“Colorado, you don’t know she’s yours,” Coach pointed out. I gagged a bit. How could a person so small make such a massive stink? “We’re due in Nevada in five hours for the first round of the playoffs. You cannot travel with that baby. The wise thing to do would be to call Child Services, have the blood test, and if you’re determined to be the father then you can search for the mother. Don’t shake your head, there are legalities that need to be—”
“No. I am not turning my back on her. She’s mine until it’s proven otherwise. Good parents do not leave their kids for other people to raise!” I yelled.
Coach glowered but he didn’t call me out. Mark and Vlad stood in the distance like golems for several seconds until Westman-Reid said something that was actually useful.
“My sisters-in-law use nannies all the time. They might be able to help us out.” Mark glanced around. I nodded. Coach nodded. Vlad nodded. “Okay, so change that diaper and we’ll figure out the formula so she can eat.”
Mark turned his back on us while he rang up a sister-in-law. I peeled open the diaper, just one side, and drew back in total horror. Coach and Vlad left the room like Satan was nipping at their balls. Madeline kicked and giggled.
“Yeah, you think it’s funny but it ain’t,” I mumbled as my eyes watered. “I got you though, baby girl.”
Two
Joseph
Mr. Johnson from Bluedown Heights Elementary was wrong.
Actually, he’d been wrong a lot, ever since he’d turned up just after my break early afternoon with a gaggle of ten-year-old kids in tow on their field trip to the planetarium. He’d spent so long explaining the planets that orbited the sun that I swear a few of the kids had slipped into a coma, with one of them falling off the end of the hard wooden bench. No wonder kids weren’t interested in the solar system when the excitement was bored out of them at such a young age. I listened for as long as I could handle but when the idiot made a blatant ass joke about Uranus, I cleared my throat and let my inner geek fly.
It hadn’t gone well.
Which was why I was now in the site manager’s office, nursing the start of a black eye, sitting on a chair and waiting for the manager to calm down enough to talk to me. Lewis Drewin was a skinny guy with a shiny bald head and a hooked nose, who had the habit of wearing cheap suits with material so thin anyone could see which way he tucked. Not that I looked. I had standards that didn’t include him. He was the kind of manager that didn’t care about the place he managed, or the story of the infinite beauty of space. He was all about money. If something hit his bottom line then he was interested, but when we’d discussed my concept of creating an installation about quasars he’d started trembling and clutching the checkbook. I didn’t much like Lewis, and to be fair, he didn’t much like me.
“You…” he began and pointed a shaky finger at me before glancing back down at his notes. For the first time in five years of working there covering shifts and hours no one else wanted, I’d made Drewin lose his ability to form words. I’d come close in the great Kuiper Belt fracas two years back, but I’d talked at him for so long that he’d sent me away and had never spoken about it again.
“What did you even…?” Again, he stopped and buried his head in his hands.
Ouch. This wasn’t good. Maybe I needed to start talking, get to the science part, and talk myself out of losing the only source of income I had at the moment. How the hell would I pay for college and rent if I lost this work? I’d fucked up, but right now I had to fall back on the science, and make Drewin see that I hadn’t been doing anything wrong.
“The teacher said Pluto was a planet. I told him it wasn’t. He said it was—”
“For God’s sake—”
“So I was telling the teacher that a planet by definition is a celestial body in orbit around the sun. But he wouldn’t listen, so I pointed out that there are two other parts to that definition. I explained, very calmly, that it had to have sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so it can assume a hydrostatic equilibrium shape.” Drewin looked up at me, his expression blank. “That means nearly round.” I even drew the shape of something circular in the air just so it was clear, and winced internally, because I was prone to exaggerating things when I thought people didn’t understand me. This is so not helping my case.
Drewin shook his head, “I can’t even—”
“It doesn’t stop there though,” I forged ahead. “I also told the teacher, and the class, the third and most important part of the definition of a planet, because he was insisting we couldn’t exclude Pluto and he’s wrong.”
“He’s a teacher—”
“But he was wrong, and I was just—”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Drewin muttered, and I wasn’t sure if he was using my name as part of the curse. He probably was.
“He had to understand that in the downgrading of Pluto it was the third part that was so important. To be a planet, the body must have vacuumed up or ejected other large objects in its vicinity of space, in other words, it must have achieved gravitational dominance.”
“Get out—”
I could see I was losing, so I upped the science. “Pluto shares its orbital neighborhood with other icy Kuiper
