5. Go Your Own Way #8
She found people at Caltech who understood.
Not a community with a name or a meeting place, but a loose constellation of people who recognized each other.
Charlie watched the way they moved through the world, carefully but not apologetically, and she started to understand that what she'd been carrying since she was thirteen wasn't a deficiency.
It was just a part of the architecture that she hadn't been allowed to build until now.
She took herself apart. She studied the pieces before she put herself back together in a configuration that finally worked.
On a Thursday night in the fall of her junior year, Charlie drove to a bar called The Boulevard. She'd heard about it from someone in her study group, a careful mention delivered with the particular casualness of someone testing whether the information would be welcome.
The Boulevard was small, a neighborhood place with low lighting and a pool table and a bartender who looked up when she walked in and gave her a quick nod and a smile.
"Take a seat, babe. I'll be right with you," he said as he poured beer into pint glasses lined up along the side.
"Thanks." Charlie sat down at the bar and looked around.
She watched women in a back booth, laughing heartily at one woman who was telling a story animatedly with both her hands while the rest of them sat in twos with their arms around each other.
She scanned over to a group standing near the pool table, men laughing at the poor guy who couldn't knock any of the balls into a pocket to save his life.
But when he finally had one go in, another man walked up to him and kissed him right there, and then held hands with the man while they waited for the turn to come around again.
Then there was the group in the corner playing cards, shifty eyes and faces hiding behind their curved cards.
"Ya got any 3s?" A young man with a fedora on asked the opponent across from him. Charlie watched as the opponent's face morphed into a snide grin.
"Go fish, Judy."
"Dammit!" And the whole table erupted in laughter. Charlie joined in before she realized the sound of nearby laughter was coming from her.
"Sorry for the wait, honey," a voice said behind Charlie, the bartender having returned to collect her order. "What can I get you?"
"What's the best beer you have on tap?"
"The best? Ooo fancy fancy. Are you celebrating something, doll?" Charlie smiled.
"I think I am, actually."
"What are you celebrating?" Charlie smiled at the man.
"Being me," Charlie replied. The bartender winked at her.
"That's the best celebration of them all." Then he walked away, grabbed a pint glass from under the bar, placed it under the tap and filled it with a golden honey-colored liquid. When he topped it off, he brought it back to her. "First one's on the house."
"Oh hold on now, I couldn't possibly—"
"Bar rule," he interrupted. "When you come in for the first time, it's just what we do." He studied her before continuing. "Lemme guess. You're from.... Kentucky?" Charlie laughed.
"Indiana."
"Eh, close enough," the man said, waving his hand. "I'm sure it was difficult no matter where you came from. But know you're welcome here, always. And we want you here." Charlie stared up at the man, grateful for his words.
"Thank you."
"You betcha, honey. Don't be a stranger now, ya hear?"
"I won't," Charlie replied with a soft laugh. The bartender knocked twice on the bar, and then walked away. Then he turned back.
"What's your name, love?"
"My name? Charlie... it's Charlie."
"Charlie," he repeated, almost savoring the word in his mouth. "I'm Matt. It's a real pleasure to meet you."
"It's a pleasure to meet you, too, Matt."
"Hey, everyone!" Matt shouted out, and every head in the bar turned towards him. "Say 'hello' to Charlie! She's here for the first time."
And for the next few minutes, Charlie was busy meeting new people, shaking hands, and talking about being a student at Caltech, growing up in Indiana, and that she was gay. It was the first time she'd said it out loud to others without nerves, and the way her shoulders relaxed was everything.
Soon after, a woman sat down next to her. Older, maybe thirty, with long dark hair and a denim jacket. But Charlie noticed immediately that she had the kind of ease that comes from having stopped pretending a long time ago.
"So, this is really your first time, huh?" the woman asked. Not unkindly.
"I would say it's pretty obvious at this point, but what could have possibly given me away?" The woman laughed.
"Well, I'd have to say it might be because you're holding that beer like it owes you an explanation." Then it was Charlie's turn to laugh, and the sound surprised her. It was a real laugh, the kind she usually saved for Katie or Frank.
