More from the Carter family
If you’re the grown-up — this part’s for you. If you’re the reader — the story bits are all yours.
Candi’s turn. She’s a long way from the creek.
Rising Stakes — Chapter One
A first chapter, by B. A. Lumin
First morning at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and the whole building smells like nothing at all — which is somehow worse than smelling like something. Candi turns up ten minutes early and learns that at Goddard, being early is a data point.
No problem — ask a grown-up to sign up for you and they can pass it along. Here’s a bit of the story while you’re here:
The first morning at Goddard smelled like nothing, and that was the thing that made Candi homesick before she had done a single thing worth being homesick over.
Home had a hundred smells that fought each other for the same air—solder and cut grass, Mimi’s vanilla, the creek when the wind came from the wrong direction. The Space Flight Center had been scrubbed down to a clean, even nothing, the way a whiteboard looks after someone erases it too carefully and leaves only the ghost of the last equation. She stood outside a door marked LAB 4B and read the placard twice, because reading things twice was how she kept her hands from doing something nervous.
“You’re early.”
Candi goes a long way from Willow Creek, and the creek does not stay behind her. This list hears first when the next Carter book is ready.