Page 2 of Love & Rockets

Jake smiled at Brooke. Brian had grabbed up one of the good ones. Fortunately, his baby brother was smart enough to know he was marrying up and treated his brainy, beautiful fiancée like the miracle she was. “Thank God.”

“Don’t be too charming,” she warned as Brian pulled her away. “You wouldn’t want to turn her head.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” his little brother assured her, shooting Jake a challenging smile.

But Jake wasn’t exactly blind as a bat. True, he did have a significant amount of astigmatism that kept him from seeing things as sharply as he should, but the fact that Brian was all but begging for a beating was hard to ignore. And he’d be happy to fix Baby Bri a big, fat knuckle sandwich.

“Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Dalton.”

The high-pitched singsong of Cassidy Johanssen’s voice always made Jake tense up inside. Not only did the girl have a tendency to hit registers only canines could hear, but there was a weird kind of sourness underlying the overly sweet tone. The mixed messages in tonal quality made him cautious. Like when he was a kid and he’d pour the entire contents of a tube of Pixy Stix onto his tongue. He knew the initial hit would curl his toes, but it never stopped him from downing them one after another. Mainlining sour sugar candy had once been a personal challenge. A training field for enduring the not-entirely-sweet aspects of life. He learned if he braced himself against the initial bite, the burn would ease and eventually he’d unclench.

Catching his tongue between his teeth, Jake rolled his head forward in a stretch that also passed as a nod of acknowledgment. He scanned the crowd in vain, hoping to spot the blob that would, please God, morph into former-St. Patrick’s-football-star-turned-car-salesman Jack Tucker. Once upon a time, his brother’s intended, Brooke, had been one half of the prep school’s golden couple and Jack had been the other. But a lot changed when people left adolescence behind. Jack and Brooke hadn’t made it through college as a couple, and now, Jake’s nerdy little brother was poised to marry the Homecoming Queen, proving nice guys finished first sometimes.

Once again, his mother tried to puncture his lung. Shaking himself like a dog, Jake zeroed back in on the conversation in time to hear Cassidy Johanssen gushing over the decor, the food, and the fact that the fifteen-piece swing band his mother hired for the occasion was indeed playing “Swinging on a Star”. Until that moment, he hadn’t realized every piece they’d played had something to do with stars, the heavens, and magic in the moonlight. An appreciative smile curved his lips as he turned to gaze down at the diminutive dervish he called ‘Mom.’ The woman really was a miracle.

“The band is great,” he said, interrupting Cassidy’s stream-of-consciousness comparison of their gala to every other party on the Mobile social circuit. He leaned down and planted an affectionate kiss on his mother’s cheek. The familiar scents of Calvin Klein’s Eternity perfume and Jergens hand lotion assailed his senses. His father bought her the biggest bottle of perfume Mr. Klein produced each year at Christmastime. The lotion, she picked up at the Winn-Dixie in the economy-sized pump bottle and kept beside the kitchen sink. “You did an incredible job, Mama.”

She patted his arm. “Thank you, baby.”

“I love the centerpieces,” Cassidy squealed. “Did you make those yourself, Mrs. D.?”

Jake straightened and tried not to smirk when his mother blinked in disbelief. The centerpieces in question consisted of Styrofoam balls in various sizes local schoolchildren had painted to resemble the planets in their solar system—if said planets were covered in glitter, foil stars, and, in a few cases, cotton batting he assumed was supposed to represent vaporous gasses.

“No. No, I’m afraid I can’t take credit for those,” his mother said, a wry smile tugging at her lips. Her dark eyes sparked with amusement, but still, she answered the inane question politely. “They were done by the kids over at Sally Ride Middle School.”

Oblivious as always, Cassidy turned in a slow circle as if she needed to take everything in all over again. As if the two hours and thirteen minutes that had passed since the torturous evening had begun had flown by at the speed of light. “The whole event is incredible.”

In that moment, he wished he’d never given up his contact lenses in favor of being able to see the wonders of the night sky clearly. At least then, he’d be able to map out a course for escape. He listened with half an ear as Cassidy and his mother exchanged inanities. Catching his father’s eye, he raised his brows, silently asking if he thought his mom might be engaged in the conversation to the point where he could slip away. His dad answered with a barely detectable shake of his head and a single finger lifted from the rim of his glass. Unfortunately, he wasn’t a mere guest at this mind-numbing shindig. He was one of the hosts. Or so his mama insisted.

But he wasn’t really. He was only a board member. Since his family had started the Gulf Coast Young Scientists Foundation, his mother considered it a personal mission to make every fundraising event better than the last. And so far, she’d succeeded. Inspired by Dalton family passions, the foundation focused on marine, botanical, and aeronautical sciences. Tonight’s event was geared to raise funds for the program closest to Jake’s heart: project- and essay-based scholarships to attend the world famous Space Camp in Huntsville. This year, thanks to the funds raised by the It IS Rocket Science gala, the foundation would be able to send three kids to camp, rather than the one they’d sponsored the very first year. And, as proud as Jake was of the program, he’d give his left nut to be anywhere but that blurry ballroom.

