by Alex Gino
“Did you ever ask?” Grandpa Ray raised a bushy gray eyebrow along with the corner of his lips.
From the first nah-duh of the theme song, watching Rogue Space with Grandpa Ray was way more fun than watching it alone. Grandpa Ray started humming the tune, and Rick joined in, and they took turns shouting the zooms and deedles that coursed through the intro. Together they gave a great “BOOM!” and whispered “rogue spaaaaaaaaaace” until the words faded and a Garantulan face filled the screen.
The special effects were kind of bad, but the episode explained why the Bzorki left their home planet, which was something Rick had always wondered. When the words TO BE CONTINUED … lingered on the television screen, Rick asked whether they could start episode two.
“You know your dad’s going to be here soon to pick you up, right?”
“Already?” Rick exclaimed.
“I told you they were movie-length episodes.”
“Yeah, but it went by so fast!”
“You were expecting the time with your Grandpa Ray to drag.”
“No,” said Rick. “I mean …”
“It’s okay,” said Grandpa Ray. “You had every reason to be nervous. We haven’t really hung out before, just us. For all you knew, it could have been like spending two hours with your dad.”
Rick laughed.
Grandpa Ray went on. “So, what are you going to tell that friend of yours about watching Rogue Space with your Grandpa Ray? You know, the one who hates us Roguers?”
“He doesn’t hate us. He just doesn’t get it.”
“Well, are you going to say anything to him about it?”
“No.” Rick shrugged.
“Interesting,” said Grandpa Ray. “Is that how you usually handle conflicts with him?”
“We don’t really fight,” said Rick. It was true. That was one of the things Jeff said he liked about Rick.
“Sounds like you don’t give him anything to fight about,” Grandpa Ray pointed out.
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”
Rick wished he were the kind of person who asked questions in moments like this. But he wasn’t, and he didn’t. Instead he and Grandpa Ray dropped into silence. A comfortable silence, though, just sitting next to each other on the couch and thinking about everything and nothing at once.
Grandpa Ray jumped when his phone buzzed, and that made Rick jump too.
“Your dad’s downstairs.”
“Can we watch another Smithfield Special next week?”
“I sure hope so!” Grandpa Ray said as he gave Rick a hug. “And Rick?”
“Yeah?”
“Think carefully about who you spend time with. The right people? Well, they can bring you great joy.”
“And the wrong people bring sadness?”
Grandpa Ray shook his head. “Not even. Sometimes the right people bring sadness too. The wrong people are the ones who keep you from being yourself.”
“Uh, okay,” said Rick.
“We’ll talk next week.” And with that, Grandpa Ray held the door open for Rick, who skipped the elevator and jogged down the four flights of stairs in a twist of right turns and echoes.
“So, bud, are we going out for ice cream or for ice cream?” Dad asked when Rick got into the car.
“What?”
“You know … ice cream?” Dad smiled goofily and gave two thumbs-up. “Or ice cream?” He threw his head back in boredom and his thumbs down.
“Ice cream!” Rick gave a thumbs-up and a much less goofy smile. “Why didn’t you tell me he likes Rogue Space?”
“Oh, that’s right. He and your grandma used to watch it every week. Your aunt Ruby and I, we never got into it, but your grandpa is a real Roguer. So, what kind of ice cream are you getting? Chocolatey chocolate with a side of chocolate?”
“What else is there?”
“Oh gosh. There are all sorts of great flavors. Take rum raisin, for instance. For years, I thought I hated it. I mean, it just doesn’t sound like an ice cream flavor. But then I was thinking about it one day, and I realized: I like raisins. I like rum. I like ice cream. What’s the problem? I tried it, and now it’s one of my favorites.”
Dad sounded proud of his own wisdom, whatever it meant. He turned on the radio to a baseball game. Rick didn’t care about the game or the score, but it made for comforting background noise as he let his mind wander to what it would be like to grow up with parents who watched Rogue Space with him. Or to have a best friend who didn’t make fun of the show.
