5. Go Your Own Way #3
When the heroes were awarded their medals and the music swelled, the credits began to roll and the house lights came up. But Charlie didn't move, and neither did Frank.
The other families gathered their things around them, kids chattering, parents stretching. Helen reached over and tapped Frank's knee. He didn't respond. Katie poked Charlie in the ribs.
"Charlie? Come on. It's over."
"Yeah..." Charlie said, shaking her head slightly. "Yeah, okay."
Helen poked Frank harder. "Frank. The movie is over."
Frank blinked. "What? Oh. Right." He turned to Helen as though he'd just been woken from a dream. Helen shook her head and glanced at Katie.
"We've definitely lost them," Helen said. Katie giggled.
The world came back into focus as they all rose from their seats. When back in the lobby, Katie looked over at Charlie and her face must have looked different, because Katie tilted her head and studied her with the particular focus she reserved for things she intended to remember.
"You okay?" Katie asked, not because Charlie looked upset but because she looked changed, and Katie could tell the difference.
"Yeah," she said, and then she smiled. "I'm good, Kit-Kat. Really good." The smile was real and enormous. Katie grinned back, because Charlie's joy had always been contagious. And it was most especially contagious to Katie.
"I don't know about you," Frank said as they walked out of the cinema and into the bright May sun. "But those ships—"
"The ships!" Charlie exclaimed.
"Incredible—!"
"Something out of my wildest dreams—!"
"How did they even come up with—!"
"Oh, goodness," Helen said as she watched both Frank and Charlie get lost in their clipped shouting match about the ships.
"And they're still going." Katie giggled beside her as Frank and Charlie talked with their hands, making motions that looked like fighter jets banking through warfare and explosions cascading across a wide area.
"I think I'm going to have to be the one to drive us home," Helen confessed.
"I think that's a really good idea, Mrs. Beckman," Katie agreed, smiling up at her.
And Mrs. Beckman did drive home, because Charlie and Frank talked for the entire thirty-two miles back to Shelbyville.
Frank listened to Charlie and Charlie listened to Frank, especially when he explained details she hadn't noticed in the movie that were direct copycats of propulsion figures in real life.
Katie fell asleep in the front seat before they hit the county line.
Seated in the back, Charlie and Frank's conversation was still going when Helen pulled into the Beckmans' driveway.
Once Mrs. Beckman had parked, turned off the engine, and stirred Katie so she could get her out of the car, they all exited and stood together outside, looking up at the sky.
"You know who you sound like right now?" Frank asked, turning to Charlie.
"Who?"
"Me. Forty years ago," Frank said. "It was the first time I saw a Dauntless on the flight deck." Charlie beamed at him. He laughed. "That's no small feeling, kiddo."
Charlie sat with that, letting the feeling that there was some part of her that was just like Frank fill her with warmth.
She looked up and saw that the stars were just beginning to show through the blue-black of early evening, faint and impossibly far away. She stared at them as if she were seeing them for the first time. Before today they'd been lights. Now they were plans.
Katie walked forward and stood next to Charlie. Blinking up at the stars, popcorn butter still on her chin, Katie studied Charlie's face in the porch light. Her sister's face was quiet and serious in a way that told Katie she understood what had just happened.
Katie didn't say maybe and she didn't laugh. She reached out for Charlie's hand and grabbed it, holding her pinky the tightest. Charlie looked down at Katie and smiled at her sister's sleepy face, then returned her gaze to the sky.
"I'm going to build those," she said.
She meant the ships. The machines that moved through nothing and worked anyway. The impossible things that somebody had to design and somebody had to build and somebody had to understand from the exhaust port to the hull. She wasn't just dreaming. She was deciding.
"I know," Katie said. "Just make sure you take me with you when you do." And the way she said it, quiet and certain and without a shred of doubt, became the most important statement anyone had ever said to Charlie Wickett, with one condition she'd never forget.
Charlie smiled back at her little sister, a real smile, the biggest one, the kind she saved for Katie and nobody else.
She reached out and ruffled Katie's hair, causing Katie to swat sleepily at Charlie's hand and duck away.
When Katie made contact, Charlie grabbed her and pulled her into a hug.
