Jumping off the Planet

FIRST CLASS

Our cabin attendant was named Mickey and his hair was so short, he was almost bald. He looked so shiny and clean he could have been a robot. He had one of those perpetual smiles that wouldn't quit, and he acted like he was genuinely glad to see us and he kept trying to make friends with me and Stinky and Weird as if he'd been waiting all his life for this moment. He was so sincere about it I had to hate him. I wouldn't give him a chance to hate me first.

Our cabin was up at the top of the car. This car was bigger than the one we'd caught at Terminus. It was ten stories high and each level was big enough to hold as many as ten cabins. The level we were on, there were only four cabins and they were all big. We had a wall of windows with drapes that were secured at both the top and the bottom, and a big overhead window too, so we could look straight up.

What was weird was the way everything looked. Even Weird said it was weird. Mickey just smiled and explained that this was because the inside of the car was built to rotate around its central axis, so that it could be spun like a top as we approached micro-gravity. Then the outer walls would become the floors, and all the furniture and appliances had to swivel; that's why they were built the way they were. He said they'd spin us up to one-third gee, and it would feel almost normal.

Most people think that space is all free fall, but it isn't really. Weird started to explain how it's really micro-gravity, he should know because he's not really from this planet anyway, but that made Mickey the attendant look at him impressed, and then Weird looked at Mickey surprised that someone had actually noticed him being smart. And then the two of them took turns explaining it to me and Stinky as if either of us actually cared.

Micro-gravity means the pull of gravity is so small it might as well be free fall, it's mostly irrelevant to whatever else is going on. Anyway, right now we were inside a horizontal pie-wedge; later on, as we went up, we would be inside a vertical pie-wedge. I pretended I didn't much care, but I was really wondering what it would be like to have windows in the floor. Mickey explained that there were automatic shutters that would close when they started spinning the car, so we wouldn't have those windows anymore. That was good. I was pretty much over my nervousness about how high we were, as long as I didn't have to look out any more windows, but I'd just as soon not have windows under my feet anywhere.

Mickey showed us where to stash our suitcases and how to unfold the beds and the chairs and how to tell the TV to turn on, all that stuff. He showed us how the bathroom worked too—it was mostly familiar, but the toilet and the sink were on swivels for when the cabin started spinning. The shower was a sealed box, kind of odd-shaped, and instead of an actual sprayer, it had vacuum hoses. Mickey said that the blue hose was for washing and the red one was for shaving.

"Shaving?"

In answer, Mickey just grinned and brushed his hand across the top of his shaven head. "If Douglas doesn't want to explain, there's a program you can watch on space-hygiene. We have the most exclusive cable channels of all." He grinned at his own joke, but I got the feeling he told it to everybody. "And we have a very extensive library."

There was a chime then, and Mickey said, "I've got a launch station to attend to. I'll be back later to sort out the paperwork on the change in your reservations." He bounced out, leaving us in a cabin that was bigger and more comfortable than our living room back home in El Paso.

The TV came to life automatically then. By now, all four of us could do the speech in unison. "Welcome aboard ... For your own safety ... etc., etc." The usual blather. "Our upstairs restaurant is now open and will remain open until thirty minutes before arrival at Geostationary. There are lounges and snack bars on levels three and seven. It's our pleasure to serve you and we hope you'll enjoy your journey with us."

"Dad?" Weird asked. "Can we go downstairs to the bottom lounge for departure? That's supposed to be the best view."

Stinky didn't want to leave his monkey behind, but Dad insisted and said he wouldn't be allowed to play with it if he fussed any more. "You'll have your toy all day—now it's our turn." Stinky didn't see the fairness of this, but he shut up and followed. We headed down the spiral staircase at the center of the car.

The downstairs lounge was full, but not crowded. The elevator held only a hundred and fifty people per trip, not counting attendants, so there was enough room at the windows for everybody. But the best views were on the sides near the cables. The car was just moving into launch position onto the cable track, so apparently we'd passed all our integrity checks.

