Page 3 of Love & Rockets

Back in focus at last, Jake turned in a slow circle, scanning the room with eyes far more attuned to darkness than light. He almost skipped right over her. Would have, if she weren’t momentarily spotlighted in a shaft of light courtesy of the swinging door leading to the kitchen. She had the entire solar system laid out on an abandoned table near the door, a big orange and yellow papier-mâché Sun at the center, the precisely beringed Saturn in its place between Jupiter and Uranus.

And she was a girl. A tall, slender girl with dark hair and the pale skin of a bookworm. He was always really bad at pinpointing ages. Middle school. His mother had said the centerpieces were made by middle school students. The girl looked to be fourteen or fifteen, but if she’d made the replica of Saturn, as she claimed, she had to be in middle school still. Jake was still trying to figure out the appropriate age range when she pulled a small brown ball out of her pocket and placed the orb on the very edge of the table.

Pluto.

He’d proposed marriage to a fellow Pluto fan.

If not for the age difference, and the obvious legal and moral entanglements, he might have thought he’d met the girl of his dreams. As it was, he’d settle for knowing he’d encountered a kindred spirit at this tedious event.

Caught in a geek-to-geek gravitational pull, he crossed the room. She looked up at his approach. Color rose in her cheeks. Little curling tendrils of her dark hair escaped her ponytail. Round hazel eyes widened even farther. She took a step back toward the kitchen door, and he held up both hands in the universal sign of surrender.

“I come in peace.”

Up close, he could see he’d been way off in his initial assessment. The girl was probably closer to twelve. Her height made her appear more spindly than slender, and her face retained the unformed fullness of a child’s. But her eyes. No longer wide with surprise and fear, he caught the sharp gleam of wary amusement in them. This was a girl long accustomed to humoring lesser earthlings.

She looked past him to the people crowded around the bars and dance floor. “Are you boldly going where no man has gone before?”

He returned her steady gaze, careful to keep his expression appropriately solemn. “The bit is better with the split infinitive.”

“I can’t do it.” The girl shrugged, tossing off the idea of using bad grammar as blithely as she’d swiped the planet from him. “Incorrect grammar is bad for the complexion.”

She fired that little salvo as if she’d heard or used a similar sentiment a dozen times before. Unable to hold back any longer, Jake grinned. “Hey, I’m Jake.”

“Grace.” She offered her name with a regal nod. “Thank you for not crushing my planet.”

“That would have been a travesty. I like what you did with the rings. The bubbles.”

The girl blinked as if he were speaking Klingon. Something he hadn’t done since he was twelve. Not in public, anyway.

“Bubbles?” Her untamed dark brows drew together in a slashing vee. They reminded him of the way he’d drawn birds when he was boy. Then his meaning sank in and her eyebrows took flight. “Oh! You mean the debris? I used glue, sand, and a little bit of pea gravel for the bigger chunks.” She paused and he caught a flash of gleaming silver braces as her teeth sank into her lower lip. Suddenly, the confidence she’d projected like a force field fled. “I swiped the gravel from Mrs. Anderson’s driveway, but I only took the smallest pieces.”

“I won’t tell.” Without thinking, he leaned over and moved Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars slightly closer to one another, adjusted Jupiter and Saturn, then nudged Neptune another inch closer to the edge. “You seem to know your stuff.” Satisfied with his contribution, he straightened and placed his hands on his hips. “Are you a big donor? Platinum level?”

Grace giggled, but this time the sound didn’t grate his nerves. She might be tall, and, judging by her obvious interest in things space-related, a little nerdy, but the way she laughed was not an outlier. Girls her age were supposed to giggle. In this case, the high-pitched laugh was entirely appropriate. Which was good. Jake preferred the times when his data lined up.

He jerked his chin toward her model of Pluto and sat in one of the chairs to take a closer look. “I see you’re a bit of a rebel, bringing your dwarf friend there into the picture.”

“My mom is working,” she said, darting a nervous glance at the kitchen door. “She told me to stay out of the way, but...”

She grimaced, and he almost laughed out loud. He had a lot in common with this girl. “Got bored?”

This time, only one of those dark eyebrows moved, arching upward in challenge. “I didn’t want some drunk guy smashing my planet.”

“I’m not drunk. I was visually impaired.” Jake tapped the taped arm of his glasses to back up his story. “My mom didn’t want me looking like a nerd with tape on my glasses.”

She nodded as if she understood his predicament completely. “Tape on the eyeglasses would be an indication of nerdiness.”

Her too-easy agreement shocked a laugh out of him. “I believe a bit of tape might be the first indicator,” he said with a pointed look. “But hardly conclusive.”

“The second being the old Martian movie lines.”

“Hey, you were the one who went Star Trek on me,” he pointed out.

This time, he got to see the whole array of metalworks when she smiled, complete with neon pink and green rubber bands. “Star Trek is a classic.”

“Only the original.”

“And The Next Generation.”

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