Practically Ever After

by Isabel Bandeira

  “Glamorous,” Natalie said dryly, giving me a look as if to say ‘I’ve heard this all before.’

  Aunt Drina leveled the same expression at me. “She says that, but wait how glamorous she feels when the AC cuts out during summer classes.” She flipped her hand in a wave at us and shook her head as she walked out. “Mop all your sweat up before you leave.”

  “Horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow,” I quoted at her.

  “Then wipe up the glow.” Came the response from the hallway.

  Natalie tossed me an oat bar from her dance bag and I rolled to standing with a groan, every muscle feeling like overcooked carrots. With a muffled noise of thanks, I alternated between my water bottle and the bar. Getting to the dance school by 5:30 in the morning didn’t leave a lot of time for breakfast. I looked up at the clock—6:20. Barely enough time to get to school and shower before my 6:50 early mod class.

  “I’ll take care of cleaning up,” Natalie said, as if she’d read my mind, “I don’t have class until 11. You know, the perks of college.” She slid back down to the ground, picking at a container full of berries she’d pulled from her bag and studying me. “Ever see My Best Friend’s Wedding?” she asked.

  I blinked at the weird change in subject, but answered anyway as I slipped off my foot undeez and wiped my neck with the towel from my dance bag. That was an old movie, but my mom and Aunt Drina loved it. Even Phoebe’s mom had mentioned it the other day. “Yeah, why?”

  “That was me and my best friend Drew.” She said, popping a handful of blueberries into her mouth. “I didn’t really realize I loved him until he proposed to this girl he met freshman year of college. They’re getting married next year, right after we all graduate.”

  “Ouch,” I said around a mouthful of oats.

  She shook her head and continued, as if she was telling someone else’s story instead of something really personal. “He was always there for me, you know? I was crushed when he introduced me to Ashley. They came home for winter break last year, this massive ring on her finger, and that’s when I realized what I’d lost. I think about him when I’m choreographing and dancing this piece.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, resisting the urge to either look up at the clock again or to hug her. Neither of us needed any more sweat.

  “Don’t be. I’m actually okay. I wouldn’t have met my awesome current boyfriend if that hadn’t happened. But dance made me feel better back then and I can still pull up those feelings when I dance now.” She looked sideways at me as I stepped out into the school hallway. “I bet you have something you can pull from, too.” One eyebrow arched up. “Leia, maybe?”

  “Too soon,” I practically choked on the words. I shouldered my bag and headed for the front door. “I’ll think of something.” Before Natalie could come up with any other ideas, I pushed out of the dance school lobby and into the fresh morning air.

  Chapter 32

  The prototype was lighter than I expected. I turned it gently in my hands, trying not to tangle the cables leading to the linkages at the back of the glove, and squinted to get a better look at the tiny servos that connected to each joint.

  “What do you think?” Oliver asked, dropping his elbows onto the work bench we had clustered around.

  “It’s pretty cool,” Alec said, pressing a button on the glove prototype he was holding, making its fingers curl and uncurl.

  “Definitely cool, but,” I started to say, but then stopped myself before I could run my mouth and give any unwanted advice. Alec and I were Oliver’s guests in the biorobotics lab, not fellow students or teachers.

  A huge grin broke across Oliver’s face. “But?” He gestured for me to go on. “I can tell you want to say something. Critiques are absolutely fine. I’m not made of sugar.”

  “Well,” I began, making the glove into a fist, then pinching, and then curling my own hand. I watched how the bones in my hand moved. “Why did you decide to make the four fingers only rotate around one axis and the thumb around another? Right now, the pinching motion looks more like a lobster claw than a hand.” I brought the glove closer to my face to look at the servos. “It looks like you should be able to add another axis.”

  “Good catch,” Oliver said, making an imaginary mark in the air as if he were giving me a point. “Honestly, I haven’t programmed that yet. Y’know. Punch cards and linear algebra and all that stuff.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling a little silly. Oliver had warned us that we were holding rough prototypes and not the final design.

