Gwen was
one of the more elusive crew members. I tried to catch her several times, but
she has good peripheral vision and saw me coming. By the time I got there, she
was nowhere to be seen.
I could
respect that, so I tried not to let it bother me. After a while, I gave up ...
so that’s when I stumbled upon her, of course.
She was
in the rec room reading a book, tucked into a corner of the couch there. The
book must have been good because I was able to get within a few meters of her
before she looked up with an expression of dismay. Maybe fear. Or maybe
dislike.
I suppose
I should have built up some thick skin by now, given how some of the other crew
members had reacted to me, but it stings a bit to be on the receiving end of a
look like that.
“Okay,
okay,” I said, raising both hands. “I’ll leave you alone. I don’t want to
interrupt someone who’s reading a book anyway.”
Okay,
I’ll admit it: I did check to see if
it was my novel. It wasn’t.
She
scowled at me for a few seconds, so I took a few steps back.
“As long
as you don’t ask me that damned question,” she said.
I stopped
backing up. “What question?”
She
rolled her eyes. “The one about what’s it like to be a woman in a man’s world.”
I
laughed. “Man’s world? What does that even mean?”
She
actually smiled. “They don’t ask you that?”
“No,” I
said, “but I’m not exactly famous, so they don’t really ask me anything.”
“So I’ll ask you,” she said, putting down
her book.
“Wait a
minute,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about myself.”
That’s
right: I did it. I walked right into her trap. Not a clue.
“Exactly!” she said. “Now you know how we feel!”
Ouch.
How do you respond to something like that?
First
you say, “Okay, you got me.”
Then you
let her smile triumphantly at you.
Then you
say, “Excuse me while I go fly the ship.”
She
laughed. “Good luck!”
“Well,
someone has to do it while you’re asking me all these questions and writing up
the results,” I said.
“Don’t
oversimplify,” Gwen said. “I’ll fly the ship, you’ll write about somebody
else.”
“Who?” I
asked. “You think what your captain and crew do should go unnoticed?”
“Well,
no, but … you don’t have to include me, though.”
“Okay,”
I said. “When you come down to pick up the crew from the middle of a firefight,
I’ll just say some pilot did it. Or maybe I’ll say it was Nick.”
“Don’t
you dare! Nick? I’d never hear the
end of it!”
“Okay,
it’s settled, then,” I said.
She
shook her head. “Just remember that I have a minor role, okay?”
“Try to
be as boring as you can.”
She
nodded as she picked up her book. “Done.”
We’ll
see how long she can live up to that.
