RO LIVED EXACTLY a block away from Drew Balonik, which meant that a) I knew the exact way to her house, and b) the entire time we were biking over there after school, I was sincerely hoping I wouldn’t run into him.
When Ro and I came in, her mom was chatting away on the phone, waving her hands around, but when she saw us, her eyes lit up and she waved and mouthed, Hi!
“Client call, probably,” Ro whispered to me. “She’s a real estate agent. We can just—”
“Hi, honey!” Ro’s mom rushed around to the kitchen table. “And you must be Benji!” She reached out for a hug, smiling, and then held me at arm’s length. “Ro has told me all about you.”
Ro’s mom reminded me of those energetic people who worked out on TV in neon leotards and made burpees look a lot more fun than they actually were, except she was dressed up in fancy clothes and wore lipstick. She kind of looked like Ro, actually, just with straight jet-black hair and bangs. And a lot of makeup. If I were to draw Ro’s mom, I wouldn’t use colored pencils; I would use those bright markers Mr. Keanan had.
“Are you hungry, Benji?” She opened the fridge and started rooting around. “We’ve got some snacks we could heat up. Or some ice cream? Or a pizza! Or maybe some tea?”
“We’re okay for now, Mom,” Ro said. “We’ll just be working on some school stuff.”
Ro’s mom turned, her jewelry clinking. “Are you sure? I think we have some cookies around, if you need.” She gathered up her purse. “I have to run to my open house. You kids will be fine, right?”
“Of course,” Ro said.
“If you say so.” Her mom swept her up in a one-armed hug and planted a kiss on her head.
Ro grinned and rubbed lipstick from her forehead. As her mom strapped on her heels and ran out the door, my chest felt a little tight. I mean, it wasn’t like my mom didn’t hug me—she hugged me plenty, mostly when she was worrying about me. But it was the way Ro and her mom almost melted into each other. Like butter or something. I wondered what her dad was like.
I looked around the kitchen. “What’s up with all the plants?”
“Oh, that,” Ro said, following my gaze. “My mom’s just gotten into horticulture lately. See, there’s her English ivy.” She pointed to the leaves cascading down the window and almost into the sink. “And she’s got some desert plants, too. Aloe and mini cactuses. And there are some orchids in the library that she’s pretty proud of.”
With the light coming in from the windows, her kitchen almost looked like a greenhouse. It was kind of cool, actually.
“Come on,” Ro said. “The rocket’s in the garage.”
The garage, however, was an entirely different story. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling. There was a table with a bunch of tools on it. I recognized the bottle of gold paint she’d bought at Hogan’s, along with the sandpaper and Popsicle sticks.
Ro walked over to the end of the table and fiddled around with what looked like a block with a lot of wires sticking out of it. She pressed a button, and the Doors streamed out, static and all.
“What,” I asked, “is that?”
“My radio,” she said, shrugging.
I stared at her in shock.
Honestly, who builds their own radio? Besides, I totally did not expect Ro to be into sixties rock. “Don’t you guys have cassettes or something?”
“Yeah, but building your own radio is way cooler.”
I shrugged.
“So this is my lab,” Ro said, over the guitar intros. She looked over. “What do you think?”
I looked around at all the wires. “This looks exactly like a mad scientist’s lab.”
“Hey!”
“In a good way!” I put my hands up. I knew that all this stuff was pretty safe. It’s just that whenever I thought of scientists, I always pictured the ones from my comics. Like how Dr. Bruce Banner put gamma rays through his body and then turned green and ballooned in size and became the Hulk. Or like how a lightning bolt hit Barry Allen’s supplies, and then suddenly his body could travel at supersonic speed, and then he turned into the Flash.
I glanced around the room. It was pretty dimly lit. Cracks of sunlight streamed through the windows. The walls were a muted shade of brown. If a lightning bolt hit Ro’s radio—
“Benji?”
I was getting way, way ahead of myself. “I mean, there’s some cool stuff in here. Like your . . . radio thing.” I walked over to the edge of the table, where there was a plastic cylinder surrounded by cut-out materials. “So this . . .”
“That’s it,” Ro said, coming around and fastening huge-looking lab goggles over her eyes. “It’s the rocket. In progress.”
“Whoa.” It was bigger than I’d thought, with the top already put together. I looked at her in disbelief.
Ro Geraghty, the girl who sat next to me in class, was an actual, serious, live rocket scientist, goggles and all.
And she was actually trying to get a rocket up into space.
Mad Scientist Concocts Top-Secret Spaceship Rocket in Garage Lab!!!
“So these go into space?”
“Well, not this one,” she said. She paused and picked up what looked like a tube and a mess of wires. “These are just model rockets. They only fly to a max of a couple thousand feet.”
Still, that was way cool.
“You think you wanna get one to space someday?”
She nodded. “Absolutely.”
I had no idea she was so serious about it. I mean, I didn’t think it was a joke or anything—I’d seen her sketches stuffed with equations and those hieroglyphic-y math symbol things. I didn’t know she actually wanted to launch a rocket, like those ones I saw on TV. Still, she sounded so confident that I actually kind of believed her.
“Okay,” I said. “So how can I help?”