Jack Tucker chose that moment to emerge from the ether, and Jake had never been so pathetically happy to see the cocky sonofabitch. Back in the day, Tucker was the prototypical Southern big man on campus. He’d made the varsity football squad in grade nine and secured the prettiest girl in school before he’d even had a driver’s license. In short, Jack Tucker was everything every other teenage boy hated, and though he’d been a couple years ahead of Brian, Brooke, and Jack, Jake didn’t mind backing up his little brother when it came to despising him.

Tucker was softer around the middle now, his hair thinner, and his teeth glowed too white in the ambient lighting. Jake shook the man’s hand, feeling smug. He might have a couple years on Jack Tucker, but at least he still had a full head of hair and his stomach wasn’t threatening the buttons on his dress shirt. Running five miles most nights and swinging a hammer on weekends proved to be a decent workout. The physical labor kept him fairly fit, which was good, considering he spent his days mostly trapped behind a desk.

He waited another sixty seconds to be sure Tucker would remain true to form and try to flirt with his mother. Jack turned on what he thought passed for charm, and Jake had to give the guy credit. He provided excellent cover. With a murmur and a few nods, Jake stepped back, slid a little to his left to evade his mother’s peripheral sensors, gave his father a silent thumbs up and melted into the dimness.

He almost made it to the end of the ballroom furthest from the dance floor before toppling over an abandoned chair. Unleashing an impressive string of curses, he planted both hands solidly on the linen-draped table to keep himself from going entirely ass-over. At the center of the table, the construction paper and mylar rings wound around a surprisingly un-sparkled Saturn trembled and shook. A yelp of surprise and horror caught his attention.

Jake squinted into the artificial twilight. A slight young woman dressed in head-to-toe black jumped away from the table. She had a hand clamped over her mouth, but if he wasn’t mistaken, her gaze was locked on the teetering centerpiece and not on her stumbling intruder. Muttering under his breath, he untangled his foot from the legs of the chair and stretched out to steady the sixth planet from the Sun.

Mortified by both his clumsiness and the crass language, Jake scrambled for a way to recover. Women, though he loved them, had a way of making him feel like an awkward adolescent again. In high school, he’d learned to hide his awkwardness behind mediocre athletic skills. By the end of his first year in Tuscaloosa, he’d cultivated a kind of hipster-intellectual thing girls found bafflingly appealing. But as he moved on to his post-graduate work, he’d found himself surrounded by fewer women and more men. Engineers and scientists. Men without his father’s appreciation of the absurd and his mother’s slyly sharp sense of humor. A bevy of colleagues so dry he looked like the class cut-up by comparison.

Knowing he’d blown any chance of appearing suave or even mildly cool in front of the woman on the other side of the round table, he snatched up Saturn and dropped onto a knee. He held the ringed planet out in front of him like an offering and peered at the black-clad figure hanging back in the shadows. “I know you said you wanted at least a full carat, but this one has almost twice the mass of the whole Earth.”

His spur of the moment proposal was met with a surprisingly girlish giggle.

Though the sound made him cringe, he didn’t let the disconcerting laugh stop him. “The core is probably iron and nickel, but I can promise you, you’ll never want for ammonia.”

Again, the woman giggled. She sounded young. Too young for him. Disappointment flared inside him but immediately subsided. Those flashes of want had been popping up more and more lately, and he didn’t need his PhD in observational astronomy to determine its source. He was jealous of his brother. Sort of. Jealousy implied envy, which essentially meant he thought Brian didn’t deserve what he’d found in Brooke, and that conclusion was light-years off the mark. He didn’t begrudge his little brother one bit of his happiness. He wanted a relationship like theirs for himself. One day. With a girl who wasn’t a giggler.

His fingers trailed over the rings and he was startled to find not only were the materials anchored to the foam ball evenly spaced, but whoever had built this particular model had taken the time to coat some kind of bubbly paint over the top of the rings. He smiled. Replicating continuous and discontinuous arcs of rocks, ice, and dust wasn’t easy, but some kid had tried.

“May I….” The soft, tremulous request jolted him from his marveling. “I, um, that one’s mine,” his companion said in a rush. “Can I have that?”

Jake’s head jerked back, but his hands shot out as if he were actually holding a ball of Saturn’s toxic gasses. The girl removed the Styrofoam planet from his grasp, turned as if she hadn’t committed an intra-galactic mugging, then disappeared into the darkness at the edge of the room. Planting his hand on the table top, he staggered to his feet, all the while groping in his pocket for his glasses.

Electrical tape be damned.

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