Below us, the Earth was bathed in ghostly sunlight. The storm clouds shone so cold and white and bright that it was hard to believe how ferocious the winds must have been underneath them. I was glad we were well out of it. Someone said that the storm was likely to disrupt passenger traffic up the Line for as long as three days. Somebody else said that with all these storms, four in the last ten years, they should encase the bottom couple of miles of the cable so that the cars wouldn't be buffeted by the winds and that traffic wouldn't have to be affected. That sounded like a good idea to me, but when Weird started explaining how it could be done and real quickly, the whole idea got boring.

The last chime sounded, and the car started sliding upward. We hardly felt anything, but out the window the beanstalk started moving downward. This time the music was much more playful: Beethoven's Fourth Symphony, fourth movement. Another one of Dad's favorites. I smiled over at him and he smiled back at me in recognition. The symphony starts out with a joyful surge; then, possessed by its own enthusiasm, it weaves its melody into a powerful surge upward. It's one of Beethoven's happier works, and it sent us cheering up through the levels of One-Hour like a rocket.

Actually, it looked more like One-Hour was falling down the Line while we hung motionless in place. As we watched, it dropped away faster and faster until finally it disappeared into the distance. Within a short time the cables were zipping along again and we were truly alone in space—except we weren't. Long dead Ludwig had given us the perfect music for a journey he could not possibly have imagined, even in his most fevered days. We weren't just leaving One-Hour; we were leaving the Earth behind. Our next stop was (approximately) 22,300 miles above. 35,770 klicks. Compared to that, the distance from Terminus to One-Hour was insignificant.

There was a half-globe of the Earth built into the ceiling of the downstairs lounge. A glowing wire stuck straight out from the equator, representing the whole length of the Orbital Elevator. The wire was three and a half meters long—350 centimeters. Each centimeter represented a hundred miles. One-Hour was so close to the globe it couldn't really be represented in scale; it was just a button at the base of the Line. Geostationary was more than two meters out; 223 centimeters along the wire. The last 127 centimeters was there for balance. "Upline" they called it. There was a marble on the end representing Farpoint—the ballast asteroid tethered at the flyaway end of the cable. It takes a day to get to Geostationary; it takes another six hours to get to Farpoint.

What made the model so interesting was all the little lights creeping up and down the wire, representing all the separate elevator cars. There was even a red one to show where ours was on the beanstalk. We were still at the bottom. After waiting forever for it to move and hardly seeing any movement at all, I went back to the windows.

Now we were passing through the rings of lights again, but this time so fast that it was almost like they were dotted lines on the Intercontinental Expressway. We still felt motionless. It was the lights that were falling. They dropped down the cables into the glaring sea of clouds below. I'd seen pictures of it, just about everybody has, but it's a lot different when you're there yourself. You'd think it would get boring really fast, but it doesn't. The Earth is just too beautiful. And besides, up here, you can't hear Mom.

"Anyone hungry?" Dad asked.

I thought about it. We'd had breakfast on the train; we hadn't had time to eat at Terminus; the snacks on the elevator up to One-Hour hadn't been much, and we'd missed most of our stopover. We hadn't eaten since breakfast. Now that Dad asked ... "Yeah," I said, almost in unison with Weird and Stinky. So we all took the elevator up to the top.

That's right. The elevator car had an elevator in it. It was inside the spiral staircase, not very big; it only held about eight people, but that was okay—the whole place felt kind of cozy. Everything was designed to save as much space as possible.

The restaurant was on the very top of the elevator car and it had a glass roof, so you could look up and see the stars and the cables reaching up into the sky. It was eerie seeing stars above and daylight below, but you get used to it really fast and then it looks normal. One thing I thought was interesting was that there was a large round solar panel on a swivel above the car to keep us from looking directly at the sun; it was large enough so that the car stayed in its shadow the whole time, but it was also small enough that it worked kind of like an artificial solar eclipse and you could see the sun's corona glowing out around the edges. The waiter said that the elevator was the only place in the world where you could see a perpetual solar eclipse.