A few batters later, Dad pulled into a spot right in front of Robin’s Marvelous Cups & Cones. There were only eight people in line in front of them. Not bad for a Sunday afternoon. With three people serving up ice cream, the wait wouldn’t be long at all. Rick recognized the three of them from past visits, and they were all experts at scooping, stacking, and sprinkling.
Soon he was standing across the freezer from Mo, Rick’s all-time favorite server. A line of earrings ran up her left ear, and today her ponytail was black with blue highlights.
“The usual?” she asked.
“You know it!” said Rick, and Mo prepared a cup with two scoops of triple chocolate fudge and loaded the top with chocolate sprinkles. Dad ordered a cone with one scoop of rum raisin and one of espresso.
“So, you enjoying middle school so far?” Dad asked once they settled in at a small, round white table outside the shop.
“I guess.”
“How’s getting from one class to the next?” Dad took a lick of his cone.
“It’s okay.”
“Been making new friends?”
“A couple.”
“Middle school is a great time. It can also be a pain in the neck, but it’s a great time. You’re growing up, becoming more independent, turning into a real person, you know?”
“Sort of.”
“Do you ever use more than two words at a time?” Dad asked.
“Not really,” said Rick, which made Dad laugh his infectious, gigglesnort laugh, until Rick broke and laughed too, in his high hee-hee-heee.
Rick ate a big spoonful of ice cream, and his mind turned back to Grandpa Ray. Hanging out with him was way more comfortable than Rick had been expecting it to be. Easier than hanging out with Dad. And fun. Rick had never heard Grandpa Ray talk about Rogue Space before. Rick hadn’t heard him say that much about anything before. It was almost as if Grandpa Ray felt more comfortable with Rick than he expected too. Rick could barely wait for next Sunday.
School kept schooling along into a second week. It wasn’t terrible, but it also wasn’t terribly exciting. Rick could remember where all of his classes were, and he even knew which one to go to when without looking at the paper in his binder. He didn’t have any classes with Jeff, but they saw each other in the morning and at lunch, and Rick was getting to know a few kids in his homeroom who he shared a bunch of his classes with.
Thursday morning, Rick got dressed, ate breakfast, and took the bus to school, with its twists and turns that sent him flying if he wasn’t holding on tight. He laughed with Jeff in the schoolyard about what would happen if all of the teachers turned into dogs and came running out of the school and everyone played fetch and tug-the-stick all day long. And in homeroom, Ms. Medina let them do what they wanted quietly as long as they stayed in their seats and didn’t disrupt her taking attendance.
Rick pulled out a quarter and practiced one-handed spins, stopping the coin on its side with his fingertip. First with his right hand, to warm up, and then with his left.
“That’s really cool. How do you do it?” Melissa asked, surprising Rick. Melissa had smiled at him before, but this was the first time that she had spoken to him since the first day of school.
“You have to be really careful,” said Rick. “If you press too hard the coin falls over.”
“Can I try?”
“Sure.” Rick gave her his quarter. He showed her how to hold the coin between her thumb and her pointer finger,
with the edge a millimeter above her desk. Then with a twist of her fingers, she let go of the coin. It wobbled for a moment and then lay still.
“It’s easier to get them going with two hands,” said Rick, demonstrating by balancing the coin between his two pointer fingers, “but if you mess up, it could go shooting across the room.”
Melissa looked up at Ms. Medina, who was still scanning the class and marking off students in her attendance book. “That sounds like a bad idea.”
“No kidding.”
Melissa tried again, and this time, the coin didn’t even wobble. It just fell flat. Rick pulled out another coin, set it spinning on end, and then stopped it with the pad of his finger.
“How do you even do it?”
“Practice. And watch this.” But when Rick released his finger, the coin toppled over.
“Oh, that I can do!” Melissa stood the coin on its end with her finger and let go so that the coin fell. Rick smiled. Then she did it again. And again. “See? I’m an expert!”
Rick started to laugh, and Melissa joined in, each chuckle reminding the other how funny it was. Both laughed into their hands until Ms. Medina looked their way, and they stared at the ground to try to gain their composure.
