line?â
âWhat?â
âBecause I was. And I was a real looker back then.â
âOkay, but what did you do?â
âI would let these couple of curls dangle down below the bill of my hardhat, and your grandfather, a strapping young buck working the crane, would see me walk in every day. He could view the whole factory from up on his perch. He kept an eye on me for months before he had the guts to ask me out for lunch. But he did it. He finally asked me out.â
After a while, she explains that she used to check welds and rivets where the sections of the airplaneâs bodyâthe fuselage âcame together. It was her job to make sure that the welders didnât miss any spots and the riveters didnât screw up any rivets. Bill was the one moving those massive fuselage parts around the factory so folks could put them together. That was pretty much what they did for about forty years of their working lives. That and apparently flirt enough to make everyone in the Renton Boeing plant sick to their stomachs.
âI gotta get going now. Thanks.â
âNo problem. Thanks for the chat.â
Â
SUN BREAK
I START MY HIKE UP THE HILL TOWARD P AC H IGHWAY  ⦠in the sun.
Where the hell did that come from?
Halfway to the top, I stop and turn around. I look west, down into Puget Sound and over to Vashon Island. The view is an intense mix of colors. The dark blue water. Vashon Islandâs midnight green trees. And the whitest, puffy clouds. Winter in the Northwest. I donât know if itâs worth all the days of depressing rain and gray for the few unbelievable hours a month that look like this.
But it might be.
I get greedy. I think about what I might see from the top of the hill. My heart starts pumping hardâin a good way. I rotate myself toward Pac Highway. I huff and I puff, sucking in chunks of air, hiking up as fast as I can, thinking this might be the most perfect morning ever.
It is. The mountainâs out.
Mount Rainier.
Crystal clear.
The white snow popping the massive volcanoâs outline out of a bright blue sky.
This place is amazing.
Â
MAKING SURE IT DOESNâT SUCK
I GET TO L UISâS . He says his momâs got to work all weekend, so she wonât be interrupting.
I figure weâre mostly done writing the poem. Luis looks tired, but heâs way hyped, like he stayed up all night thinking about it. âWe donât have much time, Sam. We have to make sure this doesnât suck. We donât wanna look like idiots.â
âOkay.â
âWe canât just be rhyming to rhyme. We gotta be saying something .â
âOkay.â
So we talk more about what we have to say, what we want our classmates and Cassidy to understand about us. And we end up laughing our way through the day. By the time itâs over, weâve thrown out what we had and weâve got a whole new poem with a superhero theme.
I donât know if itâs great . But I think itâs pretty cool.
We huddle at the kitchen table and silently read what we have. Luis reads it out loud a couple more times. He seems happy with it.
âAre we done?â I ask.
Luis studies it. âHard to say.â
He gets up from the kitchen table and heads to his room with page in hand.
I follow.
He walks over to his closet door, opens it and disappears inside. Blankets and dirty clothes fly into the room. Thereâs a clunk of stuff being shifted. In a second, he walks out holding a black-gray machine. Itâs a huge old-fashioned typewriter. It looks like something from a hundred years ago.
âWhereâd you get that?â
âMy grandpa died and left it to my mom. She never uses it, so she gave it to me.â
âDo you use it?â
âNot much.â
Luis grabs a piece of paper from the closet and puts it in the typewriter. He cranks the knob and the paper scoots into place.
âYou got a laptop?â I
Rebecca Hamilton, Conner Kressley