Also—Dad thought this was clever—there was a scale near the entrance, so you could weigh yourself. There was one downstairs too, next to the model of the Line. The higher we got, the less you weighed. Micro-gravity. So everybody who was worried about how much they weighed could stand on the scale and see how much they'd lost—except of course they hadn't really lost anything. Weird did fifteen minutes on the difference between weight and mass while we were waiting for our salads.

The food was pretty good. Better than we get back home. All the vegetables were fresh and crisp. Mickey the attendant stopped by our table to see how we were doing and to invite Weird and Stinky and me on a tour of the car later. When Dad remarked on how good the food was, Mickey told him that most of the veggies had come from the farms hanging just above One-Hour. There were more farms higher up. There were a whole bunch of farms out at Farpoint for seeding the farms of the interplanetary ships.

Mickey said once we reached micro-gravity, we'd be seeing large solar installations hanging off the Line; some would be factories, some would be power generators for local installations that needed to be energy self-sufficient—especially the maintenance stations. If there were ever an emergency, the engineers would be stranded unless they had an independent power supply. There were maintenance stations spaced regularly along the whole length of the Line. If for any reason an elevator car were in trouble, a high-speed maintenance pod could jet down to meet them from the next highest station and be there in less than five minutes. I wondered if a counter-balanced pod would be launched at the other end of the elevator. Probably. Everything else was balanced. Weird said that the cable was strong enough to handle little imbalances, but that the engineers were under orders to balance the load as rigorously as they could along the entire length.

It was okay, I didn't need to find out first-hand. I wanted the trip to be interesting—but not that interesting.

ELEVATOR MUSIC

The thing is, nothing happens on an elevator. It goes up. It comes down. You stand and watch the numbers and nobody talks to anybody. It's the same way on the space elevator, only the numbers are bigger and it takes longer to get to the top. As boring as an elevator ride is, try to imagine one that takes a whole day. It doesn't matter how good the food is or how big the view is—after you've eaten and after you've looked at the view, there's not a whole lot else to do.

Okay, so there's a casino on the bottom level and a game room for the kids and 5000 video and music and game channels and unlimited net access and library functions and ... so what? We have most of that stuff at home—everything except the casino, which I was too young for anyway. But if I didn't care about all those channels at home, why should I care about them here. It's all just bits and bytes and humming phosphors.

Oh, and there's a swimming pool. Actually, it's part of the water-storage system; the water is for ballast and weight-balancing, and it's needed for the production of food and oxygen all up and down the line, but on its way up it's for swimming too. "Have you ever wanted to go swimming in space?" They say the micro-gravity makes it very interesting. The higher you get, the weirder the water moves—except that after a while, it's almost like free fall and then they close the pool area, to keep people from drowning in globules of runaway H2O.

Naturally, Stinky wanted to go swimming. I thought about it, but not for very long. I didn't want to be around Stinky anymore. Or Dad. Or Doug. As much fun as swimming in space might be, going with them guaranteed that it wouldn't be much fun at all.

Of course, when I announced my decision, it started another fight. "Come on, Charles—" Dad said. "We need to do more things together."

"We already do lots of stuff together," I said. "We fight. We run away from each other. We throw tantrums. We blame Chigger for Stinky getting water down the wrong pipe. We pose for the cover of Dysfunctional Family Magazine ... "

Dad looked like he wanted to slug me. Good. It just proved my point. "I'm not going," I repeated. "Blame someone else this time."

"Let him be, Dad," Weird said. "It's not your fault if Chigger wants to be a sociopath. You can blame it on Mom." He said it deadpan.

Dad gave Weird an even dirtier look than the one he'd given me, but instead of arguing, he just sagged and gave in. "I'm tired of fighting," he said. "I don't care anymore. You kids are about as much fun as a visit to the proctologist. Come on, Bobby."

"Huh?" I looked to Weird. "What's a poctorologist?"

"It means you're a pain in the ass," Weird said, and followed after.

