Lynn held her hand above the door marked 2054 in golden numbers. It was a pretty house. Being in the old part of town it was squished up against the other houses on the block making a picturesque recreation of an Amsterdam street without the canal running down it. The garden was well tended and bursting with flowers. The lawn was mowed finer than a crew cut on a newly minted sailor, and the few wooden surfaces of the house were freshly painted in a lush, deep black.

Finally Lynn built up the courage to knock. Almost as if she had been waiting behind the door the entire time, Mrs. Kelley opened it up and welcomed her in. She was dressed in a very professional looking jacket and an incredibly long skirt that any teenage girl would pray to never have to wear and a radiant pearl necklace that almost blinded the onlooker. Lynn assumed that Mrs. Kelley had just got back from work. It was also clear to Lynn that Peter did not inherit his “pudginess” from his mother.

“I was wondering when you’d come in, dear. Well, um, make yourself at in, Peters’ in the bathroom, but he’ll be out shortly and you too can go do your homework. His room is upstairs.”

Lynn nodded and smiled, just enough to make her cheeks curl and hurried down the cluttered, hardwood hallway to the stairs. In the distance she heard some very dramatic fights between younger brothers taking precedence over the studious, silent nature the senior brother was insisting was required for him to do his homework. Coming from the kitchen was the sound of a sister, chopping vegetables and organizing various events over the phone with her friends. Lynn climbed the spiralling staircase (as if to make the European illusion complete) and at the top found the most beautiful grand piano that she had ever laid eyes. Its ivory keys simply begged to be touched. Lynn could not resist the allure of it. She didn’t just play that piano, she caressed the keys, her fingers lulled a magnificent sound from its oaky base. The strings of the instrument hummed a tune sweet enough at times to fill pies and pastry to diabetic levels, and sad enough at times to make potted plants consider suicide. Her magic fingers danced across the keys like a ballerina in some famous Russian epic. Nothing could have better in the world.

“You play beautifully.”

Lynn hands lashed out at the keys in shock and made a most distasteful chord. She hopped from her seat in fright.

“It’s okay, Lynn,” Peter spoke in his best soothing voice. “We got it after my grandma died. None of us ever learned to play the darn thing, if you can believe that. After hearing you, I guess I’ll have to start.”

Lynn still stared at him a deer caught in the head lights.

"Lynn, are you mute?” Peter asked, his eyebrows furrowed in an inquisitive nature.

“No,” Lynn solemnly refuted in such a way as to rest all doubts.

Peter grinned, self satisfied. “Good,” he said, “it would have made it incredibly difficult to perform our skit if you were.” Peter gestured for Lynn to follow him. “Come on we need to get to work, I’ll show you my room.”

Peter rushed down the picture clustered, white carpeted hallway with a very reluctant Lynn in tow. At the end of the corridor was a door marked with a skull and crossbones and the words written in a bleeding black ink: CAPTAINʼS QUARTERS. Peter opened the door and invited Lynn inside. The room’s contents were almost exactly the way Lynn would have imagined. A neatly made bed and a desk parallel to each other and a dresser on opposite corners were ordinary enough, but those were the only things Peter had that weren’t unique. His walls were speckled with numerous National Geographic posters and various political and geographic maps. His room occupying the top of the east wing of the house had a very large inclined ceiling that was almost entirely bedecked with a myriad of flags dominated by the Algonquian Bowmen of Massachusetts. Over his desk was a WALL OF HEROES were Peter had hung portraits of Homer, Shakespeare, John Adams, Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Tom Brady and a whole collection of obscure figures that Lynn could never hope to identify. Over his bed was a ROMNEY: 2012 poster. Peter pulled out a chair from his desk and offered it to Lynn and then sat down with a heavy thud on his bed opposite to her.

“Okay,” Peter began as he shuffled some papers he’d retrieved from his desk. “I’ve got a basic outline of the script. I had some simple knowledge on how black holes are formed and what they are, but, uh, I’ll have to take your research and fill some considerable gaps. You brought it I hope.”

Lynn nodded and handed him a few sheets of parchment with a summary of the information in the front. Peter quickly scrawled through it and stood up and laid it down on his desk. “Good, good, that’s excellent work. I’ll have it all in script form tomorrow. Now we should start memorizing some crucial information for our presentation, I think-.”

“P-P-Peter,” Lynn interrupted, stretching out the first syllable. “P-Perhaps a sk-skit is not the,” she paused and winced, her cheeks turning red, “the … best …. idea.”

Peter looked at her like a gardener looks at a dying rose, “do you have a cold or something? We don’t do this until Friday, I’m sure you’ll be fine then.”

Lynn grimaced again. “No, no … cold. I, I, I, just … I just … I just,” she buried her face in her hands, “I just can’t.”

“I’m sure you could if you tried.”

Lynn shook her head forlornly. “Maybe if I … if I did the … the res-s-search and you did the,” her lips were puckering, trying to make the ‘p’ sound, but nothing came out. Finally, after much effort, “the presentation.”

Peter sat down and turned his eyes towards Lynn in a playfully chastising fashion. “Now Lynn, you were there in that class just as a I was, and you heard Mr. Gwenct just as well as I did. So you should know he said we would be marked equally on Content and Collaboration. Now Science hasn’t been my strongest topic of late, and I want to get a reasonable grade on this assignment and I’m sure you want one too. Now let’s stand up and loosen our tongues and practise our lines, okay?”

