Perigee

There’s something wrong with the moon.

I’ve been staring at the moon through my telescope for three hours, waiting for the numbers to resolve. They don’t. My calculations converge on one result while the published data insists on another. I rerun everything, slower this time, checking each variable until there is nowhere left for error to hide.

The problem isn’t my method. It’s the moon. Its orbit has shifted, not dramatically, but enough to register once the noise falls away. A fraction of a degree, measurable and wrong. And if I can see it this clearly, then I shouldn’t be the only one. I mean NASA or someone in the government is always watching…aren’t they?

Most people don’t spend their nights watching the sky. They don’t think about how precise the moon’s position has to be, or how even a minor deviation could cascade into something catastrophic. Jaxon definitely doesn’t. He’s probably at a party right now, winning beer pong by accident and showing off a new trick shot.

He doesn’t understand that this started as something I did for fun, long before it became my senior project, or why I’d rather be at a telescope than out there pretending none of this matters. I don’t blame him. Some nights, I don’t understand it either. Tonight isn’t one of those nights. The data won’t settle, and every number points in the same uneasy direction.

I sit back from the telescope and rub my eyes. Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe my mind is creating patterns that are not really there. Jaxon always says I get too wrapped up in this stuff, that I let my thoughts sprint ahead of reality. But I know what I am seeing. I know what the data is telling me. This is not a glitch. There is a clear deviation, something the numbers refuse to hide.

I pull my phone from my pocket. Sure enough, there’s a text from Jaxon.

Typical Jaxon. He’s been trying to drag me out to more parties all year. Half the time, I cave just to shut him up. Not tonight, though. Not with this.

I hover over the screen, trying to think of what to tell him. “Busy with astronomy stuff” isn’t gonna cut it. He’s heard that one too many times. I could say I’m sick, but he’d see right through that. Jaxon knows me better than that.

He will probably give me crap for it tomorrow, but whatever. He would not understand. How am I supposed to tell him that the moon, the actual moon, is starting to drift out of orbit? There is no casual way to drop something like that into a conversation.

Jaxon isn’t dumb. He’s sharper than he lets on, just wired differently. More grounded. He doesn’t fixate on things the way I do. That’s why we work as friends. He keeps me from disappearing too far down my own head, and I keep him out of trouble. Most of the time.

But even Jaxon wouldn’t believe this. Not yet, anyway.

I lean forward and adjust the focus. The moon fills the lens, its cratered surface calm and indifferent. Beside me, my laptop hums, graphs and charts layered across the screen in tight, intersecting lines. The data converges on the same conclusion each time I run it. The moon’s orbit is off. Not by much, but enough that a few recalculations only make the discrepancy clearer.

The moon doesn’t care about me. It doesn’t care about any of us. The numbers do. They show a slight but undeniable shift in its orbit, subtle, measurable, and persistent no matter how many times I run the calculations. It’s small enough to dismiss at a glance, but real enough to make my stomach tighten. And if it continues drifting, the tides will be the least of our problems.

Another text buzzes.

I almost laugh. Jaxon’s always giving me grief about how I “spend too much time in space.” Maybe he’s right. But how do you tell your best friend that space is the problem? That everything I’ve learned, everything I know, says we’re on the brink of something huge?

It’s not the best explanation, but it’s all I’ve got right now. He’s not gonna let it go, though, not until I give him something solid. And even then, what am I supposed to say? “Hey Jaxon, the moon’s orbit is off by a fraction of a degree. No big deal, just the start of a potential catastrophe.”

I can already hear him laughing at me. I can’t blame him, honestly. It sounds crazy.

I look back at the moon, half-expecting the numbers to correct themselves. They don’t. The deviation is still there, small but steady, etched into its path with quiet persistence. I don’t have all the answers yet, but this isn’t noise or coincidence. It’s a signal. Something has begun, whether anyone is ready to acknowledge it or not.

~

The next morning drags itself into my room, bright and obnoxious, a full-blown spotlight slicing through the curtains and straight into my skull. I groan and shove my face into the pillow, wishing the world would give me just five more minutes. My brain, of course, refuses. It is already replaying last night’s readings, looping those strange shifts in the moon’s orbit like a warning I cannot mute. Ignoring it now feels impossible.

Mom’s voice floats down the hallway, warm and tired at the edges as she calls for my little sister, Ella. “Time to get up, sweetheart! Breakfast is ready!”

