“Why?”
“My dad and I just got into town, but he had some stuff to do…” I shifted on the rock.
“Do you live around here? I haven’t seen you before.”
“No,” I said. “Well, not permanently. We spend a week or so every summer.”
“Oh!” Emery’s eyes brightened. “Do you belong to the Club, too?”
She must’ve thought we had a big vacation house on the water because who in the world—besides my dad—would have a summer home on the Bend?
“No.” I sat up straighter. “But my father is very important. Heworks for the government.”
“Really? Like a spy?”
“Umm…no.” I peered at her through my glasses. “You sure ask a lot of questions.”
“How else am I going to learn anything about you?”
“Why do you want to?”
Emery cocked her head as if the question didn’t make sense. “Because that’s how you make friends.”
A lump grew in my throat. “You want to be my friend?”
“Of course!”
Emery plopped herself next to me on the rock. I froze, and—for once in my life—all thoughts flew out of my head. There was no room for anything but her. She had to be the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, and she smelled like cotton candy. For a short, happy moment, I forgot why I was alone on the rock in the first place or that I was supposed to be trying to make her go away.
I don’t want her to go away.
“So…” Emery settled herself beside me and smoothed her dress. “Your dad works for the government, but he’s not a spy.”
“He’s a physicist. That’s what I’m going to be too.”
“What does a physi…physicist do?”
She said it with a bunch ofz’s.Fizzizzist.
“Only the most important research in the world. We study why and how the universe is the way it is.” I tilted my chin. “It’s very complicated. You wouldn’t understand it.”
That was my usual thing: to make the other person feel stupid so I could feel better about being different. So I could pretend I didn’t care if they liked me or not.
Emery wasn’t buying it.
She gave me a haughty look. “Is that so?”
“Yep. Like Niels Bohr says, ‘Those who are not shocked by quantum theory cannot possibly understand it.’”
“Who the heck is Niels Bohr?”
“He’s one of the most famous physicists in history. He won the Nobel Prize for his work applying Max Planck’s quantum theories to visualize the world’s first atomic structure.”
Emery frowned. “How old are you?”
“Ten.”
“I’m ten too, but you don’t talk like me.”
