After that first bridge game at Grandpa’s house, I started borrowing more and more books from him. I was fascinated with the game and couldn’t read enough about it. He invited me to play a number of other times with his friends, and then he introduced me to duplicate bridge, which we played together at a bridge club near Pittsburgh. We became quite a good partnership and did very well together. Bridge playing sure helped fill the void in my life after Fred left.

At the beginning of 10th grade, I joined the science club. I was the only girl in the club. At first, those guys seemed thrilled to have me there and fell all over themselves trying to show me around. But it wasn’t very well supervised, and most of the guys mainly wanted to make things that exploded. I wasn’t as interested in chemistry as I was in physics and things mechanical, and I kept suggesting projects to build with that in mind.

I was always good with tools and fabricating things, and I got lots of ideas for projects from reading Popular Mechanics magazine, to which I had a subscription. One project I read about was called a Hilsch Vortex Tube, which used the principle of inertia to both cool and heat air at the same time. I thought it was pretty cool, but I couldn’t get anyone else interested in constructing one.

After that initial flurry of interest, the guys largely ignored me the rest of sophomore year, but during junior year, we built a few of the projects I suggested, and by senior year, I was one of the old-timers in the club and had a little more influence. We even built the Hilsch Vortex Tube, which we actually used to cool off our tools when grinding metal.

I volunteered to help the faculty advisor arrange for us to participate in some state-wide science fairs that year, and although we didn’t have the experience of some of the larger schools, who had been participating for a number of years, we still did pretty well.

My family always came to watch and cheer the club on, but I still didn’t have any real friends that I could hang around with. Those kids in the club could see how competent I was with tools, with building things, and with all the ideas I came up with, and I think it just turned them off.

I long for the day when people can accept me and like me for who I am. Maybe things will change when I start college in the fall.