He stood again and started adjusting his body posture, getting into the character of Stephen Hawking. “Oh, Universe,” he cried in the fakest mechanical voice ever known to man, “what secrets doth thee veil from me. What undiscovered treasures lie buried in thine bosom. Oh how my heart yearns to suckle the breast of your knowledge. Hast thee but dangle the fruit of wisdom like a carrot to a hungry man. Speaketh of your will oh fair universe!”

Peter waited patiently for Lynn to catch her cue and after a while when it became obvious she wouldn’t, he dropped the mechanical voice and snapped: “Lynn, your line!”

Lynn spoke slowly and deliberately, her words piercing: “P-Peter, I can’t.”

Peter returned with obvious frustration: “We’ve been over this before, Lynn, just try.” Peter dropped a script into Lynn’s hands and got back into character. He was about to start all over again and then-."

“I … AM …. A …. STAMMERER!” Lynn roared, but she lost her streak of defiance almost as soon as she had found it and repeated in a more cooed voice, “I’m a st-st-st,” unable to make the last syllables she bowed her head and tears started to flood her face.

Peter puffed up his cheeks in an intuitive, puzzling way. This was not an obstacle he had expected. As an actor and playwright he’d dealt with stage fright before, but nothing like this. Peter awkwardly tried to comfort her with soothing words, of which he was unaccustomed to uttering, but he could not pry another word from Lynn’s clasped lips.

“Hello there, busy students,” Peter’s father greeted before opening the door, elongating the salutation to make it sound even warmer and friendlier. Brigham Kelley was dressed in a black, white, and blue checkered sweater vest topped up with a smart looking red bow tie. His glasses dwarfed those of his son, much like a hippopotamus deciding to sit beside a hamster, and his hair, almost thoroughly gray and thinning near the top, was styled in a way that mirrored Peter’s as well, albeit the senior Kelley appeared to have paid more attention to where he was combing. All in all he resembled a gray-haired, white skinned, moustache-free version of Ned Flanders from The Simpsons. He was carrying two identical brown mugs of hot chocolate of which he offered to Peter and Lynn.

“Your mother made you folks some cocoa, now wasn’t that nice of her,” Peter’s dad exclaimed with a caring smile as always. His eyes glanced over to Lynn and he saw the tiny tear drops still inhabiting the gentle crevasses of her face. “Are you okay, Lynn?”

Lynn sniffled: “Okay, just allergies, Mist-st-ster Kelley.”

Brigham Kelley rekindled his frivolity, “well, I daresay those pollen grains this time of year do stir up some trouble in my nostrils too.” Brigham turned to Peter and waved a teasingly scolding finger at him, “now you two get back to your work, Lynn’s father wanted her home for supper.” With that Mr. Kelley half-closed the door and walked downstairs, his expensive sounding, freshly polished shoes clapping on every stair.

Lynn gingerly took a sip of the scalding liquid. “What do your p-p-parents do?” she inquired.

“They’re both professors. Mom used to work at MIT until Brian, Ethan, and Patricia were born and Dad teaches 16th century English literature with a focus on our very good friend Mr. Shakespeare at Harvard.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, with my mom teaching algorithmic calculus and my father teaching literature, I figure all my academic bases are covered.”

“Must be … lucky,” Lynn said, squinting with concentration.

Peter looked distant and disinterested. “Yeah, well most of time. There is the fact that I don’t really have any excuse to do poorly in any subject, except visual arts of course. Heaven forbid I bring home an A-, then we sit down and have a big chat about goals and values.”

“My … parents and I never t-t-talk about that at all,” Lynn stated dejectedly, staring at the floor. “I guess I’m just too, too, too stu… too stu …” Lynn tensed her muscles in frustration. “Too stupid.”

“Hey!” Peter interjected, a little too forcefully to be comforting, “we will be having none of that talk, Lynn. You most certainly are not stupid or any other hurtful word that you can think of. There are two professors downstairs who can’t play a single chord on our piano without making it sound likes it’s regurgitating a poorly baked Shepard’s Pie, whereas you could make the instrument sing the most restful lullaby in your sleep.”

Lynn smiled through her tears. When she noticed Peter was looking at her, her cheeks blemished and she started brushing them away with a curled fist. Thank you, her mouth whispered, though no words came out. She pulled out her phone and checked the time. “I have, I have t-t-to go,” she found the strength to pull those syllables together.

“We’ll pick this up tomorrow; I’ll find some way around this, Lynn. It’ll be a great presentation.”

Lynn smiled and turned for the door.

“Wait,” Peter called, with only a hint of the force he’d used before, but it was enough to make Lynn gyrate back to face him. “Perhaps we could go to your place tomorrow.”

Lynn thought for a moment and then she nodded. She trod down the stairs like a marshmallow dropped from the table and quickly said her goodbyes to Peter’s parents. She flew through the walk to her home with the graceful step of gypsy dancer, smiling and beaming a radiant glow all the way.

Peter’s eyes followed her down the stairs until he felt his brother Seamus standing beside him.

“I’m sure you too will do plenty of homework together,” Seamus said showing all his teeth in his predatory smirk.

“Oh, shut up,” Peter retorted and briskly fled down the stairs to answer his mother’s calls for dinner, leaving the two cups of cocoa in his room all but untouched, slowly losing their warmth.