Chapter Eleven Fran #3
The truth was that Fran had been “nerd candy” since high school.
It was her cross to bear as a good-looking girl majoring in science and engineering.
She was forever surrounded by hopelessly geeky guys, boys with wispy facial hair, boys who wore mom jeans, then, later, men who talked too much about Star Wars or still bought and displayed model trains.
Fran knew these boys only liked her because she was the sole female in their line of vision.
She was the one they invited to their study groups, the one who willingly spent her weekends at Popsicle stick bridge-building competitions, the one who was nice enough to talk to them as they spit slightly because of their retainers.
As Fran looked around the conference room at her colleagues, she felt like a queen bee swarmed by her writhing drones.
Their CFO and lead data scientist started the day with a talk on how they could grow their business.
After that Fran followed her schedule to a seminar on the future of the deep sea, then she attended a panel on clean energy.
In each of the rooms Fran was one of only a few women, and found herself constantly fielding offers of coffee, bottled water, help with her chair, or a plug-in for her laptop charger.
It was like being a visiting dignitary from the land of double X chromosomes, a rare and celebrated guest. The fact that Fran didn’t wear a wedding ring was certainly a factor.
Lunch was served in a grand ballroom, and while Fran waited for the speakers to begin, declining an offer of Diet Coke from a sweet guy wearing transition lenses, she texted RJ.
Hey how’s the home front? It was dinnertime back in Greenhead and Fran pictured the boys fresh from the bath, faces pink, eating chicken nuggets in their pajamas.
Three little gray dots appeared. I love u mom. This is London
Hi baby! Fran texted back. How was school?
Can u catch Pokémon there and trade them with me? It will give me candy to evolve them.
Fran laughed. You want me to spend my work trip in Hawaii playing Pokémon Go?
Yes, London replied, and sent a heart emoji
OK. I love you, buddy! Fran stashed her phone in her bag.
Even though she found the whole thing kind of creepy from a privacy perspective, Fran had downloaded the Pokémon Go app on her phone so that Hale could use it while London used RJ’s.
They were forever running around the park, holding their phones in front of them, and screaming about which imaginary creatures they had captured.
After four more panels and then a dinner in the same ballroom, Fran made her way out to the front of the conference center where a car would take her back to the hotel.
As she waited on a bench, she pulled out her phone and opened the game, logging in as Hale and immediately capturing a “Sandshrew” and a “Squirtle.” She sent London a Poké Ball gift, knowing he’d be excited when he woke up in the morning.
“Oh nice, you got that Sandshrew.” A voice startled her, and she looked up. A guy her age grinned and waved his own phone. He was skinny, with his long, black hair in a ponytail, and he wore shorts and a loose linen shirt.
“It’s for my kid—” Fran started to explain.
“Mm-hmm, right,” the guy teased. “He looks like he’s having fun.”
Fran laughed. “Are you part of the engineering conference?”
“I am. I’m Cal.”
“Fran.”
Cal worked for another contractor, his specializing in unmanned underwater vehicles.
His company did work with the Navy and with scientists at Woods Hole.
He was also staying at the Mauna Kea, and as they rode back to the hotel, they tried to count how many women had been at each of their panels.
There were women who worked in marketing, women who worked in HR, but Fran was a unicorn among the engineers, the ratio something like nine to one.
As their car pulled in front of the hotel Cal slid out and Fran noticed something fall from his pocket. She bent down and scooped it up from the footwell. It was a vape pen.
“Hey—”
“Oh shit.” Cal covered his mouth.
“Weed?” Fran asked, widening her eyes.
They spent the evening getting high on the beach and running around in the sand catching Pokémon, and it was the most fun Fran had had in months.
Cal was unabashedly geeky, obsessed with online role-player games, George R.
R. Martin, and Lord of the Rings. He had a tattoo of a dragon on his shoulder, and he confessed that for his last vacation he’d gone to Disneyland and visited the Star Wars park three days in a row.
“How much does that cost?” Fran asked, aghast.
“It’s like two hundred bucks a day.”
“So you spent six hundred dollars going to a theme park?”
“Oh no, with flights and hotel it was way more than that.” Cal laughed. “But that’s why we work, right? I’m single, so I don’t have to save for my kids to go to college, I don’t have to fly to some terrible small town to visit my in-laws at Christmas, I can just spend my money however I want.”
