Free Learning to Swear in America by Katie Kennedy

in the rearview mirror and threw the car into reverse, then stomped on the gas and the engine roared and the bodyclacked and clattered. He glanced behind them, expecting to see a dozen auto parts tracing their path through the park to the roadway.
    She rested her left wrist on the wheel and extended her right hand.
    “I’m Dovie Collum.”
    “Yuri Strelnikov. Is very nice to meet you. Um, again.” Her hand was soft and warm.
    “Nice to meet you again, too, Yuri Strelnikov. You’re Russian?”
    He nodded and wished she’d look back at the road.
    “What are you doing in Pasadena? Besides pouring coffee and jumping off bridges.”
    She had bright green glitter around her eyes. It was hard not to stare at it.
    “Um, I’m here with NASA’s Near Earth Object Program, at JPL.”
    “Oh, the meteor!”
    “Asteroid.”
    “You’re a scientist, huh?” She thought about that for a moment and looked up through the windshield, as though she could see the rock coming. “You’re here to save the world.”
    He didn’t say anything, just watched the pink feathers hanging from her mirror sway wildly as she cut the angle off a turn and clunked over the curb.
    “How old are you, anyway?” she asked, peering at him.
    “Seventeen.”
    “Huh. And you’re a science guy? Really?”
    “Um, yes.”
    He was silent for a moment, tensing as he saw her flip her turn signal on, waiting for the next challenge to the axle, then realized he should show an interest in her.
    “And yourself?”
    “Sixteen, high school student. Not a science guy.” She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “It’s nine days till summer break. I was going to apply for a job at the video store, but if California’s going splat by the time school starts up again, I should probably spend the summer doing something else. So.” She looked at him. “What do you think?”
    They rocked up and slammed down from the curb. The crystals hanging from her key ring clinked softly.
    “Pardon?”
    “Should I get a summer job?”
    He looked at her for a moment. She was what they were working to save. This girl, with flecks of paint on her knuckles and the troughs around her fingernails, and all the Dovie Collums in California. While he was printing flight schedules and scheming to get home, while he was sitting on a bridge, thinking about jumping. He felt a stab of shame. She had no chance to help shape the work that would guide the rockets. How helpless did she feel? How out of control?
    “Yes,” he said. “Get summer job.”
    Dovie smiled widely. It was a great smile, and he stopped feeling the scrapes. She nodded, and her bangs waved to him. She drove on for another ten minutes, careening around corners,testing the limits of modern metallurgy as the car groaned and clicked in unsettling ways. It made him think of submarine movies, with all their menacing creaks.
    “Do you have papers to drive?”
    “A license? I’m sixteen,” she said, and had nosed the car into a residential neighborhood of small postwar houses by the time he realized she hadn’t actually said she had a license.
    Dovie turned into the driveway of a small purple house with a wheelchair ramp, and the car rocked to a stop.
    “Home again, home again, jiggity jig.”
    She pulled her key ring from the ignition and got out of the car. The door clattered as it shut. Yuri sat alone for a moment, bewildered.
    “This isn’t my hotel.”
    She pointed to her ear.
    He got out and pushed the door shut, afraid the impact would make the car collapse.
    “This isn’t my hotel.”
    It sounded stupid. Of course it wasn’t. How would this girl know where he was staying? Maybe he was too accustomed to limo services.
    “Yeah, but it is my house.”
    She waved her hand and, without waiting to see if he would follow, walked up the ramp. Yuri hesitated for a moment, swiveling to look at the row of small dwellings, identical in size and orientation to lot, and at this one, the only purple house on the