six-inch Newtonian reflector telescope was aimed at the Ring Nebula, a dying star in the constellation of Lyra. Amy liked that one best. It reminded her of the smoke rings her grand father used to blow with his cigar — a faint, grayish-green ring puffed into outer space. Death was slow in coming, over many millennia. It was irreversible. Astronomically speaking, the Ring Nebula was light-years beyond Geritol.

Amy peered through the eyepiece, pushing her hair aside. She was a tall and skinny eight-year-old with sandy-blonde bangs that dangled in her eyes. She’d often heard grown-ups say she was destined to be the Twiggy of the eighties, but that didn’t interest her. Her interests were unlike those of most third graders. Television and video games bored her. She was used to spending time alone in the evenings, entertaining herself with books, celestial maps, her telescope — things her friends would have considered homework. She had never known her father. He’d been killed in Vietnam before Amy could even walk. She lived with her mom, a busy physics professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. A passion for the stars was an inherited fascination. Long before her first telescope, Amy would look into the night sky and see much more than twinkling lights. By the time she was seven she could name every stellar constellation. Since then, she’d even made some up and named them herself — distant constellations, beyond the reach of even the world’s most powerful instruments but not beyond her imagination.

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