Beautyland

In the 1990s, Voyager I becomes the furthest human-made object in space. Adina works the early bird shift at the Red Lion Diner, serving customers the daily special from 4:00 pm to midnight. The regulars like Adina and the veteran servers nickname her “Little One.” She attends college and reports to her superiors, who reveal that there are others on Earth as reporters. They say that there is no need to combine with them, but “Adina longs to combine” (145). Her mother is busy with work. Adina grieves when Carl Sagan dies, feeling that one of her fathers is gone. She decides that, unlike what Dakota told her, human opportunity is like a pie, and there are only a certain number of slices.

The servers at work stand up for Adina when a customer sexually harasses her. A classmate, Keith Nguyen, who runs the student newspaper, asks Adina to write an article on the lacrosse match. Instead of sports reporting, Adina fills the article with her observations. At work, she meets Mrs. Goldman, who sold books to her at the flea market and thought that Adina would become a writer.

Dominic visits, and Adina is happy to see a friend, but she feels the absence of