  Alec snorted. “You’re kidding about punch cards, right? That’s technology from my grandmom’s time.”

  “Punch cards sound cooler than MathCad,” Oliver said with a shrug. “But yeah, I had to do one of those my freshman year when we learned about the history of programming because my professor wanted to make us suffer.” He took the glove from me and slipped his hand into it, laying the wires across his forearm. “But, really, I haven’t exactly figured that out yet. I worked out where to tap into on the forearm to make the impulse from the muscle natural for rotation around the x axis for the fingers and the y axis for the thumb, but…” He shrugged. “I have a long way to go still. It’s a little frustrating, because I’m not recreating the wheel. I’m definitely not the first person to do this.”

  I nodded. I knew how he felt. My little rehabilitation glove was nothing compared to the Iron Man-esque glove he was building, but imitating all the nuances of movement of the human body was hard. Another thought came to my mind as I watched him move the glove’s fingers.

  “You didn’t machine those linkages, did you?” They weren’t as detailed or swirly as mine, but they still had curves that I knew would be a pain to make if someone was cutting them from a bar of metal.

  “Nope, I decided that I wanted to go with additive manufacturing—I think you guys probably know it as metal 3-D printing. If you look at these…” He picked up two unattached linkages from another prototype and handed one to Alec and one to me. “It’s great because I can even change the density and porosity of the material within a single linkage. See how I added material where the stresses would be higher,” he pointed to a slightly thicker section of a linkage, “and how I actually went with a thinner, slightly porous structure in the other spots where I needed a little more flex and less weight?”

  Alec squinted at the linkage where Oliver was pointing. “Okay, now that’s cool.”

  I felt a grin creep across my face as his words sunk in, “Sort of like how bone naturally grows thicker where it sees stress… Someone’s law?” It had amazed me how the body had this way of adapting to stress and how it could just change to make itself stronger.

  Oliver’s face lit up. “Wolff’s law. Yes, something like that. Did your teacher cover that in class or something?”

  I shook my head, dropping my eyes to the glove self-consciously as I tried to figure out how to communicate the real reason why I knew that without sounding like a total nerd. “No, I went down an anatomy scientific paper wormhole once when I started pointe in dance class. I was seriously convinced that law was the reason why my pinky toes got wider after pointe than before and wanted to figure out how to perfectly pad my shoes to share the load better so it wouldn’t happen.”

  “And?” Oliver prodded.

  “I just quit pointe instead. I wasn’t into ballet, anyway, and it was definitely not worth the pain.” I snorted at the memory, then went back to twirling the metal phalange between my fingers. “But, seriously, this is cool. I didn’t think of doing that to give it more flex.”

  Oliver nodded. “Designing stuff for the human body has so many challenges, you need to be creative.”

  I couldn’t look away from the prototype—his printing solution gave me so many ideas. “But it has to be worth it. I love these challenges, and it has to be cool to know you can make a difference in someone’s life with something you designed.”

  “Tell me again why you’re not looking at programs like this?” Olive
r asked with a grin. “It sounds to me like biomedical or mechanical might be perfect for you.”

  “Because it’s not a part of her twenty-year plan,” Alec jumped in. “Grace is a little obsessed with being practical.”

  Oliver shook his head. “If I were practical, I would have stayed in Ireland for grad school. My university had an amazing program, but from the minute I heard about Dr. Aubrey’s work, I wanted to study under her. Practical would have meant I probably wouldn’t have gotten to do some of the really awesome research and design she’s challenged me with as my advisor.”

  “I’m not wired that way,” I said, shaking my head. “Everything needs to make sense. I can have fun and take risks after I know I have a stable career.”

  “Have fun now.” I looked over my shoulder to see Dr. Aubrey walking over to join us, a wry smile on her face. “Take it from this old woman, life loves sending you curve-balls. The second you plan something, I promise it will fall apart.” Before I could reply, she added, “And I’ve found that the most interesting things in life come when that happens.” She then glanced at Oliver’s tablet. “Have you been able to figure out the sensitivity issue yet?”

