“Oh.” His dad had an embarrassed look in his deep-set eyes, behind his square glasses. “You want to go? This coming Tuesday?”
“Yes.”
“But … I mean, I have work. There’s a project, and I have to ace this one, or it’s going to look bad. And I know your mother would be upset if we just took you out of school like that. Plus, I mean, you can watch it on the computer. There’ll be a webcam feed or something. You know that these things are boring in person. It’s a lot of standing around, and they end up delaying it half the time. You won’t even see anything if you’re there. You’ll get a way better view via the web.” Laurence’s dad sounded as though he was trying to convince himself as much as his son.
Laurence nodded. There was no point in arguing, once his father had started piling on reasons. So Laurence said nothing, until he could safely back away. Then he went up to his room and looked at bus schedules.
A few days later, while his parents were still asleep, Laurence tiptoed downstairs and found his mom’s purse on the little side table near the front door. He opened the clasp as if a live animal could jump out. Every noise in the house sounded too loud: the coffeemaker heating up, and the refrigerator buzzing. Laurence found a leather wallet inside the purse and pulled out fifty bucks. He had never stolen before. He kept expecting police officers to burst in the front door and cuff him.
The second phase of Laurence’s plan involved going face-to-face with his mom right after he’d robbed her. He caught up with her when she’d just woken up, still bleary in her marigold robe, and told her there was a school field trip and he needed her to write a note saying it was okay for him to go. (He had already figured out a great universal truth, that people never asked for documentation of anything, as long as you asked them for documentation first.) Laurence’s mom pulled out a stubby ergonomic pen and scrawled a permission slip. Her manicure was peeling. Laurence said it might be an overnight trip, in which case he would call. She nodded, bright red curls bouncing.
Walking to the bus stop, Laurence had a nervous moment. He was going on a big trip on his own, nobody knew where he was, and he only had fifty dollars in his pocket, plus a fake Roman coin. What if someone jumped out from behind the Dumpsters by the strip mall and attacked Laurence? What if someone dragged him into their truck and drove him hundreds of miles before changing his name to Darryl and forcing him to live as their homeschooled son? Laurence had seen a TV movie about this.
But then Laurence remembered the wilderness weekends, and the fact that he’d found fresh water and edible roots, and even scared off this one chipmunk that had seemed intent on fighting him for the trail mix. He’d hated every second, but if he could survive that, then he could handle taking a bus into Cambridge and figuring out how to get to the launch site. He was Laurence of Ellenburg, and he was unflappable. Laurence had just figured out that “unflappable” did not have anything to do with whether people could mess up your clothing, and now he used that word as much as he could.
“I am unflappable,” Laurence told the bus driver. Who shrugged, as if he’d thought so too, once upon a time, until someone had flapped him.
Laurence had packed a bunch of supplies, but he’d only brought one book, a slender paperback about the last great interplanetary war. Laurence finished that book in an hour, and then he had nothing to do but stare out the window. The trees along the highway seemed to slow down as the bus passed alongside them, then sped up again. A kind of time dilation.
The bus arrived in Boston, and then Laurence had to find the T station. He walked into Chinatown, where there were people selling stuff on the street and restaurants with enormous fish tanks in their windows, as though the fish wanted to inspect potential customers before they would be allowed in. And then Laurence was crossing the water and the Museum of Science was gleaming in the morning sun, opening its steel-and-glass arms to him and brandishing its Planetarium.
It wasn’t until Laurence reached the MIT campus and he was standing in front of the Legal Sea Foods, trying to make sense of the map of coded buildings, that he realized he had no idea how to find where this rocket launch was happening.
Laurence had imagined he would arrive at MIT and it would look like a bigger version of Murchison Elementary School, with front steps and a bulletin board where people posted upcoming activities. Laurence couldn’t even get into the first couple buildings he tried. He did find a board where people had posted notices for lectures, and dating advice, and the Ig Nobel Awards. But no mention of how to watch the big launch.
Laurence ended up in Au Bon Pain, eating a corn muffin and feeling like a dope. If he could get on the internet, maybe he could figure out what to do next, but his parents wouldn’t let him have a phone yet, much less a laptop. The café was playing mournful oldies: Janet Jackson saying she got so lonely, Britney Spears confessing she did it again. He cooled each sip of hot chocolate with a long breath, while he tried to strategize.
Laurence’s book was gone. The one he’d been reading on the bus. He had put it on the table near his muffin, and now it was gone. No, wait — it was in the hands of a woman in her twenties, with long brown braids, a wide face, and a red sweater that was so fuzzy it practically had hair. She had callused hands and work boots. She was turning Laurence’s book over and over in her hands. “Sorry,” she said. “I remember this book. I read it like three times in high school. This is the one with the binary star system that goes to war with the AIs who live in the asteroid belt. Right?”
“Um, yeah,” Laurence said.
“Good choice.” Now she was checking out Laurence’s wrist. “Hey. That’s a two-second time machine, isn’t it?”
“Um, yeah,” Laurence said.
“Cool. I have one too.” She showed him. It looked about the same as Laurence’s, except it was a little smaller and it had a calculator. “It took me ages to figure out those diagrams online. It’s like a little test of engineering skill and moxie and stuff, and in the end you get a little device with a thousand uses. Mind if I sit down? I’m standing over you and it makes me feel like an authority figure.”
Laurence said that was okay. He was having a hard time contributing to this conversation. The woman sat in front of him and the remains of his muffin. Now that he was at eye level with her, she was sort of pretty. She had a cute nose and round chin. She reminded him of a Social Studies teacher he’d had a crush on last year.
“I’m Isobel,” said the woman. “I’m a rocket scientist.” It turned out she’d shown up for the big rocket launch, but it was delayed because of some last-minute problems and weather and stuff. “It’ll probably be in a few days. You know how these things go.”
“Oh.” Laurence looked into his hot-chocolate foam. So that was it. He wasn’t going to get to see anything. Somehow he’d let himself believe that if he saw a rocket blast off, something that had been right in front of him and was now free of our planet’s gravity, he would be set free, too. He could go back to school and it wouldn’t matter because he’d been connected to something that was in outer space.
Now he was just going to be the freak who ditched school for nothing. He looked at the cover of the paperback, which had a painting of a lumpy spaceship and a naked woman with eyes for breasts. He didn’t start to cry or anything, but he kind of wanted to. The paperback cover said: “THEY WENT TO THE ENDS OF THE UNIVERSE — TO STOP A GALACTIC DISASTER!”