Maybe coming home from Wendy and Jim’s so late wasn’t such a great idea, but Raina would rather sleep in her own bed than be the quiet third wheel while the other two wheels were squeaking all night long. Her eyes were sleepy and she had to keep the radio loud and the car window open on the way home to keep from dozing off. She yawned her way quietly into the house, not wanting to draw the attention of her mom and stepdad at such a late hour.
Bed.
But Raina suddenly perked up when she noticed the door ajar and the light glowing from the hallway leading to her stepdad’s workshop. Well, actually, to be fair, she thought, it was more like a lab than a workshop. Workshops had saws and drills and hammers and stuff like that, and they smelled like solvents, burnt things, wood glue and sawdust. Her stepdaddy’s lab had some of those things, but mostly it had machining equipment for making things out of plastic and metal, and all kinds of electrical and electronic equipment. He had made things like bionic prosthetics and robots and surgical instruments with tiny cameras and micro-engines. Even though he always called it his workshop, he was more like Dr. Dyson, from The Terminator, than like Norm, from This Old House.
To Raina, “Daddy’s Workshop” had always been a magical place that made her smile inside and out, and feel safe and at home. She felt her sleepiness fade and her insides do a happy dance that made her bite her lower lip a little—it was a quiet, introverted girl’s version of a “ squee,” she supposed—as she noticed the glow of the workshop light from the hallway leading to it.
She had spent tons of fun hours being “Daddy’s Assistant,” learning how to document procedures, record data, write in scientific notation and do mathematical calculations that her math teachers at school couldn’t even understand. Her mom had bought her dolls and dollhouses and princess dress-ups and all kinds of girl toys—especially all those Franny’s Special Friends dolls that her mom ended up keeping in glass cases in her own room—but none of them had interested her very much.
Who knew she’d be so excited about a lab coat, a slide rule and a scientific calculator? If that made her some kind of a nerd, then so be it. Her new daddy was very kind and thoughtful and patient and encouraging and smart, and oh so shiny and handsome in his bright white lab coat. If that was being a nerd, she was all in.
It had been a match made in heaven from the very start, as far as Raina was concerned, even if her mom got angry over how short her daughter wore her hair, or if she kept it up in a bun so she could use the scientific instruments to help her daddy with his work, and how she wore the clean, bright, white lab coat her daddy gave her everywhere, even to bed. Her daddy saw and loved something in her that nobody else ever saw, and she would always adore him for that, and be grateful, no matter how much her mother had come to resent him over the last year or so.
Thinking of whatever her mom and stepdad were fighting about over the last year made her frown. She knew better than to ask her mother, who had turned angry and stayed that way since she had divorced Raina’s biological dad before Raina had even started kindergarten.
Michael had been the daddy she had always known and it broke her heart to see him so hurt and unhappy. It had been over a year since he had asked her to assist him in the lab, and the light on the door was always red when he was in there, so she knew not to disturb him in the middle of his work.
Raina had been working her butt off to earn that graduate fellowship at the Keller Cybernetics Institute, and along with her regular classes, she hadn’t even had a chance to come home during spring break. Things hadn’t gotten any better between her mom and stepfather. It was going to be a sad summer in that respect.
But she perked up again when she heard the high whirring of one of her daddy’s
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