"So where do you go to school?"
I'm actually doing this. I'm taking a stranger I just met to my house.
"Wood River. It's pretty close."
"Is it big? Does it have like, a soccer field? Or a basketball court?"
I can't believe I'm doing this.
"Yeah, it has both."
How the hell did she even talk me into this?
"Do you play sports?"
"Not really."
"I like basketball. I never actually played it, but I like seeing the game."
She has a particular way of walking that makes her look kind of like she might levitate off the ground and shoot straight up to the sky at any second.
"Where do you go to school?"
"I'm homeschooled."
Homeschooled. Now it all makes sense.
"Bummer. You don't have too many friends then, I assume?"
"Not really."
And for some reason, I feel sorry for her. Actually, I feel a lot of things for her, which is weird, because I don't usually feel things for people. This is really weird. Maybe because I know what it feels like to not have friends because of who you are as a person.
"Yeah, me neither."
She doesn't react the way I expected her to. I thought she would be squealing in glee right now for having found someone who is just like her in a way that neither of us is particularly gifted in the art of making friends, but she just looks over at me and nods with a sympathetic look on her face.
"There's Kim though. I met her in middle school. She's my only friend."
"I know how that feels like, to have only one person you can call a friend. Anyway, my house is right
there," I point up ahead to my dad. "The guy on the telescope out on the front lawn is my dad."
She lets out a long 'o' like she just figured out a mistake in Einstein's relativity theory; the biggest discovery she's ever made.
"I spy with my little eye... a family of astronomers," she grins at me.
"Yeah, well, it's just me and my dad." He's looking into the telescope and doesn't see me coming.
"What do I call him?" she tugs at my sleeve.
"Um..." This is the very opposite of how I expected to come home from stargazing this evening. How am I supposed to know?
"Should I call him dad too?" she laughs.
"I guess Mr. Ross will do."
"Okay, Orion Ross. Let's meet Mr. Ross."
I think I'm smiling.
"Dad."
"Orion. I thought we were supposed to be stargazing together tonight," he looks up to see me and pauses when he sees Emma.
"This is, um... Emma." We just met today, I add in my mind.
"Nice to meet you, Mr. Ross." She extends her hand and after a while of looking back and forth between me and her, my dad takes it.
