Page 36 of Rules for Rule Breaking
Winter rolled her eyes and then looked around. There was absolutely no one there to watch her embarrassing herself, and no cars in the parking lot either. “Where is everyone?” she asked breathlessly.
Bobby went to check the hours on a sign in the window. “They’re closed!” he exclaimed. Winter looked at the sign for herself. They were closed one day a week, and that happened to be it. “You have got to be kidding me,” Bobby said, throwing his hair out of his eyes. “I can’t get a single thing right.”
He was so hard on himself. It wasn’t that big of a deal. She wasn’t the dermatologist in her family, but if this is how he reacted toeverything, she was pretty certain his eczema was stress-induced rather than a side effect of his shower cries.
Winter took him by both shoulders. “Relax, Robert. It’s fine.”
“Really?” Bobby asked with a pout.
“Yes! I mean, this place has a rocket garden. Meaning there’s a garden full of rockets. You can even see some of them from here.” She stood on her tiptoes and tried to look behind the building. “You seriously didn’t have to do this.”
Bobby wrung his hands. “You seemed sad after your call with Emmy, and there’s no use in us both being sad.”
Winter was going to have to put him in rice like a waterlogged iPhone and restart him later. It was likely he had some love left over from his breakup and nowhere to put it, but that love was reserved for his parents and all the people at school who liked him. None of that was meant for her, especially not Jacqueline Charlotte Turner’s portion.
“You’re doing fine, Robert.” She gave him a few pats on the chest.
“Good.” He got down in the middle of the concrete entranceway and lounged, propped up on his elbows, like he was getting a tan at the beach.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“If we can’t go in, we can at least sit here and enjoy the energy a little bit. Plus I’m out of shape. No more racing, okay?”
Winter shrugged and joined him, cross-legged. The sun wasn’t at its hottest, so the ground was still cool. Her heart felt like it’d explode as she looked at the NASA logo plastered on the building with the Delta rocket behind it, aimed at the cosmos. She followed where it pointed, and her eyes rested on the fluffiest white clouds she’d ever seen. Everything was elevated. The sun was brighter, the air was fresher, the birds were even singing better melodies.
She felt eyes on her suddenly.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “Moratorium?”
“Moratorium.”
“I’m trying to understand your obsession with space. I feel like it doesn’t really fit your whole... thing.” He waved his hands over her like he was searching for a barcode to scan.
Winter snorted. “Mything? What thing?”
“You know, your... thing. With the sweaters and the tea and the Hallmark movies.”
“I wouldn’t call it a thing. I just like to be comfortable.”
She lay down on the concrete with her ankles crossed and her hands clasped over her stomach. Bobby stared.
“I don’t see how you do it,” he said. He put his hand on the back of his neck. “You seem like nothing bothers you. Absolutely everything bothers me. Any little thing, and I crumble.”
She didn’t know if she understood what he meant. If she wanted a warm beverage and cookies, she got them. If her hair was in her face, she put it up. If she wanted an extra pillow and a blanket on her bed, she requested them. There was no great mystery. It was easy to be comfortable. Space was the hard thing to figure out.
Winter did what she did when she didn’t know what to say; she said nothing at all.
“You don’t have to tell me about your space thing if you don’t want to,” Bobby said. “It probably stretches beyond the limits of a moratorium.”
“No, it’s not that. It just feels obvious to me,” she replied with a shrug. “Everything has been done before in some form or another. Exploring the entirety of our infinite universe is one thing we know that hasn’t. It’s there, above us all the time, untouched, waiting tobe understood.” She reached up and grabbed at the air.
Bobby made a steeple of his fingers under his chin. “Space is so big and empty. It seems really lonely.”
“It isn’t empty, though. It’s full of dust and gas and raw energy. And so are we. We’re full of the same stuff as the stars. So when we look up, we’re actually looking at ourselves and all of creation. It’s not lonely to me. And yeah, it’s big, but everything is a smaller version of something else. Like the irises of your eyes are oceans and galaxies, and our Earth is a speck of sand on a cosmic beach, right? So everything is huge and unfathomable if you really think about it because we’re all made of the same material.”
He scratched his head. “And that’s comforting to you?”
