When Kaylee Went Kaboom
An Aerospace Love Story
Her phone dinged at 7am with a text from the temp agency.
“RUSH HIRE. Executive Assistant. Kaboom Aerospace. 9am. ONE DAY ONLY. Kaylee, are you available???”
Kaylee was available.
At thirty-one and single, with no prospects in sight, she was still recovering from her last relationship two years earlier when her boyfriend broke things off by telling her, “You’re a 6 and I’m an 8 and that’s just too large of a gap.”
He was a pig.
Kaylee pushed back against the insult, arguing that she was only a 6 from late-December to mid-March after which she leveled up to a solid 7 for the bulk of the calendar year.
He was not swayed.
Back in her apartment, Kaylee rescued her good jeans from the hamper and texted the agency back: “I’ll be there.”
Kaylee didn’t know much about Kaboom. Wikipedia said they had never gotten a rocket to space and her inbox said they were paranoid about security because in the hour-long drive from the San Fernando Valley to the South Bay, she received three follow-up emails reminding her to “BRING A GOVERNMENT ISSUED I.D.”
The address from the temp agency led her to a humdrum warehouse the size of four football fields near LAX Airport. An armed security officer in a flack jacket checked her passport and took a thumbprint and concluded she was not a spy, then followed her like a prison guard to her desk outside the CFO’s office.
“Bathroom is over there. Cafeteria is over there. Take a photo of anything and you’re fired,” the officer said.
“I’ll just… sit,” Kaylee promised. It wasn’t a bad spot, really. From her perch, she could look out on the sprawling bullpen of engineers and see everything. And what she saw almost immediately were heads, popping up like meerkats in the Kalahari Desert.
Pop! Nerd with a beard…
Pop! Nerd with a lightsaber...
Pop! Nerd with a beard and a lightsaber…
What made it especially odd was how their gazes were all drawn to the same mysterious object:
Kaylee.
Assuming there was something on her face, she made a bee line to the bathroom. This was not paranoia. She had spent the better part of her cousin’s wedding in San Antonio with a piece of tortilla chip stuck to her cheek and no one had the decency to tell her. A therapist friend later told her, “That means everyone at the wedding hated you.”
Thank you, therapist friend.
Kaylee leaned over the sink for a closer inspection and noticed her normal flaws: a teenage acne scar on her forehead, stubborn rosacea on her nose, a droopy left eyelid… but nothing that warranted outright gawking.
Behind her, a stall swung open and out shuffled a Korean girl in an oversized Wario hoodie. One Direction blasted from her comically large headphones. She washed her hands and glanced over at Kaylee.
Not once, not twice, not even three times.
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Kaylee had to say something. She was not the type of person who forced uncomfortable conversations. She was the type of person who stayed silent, catastrophized reality until it created paralyzing fear, then crawled to bed in a sweat.
But since she only had one day at Kaboom and knew she would never see any of these people again—
“Just tell me,” said Kaylee.
The girl—Pearl—pulled her headphones down to her neck.
Pearl: “Tell you what?”
Kaylee: “Why are all the nerds staring at me?”
Pearl: “Oh. Um. Well… I guess because you’re like… super pretty.”
As stated earlier, by Kaylee’s own estimation, she was not super pretty. She was not super… anything.
Kaylee: “I’m actually a 7 except in the winter when I’m a 6.”
Pearl straightened up, happy she now had hard data with which to work. “Well,” she said, “around here you’re a 10.”
A
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?!
Sure, there was a three-month period between her senior year of high school and her freshman year of college where Kaylee might have snuck into the 8 category, but then she got this rough pixie haircut from her mom’s friend who was trying to become a hairdresser and there went that.
Pearl wiped her wet hands on her jeans and left.
Kaylee turned back toward the mirror. Suddenly that rosacea looked almost… cute. And her left eyelid didn’t seem so droopy after all. And while Kaylee still wouldn’t go so far as to consider herself “beautiful,” it felt good to be in a magical place where everyone else did.
Especially because of her secret. A secret Kaylee had only ever whispered softly to her cats Tibby and Lena. Her secret was that all she truly wanted was to marry someone stable so she could quit working, become a mom, and have enough money left over each month to get her hair colored someplace fancier than her bathroom sink.
THAT is what she desired above all else.
THAT was her anti-feminist, counterculture, Kaylee-don’t-ever-say-that-on-social-media dream.
And as she exited the bathroom at Kaboom Aerospace and looked out at two hundred engineers with PPO insurance and a refreshing definition of beauty, what she saw… was opportunity.
Still, Kaylee had a serious problem. Her job at Kaboom was for “ONE DAY ONLY.” And engineers do not, as a rule, act impulsively, which meant they were happy to find reasons to walk by her desk or stare awkwardly, but actually progressing to a “Would you like to go out and then eventually get married so you can stop working, have kids, and get your hair professionally colored?” was, at best, six months away.
Which meant Kaylee needed to find a way to turn this temp job into a permanent one.
She googled “rocket science.”
She read about thrust.
Propulsion.