That afternoon, Rick arrived in Mr. Vincent’s science class and opened to the green tab in his binder. Mr. Vincent was a thin white man with a thick, dark mustache and a receding hairline. He wore an orange button-down shirt with thin white stripes and an orange tie with white polka dots. Rick thought he couldn’t have looked more like a middle school science teacher if he’d tried. He seemed like the kind of guy who measured his raisin bran and milk in the morning, not because he was on a diet, but because he wanted to get the perfect ratio of crunch to liquid. Mr. Vincent sat at his desk in the front corner, his nose in a book, ignoring Rick and the other students filling the science classroom.
A long table with a stone black countertop and a sink at one end stretched across the front of the room. The walls of the classroom had been plastered with posters that said things like Think Like a Proton and Stay Positive and I Have to Make Bad Puns about Elements Because All the Good Ones Argon and one with a dozen roses that said Science and I Have Good CHEMISTRY. In the back hung a giant periodic table and in the corner of the room stood an emergency eyewash station.
The moment the bell rang, Mr. Vincent stood and addressed the class from behind the center of the table. He brought their attention to the whiteboard, where he had drawn a stick figure at one end and a simplistic drawing of a house at the other, complete with a chimney and a curl of smoke.
“So, let’s imagine Plato is tired after a long day of philosophizing and wants to go home to have dinner and see his wife.” Mr. Vincent drew a line between the stick figure and the house.
Kelly raised her hand but didn’t wait to be called on. “Plato never had a wife.”
“Excuse me?” Mr. Vincent capped his marker.
“Plato never had a wife,” Kelly repeated.
“And how do you know this?”
“There’s a line about it in a song my dad wrote.” Kelly stood and began to sing. “Plato never marrrrrr-ried, he kept all the thoughts he carrrrrr-ried, to his grave where he was burrrrrr-ied, in the ground.”
“Thank you. That will be quite enough singing for one day.”
Kelly sat down, but only after a bow.
“So here’s Plato, going to his home, with no wife in it.” Mr. Vincent redrew his marker line. “Though who’s making him dinner, I don’t know.”
“He can make his own dinner,” Kelly said, and some of the other girls said things like “he sure can” and “you tell him, girl!”
“I heard that Plato was gay,” said a boy in the back row. Several kids snickered.
A kid with a high-pitched voice joined in. “I heard all the ancient Greeks were gay.”
“So?” said a kid wearing a T-shirt with a Spider-Man logo on the pocket.
“Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with being gay. It’s just how some people are,” said a girl with a long braid running down her back.
“This is no talk for the classroom,” said Mr. Vincent.
He turned back to the whiteboard, but the girl with the long braid raised her hand and asked, “Wait, what’s no talk for the classroom? That Plato was gay, that some kids laughed, or that we said there was nothing wrong with being gay?”
Mr. Vincent looked flummoxed. “None of it. Look, I have a limited amount of hours to teach you a great number of things, and we simply don’t have time for this, or any other conversation that is not about science. If you want to talk about these things elsewhere, I encourage you to do so.”
“I know just the place!” said the girl with the braid. “Has anyone heard of the Rainbow Spectrum? It’s an after-school club for LGBTQIAP+ rights. I know about it because my sister helped start it a couple of years ago, when she was in eighth grade.”
Rick wondered what a meeting for gay kids was like and what they did together. Did they talk about how to be gay? Or how they knew if they were gay? And did you have to know whether you were gay or bisexual or whatever to go? Rick didn’t even know what all of the letters stood for.
The girl with the braid continued. “The first meeting of the year is on Tuesday after school, and I’m going. Anyone else want to come?”
“Do I?” exclaimed Kelly. “Yes, yes I do, just in case that wasn’t clear.”
The girl with the braid turned to her and smiled. “Great! I’m Leila, by the way.”
“Kelly.” They exchanged a firm handshake.