"You too—" I shouted, but he didn't hear me. Or didn't care.

I found a dark corner where I could be alone and curled up at one end of a couch, plugged into my music. With my eyes closed, with my headphones turned up, I could try again to climb all the way into the sound. Sometimes I almost made it. And sometimes I even got there. And sometimes—but not very often anymore—I got there and kept going so far into it I couldn't stand it, I had to get up and scream and dance—but ever since Mom and Dad had declared war it was harder and harder to get to the other side, because you can't dance in a battle zone. But even when I did get away from the house, it still didn't work, and if it wasn't the music that wasn't working, then it was me—so now I just wanted to be alone so I could go looking for the music again. Different music. Music that would take me there again.

There was a lot of stuff to listen to—most of it overrated. I clicked through the music, flipping from page to page without interest. As much as I loved all the music Dad had given me, Beethoven and Bach and Brahms and Mozart and Orff and Stravinsky and Mussorgsky and Shostakovich and Mahler and Wagner and all those other dead white Europeans—as much as I loved their music, I didn't want them anymore. That was Dad's music. Not mine. I wanted something that belonged to me, not him; something that I discovered myself.

There was this guy I'd found. Almost by accident. I'd been reading about the history of jazz, and there was this article about him and his influence, how he'd faded from memory and been rediscovered, again and again. The writer had said, "Listen to the music! Turn off the lights and just fall into it. And think about the time and place it came from. This guy Coltrane was so fucking subversive that afterward, nothing else was ever the same!"

I didn't know anything about historical jazz—which is nothing like the stuff they call jazz now—so I listened to something called A Love Supreme. And I hated it. I didn't get it at all. But I kept listening because I wanted to know what that guy meant by "so fucking subversive" that I kept listening and listening, even though all I really wanted to do was rip the headphones off and wash my head out. Except I couldn't—because I couldn't stand the thought of not knowing, so I kept playing it over and over and over. I tried reading a couple of the analytical essays, but they didn't help. They distracted. Knowing that the music wasn't about love for a woman, but love for God, was interesting—but it wasn't the music. And knowing that this part of the music was really Coltrane reciting a psalm through the saxophone was interesting—but that wasn't the music either.

So I'd turned it off and listened to something else—tried listening to something else. Except nothing else worked anymore. Everything sounded shallow.

And that's when I got it—

—not all of it, but enough.

Jazz isn't music. Jazz is what happens when the music disappears and all that's left is the sound and the emotion connected to it. Jazz is a scream or a rant or a sigh. Or whatever else is inside, trying to get out.

And when you listen to it like that, you don't have to understand it. All you have to do is get it. And in the middle of the night, with my headphones clamped to my head, in the middle of a scorching saxophone riff that had to be about anger and love and frustration and hurt all wrapped into one gritty scream of sound, I got it—that sound was about how somebody felt and right now it was about how I felt. And I got it.

And after that, whenever I wanted to get away from Mom or Dad, but especially whenever I wanted to get away from Mom and Dad, I went to the music and the music I went to was John Coltrane, and I'd listen with my hands holding the headphones tight to my ears until I heard the sound that was me, and then I knew I was all right. I wasn't alone. There was someone else who knew. Or who had known. And it was all right for a while. A little while, anyway.

If I had my way, I'd listen to music forever. But sooner or later, usually sooner, somebody wants something, and they're never polite about it. They never say, "Oh, I see Charles is listening to his music, I'll come back later." Instead, they always say, "If you're not doing anything ... " Excuse me? I am doing something. I'm listening to my music. But what they're really saying is, "What I want is so much more important than what you want that what you want is irrelevant." And usually, it comes out as "Chigger, would you take those damn headphones off and listen to me!!" I don't think I've ever gotten to the end of any music.

