The tow truck showed up right around two that afternoon, rattling down our street loud enough that I heard it coming from two houses away before I ever laid eyes on it.
I was already out on the porch waiting, buzzing with excitement, when Herschel's beat-up flatbed rounded the corner with the Maverick chained down across the back of it.
Georgie came sprinting out of the house still in his socks, nearly wiping out on the driveway in his rush to get a look at it. He'd apparently talked his way out of today's practice somehow just to make it home in time.
"That's it? That's our car?" he said, hands planted on his hips.
"That's it," I said, doing my best to sound calmer than I actually felt.
Herschel climbed down out of the cab and looked between the two of us like he still couldn't quite believe he was going through with this. "Alright, where you boys want her?"
"Driveway's fine," I said, pointing toward the spot beside the garage where Dad usually parked his truck. We'd need to clean the thing up a little before we pushed it into the garage proper anyway.
It took Herschel about ten minutes working the winch to ease the Maverick down off the flatbed, the old suspension groaning in protest the moment all four tires finally touched pavement again. Up close, in the full light of the afternoon, it looked even rougher than I remembered from the lot. Faded blue paint, a long scrape running down one side, and one headlight hanging loose in its socket like a tooth about ready to fall out.
Georgie circled it twice, running a hand along the hood as he went. "It's uglier in our driveway than it was at the shop."
"Cars always look worse once they're your problem," Herschel said, chuckling as he unhooked the last of the chains. "Alright, she's all yours now. Title's in the glovebox, signed and ready to go. You boys take care of her, and don't go doing anything you can't undo. Come find me if you need a hand with anything."
"Yes sir," I said, already itching to get my hands on it the second he pulled away.
Mom appeared in the doorway a minute later, arms crossed, taking in the sight of the Maverick sitting in her driveway like it had personally offended her.
“Hey there mary” He greeted mom.
“So you sold this to my boys” Mary looked at herschel and he knew that she was pissed off at him and he immediately gave us a two-finger salute off the brim of his cap, climbed back into the truck, and rumbled off down the street, leaving the two of us standing there next to what was now, officially, our car.
She studied it a moment longer, shook her head slightly like she still wasn't entirely convinced she'd made the right call letting this happen, and went back inside without another word. I counted that as a win.
The second she was out of sight, I put my hand flat on the hood and let Appraisal do its work.
The readout unspooled in my head almost instantly, a full column of information sliding into view like something out of a menu screen. Engine seized from a cracked head gasket, coolant long since leaked dry, one bad fuel line, a starter motor on its last legs, brakes needing a full rebuild, and enough surface rust along the rear wheel wells that it would need proper patching before any cosmetic work would matter. Underneath all of it, though, the frame itself was solid, no hidden rot eating through anything structural, which was really all I'd needed to know before committing to the car in the first place.
Current value, as-is: right around one hundred and forty dollars. Projected value after a full repair and light restoration: somewhere in the range of twenty-eight hundred to three thousand, assuming I handled the cosmetic work properly and didn't cut corners on the interior.
"So what's actually wrong with it?" Georgie asked, leaning over the open hood like he expected the answer to be obvious just from looking.
"We'll find out soon enough," I told him, even though I already had a complete list running through my head. I sent him inside to grab a couple of rags while I reached for the Repair and Restore portion of the skill, curious whether it might already be back online.
Nothing happened. Instead, information dropped into my head on its own, informing me the skill was sitting on a ten-day cooldown, with nine days left before I could use it again.
I should have figured it wouldn't be quite that easy. Still, I let out a breath and shook it off, staying hopeful about the whole thing regardless. Even without the instant fix, the rest of what the skill gave me was more than worth it on its own, and I wasn't about to start complaining over one locked feature.
Before we got into any of the actual work, the two of us sat down on the tailgate, and I pulled out a notebook to walk Georgie through the plan and exactly how much money we'd need to make it happen.
Between what we'd already spent on the car itself and what Herschel's tow had cost us, we had right around nine hundred and twenty dollars left between the two of us. That number would round up to a full thousand once Georgie added in his share, since we'd agreed early on to split everything evenly no matter how the job played out in the end.
