Betrayed by My Childhood Love novel · Chapter 10 of 32

Chapter 10: Captain

"No," I said.

Waylon raised an eyebrow.

"No?"

"I'm a freshman. I've been here ten months. I swept the floor for the first two."

"You swept it well."

"Waylon."

"All in favor," he said to the room.

Nine hands went up. The recovery junior put up both of his, plus a Frito.

"Opposed?"

I put my hand up.

Waylon looked at it.

"Motion carries," he said. "Captain, we have no sponsor, no money and no motor. What do you want to do?"

I looked around the room.

At the sunburned faces and the orange Frito dust and the birthday girl wiping her eyes.

"Come to Galveston," I said. "All of you. For the summer. Gran's got a garage and a test pad behind the docks, and she won't charge rent if you can hold a wrench."

Seven of them came.

They slept on Gran's floors and her porch and her sofa, in sleeping bags that smelled like sunscreen.

Gran cooked for all of us every night, in a pot big enough to bathe in, and swore at every one of them by name.

She had decided they were hers.

We built every day from seven in the morning until the light went.

My four-vane motor cracked again in June.

In July it held.

It burned clean for a full ten-second test on Gran's pad.

The recovery junior ran into the Gulf with all his clothes on.

Then Gran found out I'd spent my nineteenth birthday at a test stand.

"Nobody told me," she said, frowning.

"I told you. On the phone."

"You said you were fine. That's not telling."

So on the first Saturday in August, she threw me the birthday I'd missed.

She strung Christmas lights across the garage.

She made a red velvet cake with a rocket on it, much better than the grocery store one.

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