  “I didn’t almost break my fingers the last time I tried to use the glove,” Oliver said with a shrug, “so, progress?”

  “I think that might be a good acceptance criteria,” she said with a grin. “And, with that, I’m really curious to see what you three have been up to. Grace, how’s your project going?”

  Chapter 33

  My Physics teacher once told us astronauts didn’t really feel gravity slam into them upon reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Instead, their bodies just gradually got heavier and heavier as the heat shield burned bright orange around them. Like sitting inside a giant, barely controlled fireball tumbling towards the Earth while gravity tried to squeeze their insides to mush.

  Maybe I wasn’t as melodramatic as Em when it came to describing emotional things—this time, she was midway through a retelling of her “devastating” short plays rehearsal—but the second I saw Leia sitting at Phoebe’s kitchen table, I swear I felt that gravity slam into me. Even Em screeched to a stop mid-sentence the moment she stepped through the doorway behind me, throwing me a not-so-subtle worried look.

  Leia hadn’t bowed out like I thought she would. Of course she wouldn’t—she was the most dependable person in the world and knew that Phoebe’s mom needed all the help she could get. I tried not to let my steps falter and went deeper into Phoebe’s kitchen, propping myself up against a shelf full of cookbooks and ignoring Phoebe’s apologetic look.

  Phoebe’s mom was pacing in front of the sink, muttering to herself as she went through a checklist attached to a very familiar rose gold clipboard—my mom’s signature color. She tapped the list a few times with her pen before closing her eyes, taking a deep breath, and then looking up at us with a big smile.

  “Thank you all so much for coming. With all of our family up in Massachusetts and Petur’s family in Iceland, this is going to be a huge help for me and Phoebe.”

  “No problem, Mrs. Martins,” Alec said, dropping his backpack and just missing my feet in the process. “We’re lucky Em stole Grace’s planner during lunch and penciled this in, or else you’d be one person short.”

  I elbowed him and studiously ignored the amused look that ran across Leia’s face for a second, so faint that probably I was the only one able to see the tiny scrunching at the corner of her eyes or how the corners of her lips twitched upwards ever so slightly.

  “Where’s Trixie, anyway? Isn’t she home this week?” I asked.

  Phoebe maneuvered past us with a giant cooling rack full of cookies, looking like she’d just stepped off the set of Leave it to Beaver, hair in a high ponytail and wearing a fifties-style cherry print ruffled apron covered in flour.

  “Your mom has her and Petur busy tasting cakes and then they’re checking out some spots in town for pictures.” She gently nudged aside a pile of books on the kitchen island to make room for the rack. “Trix just texted that chocolate chip with mocha filling or funfetti with vanilla are neck-in-neck right now.”

  Mrs. Martins cringed at the word “funfetti,” but just pressed her lips together, consulted the clipboard, and said, “Okay, they’re not due back for another four hours, so I’m hoping we can get all of the favors, table decorations, and place cards done and put away by then. I picked a vintage tea time theme—” That explained Phoebe’s choice of outfit…“—and little imperfections are charming, so don’t feel like you need to be perfect, okay?” At our nods, she pointed to a pile of place cards set in two neat piles on the kitchen table next to two handwritten lists. “Grace and Leia, since you both have beautiful handwriting, can you write up the place cards? I thought it would give it a more personal, vintage-y touch than something off a printer.”

  Phoebe’s brows drew together as she looked at both me and Leia. “Mom, I don’t think—”

  Leia was the first to cut her off, “Sure, Mrs. Martins. No problem.”

  I nodded, shaking my head at Phoebe’s confused and worried look. “We can definitely do that.”

