“That’s great!” Lily exclaimed.
“It would’ve been better if I got them all. But I’ll go again. Maybe I can get a spare.”
Lily took a seat at the back of their lane to watch Kath try again. There was a pleasing rhythm to the way Kath moved, a smoothness to the arc her arm followed before she released the ball. When she slid on the fourth step, dropping low to the ground, her skirt rose up and exposed the hollows behind her knees. The sight was unexpectedly intimate, and Lily averted her eyes. The men who were bowling nearby seemed to smoke and talk more than they actually bowled, and Lily saw a couple of them eye the G.A.A. girls and grin at each other.
There was a crashing sound as Kath’s ball struck the last of the pins, and she let out a triumphant whoop before returning to Lily. “You see, it’s about momentum,” Kath said. “You don’t have to throw it down the lane. The momentum will carry it. You want to go again?”
Lily was acutely aware of the men in the next lane, and she drew Kath down on the bench beside her and whispered, “I think they’re watching.”
“Who?”
Lily turned her back on the men and said quietly, “Those men behind me. When you bowl, your skirt goes up.”
Kath looked startled. She glanced over at their classmates, watching as they slid toward the lane and extended their legs back. Each time a girl bowled, her skirt rose up, exposing a flash of knee or thigh, and with those men watching, the ordinary motion of their bodies somehow became indecent—as if the girls were showing off their limbs to onlookers.
Kath looked down at her hands, her cheeks turning a faint pink. “Don’t pay any attention to them,” she said, but she didn’t suggest picking up their bowling game again.
The girls from the G.A.A. down at the far end hadn’t noticed they had an audience. They were still getting their lesson from Miss Weiland, who was instructing them on the proper way to walk toward the lane. “The footwork is unhurried—you don’t need to run at the lane,” Lily heard her say. Her voice carried clearly in a break between the echoing, musical sounds of bowling balls crashing into pins. She watched Miss Weiland take her stance and begin her approach to the lane, her arm swinging back and releasing the ball, her right leg extending backward in that bowling lane curtsy. Miss Weiland was wearing trim-fitting khaki pants rather than a skirt, and Lily wondered if Miss Weiland had done that on purpose.
“Now, you see, you swing the ball back like a pendulum and simply let it go,” Miss Weiland was saying.
Miss Weiland’s bowling ball spun down the right side of the lane and then hooked toward the center, rolling right into the space between the center pin and the one to its right. The crack of collision echoed as the pins tumbled over. Lily could imagine it illustrated in a cartoon with the jagged-edged star of an explosion, and she immediately thought of rockets. “It’s all physics,” she said suddenly.
“What?” Kath said, puzzled.
“The bowling ball hitting the pins—it’s Newton’s third law. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It’s how rockets work.”
“I think you’ve lost me.”
“Sorry. Do you want me to explain?”
“Sure.”
Lily reached for her book bag and pulled out a notebook, and began to draw a diagram with a rocket and a stick figure of a human being. Kath, sitting beside her, leaned over to watch as she drew. “How do you know all this?” Kath asked.
“I’ve read about it,” Lily said, trying to ignore the brush of Kath’s knee against her leg. “And my aunt Judy has explained some of it to me.”
“I’d love to go on a rocket.”
“People can’t go on rockets. It’s too dangerous.”
“Isn’t that why it would be fun?”
Kath was close enough that Lily could feel the warmth from her body. “Not—not for me. I get sick when the cable car goes downhill too fast.”
“I’d definitely go.” Kath leaned back, her shoulder grazing Lily’s. “Can you imagine how exciting it would be to go to the moon or to Mars?”
“Arthur C. Clarke says it would take about two hundred and fifty days to reach Mars. As long as a rocket can reach escape velocity, it doesn’t take much more energy to keep flying all the way to Mars.”
“How long would it take to get to the moon?”
“Five days or less. If we left tomorrow, we could be there by Tuesday! But we don’t have the ability yet to launch a rocket that can escape Earth’s gravity. And it’s very dangerous.” Lily tapped her pencil against her notebook, her equations forgotten. “We’d have to shield the crew—if there was a crew—from radiation. It would be much safer to send automatic instruments.” She gestured excitedly with her pencil and said, “Robots!”