White Sands, Red Menace by Ellen Klages

Author:Ellen Klages
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

SUN AND SHADOW

NO PLACE FOR TEARS

JANUARY 1947

A week into the new year, the trees were bare and empty, the attic was chilly, and Suze was in a bad mood. Outside, the wind blew snowflakes against the a window. Snow didn’t stay long in Alamogordo, just dusted the ground for a couple of hours.

She paced around the attic. She’d looked at all the slides in the View-Master Dad had given her for Christmas, read three comics, even finished the book she had to read for English—Junior Miss. It was about a fat teenage girl; she’d put it off as long as she could.

Dad was at a rocket meeting, and Mom was downstairs getting ready to go to the women’s club with Mrs. Parker. Suze thought it was dumb to get all dressed up on a Saturday—a hat and gloves and everything—for a lunch two blocks away. Dewey was with Owen, learning how to drive. In New Mexico, you only had to be fourteen to get a license. Suze punched a couch pillow. She wouldn’t be fourteen until August, and by then they’d be back in California. It wasn’t fair.

She picked up the physics book Dewey’d been reading. Maybe she’d find something she could use when her mother came home, start the kind of conversation that Mom sometimes had with Dewey.

Suze let the textbook fall open, put her finger on the middle of a page, then read: Since all motion is relative, we should expect that if the magnet in Oersted’s experiment were held fixed . . .

None of that made sense. The beginning must be easier. But by the bottom of the first page, she knew she was in over her head. Even if Mom had time to talk, Suze would never understand what she was saying. She threw the book at the end of the couch. It landed like a tent, pages bending. She didn’t care. She walked over to her worktable and fiddled with a stack of paper labels and folders she’d bought that morning, a new year’s resolution to get her junk more organized.

She printed THE WAR on a label, and frowned. The problem was, Dewey and her mother fit together. Even Suze could see that. Two science peas in a pod. It wasn’t really Dewey’s fault, but—

“We got it!” Her father’s voice boomed out of the intercom.

“What, Phil? You look like the cat that swallowed the canary.” That was Mom. She must have forgotten to turn the kitchen unit off again.

“Funding for the whole fifty launches, is all,” her father said. “Through the end of forty-eight. They were going to pull the plug this June, after number twenty-five. But the big boys at GE say Washington’s happy with the first seventeen, even with the duds. A hundred million dollars’ worth of happy.”

Suze went over to push the button and say, “Hey, the intercom’s on,” but when she was a few feet away she heard the sharp sound of something smacking down, hard, on the kitchen counter. She jumped back.

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