They ended up talking for over an hour. Not about labels or coming out.
About life. About what it feels like to walk into a room and recognize yourself in it for the first time.
The woman told Charlie she'd come out at nineteen, how she'd lost her mother but kept her brother, and how she'd built a life that was smaller than the one she'd planned but truer than the one she'd been living.
She said something that Charlie carried out of that bar and kept for the rest of her life.
"The hard part isn't figuring out who or what you are. The hard part is purposefully deciding you're allowed to be that person."
Charlie drove home that night with the windows down and the radio off.
The sky was clear and the air was crisp.
She felt like she'd just opened a door she'd been pressing her shoulder against for ten years.
On the other side was a room she already knew, one she'd stood in for those few weeks with Amy in the chemistry hallway.
The difference was, now, she was allowed to look around.
In Charlie's last year of undergrad, she enrolled in a graduate-level seminar on advanced propulsion concepts.
The class was small with only twelve students, mostly made up of graduates.
But Charlie felt good about participating with more advanced students, and the professor, Dr. Kessler, introduced her on the first day as "an undergraduate who earned her seat, so don't test her. " Charlie was a fan of him immediately.
On the first day of the seminar's course, a woman sitting two rows over caught Charlie's attention before the first lecture was over.
Dark hair pulled back in a ponytail with a pencil stuck through it, a leather jacket draped over the back of her chair, and a habit of muttering counterarguments under her breath while Dr. Kessler was still mid-sentence.
Charlie learned her name was Joss after she was called on during the lecture.
It was a name Charlie would not soon forget.
She didn't speak to Joss until the third week of the seminar when Dr. Kessler posed a problem to the class of a hypothetical deep-space engine burning through fuel faster than projected. The telemetry data said the combustion chamber pressure was nominal. The fuel flow readings said otherwise.
"Which do you trust?" Dr. Kessler prompted.
"The telemetry," Joss said from her seat, not bothering to raise her hand. "The pressure sensors are calibrated to a tighter tolerance than the flow meters. If the chamber reads nominal, the burn is stable. The flow discrepancy is instrument error."
"No it isn't," Charlie said.
Twelve heads turned, Joss's included.
"Well, well; we have a differing opinion," Dr. Kessler muttered, unable to contain his intrigue as to how this would play out. "Please do continue, Ms. Wickett. Explain your reasoning."
"It's just that flow meters don't lie," Charlie answered.
"If fuel is disappearing faster than the chamber pressure accounts for, you've got a leak somewhere between the turbopump and the injector plate.
The telemetry is reading what's happening inside the chamber.
It's not reading what's happening before the fuel gets there.
You could run that simulation a hundred times and the pressure would read clean every time.
But if you walked over to the engine and put your hand on the fuel line, you'd feel it. "
"You'd also lose your hand," Joss said.
"Gloves," Charlie replied, snapping the wrist of her own glove she was wearing without missing a beat.
The class laughed. Dr. Kessler looked like he'd been handed a gift.
"So your diagnostic method is... touching it?" Joss asked, turning fully in her seat now, one eyebrow raised. Charlie studied her expression, finding something there she couldn't quite read.
"My diagnostic method is not trusting a screen when I could trust the machine," she countered.
"That's not a method. That's a philosophy."
"Maybe. But my philosophy has never misdiagnosed a timing chain."
Joss stared at her for a beat before laughing. The laugh was sudden and real and filled the whole room as well as Charlie's chest. "A timing chain? We're talking about a deep-space propulsion system and you're referencing a timing chain?"
"An engine is an engine," Charlie said, shrugging her shoulders. "The math scales up. The principle doesn't change. If something's wrong, the machine will tell you before the data does. You just have to be close enough to hear it."
Joss studied her with an expression that hovered somewhere between amusement and genuine curiosity. "You're actually serious."
"I'm always serious about engines," Charlie deadpanned.
"Clearly," Joss said. And then she smiled, slow and deliberate, and that thing in Charlie's chest morphed into something she hadn't felt since Amy Callahan. Except this time, nobody flinched.