Chapter 9

Kimberly's turn:

It's like that day that I was interviewing with the math dudes - it's over. I'm flat on my back in the back seat of Tina's car and my head WAS hurting but Tina and Cindy talked me out of it.

Mizz Patel ... Doctor Patel, really, but she's Mizz Patel to us, I guess, just called Cindy and told her that I have survived the mathematical portion of the 'let's get Kimberly through college FAST' process.

Tim's astonished. "This thing doesn't happen except in fiction," he says.

"And I'm just a brown-haired figment of your imagination," Nikki told him when he said it. "Look! Letter attesting to my status as a degreed electrical engineer. And Cindy's a year younger."

I didn't help. "And Terri's got business cards with a title from Google."

"Nope," he said. "It was bad enough that I'm dreaming that YOU are in my life, Kim. The rest of this? Some heck of a weird dream."

"Been asleep an awfully long time, haven't you?" Nikki asked.

I giggled. Checked. No Terri or Rachel around. "Parts of him wake up pretty often."

Poor Tim. I wonder how cola feels coming out of your nose.

It's like that, though, sometimes. The sisters are very open about the joys of their lives and loving – in the physical sense – is one of those joys.

"The swim will do you good," Tina said.

Yeah, we made plans to have a little swim party this afternoon. There's a pool. A bunch of friends. Result? Party. In the pool.

Wanna race? Tina gives me a good run. Tim smiles. I remember blindsiding him with our first visit to the pool at our old apartment.

Which beings me here. Tim and I talked about this at length. I mean, the guy had a GOOD job after some years as a road warrior, and I stepped into his life and I would have been happy being Little Miss Engineer's Wife and gone about getting my own degree and going to work and living life.

But...

Tim was pacing like a tiger in a cage. Sure, the caged tiger's got all the food he needs and shelter and veterinary care, but when you look in the cage you see the tiger and KNOW what the essence of the tiger is, and it's NOT that cage. Tim would have done that for me – stayed caged.

Then I got to looking around the Internet about girls and engineering and found an article on line about a sixteen year old with an engineering degree. That led me to 3Sigma Engineering and email exchanges and then Skype and ... Well, here we are.

Tim's back to doing a rainbow of engineering, and I'm immersed in the openings of a college experience that Aunt Jenn finds astounding.

"Doesn't happen like that, kiddo," she told me. "Gotta be something wrong somewhere. Your friend Cindy ... seriously? A bachelor's at sixteen?"

"Nikki''s seventeen. Same degree. And it's Auburn, not some mail-order degree mill."

So my two aunts are coming in this weekend. They're getting a hotel room, mainly because that little trailer's just not the place I really want to stick four adults, regardless of what the sales brochure says. That's one reason. I'm sure that there are others. Cindy tells me about the sounds that carry from one end to the other in these things.

So here come Laci and Aunt Jenn. Also showing up this weekend is the legendary Johanna and her Stoney. I've seen pictures. I've seen the videos. I've been warned.

So anyway, Tina and Cindy bring me to the office. Well, the apartments, actually, which is across the parking lot.

"You coming in with us, or you going to get Tim to console you?"

"I need consolation."

Cindy said, well, go to our apartment to change into your bathing suit. Bring Tim with you. I promise nobody will walk in for half an hour. Evil little thing giggled. "Don't leave spots on the furniture."

"Tina, how long has she been this evil?" I asked.

"Ever since I met 'er," Tina laughed. "Always tags something onto a happy comment. Like SHE hasn't left spots..."

"I am the epitome of decorum," Cindy said, chuckling.

She was still giggling when I went in the office, grabbed Tim by the hand, and dragged him off.

Walking across the parking lot, he commented, "You seem to have a purpose in mind."

"I need to change into my swimsuit and you need to put your trunks on and Cindy graciously loaned us their apartment with a thirty-minute promise..."

"What kind of trouble can we get into in thirty minutes?"

"I expect NO trouble," I said. "I need to be comforted."

"Comforted..." he repeated.

"Yes. I was attacked. I have looked at integrals and derivatives and transforms and matrices and odd squiggles on a whiteboard and subjected to fired broadsides of numbers willy-nilly in the defense of my college aspirations. The stress is enormous. I need comforting."

"Comforting..."

"The only admonition is that we do not leave spots on the furniture."

"I could eat you senseless..."

"And hold me afterward? Caress me? Pat me on my head and tell me you love me?"

"Absolutely."

First time I ever had a screaming sixty-nine on somebody else's sofa. Didn't leave a spot. Not the tiniest drop escaped either of us and I was soooo much more sedate when we walked to the pool. Saw Cindy and her Dan headed toward their apartment. Gave her a thumbs-up.

The water felt good. I can still swim and knifing through a couple of laps then hanging on the side of the pool is just a bit down the list of things that relax me. Having Tim swim up behind me and press me against the pool wall helps. Hearing the laughter of Terri and Rachel, and seeing Beck in her suit, coming to join us, that's good, too.