Georgie planned on picking up a few more jobs over the coming weekends to close that gap, and I figured I might tag along on a couple of them myself, mostly because I still wanted a little spending money set aside for my own things.
For the moment, though, the two of us were completely broke, staring down a growing list of parts.
Parts came first. A head gasket kit, a full brake rebuild kit, a new fuel line, a starter motor, and enough sandpaper, filler, and primer to deal with the rust properly instead of just painting over it and hoping nobody noticed.
I figured that would fit in our budget, assuming we sourced most of it secondhand from a salvage yard rather than buying everything new off a shelf.
Appraisal would make picking through a junkyard a lot easier than it had any right to be, letting me spot at a glance which parts were actually worth grabbing and which were just scrap. It had actually been Georgie's idea to check out the local scrap yard in the first place, and I had to give him credit for it. We planned on heading over there together tomorrow morning to see what we could dig up.
That left a decent cushion for paint, a proper detail once the mechanical work was finished, and a little breathing room in case something turned out worse than expected once we actually got into it. I was fairly confident we'd manage either way.
"And you're sure we can do all this ourselves?" Georgie asked.
"I'm sure," I said, and left it right there. There wasn't really a way to explain why I was so sure without cracking open a can of worms I had no interest in opening at all.
We were still scrubbing most of the road grime off the car when Sheldon came storming out of the house looking about as irritated as I'd ever seen him.
"Poodle poop!" He slammed the door behind his back while cursing. It was actually embarrassing to hear him cuss like that.
“This is not fair at all”
he announced, before dropping down onto the porch steps with his arms crossed tight over his chest.
"Welcome to the real world," I said, not even looking up from the fender I was wiping down.
"You destroyed my train models and took over my space, and now Mother has banned me from Radio Shack for an entire month," Sheldon said, practically spitting the words out. "How will I get those thrust rocket ratios now? You put away my trains too. The one thing I actually enjoy doing, and you've managed to take that away as well."
"I'm sorry, Sheldon. I needed the space," I said, already fairly sure how well that apology was going to land. I wasn't sorry, not really, but it seemed like the polite thing to say.
"Just go on inside, twerp, and quit bothering us," Georgie said, waving him off without even turning around.
"Do either of you have two thousand dollars? I need a computer," Sheldon asked, clearly already knowing the answer before the question left his mouth.
Georgie burst out laughing.
"What do you think?" I asked, turning both my pockets inside out to show him just how empty they were.
"Even if we had it, why would we hand it over to you?" Georgie added.
"My last option, then, is Meemaw," Sheldon said, and marched off toward her house to see what he could get out of her instead.
______
Sheldon's POV
Everything about this felt profoundly unfair. Why wouldn't Mom just drive me to Radio Shack like she always did? I needed to prove to that so-called NASA scientist that he had picked the wrong kid to dismiss, and I fully intended to shake the very foundation of his work in front of the whole class.
I tried everything I could think of. I wanted a computer, badly enough that I'd even suggested to Mom that we simply take out a mortgage on the house to afford one. She didn't take that suggestion seriously in the slightest. I asked my brothers next, both of them, and got nowhere with either.
My last real option was Meemaw. I rang her doorbell and got straight to the point the moment she answered, since she surely had something set aside for me in that will of hers she kept talking about.
"When are you dying?" I asked, before she could even get a word out. She was about to close the door but I put my hand in between.
"You want to try that question again?" she said, clearly amused rather than offended.
"I need two thousand dollars for a computer," I said, deciding bluntness was my best strategy at this point.
"Well, let me just check the bank," she said, and pulled a crumpled nine dollars out from under her top , pressing it into my hand.
"I'm going to need considerably more than that," I said, sighing, and headed home with my meager nine dollars and nothing resembling a real plan.
I didn't talk to my mother all evening. I skipped dinner entirely and sat on my bed with my arms crossed, still fuming over everything that had happened that day.
