Page 57 of Every Almost

Charlie Wickett was going her own way.

? PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES?

Caltech was a different planet.

For the first time in her life, Charlie was surrounded by people as smart as she was. Nobody cared what she looked like. They cared what she knew. They cared about her ideas. She mattered for the right reasons for the first time in her life, and the relief was physical. She could breathe in a way she hadn't been able to in Shelbyville, as if someone had opened a window she hadn't known was painted shut.

She took to it the way a machine takes to the right lubricant. With courses in subjects such as mechanical engineering, experimental propulsion, and materials science, she moved through her coursework with the same appetite she'd brought to Frank's garage at twelve, just with better tools and infinitely fewer people telling her to become a nurse. It took her a few weeks to get comfortable answering questions in her classes, but once she did, there was no putting her back. She raised her hand. She challenged her lessons. She cornered professors after office hours. She was, in her own private assessment,insufferablein the best possible way, and nobody here seemed to mind.

Charlie soon found that she was surrounded by people who got into heated arguments about thermodynamic efficiency overlunch, and then forgot to eat because they were too busy sketching fuel systems on napkins. Every day, Charlie woke up ready and excited to see what was waiting for her, having realized she'd found her people. People just like her, just like Frank. She found them absolutely ridiculous.

But just like with Frank, she came to love every single one of them.

Charlie had weekly phone calls with Frank and Helen. Often, Katie would be at the Beckmans as well, there to talk with Charlie alongside them. But she also wrote to Frank and Helen every few weeks. Real letters, on paper, because they had taught her that letters were how you told someone they mattered across a distance. Frank wrote back in his careful handwriting, asking about her classes, telling her about the neighborhood. Helen enclosed cookies that arrived in crumbs and notes that arrived in warmth.

She would call Katie every Sunday as well, without fail, just a conversation for the two of them. Katie told her about everything such as the house and school, about the boy down the street who had taken over Charlie's repair clients and was doing a terrible job.

Charlie spent her first Christmas away at Caltech, deciding to experience a "California Christmas" with other people staying at school for the holiday. Her parents thanked her for not incurring them a cost for her plane ticket, but Katie had words with her.

"Our first Christmas apart?"

"I'm sorry, Kit-Kat. Really I am. If I could, I'd bring you out here to spend it with me." Charlie heard Katie grunt on the phone.

"Next Christmas, okay? I'll make sure I'm back in Shelbyville, even if I have to buy my own ticket. It’ll be like I never missed a Christmas. Just you, me, and Mr. and Mrs. Beckman, likealways." Katie grunted again. A few moments went by before Katie spoke.

"You promise?" she asked in a tiny voice.

"I promise, Kit. I swear on the Millennium Falcon." She heard Katie take a quiet gasp, registering between both of them that Charlie meant it.

A few days before Christmas, a package arrived from Shelbyville. In it was a cassette tape in a hand-decorated case. Katie's handwriting was on the insert card and there were doodles of stars and moons on the cover. A "best of" mix of the songs they'd loved that year together. Songs like "Don't Stop Me Now," “Heartbreaker,” and "Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)." Songs they played in Charlie's Plymouth, songs they listened to on the radio, and the songs they shared with Frank and Helen. They were all there.

Charlie cradled it in her hands, a gift from her little sister, using music to tell her she was thinking about her. Charlie's heart had never felt more full.

These mixtapes became their tradition. Every Christmas after, Charlie would always receive a mixtape as her gift from Katie. Insert cards and doodles each time. Those tapes stayed with Charlie from that Christmas on, right in her bag. When Charlie had the means to, she purchased a Walkman a few months later, ensuring she always had her and Katie's music with her wherever she went.

And about a month into her time at Caltech, another big change happened quietly.

The nightmares stopped.

Not dramatically, though. Charlie just woke up one morning and realized she couldn't remember the last time the walls had closed in. Now it was California that had air, had room to breathe, and walls that stayed where they were.

As Charlie spent moretime in California, she noticed things about herself come to life that she hadn't allowed herself to see in years.

California knocked the wall down.

Slowly. Not all at once. But in the way you disassemble something you've been living inside of without realizing it had walls at all.

It started with noticing thingsdifferentlyagain. A study partner whose smile made her stomach drop. A woman at a department mixer whose eye contact lingered half a second past expected, and the half second felt like permission.

But this wasn’t the same crisis Charlie had at thirteen. Instead of a crisis, it felt like recognition. The same, except this time it didn't come with fear.

But the recognition came with its own weight. There were nights in her small apartment when the understanding of who she really was settled over her like something heavy and permanent. She'd lie in bed and trace what it meant, for her whole life. For the version of the future her mother had always assumed Charlie would step into. The woman who made some young man very happy. The daughter who came home for holidays with a husband. The life that fit the picture.

Charlie realized she was never going to fit that picture. She'd known that since the chemistry hallway. She'd just refused to look at it until California gave her enough room to do so.

Other times the recognition was freedom. She'd be at a department gathering and notice a woman whose hand rested on another woman's back in a way that meant more than friendship, and something in Charlie's chest would loosen.Other times it was standing at the edge of something she couldn't take back. She thought about Ed's silence and Diane's picture-perfect world and the Wickett house where nobody mentioned things.

She found people at Caltech who understood. Not a community with a name or a meeting place, but a loose constellation of people who recognized each other. Charlie watched the way they moved through the world, carefully but not apologetically, and she started to understand that what she'd been carrying since she was thirteen wasn't a deficiency. It was just a part of the architecture that she hadn't been allowed to build until now.