The sound tugs me out of the fog, reminding me that life keeps moving even when the sky is falling apart. I roll over and check the clock. If I don’t get moving soon, I will be late for school. Again.

I shove my feet into my slippers and drag myself to the bathroom, splashing cold water onto my face. The mirror is honest. Dark circles shadow my eyes, the result of restless nights spent logging minor anomalies I could never quite explain. Until last night. What once felt like noise has sharpened into a pattern, and the air now carries a quiet pressure, the kind that settles in when you realize something familiar has begun to behave differently.

Breakfast is quick. Toast with jelly and a glass of orange juice, Mom’s standard when she is rushing between shifts. I grab my backpack, stuffed with astronomy books, notebooks, and my laptop, and step outside. The morning air is crisp, carrying that early hint of autumn that usually feels like possibility. Normally, I love mornings like this. They feel like the start of something new. Today feels different. Heavier. As if the sky itself is holding its breath, waiting to see what comes next.

As I walk to school, my thoughts drift to my family. Mom works long hours at the hospital, juggling schedules and exhaustion with the kind of quiet determination she never talks about. Things have been complicated since Dad took a visiting professor position at a university a few cities away. We still talk. He still checks in, usually to ask about my grades or push me on my senior project.

But his absence hangs over the house in ways I don’t know how to explain. He isn’t gone, not really, but the distance leaves a gap Mom works hard to fill. I keep my worries to myself, small things piling up into something heavier, telling myself I need to be the strong one for her and for Ella while he’s away. Still, the charts on my laptop and the numbers that refuse to settle leave me wishing he were here to examine them with an experienced scientist’s eye.

Ella doesn’t seem to notice it the same way I do. She is a whirlwind of energy, always curious, always asking questions. She thinks I am a genius because I can name all the planets in order. Sometimes I catch her peering through my telescope, her wide brown eyes filled with wonder. I want to protect that awe for as long as I can, even if it means keeping my own worries carefully contained.

As I step into the school building, the familiar noise closes in. Locker doors slam, laughter echoes down the hallways, and everyone moves as if the universe isn’t quietly coming apart. I go through the motions, but my mind stays locked on the moon and the numbers that won’t settle. I need to talk to Mr. Jennings. If anyone can make sense of it, it’s him.

Mr. Jennings is the reason I stuck with astronomy past the basics. Most teachers lose me once things start repeating, but he never did. He noticed when I finished early and handed me harder problems instead of telling me to slow down. Sometimes he’d drift into side stories about observatories he’d visited or nights he spent freezing under open domes, but he never made it sound glamorous. Just work. Real work.

I liked that. It made the sky feel less like a dream and more like something you could actually study, if you were willing to put in the time. That’s why I trust him now, standing in the doorway of the science wing with last night’s data still rattling around in my head. If something really is wrong, he’s the one person who should see it.

Inside the classroom, Jaxon is already at our usual table, hunched over his phone. Probably doom scrolling and sharing memes. Maybe lining up plans for later. His messy hair and easy confidence feel disconnected from the tight knot sitting in my chest. I drop into the seat beside him, backpack hitting the floor, still trying to figure out how to explain what I saw through the telescope. He barely grunts in acknowledgment before the warning bell rings and the room surges into motion, students rushing for their seats and talking over one another.

“Dude, you’re not going to believe what I found last night,” I say, my voice barely above a whisper.

He looks up, eyebrow raised. “You actually did something other than stare at the stars?”

“Very funny,” I say, rolling my eyes. “I think there’s something wrong with the moon.”

He smirks, leaning back in his chair. “What, is it suddenly jealous of Venus? Because that would be a plot twist.”

“Jaxon.” I lower my voice, the edge in it cutting through his teasing. “I’m serious. Its orbit—it’s shifting. I think it’s going to affect more than just our sky.”

The smirk falters. He studies my face, longer this time, like he’s recalibrating. “You don’t usually say stuff like that unless you’re sure.”

“I am,” I say. “I know it sounds crazy, but the numbers won’t line up. I’ve checked them over and over.”

He exhales through his nose, glancing around the room before looking back at me. “Okay,” he says slowly. “I don’t get the science. But you don’t panic over nothing, either.”

“That’s not exactly reassuring.”

“I’m not reassuring you,” he says. “I’m saying if this is real, you shouldn’t be the only one carrying it.” He nods toward the front of the room. “Talk to Jennings.”