The pool gets crowded when everybody shows up. Everybody showed up. Conversation was like a shotgun blast hitting a balloon bouquet. If you couldn't shift quickly, it was chaotic. If you COULD shift quickly, it was STILL chaotic.

I got in on snippets of engineering, the BIG story of two pregnancies, the ongoing saga of Terri and Rachel and Bot-bot, now the subject of a very popular YouTube video, the latest news from Cindy's mom's honeymoon, Beck and Nikki comparing notes on the recipes of Jewish and Cajun grandmothers ... The list goes on and on.

It's like what we used to have with me and Laci and Aunt Jenn and Tim, multiplied several times over. NOT boring.

I'm also Terri's lab assistant. That's what I call myself. I look at the other girls and they all have hardware and software experience that I don't have, so Terri takes me under her wing.

"You had stepper motor control explained to you by a ten year old?" Tim laughed.

"Well, this is what she said. We're using stepper motors for some of the functions. Terri says that we either can TRUST the motor to move the number of steps we tell it to move, and leave it at that, or what she personally likes - feed the actual position back to the controller."

"Terri said that."

"Learned it from Nikki."

"Oh, that's peachy," Tim laughed. "It's soooo much better when she gets it from a seventeen year old..."

"A seventeen year old graduate engineer with a master's degree."

"I'll be in my closet, weeping softly," he said.

"She explained to me the distributed control functions of Bot-bot. I said, you mean, like ganglia? She said 'Yes. Exactly!' Like ants. Ganglia will keep it walking even if the head's cut off. She saw it on National Geographic Channel or something."

"She should be playing with Legos or something..."

I laughed. "I dunno. Her, a set of Legos and a D-cell battery and we're liable to solve cold fusion. Anyway, we're talking about changing Bot-bot over from tracks to a hexapod carriage."

"I dunno. That four-track thing she did, it works well. Darned thing can climb steps."

"You don't think all of this is toooo crazy, do you, baby?" I asked him.

"This is geek heaven," he said. "Absolute geek heaven. It's like a greenhouse for brains."

"I think the same thing. Did I mention that I'm on the payroll now?"

"Payroll?"

"Yep!" I said. "I'm an engineering assistant. I'm going to tag along with Nikki on that packaging machine project. See if I can transpose some of Terri's technology into an industrial setting."

"They said that they were considering it. Nikki and Cindy thought that you needed to spin up pretty hard..."

"So I started out with Terri. And Rachel."

Another thing – college IS different. Back home, in high school, I was a known quantity – avoided at first for who Mom was, then later because I was married. Here, I'm an unknown.

Cindy left me in the Engineering Building to go take care of something and after I finished talking with Mizz Aneeta, I was waiting. This random dude walks up.

"I saw you with that Cindy thing, didn't I?" he asked.

"Yea, that 'Cindy thing' is like my sister, but go ahead and talk."

"I'm sorry. My name's Rick. Rick Becker. He extended a hand.

I shook it. That much contact with another male, I'm okay with. "Kim Duncan."

"Are you one, you know, like Cindy and Nikki 'an them?"

"In reference to what?"

"They're ALL graduating. Cindy and Nikki are getting master's. None of 'ems been here more than two years."

"Well, then, no, not exactly. I just graduated from high school this year."

"You're eighteen?"

"No, sixteen."

"You ARE one..."

"I don't suppose you're single..."

"Nope. Married."

"Damn!" he spat. "I don't work up enough nerve to talk to girls very often, and..."

"And I'm married and frankly, Rick, you oughtta talk to more girls. Im sure you'll find somebody entertaining."

"Look, Kim, I'm an engineering student. I don't want to be entertained. I want to be liked and talked with and enjoyed and vice versa..."

"Do you go to the Greenhouse? That study group?"

"Yeah. Mostly guys..."

"And the girls?"

"I dunno."

"Oh, don't pull that 'awkward' crap, Rick. Ask one..."

"Well, some of them weren't, you know..."

"No, I don't know. Weren't what?"

"Exactly pretty..."

"Ah-hah! You're picky. Apparently I'm at the bottom of your range..." I smirked.

"Not really. You're really pretty cute."

"Thank you. Nice of you to say so. My husband thinks so too."

About that time Cindy showed back up. "Rick, you're not hitting on Kim, are you?"

Rick looked guilty. "I know how to pick 'em, don't I?"

"Yeah. You hit on me. You hit on Tina. You hit on Nikki. You hit on Susan. I'm surprised you didn't hit on Jason and complete the set..." Her eyes were twinkling while she was saying it.

"Jason?!? That's COLD, Cindy! I'm just tryin'..."

"Oh, Rick, relax. We all think you're a nice guy. I told you, ask Maddie..."

"Maddie's..."

"Our friend. Decent. Smart. Cute. But if you're lookin' for a roll in the hay..."

"Cindy ... I never..."

"You're a guy, Rick. You're automatically tainted by your gender."

I was smiling. Cindy's gutsier than I thought.

"Maddie," he said.

"Better hurry. She's going back to Louisiana at the end of the semester. If you're nice and you present yourself, she'll spend the summer thinking about you."