"I think," he said, "that we disturbed the cosmic rhythm this afternoon. Or the karmic balance. Or something that Dad believes in."
He climbed the steps, stopped with his hand on the banister, and looked at her again. He felt a little queasy. Up till now the girls he had seriously wanted to kiss had mostly been . . . pretty. Preferably gorgeous, but cute was the bottom cut-off and "pretty" covered most of them.
Missy Jenkins wasn't ugly. She wasn't even unattractive. She just wasn't . . . pretty.
Missy looked back at him. Ron Stone seemed more or less like he always had been. He was a little more adult-shaped than she remembered. Thicker in the chest. He didn't really look like a kid any more. But he was still himself. Straight hair, darkish blond. Medium. Medium height, width, face. Ordinary, except for the hazel eyes which proclaimed "brighter than your average bear." She knew that from being in school with him, anyway. So what had happened?
They had disturbed something, all right.
Her.
Missy didn't have anything against Ron, but she had sooooo not wanted to respond like that to a kiss from any guy in the world for another five years. Ten years. Until she got herself organized and had real life down pat.
"Yeah," she said. "Maybe."
"I figure it this way," Ron said. "We performed the deed that upset the equilibrium in front of my place. So we ought to be able to reverse the process if we kiss again in front of your house. That will put everything right back where it always was."
She looked around. "Interesting hypothesis. Nice persuasive tone of voice, too. You're talking to the daughter of a car salesman, though. If you think I'm going to add another chapter to Nani's story by standing here on the porch and kissing you again—rethink the program."
"Hmmn. We did it in the daylight, there, and it's still barely dusk. In order to achieve karmic balance, let's figure that the reverse process will work better if we do it in front of your house after dark. I'll accept the sidewalk if you have a quibble about the porch. Library now, kiss me again later."
In spite of herself, Missy laughed.
They weren't walking very fast. For one thing, the public library wasn't far from her house.
"What do you mean, you're studying to be a librarian?"
That really startled Ron. He'd figured that Missy had picked "library" as a place to spend what amounted to their first non-date on the theory that it was safe. Neutral. Noncommittal. A part-time job, since she had said she had to work.
Not that it was her own personal turf.
If it was, though, it sort of made sense. She was trying to put herself in charge of whatever was going on. Playing on the home field.
That kiss this afternoon had been weird.
"There weren't that many options when I graduated. Well, when you graduated, too. You knew that it was either the army or pharmaceuticals, though, and everyone knew that even Frank Jackson wanted you to work with your dad, like your brother Frank was doing—not waste the preparation you already had. What was there for me? I didn't want to join the army. Definitely not nursing or medicine. I didn't really want to devote my life to manufacturing steel or dealing with methanol or being a radio operator. Dad could use me as an assistant for his office work, but . . . So Mom stuck me into teacher training, which wasn't bad. And being an ESOL aide at the same time was fine. I'd had the experience, in a way, with Gertrude living with us. I did that until this spring. You were off in Venice with the embassy by then. That's when Marietta talked to me."
"Marietta?"
"Ms. Fielder to you."
"The Sherman tank of Grantville Public Library."
Missy gave him a sour look. "She's Dad's first cousin and what you've been undressing with your eyes is my version of the 'Newton body.' My half-sister Anne Jefferson got Mom's shape, with her father's height. Elegant. I got this. Before the Ring of Fire, Dad was headed in an expansive direction, too. Gran doesn't have it, herself. She's paper thin, like most of the Williamses were, but she passed it on to Dad and Chip and me. It's one of my annual New Year's resolutions—never to let myself blossom to the extent that Marietta and Great-aunt Elizabeth have. It's what I've inherited, but at least I'll keep it pared down. In order to do that, though, I have to exercise regularly. Which I do, even though it's boring. I'm actually in very good shape."
Ron eyed her again, from head to toe. He repeated the scan focusing on neck to knee. The sweatshirt was not a lot of help. "Way to go."
She gave him a shove and started to talk about data and information gathering. How important they were becoming to Grantville; the role of the different libraries and the research center. That her real apprenticeship, if that was what you wanted to call it, was out at the high school under Elaine Bolender, but that she spent time in every library inside the Ring of Fire, from the grade school to the power plant. That was the first year. By third year, she would need to be learning about down-time libraries. The University of Jena, for example. By then, there would be an exchange system set up, Elaine expected, sort of like the one the medical school would have between Leahy Medical Center here in Grantville and Jena. There were down-time librarians coming to Grantville fairly regularly now, especially to study cataloging.