Levi and I watch them walk away in the late afternoon sunlight. When they’re just little dots on the street, he tells me, “That was excellent practice for when we’ll have teenage daughters.”
My heart skips. He doesn’t mean together, idiot. “They’re young. Their frontal lobes are not fully developed yet.”
He takes the car keys out of his pocket and dangles them in front of my face. “Want to process the trauma of our twenty-three-year-olds role-playing on top of your Marie Curie mouse pad while I take you home?”
“They better be going to Kaylee’s place.”
“Why?”
“The walls between my apartment and Rocío’s are very thin.”
“You should invest in noise-canceling headphones.” He tugs me toward the car. “Order online while I drive.”
* * *
? ? ?
“IT JUST SEEMS far-fetched,” I say in the passenger seat. “First of all, Rocío’s in a relationship. Oh—I wonder if they’re poly?”
“Should we be discussing our RAs’ love lives?”
“I’d normally say no, but them bumping uglies on my desk automatically grants us a waiver.”
He contemplates it. “Fair.”
“And—those two are so different from each other.”
“You think that’s a problem?”
It might not be. They might produce well-rounded children who know how to apply raccoon-style eyeliner and glitter. “Okay, it’s not. But Rocío disliked Kaylee. She kept clamming up whenever Kaylee was around. She made an entire list of things she hated about her.”
Levi half smiles. “You sure about that?”
“Yeah. She told me that—” I recall what Levi told me less than one hour ago and shut my mouth. I forgot when Boris’s call sent me into emergency mode, but now it’s all back, swirling around the forefront of my brain, and with that my heart is heavy in my throat, a liquid warmth in the pit of my stomach, the sense of being on a precipice. I could be falling. I will be falling, fast and hard, if only I take one step forward and let myself—
A thought hits me. Smack in the head. Like a freight train.
I gasp. “I’ve got it.”
Levi pulls into my driveway. “What did you say?”
“I got it!”
“Got . . . what?”
“The helmet. BLINK. I know how to fix the compatibility issue—do you have paper? Why don’t you have paper in your stupid car?”
“It’s a rental—”
“My apartment! I have paper up there!” The car hasn’t fully stopped, but I jump out and run upstairs anyway. I unlock the door, hunt down a pen and notebook, and start scribbling as fast as my fingers will go, pitifully out of breath. A minute later I hear steps behind me and Levi closing the door I left open. Oops.
“I’m assuming you wanted me to follow you in, but if not—”
“Look.” I push the notebook under his nose. “We’re going to do this. Look at this.”
He blinks a few times. “Bee, I don’t think this is . . . English.”
I turn the notebook around. Shit, I wrote in German. “Okay—don’t look at this. Just listen to me. And don’t be scared. We’ve been having issues with the switchboard, right? We’ve been trying to fix it, but . . . what if we just bypass it?”
“But the different frequencies—”
“Right. That’s where I’m going to scare you.”
“Scare me?”
“Yes.” I make room on the table, and start sketching a diagram. “But don’t be scared.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Good. Stay unscared.”
“I— Why would I be scared?”
“Because of what I’m about to show you. Which you might find scary.” I tap the back of the pen on the top of my diagram. “Okay. We remove the switchboard.” I draw a cross on it. “We build separate circuits. And then we leverage the magnetothermal properties of each one—”
“—for speed.” Levi’s eyes are wide. “And if we have separate circuits—”
“—we can rely on the wireless remote.” I grin at him. “Will it work?”
He bites into his lower lip, staring at the diagram. “The wiring will be tricky. And isolating each circuit. But if we work around that . . .” He turns to me with a wide, breathless grin. “This could work. It could really work.”