A Girl's Guide to Missiles by Karen Piper

Author:Karen Piper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

Dynamic Instability

Missile Guidebook:

Notice its faults, such as how often it fails to fire. Tell this to everyone. This will take away some of its power, since a missile does not want to be shamed.

Chapter Eighteen

Astral Projection

I would drive the narrow, windy roads of Montecito with the ocean in my driver’s-side window, whizzing through junglelike foliage that smelled of eucalyptus, down to the waterfront city of Santa Barbara. Someone said Michael Jackson kept giraffes in his yard in Montecito, but most of the movie stars’ houses were in well-guarded compounds with high walls and trees blocking the view, so it was hard to say. I knew that Oprah Winfrey lived next to campus. I drove by her house every day.

I was a poor person living in a rich man’s world.

In the coffee shops lining Santa Barbara’s State Street, people talked about “astral projection,” which means catapulting yourself into the stars to meet aliens. Since I still felt that edge of invisibility, I gleaned most of my information from eavesdropping. In fact, that was primarily how I learned to behave in each new world I encountered: eavesdropping and mimicry. I should have been a spy. If you sat still and listened, I found, you could learn most anything. At the State Street Bookstore, a wall was labeled “New Age Books” and dedicated to Zen, Wicca, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and astral projection. It seemed everyone wanted to get out of there, if only in their own minds. I could relate to that.

Westmont was not at all like Cal Baptist, though the doctrine was nearly the same. At Westmont, trust fund kids went sailing on weekends, carried their parents’ credit cards, and dined at the finest restaurants. The campus library lawn looked out over a lush, forested sea of celebrity estates, which took up whole blocks and ended abruptly at the Pacific Ocean. If not for the sea, it could have been the Amazon. Since the estates were walled in, gated, and overgrown, you never saw the celebrities inside. They came and went in cars with tinted windows. Westmont’s campus used to be one of these estates until a rich old lady dreamed of a Christian college among the celebrities.

At Westmont, students signed up for spring missions to Mexico to help the poor and fall semester trips to Europe for shopping. (I did both.) Tuition was as high as Harvard’s, though average SAT scores were not. I could afford to attend only with the combined help of a partial scholarship, my parents, and a twenty-hour-a-week secretarial job. That was the price for this piece of heaven.

As one of the “scholarship kids,” I was relegated to a particular niche with the foreigners and atheists, which suited me fine. The international students were working hard to assimilate, as I was. They were some of my first friends to whom I felt I really could relate. In the evenings, we would dance to David Byrne, U2, and R.E.M. at someone’s house-sitting gig. Unlike at Cal

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.