I hesitate, then nod. “I was planning to. After class.”

Before Jaxon can respond, Mr. Jennings sweeps into the room with his usual spark of energy and claps his hands once, loud enough to cut through the chatter.

“Alright, everyone, settle down. With a full moon coming up later this month, today we’re diving into lunar cycles this week. Who can tell me what they are?”

His enthusiasm ripples through the room, and I sit a little straighter, feeling that familiar pull beneath the tight knot in my chest. I have been building toward my senior project for a long time, studying the moon in careful stages and waiting for the moment when the class would finally catch up to what I already knew. Normally, this unit would feel grounding. Instead, unease presses in, refusing to settle.

Mr. Jennings turns to the board and begins sketching diagrams, quick and practiced. Chalk taps, then drags, forming clean arcs and labeled curves. I write without thinking while he talks about tides, migrations, sleep cycles. Systems. Rhythms. The invisible structures that keep things where they’re supposed to be.

He keeps coming back to the same word.

Steady.

That’s when the chill starts.

If the orbit of the moon is not steady, none of this holds. Not the diagrams. Not the assumptions underneath them. The numbers from last night push back into my thoughts, bleeding through his lecture like something trying to surface. The deviation was small. Quiet. The kind of thing you miss unless you’re already looking for it.

And once you see it, it doesn’t go away. What if it isn’t an error?

“Marcus?”

The room snaps into focus. Silence closes in. Desks, faces, waiting. The air feels tighter, like the walls have leaned in without anyone noticing.

“What’s your take on the moon’s impact on Earth?”

My mouth is dry. “Even small changes matter,” I say. “Everything depends on predictability. If that slips, the effects don’t stay contained.”

Mr. Jennings tilts his head, interested. “Go on.”

My pulse thuds in my ears. “Ecosystems destabilize. Weather patterns fracture. Tidal stress increases.” I stop myself before the words run too far ahead. “Things stop behaving the way we expect them to.”

“Yes,” he says, energized. “That’s why long-term observation is critical. Patterns don’t announce themselves. They emerge.”

The word emerge settles wrong. He means it academically. I feel it physically. He had approved my project months ago. He knows how closely I track this data. If he’s willing to say this much out loud, then what I’m feeling isn’t paranoia or imagination.

It’s confirmation.

My palms are damp, the back of my neck prickling as I stare at the board without really seeing it. The numbers replay in my mind, the slight but stubborn shift that refused to smooth out no matter how many times I ran the calculations. If I showed him what I found, he might see it too. Maybe someone besides me would finally understand.

Mr. Jennings moves on, calling on another student, and the class settles back into its rhythm. I force my breathing to slow and my expression to neutral. Outwardly, I am just another senior sitting through a lesson, taking notes like everyone else.

Inside, the pressure keeps building. The moon is doing something it should not be doing, subtle enough to ignore if you are not looking closely, but unmistakable once you see it. The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that this is not an isolated anomaly.

It is the beginning of a pattern.

~

I linger in the classroom after the bell rings, letting my classmates pour into the hallway while their laughter thins into noise. Jaxon glances back, then nods toward the door. I answer with a small tilt of my head, and he goes. My hands are clammy as I collect my notes, the numbers from the lunar stability assignment replaying with stubborn precision. Something is off, and I need to know why.

“Hey, Mr. Jennings,” I say, lingering near his desk as the rest of the class files out. Chairs scrape against the floor, backpacks zip, voices blur together as people funnel into the hallway, but I stay where I am, pretending to adjust the strap on my bag while I gather the nerve to speak.

He looks up with a smile that should have been reassuring. “Hey, Marcus.” His voice is warm, familiar, the same one that once stayed after school to explain orbital mechanics long after the bell rang. But there is something tight beneath it now, a faint tension that wasn’t there earlier in the semester. “What’s going on?”

I hesitate, suddenly aware of how exposed I feel standing there. Mr. Jennings is the reason I fell in love with astronomy in the first place. He’s the one who noticed I wasn’t bored during the basics, who handed me extra problems just to see how far I would go. Normally, bringing him a question feels like stepping into solid ground. Today, it feels like stepping onto thin ice.