And this time, I didn't either—

This time it was a kid. A skinny kid in T-shirt and baggy over-shirt, shorts, and scabby knees. I had a weird feeling like someone was watching me and I opened my eyes and there he was, standing right in front of me, staring. My age maybe. But smaller. Brown hair, cut very short. Goofy smile. He tilted his head sideways with a funny sort of expression, but I couldn't hear what he was saying, and even though I didn't want to take off the headphones—I was listening to The Paris Concert—my concentration had already been broken, and wherever I had been I wasn't getting back there tonight, if ever, so I peeled the headphones off my ears and said, "What?"

"I said, 'What are you listening to?' " He had a soft girlish voice.

Nobody ever asked that before. Nobody ever cared enough. "Why do you want to know?"

"Because you had such a strange look on your face, I wanted to know what program you were running."

"I wasn't running a program. I was listening to music. Have you ever heard of John Coltrane?"

He scratched his head—some people do that when they think, probably because thinking makes their brain itch, but this kid actually went into a momentary trance—then he snapped out of it, frowning. He said, "One of the most influential jazz saxophonists of the nineteen-fifties. Died of liver cancer in 1967. Recorded with Miles Davis and McCoy Tyner and Thelonious Monk. The recordings he made for Impulse are generally regarded as his best, in particular—"

"What are you plugged into?" I interrupted.

"Nothing." He grinned.

"You've got all that in your head?"

He nodded and tapped the space above his right ear. "Built in."

I didn't say anything, I just sorta sucked in my cheeks. Augments are expensive. Whoever this kid was, he was worth a lot of money. Or his family was.

"Is he any good?"

"Who?"

"Coltrane."

"I thought you knew—"

"Not yet, but I will ... in a little bit." He scratched his head again.

"That won't work."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because it won't. You can't listen to Coltrane. Not like you listen to anybody else. That's why."

"How do you listen to Coltrane?"

I shook my head. "It can't be explained. You just gotta go out there where the music lives and live there with it."

He frowned, puckering up his mouth while he turned my words over in his head. It was a funny expression. I bet his grandma liked to pinch his cheek and say, "Look at this, isn't this such a cute little face, I could eat it up." And I bet he hated it too.

Abruptly, he finished with whatever he was thinking about. He said, "My name's J'mee, what's yours?"

"Chi—Charles."

"How far are you going? We're going to the moon."

"For a vacation?"

"Uh-uh. To live. What about you?"

"Um, we're supposed to be going to Geostationary, but ... we might go farther."

"The moon?"

I shrugged. "Dad was talking about a brightliner. I don't know if he was serious."

"Your Dad is like mine."

"Huh?"

"Daddy says the Earth is getting too dangerous."

"I don't think it's that bad."

"Where are you from?"

"El Paso. Where are you from?"

J'mee shrugged. "All over."

"Yeah, but where do you call 'home'?"

"The last place was Edmonton. Daddy does a lot of traveling for the company."

"What does your dad do?"

"He's a conductor."

"Really? So's mine!" I was suddenly interested. "What orchestra does your dad work with?"

"No. My dad's an electrical conductor. Or sometimes he says he's a 'power broker.' For the Line. Do you know that the Line generates electricity? A lot. It has something to do with poles and potentials and moving through the Earth's magnetic field and generating super-currents. Do you know what super-currents are?"

"Lightning."

"Yeah, that's the short explanation. But super-currents are part of what holds the Line up. You probably don't want to know this, most people don't, but the Line isn't strong enough to hold itself up. Earth's gravity is just a little too high, and the molecular bonds aren't strong enough to withstand the strain. But when you run a supercurrent through superconducting carbon-doped titanium-ceramic alloys you get a superbond, with the current doing most of the work. Daddy says the Line is made of lightning, that's how much power is flowing through it."

"Oh, yeah," I said. "I knew that." Sort of. Lightning, huh? I looked at the huge cables just outside the windows with new respect.

"Don't you think it's scary?" J'mee said.

I shrugged. Yes, it was scary. But I wasn't going to admit it. I looked around the lounge, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. This was the feeling that I'd had down below just before we started up, only worse. I wished J'mee would change the subject.