Mom and Dad both came by at different points to check on me, but I wasn't in any mood to talk to either of them, not after they'd gone and banned me from Radio Shack for an entire month.
I could hear them lingering just outside my door for a moment. Part of me almost felt bad about shutting them out like that, but the larger part of me was still too irritated to care one way or another.
It was Charlie who finally came up to my room, and the first thing he did was tell Mom and Dad to leave us be, which struck me as odd. I couldn't imagine what he possibly wanted from me tonight, of all nights.
He tossed a notebook toward me, clearly expecting me to catch it. I let it drop instead, watching it land on the bed while I stared back at him, unimpressed.
"Read that," Charlie said.
The title on the cover read Retro-Propulsion and the Feasibility of Reusable Booster Recovery. I let out a short, involuntary snort before I'd even opened the cover, half expecting a page or two of scribbled nonsense and little else worth my time.
I was wrong. The moment I actually started reading, I realized this was nothing close to what I'd expected. It read like a full thesis, methodically laid out, walking through the entire concept from first principles straight through to the practical obstacles standing in the way of ever actually building the thing.
The central proposition explored in the notebook concerned the feasibility of recovering a spent first-stage rocket booster through a controlled, powered descent, rather than allowing it to fall uncontrolled into the ocean the way NASA currently did. By reserving a calculated fuel margin after stage separation, the booster could reignite its engines partway through descent, using throttled thrust to counteract both velocity and gravity at once. Small maneuvering fins would correct for lateral drift along the way, guiding the booster toward either a floating platform or a reinforced landing pad. The main obstacles that remained, as the notebook laid out clearly, were thermal stress during reentry, precise throttle control at low altitude, and the extra structural weight needed for a booster to survive multiple flights instead of just one.
In certain sections, I had to admit, his approach was actually more elegant than my own notes on the exact same subject. I might have suspected that he copied something out of one of my own notebooks without my noticing, but the handwriting, the phrasing, and the specific angle he'd taken on the thrust calculations were unmistakably his own work, not mine.
It still needed real data behind it, actual test figures rather than theoretical projections, but the underlying framework held up under scrutiny. I sat there for a long moment just staring at the page, genuinely unsure how to feel about any of it.
I had known Charlie was sharper than the average kid I dealt with at school, sharper than nearly anyone I dealt with, if I was being honest with myself, but I had never once considered that he actively studied like me. He was always wasting his time doing mundane things like having a girlfriend and doing odd jobs. I felt he was wasting his potential but I was wrong.
The way he approached certain sections was different from how I would have tackled them myself, coming at the same problem from an entirely different direction, and yet somehow arriving at conclusions that were, infuriatingly, just as sound as my own.
"It's good," I said, though I knew full well I couldn't have done a better job myself. Admitting that out loud still felt like conceding something I wasn't ready to concede.
"I want us to do it together," Charlie said, sighing like he didn't particularly want to deal with me tonight but was making the effort regardless.
"Why would I do that? Even if I wanted to we don't have the computer to run the simulations," I said, since I was more than capable of managing this on my own.
"Look Sheldon, I can finish this by myself if I have to. I'm giving you the chance to actually be part of it instead. It'll look good on college scholarship applications down the line for both of us and I will also help you get back at that nasa guy. I also need you to quit acting like such a brat about all this. And yes, before you ask again, I can arrange a computer," Charlie said, laying out his reasoning like he'd already anticipated every objection I might throw at him.
His reasoning, frustratingly, held up. I was already stressed enough these days between the Radio Shack ban and everything else piling up, and there wasn't much fight left in me to keep arguing against something that actually made sense.
He gave me a few more reasonable points after that, including the idea that he could arrange for an attorney to help patent our research down the line if the project actually panned out the way we hoped.
"Fine. We'll be co-authors on this," I said. "I'm keeping the notebook for now, just to check it over for anything you might have gotten wrong." In truth, I mostly wanted an excuse to keep reading it.
Charlie sighed, smirked at me like he'd already known exactly how this conversation was going to end, and let himself back out of the room.