Different types of fuel.
She looked up what NASA stands for…
What Kaboom Aerospace actually does…
How Ron Howard got Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon to float around in Apollo 13…
And by noon she knew just enough about aerospace to inquire with the CFO, her boss for the day, about whether he’d like to make her a permanent hire.
“No,” he said. “But bring me a chicken breast and two cookies.” And then, like one of the soldiers from the clock outside Disneyland’s “It’s A Small World,” he wobbled back into his office as the door closed slammed behind him.
His rejection left Kaylee five short hours as a 10 before she Cinderella-d back to a 7, a worrisome fact that explained her next action.
Kaylee went to the lunch line to flirt with the first man she saw. Unfortunately, she was not good at flirting and the first man she saw was a grim-looking fifty year old with wildly uneven sideburns.
Kaylee: “Hey there. You been at Kaboom a while?”
Sideburns: “I’m employee number twenty-seven.”
She didn’t know what to do with that information and shifted to a safer topic.
Kaylee: “Boy. Lunch smells good, huh?”
Sideburns: “I lost my sense of smell fifteen years ago. I work with industrial strength epoxies. With improper ventilation, you can burn a hole right through the middle of your septum in under twenty minutes.”
Then Employee #27 lifted his chin and shined his iPhone flashlight up his nose to show her the open cavity between his nostrils.
Kaylee stared into the void—trying to turn this into a Hallmark movie meet-cute moment and hating herself for it—when an arm from behind her reached forward and snagged a chicken breast. The last chicken breast.
“I don’t think so,” she told the arm.
“Is there a problem?” the arm said. The arm had a French accent which might have been alluring except he also had a wedding ring and even though Kaylee was longing to be a wife she wasn’t looking to destroy someone else’s in the process so—
“You can’t reach ahead into someone else’s section of the buffet line and take food. That’s a rule.” Then she grabbed a set of tongs, removed the chicken breast from the French man’s plate, served him a piece of gray-looking salmon instead, and marched to her desk to spend the rest of her day as a 10 before going home to spend the rest of her life as a big fat ZERO.
Or at least that was her plan. But at 4:30 executives started to gather outside the CFO’s office and murmur.
You hear about Leo?… What about Leo?... Bad salmon… Leo is sick?!…
Kaylee tracked down Pearl (the girl from the bathroom) who explained that Leo was the host of Kaboom’s livestream rocket launches. In the company’s two years of launches—all spectacularly unsuccessful—Leo had not missed a single one. With investors increasingly nervous about the health of the start-up, not having Leo was an added hiccup no one wanted.
“He’s not that great at it, but his French accent makes the company sound profesh,” said Pearl.
For a moment, Kaylee tried to convinced herself that there were multiple men at Kaboom Aerospace with French accents who had the salmon for lunch because she had taken the last chicken breast.
But there were not.
Kaylee felt guilty.
And yet, she thought. What if Leo’s absence paves the way for someone else? Someone anxious to get herself in front of the company’s best and brightest? Someone with an adorable acne scar on her forehead?
She strode over to the circle of executives. And with all the confidence that a woman with a bookmarked tab for discount egg harvesters in Costa Rica can muster, declared, “I CAN REPLACE LEO.”
Kaboom’s risk-averse launch director, a green-eyed, engineer named Kurt Kohli, took notice. “Do you have experience?” he inquired.
“No,” said Kaylee, "but I love to perform and I know an impressive amount about rocket science.”
The first part of that answer was mostly true as she had played Orphan #11 in her high school production of Oliver! and didn’t hate it, and the second part was definitely true in the sense that she knew an impressive amount about rocket science compared to what she knew before she googled “rocket science” a few hours earlier.
“Have you ever done live TV?” Kurt asked.
“Of course.”
ALSO NOT A LIE! She made the local news in fourth grade when a gang member was shot and killed on the sidewalk outside her family’s duplex. This was a big deal since her town only had two gang members. It also made the murder easy to solve since it was obviously the other gang member who shot him.
The executives circled up again. More murmuring. One of them said just loud enough for her to hear: “I will note that she is visibly appealing.” The nerds dispersed and Kurt Kohli turned Kaylee’s way. “Report to the second floor studio at 1830,” he said. I’ll send over launch details. And most importantly, no matter what happens, project confidence.”
Holy guacamole, she thought. They bought it.
It was time for more learning. She read up on the Kaboom 3 rocket. She watched a couple YouTube videos. She asked a guy in an Avatar t-shirt what 1830 meant. Yep. She was ready.
By 1829, the entire company was crowded outside mission control, a glass-walled room filled with floor to ceiling screens showing the rocket from every angle along with pressure readings and parabolas and flashing numbers that meant little to Kaylee but held the fate of every engineer on the payroll.
The security guard with the sidearm pointed her toward a long staircase that led up to Kaboom’s in-house studio. As she climbed, she looked down at the energized crowd below. A sea of bachelors. And masters. And even a few doctorates. In the moment, one thought consumed her.
This might be my last chance.
Last chance for a spouse.
Last chance for a family.