Mr. Vincent huffed. “Now, if everyone’s social calendar is firmed up, maybe we can get back to the physics involved in Plato reaching his home.”
Mr. Vincent wrote an equation on the board, and Rick copied it into his notebook along with the rest of the class: WORK = FORCE x DISTANCE.
The equation made it sound so easy. Work is just putting in some effort and getting somewhere. As if it didn’t matter where you were starting from or which direction you were headed.
Rick was still thinking about the Rainbow Spectrum that evening. Sometimes Rick wondered whether he was gay because he had never had a crush on a girl. But he had never had a crush on a boy either, so how could he be gay? If Diane were there, he would have asked her what she thought. Diane was always happy to share her opinion, and more often than not, it wasn’t terrible.
Instead, Rick opened his laptop. He typed into the internet search box how do you know if you’re gay? The results page was filled with quizzes, so Rick clicked on one. He gave up after the first question that asked him to think about the last five people he liked. He went back to the search box and typed in how do you know if you like someone? More quizzes, which he avoided, and a list that started off by assuming you already knew who it was you thought you liked. It seemed to Rick that if you knew who it was, you already liked them, and you were just trying to figure out how much.
He spun quarters to soothe his mind, but there were no answers in the dancing coins, and eventually, his stomach growled. He headed to the kitchen, where he found two boxes of macaroni and cheese on the counter next to a large green salad, and a pot of water heating on the stove.
Mom said that a watched pot never boils, but Rick knew that wasn’t true. If you could be patient, it was entrancing to watch the water heat up. It takes a long time for tiny bubbles to develop at the bottom, but then they start to rise into little bubble columns that multiply and grow faster and bigger, until trails of steam start to waft from the surface, and then suddenly—poof, the water is in a full boil. Today, the bubbles looked like tiny questions building into curiosity columns that tumbled into larger unknowns until the pot was a rolling mass of boiling unsteadiness.
Backpack-laden kids gathered outside Jung Middle School for the second Friday of the school year, with windbreakers, hats, and the occasional umbrella to shield them and their backpacks from the drizzle.
“Wanna come over tomorrow and watch Nohomework
sburg get destroyed?” Jeff asked Rick from under his dripping-wet jacket hood.
“Yeah!” said Rick from under his. “We’re at nine hundred ninety thousand citizens.” Just ten thousand from a major disaster. “It’s all gonna go down.”
“Godzilla cometh, Nohomeworksburg! No one will be safe!” Jeff raised a wet fist in the air, and Rick joined him, as they cheered on the upcoming destruction of the town they had spent the summer growing.
The security guard pushed open the school doors, and a wave of wet students flooded in. The hallway smelled faintly of cleaner, but Rick couldn’t tell what had been washed. Certainly not the floors, and most of the walls were covered in bulletin boards with posters saying things like How to Study and The Importance of Eating Breakfast.
Rick and Jeff joined the swell of students on the stairs, trudging upstream to the daily misery of middle school. Eighth graders had homeroom on the first floor, and seventh graders broke off on the second, but sixth graders had to hike another flight in soggy sneakers and jeans, where they filtered into chilly classrooms that the boiler room in the basement hadn’t yet reached for the day, like some kind of administration-sponsored hazing.
Sneaker squeaks and secret whispers echoed up and down the stairwell, drowning out Principal Baker’s declarations that “School has begun” and “It is time to quickly and quietly make your way to your homerooms.”
Rick filed into room 326, where students crowded in circles around desks. The football fans huddled in one corner talking about last weekend’s game, and a group by the window competed to see who could rap the most lyrics from the latest Angie T song.
Rick joined a couple of other kids around Ronnie’s desk. Ronnie was an amazing artist, and he could draw a face on just about anything. Kids liked to challenge him to draw anthropomorphic mailboxes and BMWs and, today, a plate of spaghetti. Rick knew it was mostly in the eyes—put a giant pair of surprised eyes on a meatball and suddenly it’s like the rest of the face is there too. But Rick also knew that he couldn’t draw nearly that well, and he liked watching the characters appear on the page.