“I was going over the parameters for my senior project assignment,” I say, lowering my voice as I step closer to his desk. “I’ve been keeping my own notes for a while, mostly out of habit. When I lined them up with the stability models we’ve used in Algebra class, they didn’t match the way I expected. The discrepancy doesn’t smooth out when I run it again. It actually gets clearer.”

For a moment, his expression flickers. The smile falters, just barely, and I catch something else underneath it. Not confusion. Not skepticism. Recognition. His eyes slide past me, toward the open classroom door, and then back again, as if checking the room before he speaks.

“Marcus,” he says, his tone light but measured, “you know how raw data can be. When you spend enough time staring at numbers, it’s easy to see patterns that aren’t really there.”

“I get that,” I reply quickly. “That’s why I recalculated. More than once. The deviation’s small, but it’s consistent. It doesn’t smooth out the way it should.”

He turns back to his desk and begins closing tabs on his laptop, the motion deliberate, almost ritualistic. “The moon’s orbit is stable,” he says, without looking at me. “It has been for millions of years. That isn’t something we suddenly discover is wrong because of one dataset.”

“But science changes,” I press, feeling the urgency creep back into my voice. “We’ve been wrong before. The models rely on assumptions, and if those assumptions—”

“Marcus.” He interrupts me, sharper this time.

I stop mid-sentence.

He exhales slowly, rubbing the bridge of his nose, then softens his tone. “There are a lot of theories out there,” he says. “Some of them sound convincing, especially when they’re new. That doesn’t make them reliable.”

He opens a file and turns the laptop toward me. Graphs and equations scroll across the screen, dense and familiar. Long-term projections. Stability models. The kind of peer-reviewed work I’ve already studied, memorized, and argued with in the margins of my notebooks.

“See?” he says. “Established models. Reputable work. The long-term data holds.”

I scan the screen, my unease deepening. It feels less like evidence and more like a shield. “Those studies average out short-term shifts,” I say carefully. “They’re designed to smooth anomalies. If something’s accelerating—”

“—it still falls within acceptable margins,” he cuts in, a fraction too quickly. His fingers tap once against the desk, then still. “You’re smart, Marcus. You know better than to jump to catastrophic conclusions.”

“I’m not jumping,” I say. “I’m asking questions.”

That finally makes him look at me. Really look at me. Something like regret passes over his face, and for a moment, he looks older than I’ve ever seen him. He rubs the back of his neck and lowers his voice.

“And I’m telling you that some questions don’t have answers you can act on,” he says. “Not yet.”

My chest tightens. “So we just ignore it?”

“No,” he says immediately. Then he hesitates, choosing his next words with care. “We… contextualize it.”

His gaze drifts, once again, toward the door.

“There’s no danger,” he continues, more firmly now, as if repetition might make the statement stick. “The moon isn’t going to suddenly veer off course or collide with Earth in our lifetime. That’s not how celestial mechanics work.”

I can hear the effort in his voice, the way he’s holding the conversation inside a narrow lane. “I just think we should stay open,” I say quietly. “That’s what you taught me. That science isn’t about comfort. It’s about following the data.”

“And I stand by that,” he says. His voice is steady, professional. “But science is also about knowing when to trust what’s already been proven.” His smile comes back, but it’s wrong. Too deliberate. Carefully arranged, like something he learned to do when the truth isn’t useful. The smile doesn’t reach his eyes.

He reaches for the laptop. The screen goes dark as he closes it. The click is soft. Final. It lands in the room like a period at the end of a sentence neither of us wanted to finish. For a moment, there’s nothing. No lecture. No reassurance. Just the hum of the lights overhead and the faint sound of students moving down the hall, laughing, living in a world that still makes sense.

He speaks again, quieter this time, as if the words aren’t meant for the room at all. “Be careful, Marcus.” He hesitates, just long enough for the pause to mean something. “And get some sleep.”

The words settle into my chest and don’t move. They weigh more than the charts. More than the numbers. More than the silence he’s wrapped them in. I nod, because nodding is easier than asking what he didn’t say.

“Okay,” I manage. “Thanks for your time.”

My hand is on the door before I realize I’ve stood up. I turn back once. Just once. He hasn’t moved. He isn’t watching the door. He’s staring at the closed laptop, his jaw tight, his fingers resting flat against the desk like he’s holding something down.

His expression isn’t annoyance. It isn’t dismissal.

It’s recognition.

The kind you see when someone understands the implications before they understand the solution. When they know the math makes sense. And also when they know what happens next.