Chapter 9: Fourth

I looked at her for a long moment.

The money my parents had set aside for me was buying nitrous for a copy of my own engine.

"Then you'd better win with it," I said.

She laughed and got into the SUV.

The doors shut. The tires spat shells.

Gran watched them go until the taillights were gone over the causeway.

Then she turned around, picked the torn envelope out of the shrimp bucket and threw it in the trash.

"Who wants seconds?" she yelled.

Fifty people cheered.

We cleared four thousand two hundred dollars that night.

The recovery junior counted it twice on the hood of a car and then hugged the old man from the red boat.

All winter, I built.

My new motor had four vanes and a side-fed port, and it hated me.

The first test article cracked. The second burned through the wall almost immediately.

I turned nineteen in April during a static fire and forgot about it until midnight.

Then Waylon put a gas-station cupcake on my bench and walked away without a word.

By May we knew my motor wouldn't be ready.

We'd fly Waylon's old motor, with my igniter and every fix the two of us could cram into it.

In June we drove to the New Mexico desert.

The launch site was a flat white plain with mountains on three sides.

Forty colleges set up in a long row of tents with their rockets on sawhorses.

It was a hundred and four degrees by ten in the morning.

Thornbury's tent was six down from ours.

It had a banner, matching polos and a misting fan.

I didn't look at it.

I looked at it anyway.

Annika was in front of their rocket in a white visor, doing an interview with a student reporter.

"I've been sketching engines since I was little," she was saying. "It's just always been my thing."

Keep reading free with an account. Start Betrayed by My Childhood Love from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.