WIRED

Julie had never seen anything like it. A bloody mess, as her engineer father would say. There was no apparent rhyme or reason to the mechanism as if it was deliberately constructed to confuse anyone with a sense of logic and precision. That was her initial impression, the reflexive “Holy shit” muttered before she could head it off. The team was within earshot and she didn’t need anything to undermine their tenuous confidence in her. They were nervous enough as it was. She rotated her head enough to see the group of men exchanging anxious expressions before they became aware of her scrutiny. They quashed any further signs of concern, adopting the neutral facades they’d all learned. Damn. Her words had already done some damage. She had to compartmentalize, just like them. Up until this point, she was just baggage, being toted along like some roadside emergency tool kit. Now, she was responsible for any forward progress. All eyes were on her. No pressure.

She drew an intentional deep belly breath, holding it for two heartbeats, before slowly releasing it through widened nostrils. That brought some calm, at least allowing her to think more clearly. If ever there was a time to return to the basics, it was now. Step one: assess the overall situation, which she had already. Step two: identify the key components. She searched, eyes probing the background first. It was too easy to focus on the foreground filled with shiny objects, ignoring critical information. Julie was the main character in this scene. The thought brought her back twelve years.

Julie had a small part in the middle school play. She’d studied her lines and knew them forward and backward. Her heart pounded in her tight chest. What if she missed her cue? What if she flubbed a line? What would her teacher in the wings think of her? What about her parents in the second row, her fellow performers, or her classmates? When the cue came, she froze, red-faced, pupils wide despite the blinding spotlight. After a paralyzing eternity, the lines came to her and she spoke them barely audible and without emotion, like they were surrendered at gunpoint. She retreated to the safety of the wings, an epic fail on display for all to see. It took years for her to process that everyone had long since forgotten that fleeting inconsequential episode, except her. She’d outgrown that insecure eleven-year-old a long time ago, burying her under layer upon layer of academic excellence. A fossilized curiosity that made a cute story for her parents to use to illustrate her tenacity and self-driven evolution.

Now, something had excavated that curiosity, restoring it for public display once more. Though her heart rate had slowed, she still was aware of the bounding pulse in her neck. Nature’s way of telling her that something was very wrong and she should escape to the safety of the wings. But no one would be there this time to pat her back, dry her tears, or save her with calm, gentle words of encouragement. She was it, the main act, and an epic fail this time would mean no one was going home anytime soon.

“How’s it going, Jules?” She’d expected that nudge, coated in a nervous question, from Joizee, the most outspoken of the group. Part of her mind had been waiting for it, and when it finally did arrive, she felt some comfort that it was out of the way. It freed up a few more neurons for the task at hand. One could never have enough neurons.

“It’s going,” she reported, like a parent’s reply to ‘Are we there yet?’ during a family road trip. Those guys were a fraternity, her brothers, and she was the little sister that tagged along. All except for Elvis and Christmas. They already had their nicknames by the time she joined them. Elvis was tall and handsome, equipped with the Elvis Presley sneer. Christmas was the elder of the group, a bear-of-a-man with a scraggly beard, always the cheerful optimist. Her default father figure in the field. Elvis, on the other hand, was anything but brotherly, and Julie had to swallow hard thinking about his gorgeous eyes. She blinked and shook that notion out of her mind. She had to focus.

“Start at the ending you want, and work backward,” Mom would say. How about, we all get home and celebrate our success over too many beers and shots? That was an ending she wanted. She pulled off her field gloves and stowed them in a pocket while her eyes sought out her destination. Her fingers danced in the air before her, tracing paths over, under, and across like an ancient mystic, lips moving slightly.

A gradual sense of loss and emptiness crept into her chest and her eyes started to water. That wasn’t good. She needed to see everything clearly, dispassionately. But there were so many things left assumed, yet never said. Had her mother known how much admiration Julie had for her, a woman who came from nothing and still gave to any cause and every lost soul she encountered? Did Dad know how grateful she was for his sacrifice of career advancement just to spend time with her on mundane things like how to pitch a softball, or how to build a tree house? Not in so many words, but they knew she loved them. It would have to be enough.

What about her crew, her ‘brothers’? Did they know how much their acceptance meant to her? How much she enjoyed their teasing her like any one of the fellas? Yeah, even with off-color jokes. They all had big mouths and bigger hearts. Warmth fought back her cold and empty until the corners of her mouth ticked upward. She couldn’t let them down. Not now. Not ever.

Julie glanced back at them, smiling, etching their images into her mind, then returned to her task, target identified. She withdrew the multi-tool and cut the red wire.