Last chance for a future of getting stains out of onesies and driving a mini-van and taking your teenager to the dermatologist and watching your babies become kids and your kids become adults and those adults become humans who are a lot like you but if you do your job well, hopefully a little bit better.
And if it was her last chance, she was not going to waste it.
At T-minus 4 minutes to launch, the giant screen in mission control cut to Kaylee. “Good evening, rocket enthusiasts. I am Kaylee Anderson and welcome to tonight’s test launch of Kaboom’s new and improved Kaboom 3 rocket. In less than five minutes, all those talented rocket scientists below me will find out if their hard work has paid off and if Kaboom Aerospace can join the ranks of private rockets companies who are revolutionizing space commerce, reawakening interest in interstellar exploration, and frankly, having a blast doing it.”
But she wasn’t really there to narrate a rocket launch. She was embarking on a larger, even more dangerous mission.
“While we wait,” she continued, “I’d like to tell you a little bit more about me. I’m thirty-one and originally from the west coast of Florida. And yes, I am single. But I would love not to be. Objectively speaking, I would make an excellent wife. I’m supportive. A good listener. Emotionally stable. Fiscally responsible. And I genuinely enjoy children. I would love at least three of them. Maybe four. Physically, I’m up for it. When I was fifteen, my pediatrician said I had ‘ideal birthing hips’ but I wasn’t offended. I took it as a compliment. So yes, I’d love to be a mom. And I’d make a great one. I’m patient but not a pushover. I love baking. And arts and crafts. I actually own two hot glue guns—”
That is when the security guard burst into the studio.
“CUT HER MIC,” he barked.
“My Insta handle is Kaylee with a ‘K’ and 7 e’s—”
“YOU’RE DONE!” yelled the guard, pushing the mounted camera away from her like it was paparazzi outside a bougie Beverly Hills restaurant.
As he turned his sights on her, she collapsed to the ground and curled up like a roly-poly. She’d seen this work when toddlers threw tantrums in Target but the guard must have been a dad because he squatted down and threw her over his shoulder.
The moment he did, a cheer rang out. From her upside-down vantage point, Kaylee look down, or rather up, at mission control and saw that the engineers were not cheering for the guard. Or for her. They were cheering because their rocket, for the first time ever, had cleared the tower and was heading to space.
Perhaps it was for the best that no one was watching as Kaylee descended the stairs, the guard’s meaty hand gripping her bottom while her chin bounced against his sweaty back. He barely even slowed when they arrived back in the bullpen, just a pause for Kaylee to grab her purse as they passed her desk and continued toward the exit. The last thing she heard before the officer yanked the warehouse door closed was the voice of launch director Kurt Kohli. “Congratulations, Kaboom. All systems are nominal.”
Nominal.
Kaylee had learned about that word earlier in the day. In engineering speak, “nominal” is any value that falls within a range of being insignificant and unremarkable.
Like her.
And while a nominal rocket is worthy of celebration, a nominal person is not. They merely exist. Was she a 6? Or a 7? Or a 10? Ultimately, the numerical value made no difference. She was doomed to orbit through space alone. Unseen. Lost in a forgettable black tapestry of nothingness.
As Kaboom 3 approached an altitude of 500 kilometers, Kaylee landed with a defeated plop in the driver’s seat of her Nissan Rogue. She queued up Kelly Clarkson’s “Broken & Beautiful” and searched Apple Maps for the closest Sonic. Within six minutes, she would be ordering French Toast Sticks and crying in the drive-thru line.
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She never made it to Sonic. She didn’t even make it out of the parking lot.
She only made it partway to the main gate when Kurt Kohli, in his champagne-splattered, Kaboom quarter-zip, ran in front of her car with his hands in the air and ordered her to stop.
Kaylee rolled down her window and stuck her head halfway out.
“I know,” she said. “You trusted me with an important job and I took advantage of that for my own selfish agenda. I’m sorry.”
Kurt didn’t immediately respond. He appeared to be thinking, as if he were working through a complicated calculus equation.
“Was that all true?” he asked. “What you said? On the livestream?”
Kaylee shook her head. Guilty. “No. I own three hot glue guns.”
Kurt nodded, analyzing her confession with a stoic seriousness. “Would you have dinner with me sometime?” he asked.
Kaylee’s Internal voice: “Yes.”
Kaylee’s External voice: “Sounds fun.”
Kurt: “When?”
Internal voice: “Tonight.”
External voice: “Tonight.”
Oops.
“I’ll DM you,” said Kurt. Then he turned and headed back toward the warehouse.
“Wait! Let me give you my contact,” she said.
Kurt shook his head. “Kaylee with a ‘K’ and 7 e’s. I’m also a good listener.”
Before he slipped inside, Kurt’s watched chirped an alert. He stopped in his tracks and looked up. High above Earth, visible only to someone who know what to look for, a white dot streaked across the evening sky. It was perfectly, beautifully unremarkable.
Bob, I loved this story. Thank you so much. Signed, a six maybe a 7.
That. Was. Excellent!
Well done!