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“I can’t be gone longer than five minutes without it looking weird, so that’s all the time you’ll have,” she’d told Jonathan earlier. “That’s your window to ask her out. Don’t miss it.”
Grabbing a handful of quarters out of the bowl, she let herself out of the apartment. When she got downstairs to the laundry room, Brent, the stoner musician who lived in fourteen, was there, transferring his clothes from the washer into the dryer.
“You need the machine?” he asked, glancing at her over his shoulder.
“Nope.” Esther hopped up onto the folding table and pulled up a game on her phone.
He gave her a puzzled look.
“I’m just hanging out,” she explained.
“In the laundry room?”
“I’ve got people in my apartment and I needed to give them a few minutes alone.”
“Okay, whatever.” Brent went back to putting his clothes in the dryer, and Esther went back to playing on her phone. “Later,” he said on his way out.
“Yep, see ya,” Esther replied.
When five minutes had passed, she went back upstairs to her apartment.
Jonathan and Jinny were standing a lot closer together than when she’d left. They both had their phones out, like they were exchanging numbers. Even better, they were both smiling.
“Get your laundry squared away?” Jinny asked, setting her phone down.
“Yep.”
“All right, well, I’m gonna go,” Jonathan said. “Thanks for the beer and the ribs.” He glanced at Jinny shyly. “I’ll text you.”
Jinny nodded. “Cool.”
“Don’t forget your mail,” Esther said.
“Right, my mail. Thanks.” He grabbed it off the table and let himself out of the apartment.
“What was that?” Esther asked Jinny when he was gone. As if she didn’t know.
Jinny bounced on her toes, practically glowing. “He asked me out!”
Esther grinned. “And you said yes?”
“Of course I said yes!”
“That’s awesome. Good for you!” Feeling extremely pleased with herself, Esther began gathering up the leftovers and carrying them into the kitchen. She’d done it. Jonathan had done it.
“Can you believe he asked me out?” Jinny said, following her.
Esther pulled open the fridge and shoved the other takeout containers around to make room. “Of course I can believe it. You’re beautiful and awesome. Who wouldn’t want to ask you out?”
“Yeah, but I was just talking about how cute he was the other day, and then tonight he asked me out, out of nowhere. It must be fate or something.”
“Must be,” Esther agreed.
Chapter Five
When Esther told people she was a rocket scientist, they tended to imagine she spent her days walking the floor of a gigantic manufacturing facility, wearing one of those white cleanroom suits with the hats and the footies, carrying a clipboard as she stared at a fully-assembled spacecraft—like one of the background extras in The Right Stuff.
The reality was that she sat in a cubicle in a drab office building in El Segundo and spent a truly ridiculous amount of her day using Microsoft Office. The Sauer Hewson Aerospace facility where she worked had started life as an automobile plant in the nineteen forties before being sold and acquired by a half dozen different aircraft companies, most of which no longer existed. In the golden age of space exploration, some of the components of the Apollo service modules had been manufactured there. These days, the site was focused exclusively on satellites, which were a little less cool than the Apollo program—but between satellite television, radio, broadband, and mobile voice and data, they were big business.