“Well,” she said, coming over. “You have to know a couple of things about the rocket first.”
She pointed to the top, the middle, and then the bottom, where one of the fins was jutting out. “Nose, airframe, fins. Airframe is the body of the rocket. I’ve trimmed the fins a little to make it fly higher. It’s supposed to go over fifteen hundred feet, according to my calculations, but I think we can push it to sixteen.” She pointed to the plan. “We’re also going to add a radio transmitter in there”—she pointed to a mess of wires over at the end of the table—“to send signals back to the ground.”
“You’re building another radio?”
“Shouldn’t be that hard,” she said. “I mean, usually people just launch the rocket itself, but I wanted to add something to, you know, keep track of speed and how high it goes and all that. I was going to get a rocket camera, but that’s too expensive to order. So I thought I’d just build a radio instead.” She straightened up. “Anyway. The point is, if we stick to the plan, we’ll be A-OK. Got it?”
“Yeah,” I said, even if I didn’t understand half of what she said. I looked at the rocket. “But hey, we should put some space blasters on this.”
“What?”
“Wouldn’t that be cool? Like if we were under attack, we’d be prepared. Oh, and we could add some forcefield shields while we’re at it.”
“That’s impossible,” she said curtly.
I looked down. Jeez.
“But,” she said, grinning a little, “we could add on some sonic jet packs, just for some extra speed.”
“Now we’re talking.”
“I’ll consider it for the next prototype.” She handed me the hammer. “Ready?”
Honestly, I’d never expected to get excited about a science project. It was just supposed to be a part of a deal, right? Ro would use her genius brain to think of ways to track my dad down. I would put up with an hour here, maybe two, tops, scribbling out numbers until Ro knew just how bad I was at calculating things. I could help paint the rocket, if anything. I would do the least work possible to get my name on a science fair poster so Mom would get off my back and I could keep Mr. Keanan’s art class. Win-win. Well, win mostly for me.
But as Ro grinned across the table with that wide smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes, her goggles huge on her face, and the Beatles hummed out of her janky radio, and as I joked about all the cool things we could possibly add to the rocket, I realized, This isn’t half-bad.
This could actually be kind of fun.
I didn’t get my first letter from Amir until the beginning of November. It came in a skinny envelope, and Mom made sure to personally hand it to me.
“I miss that kid,” she said. It was true—she especially loved Amir and would constantly invite him over for dinner. She’d even insist he bring home a batch of her slightly overcrisped brownies. “Tell him I said hello.”
“Will do,” I said. I raced to my room and carefully tore the side open and shook the letter out.
Hey, Ben Franklin, Amir began, and I grinned at my old nickname. Sorry for the prolonged wait. I’ve been so busy in my move that I’d lost track of time.
I rolled my eyes at the word prolonged. Of course. I’d forgotten he was practically like a walking thesaurus.
I have to say, New Haven’s like an entirely different world from Sacramento. First of all, our current house is way tinier than our old house. I have to share a room with two of my sisters. Can you even imagine? The third one’s at college, so we don’t see her as much anymore, but when she comes home to visit, it’s all four of us in one room. Sometimes I can barely even hear myself think.
But other than that, I love this place. It just snowed here, and so the roofs and bushes and sidewalks were all covered with snow when we woke up last Saturday. And in our neighborhood they say that during Christmas, everyone decorates their yards with holiday lights, just like how it was in England when we used to live there. I’d forgotten how much I missed it, honestly. We’re also just two hours away from New York City, so we’re planning to visit next weekend. Maman says we might even be able to visit Niagara Falls over winter break.
I smiled a little.
My new school is so much better. People still give me strange looks or have trouble pronouncing my name. But they don’t pick on me or pull pranks on me like Drew did. I also met these two guys in my class, Kenny Lin and the other’s Alex Freeman. They’re both really nice to me. They helped me out with my project in science class and then invited me to their robotics club that they started. We’re trying to build one of those robotic arms that can carry objects to you. Isn’t that cool? Anyway, Alex invites us over to his house a lot because he’s an only child and his parents are never home, so whenever I want some peace and quiet, I just walk over to his place. His parents let him watch as much TV as he wants, too. My baba won’t even let us watch thirty minutes.
Spacebound comics?
I wish I was able to get the latest issue, but I can’t read them anymore. Maman found my stash and threw them all away. She’s telling me that it’s about time I started reading real books. Of course I think she’s being too strict, but I can’t really do anything about it. But it’ll mostly be fine. I’m pretty busy anyway.
Anyway, I’m going to go and figure out how to make this robotic arm move. Please do tell me everything that’s occurred since I’ve left. Looking forward to the next letter.
I set the letter on my bed. The door opened behind me, and Mom came in with a pile of laundry.
“Amir wrote me,” I said.
“I saw.” She set my folded shorts on the bed. “He adjusting okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. More than okay, I thought, with a little funny feeling in my chest. He lived on the other side of the country. He got two new best friends. I mean, he didn’t even read comics anymore.
I tried to push aside that funny feeling. There was so much to tell him—about Ro and how we finally had put together a solid plan to find my dad. I fished a blank piece of paper from my backpack and started writing.