Instead, he nattered on: "Daddy says, if you could turn the current off, the whole thing would fall down—the Line would come apart in a million little explosions. Doesn't that make you feel gooshy inside? But don't worry. You can't turn the current off. It's automatic. The Line generates it because one end is sticking out in space and the other is connected to the Earth, and even if it weren't covered with windmills and solar skin, it would still generate electricity because of all the different potentials. And that electricity has to be drained off to keep the potentials unbalanced and keep the current flowing.

"That's Daddy's job. To keep the electricity flowing. He sells it to whoever will buy it. And there are lots of people who need it all over the world. He's real good at explaining it; he's got a whole VR program that lets you see exactly how it works. The peak power flow follows the day. In any particular place, the need for power starts just before sunrise and goes up and up all day long. On a hot day, when everybody has all their air conditioners going, the hours around noon are the most profitable, and then the power demand ebbs, peaking again at dinner time and sunset, and then ebbs away, dropping off after ten or eleven and hitting its lowest levels at three or four in the morning. But that's only if you look at one location. If you watch the way the daylight moves around the planet, so do the waves of power demand, and that's what Daddy does. He makes contracts to sell the power to fill in the peak demands all up and down the entire western hemisphere and even across the oceans to parts of Africa and Australia and a lot of the Pacific islands. The Line almost generates too much power. Sometimes Daddy has to give it away. Or even throw it away. The Line has got microwave beaming stations that can send the excess anywhere there's a receiver, but if there's no one who will pay for it, Daddy dumps the extra power into space or sometimes even into the ocean or the atmosphere—wherever someone needs to heat up the air or the water because they want to try to divert an ocean flow or a hurricane or something."

"They didn't do too well with Hurricane Charles," I said. I didn't mean it badly, but apparently J'mee took it that way. He made a face and turned away to look out the window. The hurricane was a vast white sweep below us.

Finally, J'mee said, "I don't know why they didn't stop the hurricane. I know they were going to try. Daddy was talking about beaming power at it all last week. I thought they were. We were in Terminus, and Daddy had meetings all day. He was awfully worried about something. I don't know what." He stared out the window again. "It's hard to believe we'll never go back."

"You're jumping off the planet too?"

"Yeah. You too?"

"Uh-huh," I admitted. It gave me a weird feeling just to say it aloud.

"Why're you going?" J'mee asked.

I shrugged. I really didn't want to talk about it. How could I explain it anyway? I can't even explain jazz. And explaining jazz is easy, compared to explaining life. Except maybe the same principle applies: If you have to have it explained to you, you don't understand it.

Weird says it's possible to tell your whole life story in thirty seconds. That's another one of the weird things he says. But I sort of understood what he meant. You have to leave out the details. The details aren't interesting. It's the interpretation. Like in music. The notes themselves don't mean anything—it's how you put them together—and how you play them.

When I was little, I used to pretend my life was a grand concert. The overture was Mom and Dad meeting. Two conflicting motifs. She was a singer and he was an arranger, so naturally they spent a lot of time together. Making beautiful music. That's enough to overwhelm anyone. They had so much fun making music they got confused, they thought they were in love. Decided to live happily ever after and create a glorious symphony of joy. Or something ...

First movement. Melody plus counter-melody equals harmony—a new theme, full of expectation. Whoops, a little too expectant. A pregnant diva? A tremulous minor chord. Does this portend disharmony or resolution? The diva stops singing and stands aside. For just a bit. But the movement has to resolve. Will it be joyous or tragic?

So they get married and have me. This is supposed to be good news. So the second movement opens with a triumphant fanfare. Bridge to a tableau of pastoral beauty. The diva returns to center stage and sings the second movement sweetly toward a promise of greater triumphs still to come. The conductor is glorious and everything sparkles in the afternoon. I like the second movement. I want to go home to it. But it's over too soon. It's just there to provide contrast for the horrors to follow.