She held on for a long time, her arms tight, her chin on top of Katie's head, holding on when you've just decided you will never, ever let go.
Behind them, Frank wrapped his arm around Helen, and she leaned her head on his shoulder. Neither of them said a word.
Katie pushed against Charlie as they parted. "Why'd you have to get all sappy?"
Charlie laughed. "Come on, Kit-Kat," she said, pulling Katie towards the kitchen door. "I'm sure Mrs. Beckman needs our help wrangling up dinner."
"You bet I do." Helen replied, following Katie as she broke away from Charlie into the house. "We're having meatloaf!"
"Yes!" Katie said, walking through the door.
Frank gazed at Charlie and gave her a wink. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and led her towards the house.
And the two of them walked through the side door together, the stars still burning behind them in the Indiana sky.
Junior year of high school, Charlie ran out of science classes.
Shelbyville High didn't have anything left to teach her, so she started taking the bus to Indianapolis on Saturdays to use the university library, reading college-level textbooks on materials science and thermodynamics while other kids her age went to football games and house parties.
When the Apple II arrived at school on a metal cart, one beige box that the science teacher guarded like a museum piece, Charlie was the first student to touch it.
She learned BASIC in a week and wrote a program that calculated orbital trajectories because of Star Wars, because she needed to know how the Millennium Falcon actually worked.
Then she took the computer apart. Mr. Hendricks nearly passed out.
She had it back together and running better by the end of the period, and that was the afternoon she understood what she was.
Not just a smart girl. Not a pretty girl.
Charlie was an engineer.
But that didn't make sense to the general population of Shelbyville. The guidance counselor at school suggested nursing.
"Nursing?" Charlie questioned.
"It's a reputable career, Ms. Wickett."
"I'm aware of that Mr. Draper. One of the most incredible people I know was a nurse in World War II," Charlie deadpanned.
"Well then why wouldn't you want to be a nurse?"
"It's not me."
Mr. Draper didn’t suggest a career for Charlie again after that.
Diane suggested teaching.
"I can't be a teacher, Mom," Charlie had explained one evening after Diane brought it up again.
"Why not, Charlotte? It's a wonderful career for a woman! At least, for women who want to work."
"I do want to work."
"Then become a teacher! It would look so good to an up-and-coming young man, seeing you teaching young children, dressing in outfits fit for showcasing your 'assets.'" Diane raised her eyebrows suggestively. Charlie stared directly at Diane.
"The last thing I want is a young man admiring me for my 'assets' instead of more important things."
"Oh for heaven's sake, Charlie. Such as what?" Diane asked, exasperated.
"Such as my brain, Mom."
"Oh honey," Diane said sweetly. "A young man will only notice that when he's ready." Charlie sighed.
Ed ended up suggesting nothing, which meant he hadn't thought about Charlie's future beyond the assumption that she'd get married to a well-to-do man that would take care of her and not require her to work.
"Why bother?" Ed had asked after Charlie talked about maybe finding work at the airstrip.
"For experience," Charlie explained. "To increase my skills, work on planes aside from Mr. Beckman's Cub. See if I could make this a real career." Katie nudged her with her shoulder at that moment, and Charlie looked over to smile at her sister.
"You don't need a career. Only a husband. Work on that skill. It's more important for your future." Ed hadn't even looked up from his newspaper when he said this. Which made it easier for Charlie to get away with the look of disgust that crossed her face at the thought.
At the end of the day, the problem was that Shelbyville saw the pretty girl first, and couldn't find a way to look past it.
Charlie knew what she looked like. She'd known since she was old enough to catch boys staring at her in class, watching her mouth move instead of listening to her answers.
She was five-foot-ten with honey-gold hair that fell in natural waves with the kind of looks that made people forget she'd been talking.
So Charlie started dressing down around fifteen, wearing baggy flannels that swallowed her frame and hid parts of her she wanted to keep for herself.
Charlie didn't dislike her looks or her body, but with what she wanted to do with her life, it didn't exactly help.
The harder she tried to subdue it in order to be taken seriously, the more of a game it seemed for others to pursue her.
But hiding wasn't only about staring. She'd learned it at thirteen when it had nothing to do with being looked at too much and everything to do with being seen just once.
A girl. Amy Callahan.