I wouldn’t say that we’re close, but I’ve decided that I like her. A lot. At this point, my grad school attitude is some mild variant of I did not come here to make friends: I don’t feel in competition with the rest of the program, but neither am I particularly invested in anything that isn’t my work in the aeronautics lab, including getting acquainted with other students, or, you know . . . learning their names. I’m fairly sure that my lack of interest is strongly broadcasted, but either Mara didn’t pick up the transmission, or she’s gleefully ignoring it. She and Sadie found each other in the first couple of days, and then, for reasons I don’t fully understand, decided to find me.

Hence Mara sitting next to me, telling me about her JPL contacts.

“A cousin or something?” I ask, curious. It seems a bit sketchy. “You think?”

“Yeah, I’m not sure.” She shrugs and continues to make her way through a Tupperware of broccoli, an apple, and approximately two fucktons of Cheez-Its. “I don’t really know much about him. His parents divorced, then people in my family had arguments and stopped talking to each other. There was a lot of prime Floyd dysfunction happening, so I haven’t actually spoken to him in years. But I heard from one of my other cousins that he was working on that thing that landed on Mars back when we were in high school. It was called something like . . . Contingency, or Carpentry, or Crudity—”

“The Curiosity rover?”

“Yes! Maybe?”

I put my sandwich down. Swallow my bite. Clear my throat. “Your cousin or something was on the Curiosity rover team.”

“I think so. Do the dates add up? Maybe it was some kind of summer internship? But honestly, it might just be Floyd family lore. I have an aunt who insists that we’re related to the Finnish royals, and according to Wikipedia there are no Finnish royals. So.” She shrugs and pops another handful of Cheez-Its in her mouth. “Would you like me to ask around, though? For the assignment?”

I nod. And I don’t think much about it until a month or so later. By then, through means that I am still unable to divine, Mara and Sadie have managed to worm their way into my heart, causing me to amend my previous I did not come here to make friends stance to a slightly altered I did not come here to make friends, but hurt my weird Cheez-It friend or my other weird soccer friend and I will beat you up with a lead pipe till you piss blood for the rest of your life. Truculent? Perhaps. I feel little, but surprisingly deeply.

“By the way, I sent you my cousin-or-something’s contact info a while ago,” Mara tells me one night. We’re at the cheapest grad bar we’ve been able to find. She’s on her second Midori sour of the night. “Did you get it?”