  “Great. The list is there, and I have an example I made,” Mrs. Martins waved over to the table and added, with a little laugh, “though you’ll probably have to redo it, too, because my writing definitely isn’t beautiful.” She then turned to Em and Alec. “Do you two mind making the centerpieces? They should be pretty easy to put together”

  “How about Alec decorates and I’ll be quality control? He’s the artistic one.” Em asked, poking at one of the china teapots lined up on the kitchen counter. “Unless you want the centerpieces I make to look like the stuff Monet painted when he started going blind.”

  “How about you sort the flowers and butterflies into piles to make things easier for Alec?” Phoebe shot back, pointing at a pile of fake flowers, fake butterflies, and mini umbrellas. “No artistic skill needed, Monet.” Part of me realized that Phoebe had taken over my usual problem-solving role, but since my brain was still trying to process the situation, I couldn’t even think of anything to add.

  “Aye-aye, boss-lady ma’am,” Em said with a jaunty salute.

  “And Phoebe and I will be working on decorating the chair and wishing well in the family room,” Mrs. Martins nodded at the half wall dividing the kitchen from the living room, where fake flowers were scattered all over the floor, along with a lacy parasol and a giant laundry basket half-wrapped with poster paper. “So just yell out if you need anything.”

  “Got it,” Alec said over his shoulder. He slipped behind Phoebe’s mom to plug in the glue gun and then dropped onto one of the island stools.

  “Great. Thank you all again,” Mrs. Martins said with a grin before dropping her clipboard on the counter and gesturing to Phoebe to follow her into the family room. “You kids are fantastic.”

  Leia tapped Phoebe’s arm before she could leave. “Um, I wanted to let you know I can only stay for about two hours because I’m meeting up with my friend Abby for dinner over in Philly, if that’s okay?” Leia had mentioned Abigail a few times before, a girl from her middle school who she’d had a crush on, before meeting me. The way Leia smiled and said “Abby” reminded me of the smile she used to just save for me. In that second, my stomach seized as if I’d eaten hot boulders. I couldn’t even hide the hurt I knew had to be all over my face. Awkward wasn’t even the right word for the whole situation. Gut-wrenching and awful were more like it.

  Phoebe glanced over at me, seemed to notice my expression, then shook her head the tiniest amount before turning her full attention to Leia and saying, “Of course it’s not a problem. I’m so thankful for any help you can give.”

  “Definitely. I just wish I’d planned better. Dinner in Philly on a Friday night wasn’t my smartest move. I panicked when I realized I’d be competing with commuters,” Leia said with a bright laugh.

  Before Leia could turn around and see my expression, I tried my best to paste on a detach
ed, friend smile. Em wandered over from the island, pretending to check out the list in my hands, and whispered in my ear, “I know I’m not taking sides, but, if that’s the competition, I bet one hundred percent that you’re prettier and smarter.”

  It was such an Em thing to say that, despite the ache that lingered in my chest, I had to resist the urge to laugh.

  “Thanks,” I whispered back, then, at her concerned, searching look, I added a nod to let her know I was okay. I was not jealous, I told myself. I didn’t have the right to be.

  Before anyone else could decide to join in the “pity Grace party,” I took a deep breath and headed over to the kitchen table. “So,” I said, sitting next to Leia and shifting my seat slightly to give us both a little bit of room. I stared down at my list, which was thankfully written out in Petur’s neat handwriting. “You came to help out?”

  “I keep my promises,” Leia said, her tone light but definitely clipped. She picked up one of the fancy fountain pens Mrs. Martins had left for us and bent over her first place card. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her worrying at her lip in the same way she always did before tackling a new task. It was one of the unconscious habits I had found incredibly cute when we’d first met.

  I answered her minor jab with a humming sound, then picked up my own pen and tried to focus on my list. At the same time, I realized I was close enough to smell Leia’s perfume and shampoo, and my annoyingly illogical heart clenched over the familiarity of it all. This was going to be a long afternoon.

  “Is that an accent or a dot?” Leia whispered to me, pointing at one of the names on the list in Mrs. Martins’ handwriting. Phoebe’s mom hadn’t been kidding about her writing, which was a far cry from the list I was using in Petur’s super clear, boxy handwriting.