Page 59 of Every Almost

And for the next few minutes, Charlie was busy meeting new people, shaking hands, and talking about being a student at Caltech, growing up in Indiana, and that she was gay. It was the first time she'd said it out loud to others without nerves, and the way her shoulders relaxed was everything.

Soon after, a woman sat down next to her. Older, maybe thirty, with long dark hair and a denim jacket. But Charlie noticed immediately that she had the kind of ease that comes from having stopped pretending a long time ago.

"So, this is really yourfirst time, huh?" the woman asked. Not unkindly.

"I would say it's pretty obvious at this point, but what could have possibly given me away?" The woman laughed.

"Well, I'd have to say it might be because you're holding that beer like it owes you an explanation." Then it was Charlie's turn to laugh, and the sound surprised her. It was a real laugh, the kind she usually saved for Katie or Frank.

They ended up talking for over an hour. Not about labels or coming out. About life. About what it feels like to walk into a room and recognize yourself in it for the first time. The woman told Charlie she'd come out at nineteen, how she'd lost her mother but kept her brother, and how she'd built a life that was smaller than the one she'd planned but truer than the one she'd been living. She said something that Charlie carried out of that bar and kept for the rest of her life.

"The hard part isn't figuring out who or what you are. The hard part is purposefully deciding you're allowed to be that person."

Charlie drove home that night with the windows down and the radio off. The sky was clear and the air was crisp. She felt like she'd just opened a door she'd been pressing her shoulder against for ten years. On the other side was a room she already knew, one she'd stood in for those few weeks with Amy in the chemistry hallway.

The difference was, now, she was allowed to look around.

In Charlie'slast year of undergrad, she enrolled in a graduate-level seminar on advanced propulsion concepts. The class was small with only twelve students, mostly made up of graduates. But Charlie felt good about participating with more advanced students, and the professor, Dr. Kessler, introduced her on the first day as "an undergraduate who earned her seat, so don't test her." Charlie was a fan of him immediately.

On the first day of the seminar's course, a woman sitting two rows over caught Charlie's attention before the first lecture was over. Dark hair pulled back in a ponytail with a pencil stuck through it, a leather jacket draped over the back of her chair, anda habit of muttering counterarguments under her breath while Dr. Kessler was still mid-sentence. Charlie learned her name was Joss after she was called on during the lecture. It was a name Charlie would not soon forget.

She didn't speak to Joss until the third week of the seminar when Dr. Kessler posed a problem to the class of a hypothetical deep-space engine burning through fuel faster than projected. The telemetry data said the combustion chamber pressure was nominal. The fuel flow readings said otherwise.

"Which do you trust?" Dr. Kessler prompted.

"The telemetry," Joss said from her seat, not bothering to raise her hand. "The pressure sensors are calibrated to a tighter tolerance than the flow meters. If the chamber reads nominal, the burn is stable. The flow discrepancy is instrument error."

"No it isn't," Charlie said.

Twelve heads turned, Joss's included.

"Well, well; we have a differing opinion," Dr. Kessler muttered, unable to contain his intrigue as to how this would play out. "Please do continue, Ms. Wickett. Explain your reasoning."

"It's just that flow meters don't lie," Charlie answered. "If fuel is disappearing faster than the chamber pressure accounts for, you've got a leak somewhere between the turbopump and the injector plate. The telemetry is reading what's happeninginsidethe chamber. It's not reading what's happeningbeforethe fuel gets there. You could run that simulation a hundred times and the pressure would read clean every time. But if you walked over to the engine and put your hand on the fuel line, you'd feel it."

"You'd also lose your hand," Joss said.

"Gloves," Charlie replied, snapping the wrist of her own glove she was wearing without missing a beat.

The class laughed. Dr. Kessler looked like he'd been handed a gift.

"So your diagnostic method is... touching it?" Joss asked, turning fully in her seat now, one eyebrow raised. Charlie studied her expression, finding something there she couldn't quite read.

"My diagnostic method is not trusting a screen when I could trust the machine," she countered.

"That's not a method. That's a philosophy."

"Maybe. But my philosophy has never misdiagnosed a timing chain."

Joss stared at her for a beat before laughing. The laugh was sudden and real and filled the whole room as well as Charlie's chest. "A timing chain? We're talking about a deep-space propulsion system and you're referencing atiming chain?"

"An engine is an engine," Charlie said, shrugging her shoulders. "The math scales up. The principle doesn't change. If something's wrong, the machine will tell you before the data does. You just have to be close enough to hear it."

Joss studied her with an expression that hovered somewhere between amusement and genuine curiosity. "You're actually serious."

"I'm always serious about engines," Charlie deadpanned.

"Clearly," Joss said. And then she smiled, slow and deliberate, and that thing in Charlie's chest morphed into something she hadn't felt since Amy Callahan. Except this time, nobody flinched.