Suddenly, the third movement. Unasked, the composer expands the wind section with the worst of all possible untuned wind instruments: a baby. Some people think there's beauty in cacophony, if you know how to do it right. This unanswers questions all over the stage. Mom and Dad get the cacophony part right. The diva starts shrieking invective at the conductor, claiming it's his fault the music isn't working. The conductor waggles his baton at the diva warningly; he tries to get the rest of the musicians to play. But suddenly he is dragged kicking and screaming out of the concert hall by the ushers while the diva throws music stands after him. She is hissed by the audience, who start throwing eggs and tomatoes.

Fourth movement. Everybody in the orchestra plays whatever they feel like. If no one listens, they play louder. The diva shrieks a monotonic babble, like something out of a minimalist opera, only not as melodic. The conductor sneaks back into the hall and kidnaps the wind section. The strings light torches, grab a rope, and go charging after.

And that's the nice way to explain it.

Mom had a career. So did Dad. Until they got married. Then Mom didn't have a career and Dad did. And Mom hated him for it. It was no secret. I heard her say it to him enough times, "You still have a career. Why don't you come home and wash a few stinky diapers in the toilet once in a while—then you'll see what I'm so angry about! I'm flushing my best years away! I thought we were going to record together—"

Whatever Dad did, it was wrong. Mom complained that he wasn't earning enough money to support a family, so he went out and worked harder. But when he worked harder, Mom whined that he wasn't spending enough time at home. But that wasn't it. Mom was unhappy because Dad was having a life, and she wasn't. And it never occurred to her that maybe Dad didn't want to spend too much time with her because she wasn't all that much fun anymore. But if she wasn't all that much fun for him, why did he assume she would be any more fun for us?

Weird tells me I've got it all bass-ackwards, that it was more Dad's fault than Mom's, because he kept promising to get her back in front of a microphone, and he never did. It was all broken promises to her. Just like all the broken promises to us. He said that we don't take Dad's promises seriously because we've never seen him keep any—but Mom always believed him because she always wanted to believe him. And that's why she's always so angry, because she's frustrated that no one around her keeps their word.

But she takes it out on me. Every time she sees me caught up in my music, she has to interrupt. She rants at me, "You're just like your father. He hides out in music too. It's a waste of time, Charles! And the sooner you learn that, the happier you'll be. It'll never make you a nickel."

So how am I supposed to take her side in that argument? Or any argument? I'd have to give up the only thing I have left.

Mom says that the music is my way of trying to get close to Dad. But she's wrong. The music isn't my way of getting close to Dad or anyone. It's my way of getting away from both of them and going somewhere else. Someplace where things always resolve in the final eight bars.

After the divorce, it was all I had left. Mom didn't have any money. And I guess, neither did Dad because he never sent us enough. So we couldn't take the piano with us. Mom had to sell it. I remember crying when the moving men came to take it away. I had a keyboard, but it wasn't the same. And Mom wouldn't let me continue my lessons anyway. She said it was time for me to get practical—but what she really meant was that it was time for Dad to get practical. And because he wasn't there, she was going to make sure I didn't grow up like him. Which was why I didn't want to go back. I was tired of her punishing me because she couldn't get her hands on Dad.

But I couldn't tell that to J'mee. Or anyone. Because I was embarrassed for both Mom and Dad. And myself for having them as parents.

It was easier to change the subject. "You want to go swimming?" I asked.

I don't know why I'd said that. Only after the words were out of my mouth did I realize what a mistake that would be. I hoped he'd say no.

"Okay—"

"Uh, let's not. I changed my mind."

"Uh-uh. You don't get to change your mind. Come on." J'mee grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. For a little guy, he was strong. Wiry. Or just determined. I dunno. He pulled me along and I went along reluctantly.

When we got to the pool, I realized I didn't have any swimming trunks. J'mee said not to worry about it and put his card into the slot of the machine. He punched up two disposable swimsuits and gave one to me. I got the feeling he was used to buying whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted to.

In the changing room, J'mee was a little shy, which was fine with me, because I don't like changing clothes in front of other people either. I followed J'mee into the bathroom; he went into one stall and I went into another. He must have been very shy about being so small and skinny. He came out still wearing his T-shirt and hugging his arms across his chest.

