5. Go Your Own Way #10
In the spring of her first year of graduate school, a man named Steve Jobs came to Caltech to demo something called the Macintosh.
Charlie sat in the back of the auditorium and watched a man who believed that building things could change the world.
That engineering wasn't just function but highly relied on imagination as well.
That night, the man taught Charlie that the machine and the art were the same thing.
He stood on that stage and talked about computers like they were alive, like they mattered, like the act of making them was the closest a person could get to magic.
She didn't meet him. She was one face in a crowd of hundreds. But she walked out of that auditorium with something confirmed that she'd carried since the toaster and the Cutlass and the Continental A-65.
That the people who build things are the people who change the world. And she planned to be one of them.
Later that same year, Charlie built herself a coffee machine.
She'd grown to love the stuff since Caltech, a complete reversal from the face she'd made at Frank's table at thirteen.
But the machines in the graduate labs were always broken or producing something that tasted as though it had been filtered through a tailpipe.
So she took apart a Mr. Coffee she'd found at a yard sale, rebuilt the heating element, replaced the tubing, and reassembled it into something that brewed coffee strong enough to strip paint.
She loved it. Joss had loved it. Her friends in the department loved it.
It became a fixture of her apartment, the first thing anyone mentioned when they walked through the door.
Charlie treated it the way she treated all machines she'd fixed, a companion that had earned its place.
It was also the first piece of machinery that she made that her sister could not stand.
Katie visited the summer she turned seventeen, right before she would start her senior year of high school. She took the bus from Indianapolis to Los Angeles, a trip that took two days and that Charlie had tried to talk her out of no fewer than six times.
But Katie was determined, and stubborn, and not taking 'no' for an answer.
She arrived at Union Station in downtown LA with a backpack, a sunburn, and the same defiant set to her jaw that she'd had since the day she'd planted herself in the passenger seat of Frank's Cutlass and refused to budge.
Charlie couldn't contain herself when she caught sight of Katie walking through the brass doors of the art deco station.
"Kit-Kat!" Charlie yelled from her car, standing out of the driver's side door with one foot still inside.
Katie turned to the sound of Charlie's voice and broke into the biggest grin.
She ran to Charlie, who had just enough time to pull herself completely out of the car before Katie barreled into her.
Their embrace lasted long before Charlie pushed Katie out to arm's length.
"Jeez, you look like... like...!" Charlie said.
"Like?" Katie asked trepidatiously.
"When did you start looking like a Vogue model?
!" Charlie spluttered. She’d often dismissed all the accusations that she, herself, was undeniably gorgeous.
But now that she looked at her little sister, standing there looking like she was carved by Michelangelo himself, she began to understand the statement.
Katie had grown into a beautiful woman, inside and out.
Katie laughed and stuck out her tongue.
"Eh, it is what it is," Katie commented. "Most of the time I'm covered in dirt from the garden at Frank and Helen's house, so nobody notices."
"Well, I'm noticing," Charlie said. "You look incredible, Kit. You look so... mature. I can't believe you're the same person!" Katie beamed at her, her mega-watt smile almost blinding.
"Well, believe it. Flesh and blood standing before you!" At that, Katie struck a pose, causing Charlie to let out a full belly laugh.
It was so good to have Katie here.
It wasn't the first time Charlie had seen Katie since she left for Caltech, but it was the first time Katie was visiting her in California. Charlie couldn't wait to show Katie everything in the life she'd built, from the campus to the labs, even to the people she'd met.
But this was also the trip where she knew she needed to tell her, and she hadn't figured out just how yet.
Katie stayed for a week. They ate cheap takeout and walked through campus.
They drove to the beach and stayed up too late talking about everything and nothing.
Katie slept on Charlie's secondhand couch and drank coffee that was too strong from Charlie's MacGyver'd machine, grimacing at the first sip and then drinking two more cups because she refused to let a machine beat her.
Charlie got to know seventeen-year-old Katie, away from home and away from their parents.
She was different, still Katie, still sharp and watching, but growing into someone with her own edges and gravitas.
She asked Charlie about her work and actually followed the explanations.
She told Charlie about a book she'd read on indigenous cultures in the and how it made her think about the way communities sustain themselves through hardship.
Charlie looked at her sister across a table full of takeout containers and saw, for the first time, the woman Katie was becoming.
But Katie saw Charlie too, saw the differences in her posture, in the way she carried herself, in the ways she seemed to be able to breathe. Katie had been watching Charlie her entire life, so she noticed everything.
She noticed the way Charlie talked about a woman in her department, the way her voice changed register when she mentioned her name.
She noticed the small rainbow pin on the corkboard above Charlie's desk, half-hidden behind pictures of Charlie and what looked like some friends in a bar.
She noticed the way Charlie was relaxed here in a way she had never been in Shelbyville, as if some invisible weight had been set down and she'd finally straightened up to her full height.
One evening, Charlie mentioned Joss's name over dinner. Katie noticed the way the corners of Charlie's mouth softened when she said it, the way her voice picked up a warmth that Katie had never heard before.
"So, Joss, was it?" Katie asked. Charlie choked on her broccoli and cleared her throat, grabbing for her glass of water and gulping it down.
"Yeah?" Charlie managed once her airways cleared, her voice noticeably higher than normal. Katie nodded slowly, pulling her eyes away from her sister's gaze.
"She seems rad."
"Yeah," Charlie said, her voice gentle. "She is."
"Do you think I could meet her?" Katie asked.
Charlie went quiet. Then she smiled. "I think that's a great idea. In fact, I'd like that. And I think Joss would, too."
They had dinner together the next night, Charlie, Katie, and Joss, all around Charlie's small kitchen table with takeout and the Mr. Coffee brewing its industrial-strength product on the counter.
Katie watched the way Charlie looked at Joss across the table, seeing what full happiness looked like on her sister.