Chasing Jupiter Read Online Free Page A

‘thee’s and ‘thy’s? Why not ‘y’all’?
    I didn’t really care that much about church or about the music or the sermon. I never gave much thought to God or heaven. I mean, the way I saw it, I was only sixteen. I had a long time before I really had to worry about getting “right with the good Lord,” and all that. But what I did find intriguing was the pastor’s wife’s singing voice.
    The music swelled to the chorus, and Dotty Greene’s voice began to raise and waver. “Then sings my soul!” she belted out in a high, screechy voice. And then suddenly it dropped, breaking over a low note.
    My eyebrow shot up. Because no matter how bad it sounded, it sure was interesting.
At least she sings with enthusiasm
. I tucked away a grin from the side of my mouth.
A whole lotta enthusiasm
.

Chapter 3
    T he last few days of school passed by in a blur. It had been a hot spring and an early summer. By mid-June, the peach trees were loaded with fruit and Georgia smelled sweet and sticky again. We were free to roam from dawn ‘til dusk.
    That was the summer of 1969, and I was sixteen years old. Thanks to Mama’s prodding, I’d finally let my hair grow out, and it was the first summer I could run around with my loose waves whipping around me in the wind. It made me feel free and a little bit wild.
    On our first official day off of school, we didn’t have anything better to do than lie around, watch the clouds, and talk about nothing.
    Cliff loved running his fingers though my ponytail. We’d sprawl out by the fence in the backyard and stay like that for hours, his hand tangled in my long auburn hair. That’s what we were doing on a Monday. Just lying there and breathing in and out in silence.
    Cliff took a deep breath and let it out, his chin tilted up at the sky. “Say, Scarlett?”
    “Yeah?” My eyes were closed, and the sun felt so warm and soothing on my face.
    “When are we going to build a rocket to Jupiter?”
    A frown pinched my forehead.
Oh
,
I forgot I promised him that
. Obviously Cliff wouldn’t have forgotten. I’d never known him to forget anything.
    I closed my eyes. “Sometime, I guess.”
    Cliff sat up abruptly, frowning at me. “No! Every time you say that it means you’re never going to do it! Scarlett never keeps her promises to Cliff!”
    My eyes flew open.
Whoa, referring to himself in third person—not good
. I pried his fingers out of my hair. He was making it even more of a snarled mess. “Well, I promised you I would, didn’t I? And I
always
keep my promises.”
    He settled back down, pacified by my response. I did always keep my promises, unlike most people. A promise spoken by Scarlett Blaine was a promise kept.
    I rested my head on my forearms and stared up at the sky. Little wisps of clouds floated by like ships drifting across the deep blue sea. The grass was warm and soft under my skin. “So is that what we’re going to do this summer? Build a rocket?” I asked.
    “To Jupiter.”
    “Right.” I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. His chin was tilted back up toward the sky. I wondered if his thoughts were always up in the clouds, hovering above those of the rest of us. “What are we going to build it out of? Wood?”
    “I don’t think we’d ever make it to space in a wooden rocket ship. It would burn up from the sun!” He frowned. “No, we’d have to cover it in some kind of metal. Metal sheets, maybe, like the kind they used to cover the warehouse last fall.”
    Metal sheets
. I ran up the calculations in my head. “Cliff, that’ll cost a lot of money. How are we going to get it? I don’t have a job.”
    He bit his lip, thinking hard. “We could do a tap show act.”
    “Neither of us knows how to tap dance.”
    “Oh.” Cliff fell silent for a moment. “Well, you’re pretty good at baking pies. You’ll sell pies, and we’ll use the money to buy wood.”
    “Sell pies?” I tried to imagine myself standing at a pie stand, selling pies on the