"You going swimming in your shirt?"

"Yeah. I always do."

I didn't think this was the truth, but everybody is weird in their own way. It's that geek business again—that thing Weird said once—everybody's a geek somehow. I'm a music geek. Weird's a techno-geek. Maybe J'mee was a shy-and-skinny-geek. Or something. I guess the way geeks get along with other geeks is that we pretend not to notice each other's particular geekiness. Or maybe we just don't care. I dunno.

The pool was kind of small and funny-shaped. But that's because it wasn't a pool as much as it was a tank with a door. It didn't have a deep end; it had a deep side and a shallow side. This had to do with the way the room was shaped and how the water would slosh sideways when the elevator car was spun for pseudo-gravity. But there were a bunch of people in it anyway, shouting and laughing, even Dad and Weird and Stinky. J'mee jumped right into the water in the deep side. I like to get in slowly and get used to it, but when J'mee jumped in, so did I. The water was warmer than I'd expected and I shouted with surprise.

"Hey, look who's here," Dad said. "Chigger decided to join us after all."

J'mee looked at me. "Chigger?"

I made a face. "It's a nickname. My grampa used to say I was no bigger than a chigger. And it stuck."

"I won't tell you my nickname," J'mee said, and ducked under water swimming off to the opposite end. I swam after.

We played tag for a while, trying to duck each other, until Weird and Stinky challenged us to a game of horse-and-rider. Stinky rode on Weird's shoulders. J'mee rode on mine, I thought it would be a fair match because Stinky was so small. We got knocked down a few times and so did they—until Stinky started crying (which was inevitable) because he got ducked once too often and got water up his nose, and I was sure Dad was going to yell at me, but instead Dad just came over and got Stinky and told him he had to take a break for a while. He complained about that until Dad told him he could be referee. Dad put him on the sidelines to watch, and I thought the game was over, but then Dad came back and put me on his shoulders and J'mee rode on Weird, and this time the game was a lot more ferocious, with Weird pushing at Dad and me pushing at J'mee—and a couple of times we all fell down together, laughing. And for a while there I even forgot that I was angry.

So, yeah, it wasn't all bad. Once in awhile it was almost nice. And later, when we got out, we stood around for a bit, just laughing and grinning. J'mee hugged his chest again and pretended to shiver even though we were standing under the tanning lamps. I just stretched my arms up and out and leaned as far back as I could, basking under the narrow-spectrum UV rays. J'mee started to do the same, then stopped when he saw me looking at him. "I'm gonna go get dressed," he said abruptly.

"Okay, me too."

We went back to the changing room. This time all the bathroom stalls were filled, so we had to change in front of each other—except that J'mee turned his back to me when he pulled down his shorts and then he pulled on his underwear real fast. And that's when I figured it out. "You don't have any brothers, do you?" I asked.

"Huh? No. How can you tell?"

I shrugged. "Just the way you change clothes. That's all. Lotsa guys are shy."

J'mee didn't answer. He turned away and pulled off his wet T-shirt, then quickly pulled his sweatshirt on.

"Do you have any hair yet?" I asked.

"Huh?"

"You know, down there."

"Uh—"

"Let's see," I said. "I'll show you mine." I yanked down my shorts and turned so he could see. I didn't have a lot of hair, but enough so I didn't look like a baby anymore. J'mee glanced, in spite of himself, probably just to see if I meant it—then he glanced away quickly, face reddening.

"It's okay," I said. "You can look—"

"No thanks," he said, sitting down to pull on his sandals.

"Come on," I teased. "It doesn't bite."

"No!" he shouted, a little too loudly. He grabbed his other shoe and ran out of the changing room like he was suddenly scared of me.

Okay. So that was that. I shrugged and pulled my underwear up and finished getting dressed. When I came out of the pool area, J'mee was gone, and I couldn't find him in any of the lounges.

So I went back to the cabin and listened to my music until Dad and Stinky and Weird came in and interrupted me. Again.