“Whoa.” Fran tried to imagine a world where she could blow that kind of cash purely for her own entertainment.
“Oh, don’t get jealous,” Cal teased.
“I am jealous! But I’m also mentally trying to decide what I’d do if I didn’t have to spend all my money on kids’ summer camp and orthodontics and speech therapy.”
“You could send yourself to the Harry Potter theme park,” Cal joked.
“Nope. Here’s what I’d do if I didn’t have kids: I would get a massage once a week, I would order takeout sushi every night, and I’d throw out every single pair of socks that had bad elastic and just buy all new ones.”
“Fran.” Cal looked at her in mock disappointment. “That is the most depressing thing I have ever heard. You’re going to use your newfound disposable income to buy socks.”
“Shit, oh my God, you’re right.”
“Dream bigger. Buy a toy. Like a motorcycle or a fast car.”
“I’m not a motorcycle person.”
“A yacht?” Cal suggested.
“I’m not a yacht person either.”
“Well, what kind of person are you?”
“Cal!” Fran yelled in exasperation.
“What?”
“You can’t go asking me deep questions when I’m stoned! I’ll go and say something weird and freak out my new friend!”
“Nah.” Cal bumped her knee with his own. “I like weird people.”
The light from the outdoor restaurant was playing on the water, music drifted from speakers hidden in the garden, and beautiful couples occasionally walked past along the beach, holding hands.
Cal was in the gift shop buying potato chips when a man in a polo and leather flip-flops came over and crouched down next to Fran in the sand.
“Hey, how’s it going?”
“Hi,” Fran replied, confused. Had they met at the conference or was he hotel staff?
“What are you up to?” His teeth were very white, and he looked like he had probably been in a fraternity.
“Just hanging out,” Fran replied slowly.
“My buddies and I are here for the golf tourney and we’ve been with the same foursome all day. We’re sick of talking to each other and we were wondering if you’d like to join us for a cocktail up at the bar, mix it up.”
Oh, Fran realized. Not a coworker.
“I’m actually just about to call it a night,” Fran said politely.
“Booooo. Don’t be lame. Come talk to us,” he insisted.
“I don’t think we like to talk about the same things,” Fran said. She saw Cal making his way down the path and wondered if he would think she knew this guy.
“Ha!” White Teeth barked, surprised. “We’re pretty good conversationalists. We’re not going to talk about golf.”
“No, I definitely don’t want to talk about golf.”
“Well, what do you and your friends talk about? Gossip? We can gossip.”
“We’re here for an engineering conference, so we were talking about drones,” Cal said, slipping into the conversation. He looked sort of heroic, but also like a skinny nerd with the munchies holding two giant bags of chips.
“Drones! You’re funny. Okay, if that’s what you’re into, the boys can talk about drones. You’re both welcome.” The guy was chewing a piece of gum and he had leaned in close enough that Fran could smell the mint on his breath.
“Nah.” Fran shook her head. “You guys couldn’t.
Because unless you already know about the recent seizure of an unmanned underwater vehicle in the South China Sea and what it means for US security, especially now that the Chinese can camouflage drones to look like marine life, adding propulsion units that don’t require oxygen, markedly increasing the amount of time they can remain submerged and undetected, you’re just not going to be able to keep up.
And we don’t want to spend our whole night explaining it to a bunch of guys. ” Fran stared the man down.
“Look, it’s fine if you don’t want to hang out.” The golfer got angrily to his feet. “You don’t need to be a bitch about it.”
As he marched away Fran grinned happily. “I hate guys like that.”
“But you could see why he was confused,” Cal offered. “Why would a woman possibly be sitting on the beach if not for the entertainment and stimulation of men?”
“Obviously. And if I was sitting at the bar? Forget it.”
“No, women only sit at bars alone if they want men to make sexual advances.”
“True, true,” Fran agreed. “And after dark. It’s like a werewolf thing. The sun goes down and women all turn into possible sex objects.”
“Werewolves are full moon,” Cal corrected. “Gremlins are after dark.”
“You really are a nerd,” Fran said affectionately.
As they walked back to the hotel with their potato chips, Fran decided that being mistaken for a sex worker was a universal part of the female experience, a rite of passage, as common as getting a period, breaking out from a bad eyebrow wax, or suffering from IBS but eating dairy anyway.
It made her glad London and Hale were boys.